Too many people want to dismiss Dante's Divine Comedy as fanfic, and they don't even know about the bit where it contains a new epilogue to the Odsessy, wherein an elderly Odysseus decides to get the crew together for one last job, tries to sail to heaven, and is smote by God like the Numenoreans.

james bond should exist in the same universe as Godzilla, they don’t interact or anything, it’s just like yeah while 007 is trying to stop spectre for the 10th time Gojira is fighting Geedorah again

literally no one who actually lives in seattle is mad about this. hilarious.

mao also seems like. completely indifferent to baseline material considerations. mao saving hegel from the suffocating embrace of marx and producing a truly left-wing variant of german idealism? no, but im going to say yes because its funny

Africa Was Not an Anarchist Paradise: Misconceptions about Precolonial State-Building in Africa www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/africa-was...

If Americans liberals and left want to reduce the risks of the US getting sucked into foreign wars then they need to start thinking seriously about planning and prep needed to enable a stable post-American order. And accept that loss of long term influence. Just memeing through this solves nothing

It is very difficult for neo-imperial societies to acknowledge that they need to strategically and culturally decentre themselves and accept that greater autonomy in other parts of the world means less influence. But its an essential step that then requires clear-eyed planning and preparation

New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji Utagawa Hiroshige ca. 1857

"[Spanish elites] had no sense of imminent collapse. Spain remained a wealthy country where life was very good, at least for the fortunate few at the top of the social scale."

Overextended superpower contracting out core military functions to private capitalists in a haphazard, unplanned manner 🤔

The first part of the book, on the geopolitical situation in Europe at the beginning of the 17th century, is incredible. Here's a great passage from the "Pax Hispanica" chapter on the overextended Spanish crown doing fiscal contortions and fire sales of public/royal assets to stay afloat.

Time to learn more about what happens when hegemonic decline, sectarian strife, and millenarian fervor on all sides lead to regional war, and then to regional war spiraling out of control.

I cannot over emphasise how important this action is. Most MPs don't know this is going on, and by the time the guidance is laid it will be too late. Make sure you email your MP now – and encourage others to do the same.

Jenny Holzer, Marquees, Times Square, 1993

this is like a dos passos "camera eye" sentence.

years of interrupted lead

cis woman starts dilating. writes a book about its therapeutic properties and starts giving seminars. goes on oprah. it becomes a whole, big thing for about a year and then gets dropped

portland needs to annex vancouver already they cannot be left to their own devices

Headlines beamed straight from hell

The Georgian Ministry of Highway Construction in Tbilisi, Georgia. r/brutalism

I really need to learn more about Buddhism so I can understand more of Dream of the Red Chamber

a discourse network? you mean a mail room. a typing pool. i'm sure these networks look autonomous if you don't ask where those traces come from or how they move. if you abstract away administrative labor. if you never see the "dictated but not read" at the bottom of the page.

This brand of Icelandic salty licorice is no longer available with vintage boxes going for high prices on the secondary market. Opal says its because they can't get a crucial flavor ingredient after 2005, and that ingredient? Chloroform. Gives powerful "cool" rush.

Stop me if you have heard this before, but I think Baudrillard warned us a few years ahead of time

🤔

Next government of Israel will be just as racist towards Palestinians in the 1967 and 1948 territories alike and will have no 48er party in coalition

I still think if you attended last night you fucking suck. The circumstances don't change that. It's actually an incredibly consistent and correct set of beliefs to hold!

jfc

Whether that's disrespectful to Chernobyl's victims is a good question but, much like Death of Stalin, the reason it was made and is popular isn't because a bunch of folks are interested in Soviet history

Folks who criticize Chernobyl for being historically inaccurate miss the fact that it's pretty blatantly historical fiction using a long-vanquished enemy to say things about America today

One of my first thoughts with this, and even going in to tonight, was, "I wonder if the WHCA is going to realize how hated they are," and the answer is very very much no, they are not. I also have so much less respect for so many journalists after seeing their responses.

1) the purpose of the "ballroom" is to serve as a bunker when Trump refuses to leave office 2) tonight's events were functionally a false flag attack to serve political ends and further disempower journalists

It should only be held at the White House if WHCA members work for the White House. Ergo, it should probably be held at the White House.

why not hold it at the white house? would that damage the polite fiction that this isn't about sucking the toes of the powerful?

the correspondents dinner shooting was a plot from big Situationist to sell you more Debord

Every school in America is going to need to build a ballroom.

While we have your attention about the safety of journalists in harm’s way… Say her name: Amal Khalii. She was killed by US-Israel this week. She is one of 14 Lebanese journalists killed, and among nearly 300 killed in the Middle East since 2024.

The issue is that the ones telling us that “school shootings are a fact of life” do so because they simply do not feel consequences in those cases and have no empathy to feel for those that do. It only matters when it happens to them. “Everyone or no one” only works if you see others as having value

Ok yeah so 1000% staged

It’s gonna be pretty funny when the WHCA attendees try to talk about this like they were reporters in a war zone congratulating each other for their bravery.

just to cover my butt: no I don’t believe the current state of cleanliness across US transit systems is tolerable yes, I believe there is a happy medium between transit cleanliness and labor rights once confronted with the facts tho you do have to whether to reorient your position or double down

idk. in sum people laud how clean Korean metros are and while yes, social disorder/crime/culture may play a part, it's easy to keep things clean when you can hire en masse elderly people in poverty to work 60+ hours/week for near (or below) minimum wage with no benefits as independent contractors

the high quality service seen in public spaces in South Korea to global admiration are so often built upon grueling labor of middle-to-elderly-aged women working themselves literally to death at minimal pay and no job protection. www.koreatimes.co.kr/opinion/2025...

One of the worst things to happen to America was journalism ceasing to be a middle income career like teaching or accounting and transforming into a bullshit job for precocious rich kids because parental subsidies are required for your first decade in the business.

if you want to be a publisher you can (put in a lot of work and eventually) be a publisher

Attention liberals: COVID anti-vaxxers are your fault for being "alienating" www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/o...

It's very uncanny-valley that American fascism has evil center-part lesbians now, that feels way too European

In nine hours the national press corps will raise their glasses to the most racist person in the country and claim it’s a “work dinner” for “source building”

"When your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark."