“That’s the trouble with dreams of power. It stimulates anxiety about a catastrophe that has yet to happen. ” @hernyfreebland.bsky.social in a collage essay which was published by @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social.

is there a more haunting line than Friedrich Kittler’s “no reader will ever notice” about statistical text generation (from Artforum, 1992)?

The collage essay I put together for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social out of Lewis Lapham’s sentences is excerpted in the new issue of @harpers.bsky.social. Feels fittingly full circle: I sourced many of the sentences from his Harper’s columns, and LQ is effectively Readings through history.

buttondown.com/perfectsente... this week in sentences: syntax, inarticulate, mountain too big, constant vigilance, crew cut spirit, werewolves, 27th place, grappling, doomed to hear, hard candy, the vibe, doorbell-synth, curiosity, communal spirit

“In short, I read, I stole, I arranged, I found energy again in the Laphamian vernacular, I glimpsed some honest hope for these anni horribiles. The result is something I could never have known how to say without him.” www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/m...

Here’s a collage essay I put together for @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social in remembrance of Lewis, who I’ve missed since his passing a year ago. It’s in my voice using 121 of his sentences, or in his voice transmuted by me into the present—really both. Either way, it means a lot to me.

"I know you work as a human even if you are a piece of work with variously disordered aspects... You do not have to be working to work; an apparent function may break whatever about you should be otherwise humming along." Everybody go read Henry, it'll make your day better:

highly recommended read

I would absolutely like to see Mamdani clarify his stance on some things, namely the development of algebra and the invention of the toothbrush in the Islamic Golden Age. What do you have to say for yourself SIR

I’ve been thinking about what it means for something—or someone—to be working, among other questions of fatherhood and generally being alive.

feels like there probably can’t be this many dads ranked #1 all at once?

At last, the good news that @laphamsquarterly.bsky.social will return—lovingly in the memory and vernacular of Lewis. Because if we want this whole human project to last, it’s probably worth learning from more than the last few minutes of what Lewis would and did call our “wreckage of history.”

“It’s more important than ever that this magazine survives. It acknowledges the importance of history and art and thought — all things that seem to be threatened now.” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/b...

inside Val were two wolves

BLIPPI: Hi kids, today we’re going to learn about shapes and colors! [frolics goofily across a grassy field] Have you ever heard the song “Kill the Boer”? Hee hee!

been reflecting on how the Truman Show house was filmed at Matt Gaetz’s childhood home, and how in retrospect maybe that was the butterfly flapping its wings

KEXP playing Explosions in the Sky while I’m driving my kid to school like we’re about to take the team to state championships while struggling with our sense of identity in small-town Texas

a truly brutal truncation

super impressed that chuck schumer would come meet some kids at the local science center

not me sitting in a diner with my back to the door and “don’t stop believing” coming on

well if it isn’t @ryannliebenthal.bsky.social giving a talk at @sxswedu.com

every worm-brained piece that treats the dumbest possible shit as parlor-room fodder for pipeful consideration hinges so atrociously on a big “But” like this. just always “here’s a thing completely undeserving of serious consideration BUT what pray tell if we give it anyway?”

again, @markkrotov.bsky.social perfectly nails the moment

and we’re all posting straight to hell

I was fighting fascism with the power of love and kindness and just really getting my ass handed to me. flaminghydra.com/issue-243/

This is simply *not* useful vox populi from the NYT—it’s just amplifying and circulating racism and cruelty and transphobia and bigotry we all know exists in exactly this form. I don’t know why it would be important to elevate hate when it’s already in power and being systemically encouraged.

*being stabbed in the face* this is just a little joke, right?

A month ago, I saw an OPD car with a 1488 on the back, spent a month going down a rabbit hole, and then yesterday we saw Elon Musk do a sieg heil at the presidential inauguration. I wrote this about trying to think about contexts and what we overlook: shellsinanorange.blog/2025/01/21/o...

pretty sure Rawls didn’t mean for the veil of ignorance to be taken quite so literally

thinking once again of the semi-successful attempts to mask Lindbergh’s obvious Nazi saluting in 1941 under other guises (even when, as Dorothy Thompson wrote, “the conclusion is inescapable”)

@hoopladigital.bsky.social is criminally underused and answers the individually perceived need underlying *most* people’s casual use of Spotify

"Who owns the fire that burns down my friend’s house? Who will own the flood that will drown my city? One moment criminalizes living in the next." I used to read Henry because it was my job. Now I do it because his words make my brain feel all funny and inspired. You should, too.

There’s a bakery in downtown Toad Town that makes eggplant spaghetti. Spaghetti is Mario Brothers cuisine; eggplant is Waluigi’s favorite food. The combination is more Mushroom Kingdom than a flat Koopa Troopa.

There’s simply not a newsletter I open more quickly and enjoy more consistently than this one.

A while back I wrote for @nplusonemag.com about how big tech/Silicon Valley emerged very much in the shadow of its “father,” William Shockley, a proud eugenicist and bigot. Basically a broad eagerness to demean the validity of moral values in the service of amorality redefined as some purer truth.

I’m in this sentence and I don’t like it

We're minutes away from the start of voting in the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year competition—the only one that matters! Behold the nominees: americandialect.org/nominations-...

Some thoughts on fire, snow, Idaho, and spelling sarsaparilla.

the greatest hyphenation in English is, I think, “unself-conscious”

Friends are texting to ask if I think the LA fires will change the conversation around climate. My answer is the same as it was in 2019 when I wrote this piece for @londonreview.bsky.social: perversely, the fires will help normalize climate effects. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A few years back, I wrote a thing about flashes of Hell (as humans have imagined it for centuries) on our actual earth—fires in California, social media disreality, fascist governance—and trying to avoid useless despondency. Definitely wish it hadn’t come back to mind, but here we are/it is.

the purest form of editorial schadenfreude

festival of blights, is this anything

why yes I did pass new year’s eve in the traditional manner: frantically filing expenses and benefits expenditures so they could be reimbursed within various strict and capricious requirements

literally new year’s eve

playing Polaris for my son in the car and telling him it’s Nicky Notes

Wrote a bit about my son breaking a window, an inadequate fix, and the lie of being alone inside.

guess the tsunami did in fact lose by a landslide

I started writing again a little bit—for myself, mostly, but it’s nice to know you’re out there. It’s an attempt to make some sense for myself (though what isn’t, I guess). Here’s the most recent post, on the power of taste and space brought to mind by the reopening of @ebbooksellers.bsky.social