Thanks M-W. So ... I'll be staying on brand this year, I guess...

It's E.M. Forster's birthday! Here's the original epilogue to "Maurice", only ever published, as far as I know, in the Abinger Edition of the novel edited by Philip Gardner and released by Andre Deutsch in 1999. It's lovely & moving. chew-disco.co.uk/post/6900836...

“if…we look at this moment as a stark reminder of the limits of legal advocacy and as an opportunity to invest more in community and power-building, then we can begin to map out meaningful strategies for change.” @chasestrangio.bsky.social on the power of community and the limits of legal advocacy

Happy Public Domain Day 2026! — The Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2026/01/public-domain-day-2026/

Happy new year! May 2026 be the year that those who deserve to be cursed are cursed (100 times over!) and those who deserve mercy finally receive some. youtu.be/PGhLQScRElI

andy cohen's "am i excited about 2026? [pregnant pause] yeah. i... yeah. i mean, what's the alternative?" is the realest thing i've seen all night

My New Year's resolution is to accept a force greater than myself, something I can truly believe in: entropy.

Just like every year, a friendly PSA: “Feliz ano nuevo” means “happy new anus.” “Feliz año nuevo” means “happy new year.” Wishing folks either one is nice, but make sure you’re using the one you mean.

Murderous, sociopathic cosplay all the way down.

‘I always say, the film is the thing. The film is the thing. It’s the film, the language of cinema. You work so hard & the second it’s finished, people want you to change it back into words.’ - David Lynch

"the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning...was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column ('Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way') can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity."

This is why they want us talking about day care scams.

Goddamn this is good, and also a way to fire up the real journalists working, and fighting, to tell the truth.

The nuance here is that the IRT Company went bankrupt, and its subway lines survived because the city took them over under the leadership of the socialist Fiorello LaGuardia.

Newsreel’s “films, produced during the political ruptures of the 60s + 70s, may be the closest the US has come to a homegrown revolutionary cinema. In their approach to financing, filming, + distribution, [they] embodied a genuinely counter-hegemonic method that moved beyond revolutnry aesthetics…”

Really enjoyed this essay, tho it's getting close to 20 years since I last read Jeff's trilogy. (Regret I never picked up the lovely Golden Gryphon paperbacks, but I already had the motley early printings of the books.)

can somebody please bring this trilogy back into print? I'd really like to read it and find it frustrating that I cannot seem to track down any matching sets that aren't gonna put me out of more than I'd like to spend at the moment...

"Tragically...the news orgs with the least community-hostile approach tend to be right wing MAGA shitpost factories. They’re running on dark money or extracting cash from the perpetually credulous, but either way they’ve figured out that not actively pissing off your audience creates loyalty."

"Between the administration and the opposition are actual opposites of principle: among those committed to inclusion and those to exclusion; truth and lies; kindness and cruelty; the protection and destruction of systems that in turn protect the climate or public health."

2025 has been an incredibly hard year for trans people. And yet... the political project to erase us is failing. In spite of them having so many levers of power, many of us have continued to thrive, and new pathways open up every day to get around the attacks. My case for hope for 2026.

"Dunn explains, 'In slavery, after the working day was over, Black men gathered around a tree and talked. That is how our history was passed on — under a tree, informally, through stories.' That lineage endures wherever people gather collectively to remember."

I just started reading @karenhao.bsky.social's "Empire of AI," and this epigraph knocked me right out. Attributed to Joseph Weizenbaum, MIT professor and inventor of the first chatbot, 1966.

My book-lover hot take for 2026: Publishers should revive the old Pocket Books format (5.5 inches by 6.5 inches), a lovely size that really did fit in a pocket. Here is an old Pocket Book next to a classic mass-market paperback, the other standard now headed for extinction.

Best part is that Canvas is built on open source; it's enclosure all the way down

Here’s an NPR explainer from Oct on the Post Office’s proposed changes to its definition of postmarks. *These changes went into effect on Dec. 24.* So, if you want to prove that you mailed a ballot (or sent a check) in by a certain date, it needs to be hand-stamped by a clerk. tinyurl.com/3bdu28ne

Not just the rich and that's also something to sit with.

Exactly and more. When I was a student blue book exams were the dullest; they felt actively anti-intellectual. Research papers were the deep pleasure and substance of learning; I wouldn’t be a writer or a professor now without them. But they’re most vulnerable to the LLM plague,

A good interview here at @proteanmag.com with Mitchell Abidor, whose new book on Victor Serge I'm looking forward to reading, though the revelations of Serge's apparent late-life anti-communism etc. are tough, as I admire so much of his writing. proteanmag.com/2025/12/18/v...

“I’ve often said this and I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much: America may be the only country that hates art. Money is the only thing that’s considered a healthy habit. Art is considered neurotic, or it just shows that you have problems, whereas having money is somehow seen as totally healthy.”

Cannot recommend this highly enough, and my added suggestion would be César Aira, who does perhaps have a fandom of sorts (Patti Smith, chairperson) but whose work really rewards substantive and ongoing engagement.

New from Matt Seybold and @ehayot.bsky.social — "The crisis of the humanities has been revealed by the events of the last year to be a crisis of civil society writ large."

A Hampton Inn in Asheville just canceled my family's reservation because our address (incorrectly) showed Asheville—and the hotel bars locals within 50 miles. When I asked why, they said, "because of our homeless population," adding that most hotels here have similar policies. This is outrageous.

Microplastics are here to stay; that's why we need to eat them responsibly in the classroom

Everyone doing anything related to anti racism work is seeing this. The right supports its causes and beliefs. We don't. A racist acts a fool in public, they will raise a half million in Go Fund Me. Us? Not even. Not even close. We just talk big.

“There’s a responsible way to use AI” “There’s a responsible way to pay more for electricity, poison Black people, and encourage teens to kill themselves”

Bizarre Ecosystem Discovered More Than Two Miles beneath Arctic Ocean

These technologies can and are being used to create lifelike images and videos of actual living women and girls. For what I think are pretty obvious gendered civil rights reasons, it needs to be a recognized civil cause of action to create an AI image or avatar of a woman without her consent.

Brigitte Bardot supported the far-right politician Marine Le Pen and was married to Bernard d'Ormale, a former advisor to Jean-Marie Le Pen. She also said a lot of racist, anti-Muslim, and homophobic stuff. RIP.

Definitely. Also: food co-ops and independent bookstores should team up more often.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

It continues to be important to say that there is still no ethical use of "AI". matthewcheney.net/blog/there-i...

Thinking about that story from the other day about Waymo having to pay people to close car doors/trunks of self-driving cars because users and passers-by are "unreliable".

The definitive proof that ICE was always a fascistic institution is that Trump didn't needed to reform It. No mass firing, no change in training, no mass hiring. He simply said "go, my attack dogs, find brown people". And they went, because they were always fascists.

“Staff discussions on ad implementation have ranged from prioritizing sponsored content in the chatbot’s answers to adding a sidebar that shows ads related to the user's query.”

"Chomsky can no longer offer apologies or consolation to the survivors. But that does not relieve us of the responsibility to do so, part of which is acknowledging that someone who had such a huge impact on so many of us made such profoundly disturbing moral choices."

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of "AI".

obvious but still significant that one of the primary and most socially tractable ways some people experience their own “whiteness” is when they decide they’ve been personally deprived something they’re owed, whereas when they get or have things, it’s what they’ve personally earned as an individual

"I think we need art that imagines a way through and out, an art that does more than point fingers in songs that are barely written, an art that dares to dream about the escape."

Apple installed suicide nets to prevent the current workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones” from continuing to kill themselves.

"One judge moved house. Another had to freeze her credit cards after a security breach. Other judges have taken actions to adapt to the changing landscape by upgrading home security systems, changing the route they drive to work." This is fascism. This is what terrorist intimidation looks like.