It's a thrill to see this review by B.D. McClay in The Washington Post of MOON SONGS, which I edited for @thirdmanbooks.bsky.social, with a foreword by @kellylink.bsky.social: www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

there are 39 hours of scripted programming in this season's broadcast TV lineup, & 20 of them are explicitly pro-law enforcement programs. More than half of scripted TV is still not enough for them.

Grateful to the editors of @nplusonemag.com for the clarity and force of this editorial. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Ugh, got email requesting faculty help train a new admissions AI bot because it's terrible at giving accurate info & so naturally admin sees it as our job to fix this. I do not like it in a school. (Someone should drown it in a pool.) I will not feed "AI" or spam. I will not feed it, Sam-I-Am!

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

A network of right wing “pink slime” faux news sites is targeting “anti-American” classes at colleges & universities nationwide. #DefendHigherEd

Yes, that's right.

“I am a Gramscian in that I believe that to become hegemonic an ideology must offer a vision of a future in which the interests of those who rule coincide with the interests of everyone else. MAGA fails to offer one...Yet the opposition to MAGA also fails to offer an alternative.”

Excellent reporting from Heated and Atmos. It looks like some of the biggest investors in the anti-trans movement are fossil fuel billionaires who are trying to use trans issues to ensure that Republicans pass policies favorable to their industry. heated.world/p/fossil-fue...

It is really funny that Jimmy Kimmel Live showed more moral fortitude and adherence to a system of values than Columbia University

"Nightshade expert" is an excellent job title.

We are obliged as thinking people to think, talk, work, act, and live as though none of tech's fascist dreams will come true because they won't, and that their thoughtkiller machines will fail because they will. I sincerely believe artists' lives are at stake and are being lost when we don't.

Listen, on the one hand, we're not going to Reading List our way out of this mess, but on the other hand, it is vital that we keep circulating the stories from the communities under attack and the easiest way to do that is read & talk about their books. So let's talk about some trans books!...

Horrific: Doctors Without Borders is suspending medical work in Gaza City due to Israel's violence, including airstrikes & tanks less than 1KM from their facilities. Comes same day Netanyahu used his UN speech to scold dozens of nations for accusing him of committing war crimes.

In the tradition of Agee & Evans’s "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," IMAGINARY DEATH is part meditation, part history & part memory fragments, telling a story of a Japanese soldier’s life and death during World War II. #OpenAccess & FREE to download: tinyurl.com/4nhr37xx #trauma #war #history

Never forget: Americans are in the streets fighting back against authoritarianism every single day

and to also tie this to the longer history of astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology (since @chanda.bsky.social is a cosmologist), astronomer Frank Kameney was arrested in the 1950s during a similar operation at a San Francisco bus station, which prevented him from working with the space program

Morning walk

I told you guys

alberto martini -- an illustration for Poe's "the power of words"

"It’s a deeply romantic film, weird as that might sound. The main love story is as unsentimental as a love story can be, but powerful because it evolves out of circumstances. It underlines that there is more to survival than survival itself." -- from an old piece I did on 28 days later.

4. Rewilding rainforests across Europe has brought long lost ecological dynamism back:

Indianapolis residents have shut down a proposed Google data center. The tech giant wanted to build a massive 500 acre facility, but people got organized and stopped them. The $1 billion data center would've used one million gallons of water a day. www.youtube.com/shorts/bhOHy...

Reading Tim Lucas's 1993 defense of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me". He compares it to Fuller's "Naked Kiss" and notes that NK has just been given a laserdisc by @criterion.bsky.social and one day Lynch's film will likely be so esteemed. And, indeed, in 2017 it got a well-deserved Criterion edition.

"A lively biography of a bold woman." Thank you Kirkus for a nice review of A DANGER. 🥹 www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

At @lithub.com.web.brid.gy, a good overview of the golden age of biography we're in from Megan Marshall, whose biographies of Margaret Fuller and the Peabody Sisters I've very much enjoyed. lithub.com/are-we-enter...

I rarely defend Americans, but we shouldn't forget that American GenZ started the student protests in 2023, were beaten to a pulp by police, got thrown out of school, lost scholarships, had their degrees revoked, etc. An Egyptian friend of mine joked "those kids were Arab Springed" Funny but true.

NH's longtime senator is retiring and still can't bring herself to stand for anything. The collaborationist impulse runs deep. It's pathological.

No mention of the CDC shooting. No mention of burning down the PA governor's home. No mention the Colorado school shooter apparently expressed neo-Nazi views. They included Luigi as getting "leftist" support when his support was bipartisan b/c every american has been screwed by health insurance

Will the horrors never end?

I want to go back, out of the bad stories, John Ashbery

Even back in the 70s and 80s when I could be hassled by the police for walking while trans, no one ever tried to stop me pissing in the Ladies or tried to make me change into my swimsuit among men. There is no dignity or respect involved in taking away rights I have exercised freely for forty years

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

Easy messaging win for Dems, "you can't have [good thing] because Trump is spending $20B to subsidize the failures of some libertarian clown abroad." And, no, Dems shouldn't support it because it's "foreign aid." It's a right-wing clown bailout. Supporting it trivializes and undermines foreign aid.

in which i have sold some books & now must write them

Should I be a kind person? Should I help my community? Should I learn dark magic from dusty books in secret libraries? Should I wear a tiara of ancient goblin bones and a raven on my shoulder to the market to buy cheese and wine? The answer is always yes.

Rich people love giving money to rich schools that a tiny percentage of US students attend. Meanwhile, my little regional university 35 miles from Dartmouth is cutting about 25% of its faculty to save ... a lot less than $15 million. www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025...

isaac chotiner’s interview with bret easton ellis about his little book of nonfiction essays is still one of the funniest and most brutal things ever put in print

this is the most chotinered a chotiner interview has ever chotinered

The Irish government has released a report on the benefits of the pilot for a Basic Income for the Arts, and in a total shocker, it seems like it was good for the country as well as the artists. Nobody could have seen this coming. #SpeirGorm #UBI www.gov.ie/en/departmen...

sittin on the dock of the bay

Absolutely, not to mention pregnant people suffering through pain for months that could be treated. There aren't many pain relievers that have been recommended for those who are pregnant, this fabricated "evidence" means a lot more unnecessary pain.

And hey a writerly update!! My story Bindweed is out in the current issue of Interzone, 303. You can subscribe here: www.patreon.com/InterzoneMag or buy a single issue here: shop.interzone.press It’s over 65K words of fiction and not. And if you’re broke and want to read my story only, DM for pdf!

The cover you didn't know you needed

M. Gessen is one of the writers I look to for naming the way this cookie crumbles. “It was never a cookie,” you say. No, & Gessen knows that, but having fled Russia to keep their kids, they also know there was something worth holding onto. But we didn’t. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/o...

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

As a government information librarian who archives a lot of federal web pages, I strongly recommend this approach. The Internet Archive and similar tools are great, but, as mentioned here, are imperfect tools and there is just too much uncertainty about continued access to federal resources.

her name couldn’t really be WILL OBEY