They don’t have the power to do what they’re threatening on a grand scale. But they want us to think they do.

the real glory of world war two was that it involved a warrior cult being ground down and beaten to a pulp by people who would rather have been doing something else.

surely we can come up with something better for 7 billion people than being lorded over by a bunch of plundering elderly murder and torture enthusiasts who whisper to each other about printing spare organs so they can immiserate others in perpetuity

The biggest scandal in US public life *ought* to be that we are the richest country in history & yet our infrastructure sucks, our transportation choices suck, our cities suck, our healthcare sucks, our public administration sucks, & in dozens of little ways, our daily lives suck.

the thing about Trump and Putin meeting is that Russiagate was basically entirely correct and the fact that the media bought Bill Barr's Mueller Report cover letter saying "he didn't do it" hook line and sinker remains a national disgrace

The military takeover of Washington is not a “distraction” from Epstein. It’s a military takeover of Washington, which is an even bigger deal, and those of us who kill brain cells reporting on this stuff knows it’s been an explicit goal since before the election.

appropriate that the calvinists are now moving toward a vision of god as tyrannical leader of a cult of personality

"We're all throwing dildos at women athletes to promote our memecoin" really puts a fine point on not just how sexist, mean and stupid so much of right now is, but also the grim degree to which we're just inundated with Stuff a 15-Year-Old Dipshit Would Think is Cool. A confederacy of Beavises.

Chris Cuomo posting a deepfake of AOC the same week that Jim Acosta “interviews” a deepfake of a school shooting victim are both harbingers of how traditional media power players will help usher in the worst of the AI slop era

On this Chairteenth, we celebrate the good folks of Montgomery, especially our guy AquaMayne. Special shout out to the folks who, within 72 hours, recreated this in their apartment complex. A COMMUNITY!! 💀

This is what media sanewashing our insane president looks like, courtesy today of ABC, CNN and The NY Times:

i think the correct way to think about the lonely boy question is not "how do we reach out to incels?" but "how do we make sure that a teenage boy looking for romantic advice isn't flooded with right-wing propaganda?"

We inventid art, poetrye, and musique and we hadde an amazinge fuckinge tyme.

IMHO no person who has never menstruated should be allowed to graduate from medical school until they have experienced a period pain simulation

The Devil's Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina, The forthcoming @blairpub.bsky.social anthology edited by @edsouthern.bsky.social (in which I have a short story), is longlisted for North Carolina Reads! You can vote here; voting ends 7/31: docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLS...

The GOP passed a budget that will eviscerate health care in rural areas. They delayed much of the impact for after the midterms, hoping the public will think any discussion of the impending collapse is hyperbolic. Local reporters have a chance to do service journalism that'll make a splash too.

People have no idea, not really, how this budget is about to wreck their very foundations.

Delighted to have a short story in this @blairpub.bsky.social anthology, edited by @edsouthern.bsky.social, which is available for preorder: bookshop.org/p/books/ghos...

Get up, y’all. It’s Independent Bookstore Day.

There were clearly millions of people who voted for Trump in 2024 who didn't think he'd do the things he ran on in the campaign. One way to think about this problem is that many people don't expect the federal government to do anything, so it's all just reality TV to them.

Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.

Are you a progressive from a blue state who hates seeing Europeans indiscriminately blame all Americans for Trump? Remember this feeling the next time you’re inspired to talk about the South

Join us this Friday, April 11, at 1PM in the Hodges Reading Room of Jackson Library for a reading by UNCG Creative Writing faculty member Terry Kennedy buff.ly/7jHDKW4 #UNCGEnglish #UNCG #UNCGWay #FindYourWayHere @mfagreensboro.bsky.social

what booker is doing right now is an example of what i mean when i say things like “we need more ambition right now.” there is room in american politics right now for people with ambition to take big stands and reap the rewards. he’s doing it!

I'll post photos & happy memories from #AWP25 soon, but first this sad little real-life allegory: Friday I went to an offsite reading in the courtyard of a community center, adjacent to a gym hosting pickup basketball games. Being me I watched before the reading started . . .

For the love of whatever prime mover you ascribe the universe to I implore you from the bottom of my heart that the very first time you email someone, don't write them a several thousand word essay, you will mark yourself as someone without a sense of boundaries and your email will not be read

Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was being pranked and then realizing he was actually just in the war plans group chat is such a good microcosm of how it feels to be alive right now, everything seems fake until you realize it’s actually real and incredibly stupid

Okay it may seem bad that Meta appropriated the entirety of the written word without compensating or even consulting with any writers, but consider what the world got out of it: a thing you accidentally tap in Instagram

When civil society institutions — big law firms, Ivy League institutions — cave to Trump rather than fight what appear to be illegal demands, do they expect him to be satisfied and stop? Do they believe others should step in and fight where they have not?

Everyone’s like “this can’t be fascism it’s too dumb” but they don’t understand that fascism is in fact almost always very dumb! Fascist dictators are cruel and stupid men. And it’s popular because many people are cruel and stupid!

Making economic growth the overriding purpose, to which all else must be sacrificed, not only trashes ecological and social values. It's also spectacularly bad politics. Governments can't control growth, but when it dips, this government, by its own criteria, fails. A rod for its own back.

this is still so funny to me

Vassily Grossman: "Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed -- while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end."

If you’re looking for something to do tonight, I suggest a few minutes to read the Declaration of Independence. It bangs. The jokers who wrote it were full of flaws, but they knew when a government had failed the people, and they did something about it.

I feel like we need to form a League of Relatively Normal People, and our agenda should be things like: --Canada's cool, leave them be --Lot of smart people at universities, that's a plus --We're scared of getting cancer, so let's research it --Fewer floods and wildfires would be nice

America is under siege by a surprising force: losers.

If you missed it - this is @chrismurphyct.bsky.social describing the transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the very wealthy, happening right now youtu.be/MXZuHf7LMZE?...

Think when we look back on this era, we will realize Trump 2 was a lot less about voter preferences / anti-woke backlash / college campus culture stuff and way more about the plutocrat class being furious at COVID restrictions, rising interest rates, and unionization efforts.

zoomer 90’s and 00’s revivalism is so interesting because ngl with the exception of some niche spaces, it was the worst cultural era of the past century. this was the grunge suburb mcmansion moment. rebelling against a period of affluence. it was twenty years of that fukuyama quote

Your daily reminder that writing love poems and paying deep attention to language is inherently anti-fascist.

Let’s be clear: This is the end result of 30 years of conservative thought. Small government, free markets, blah blah, all of it ended with this: the indiscriminate firing of the scientists who predict the fucking weather. Their goal is to literally drag us back into the dark ages.

Thissetty this this.

aint no way we cut medicaid and housing assistance so jeff bezos could buy this shirt

POV: You're 16, believe being in advanced placement math class means you're a once in a generation genius, and have just discovered Reddit.

The year after I graduated college I ended up living within a quarter-mile of a park, a bar & grill that served the best subs I'd had to that point, and a local indie video store staffed by smart people who helped me discover great stuff. How could I have imagined how lucky I was?

My zoomer son just now: "I feel like none of this would be happening if Schoolhouse Rock was still regularly on television."

In the last 12 hours I've gotten dozens of follows, all of them pretty bottish. Is there a way to mass block on this app, or do I have to go through them one by one?

If I had a band or a label, I would do a punk cover of "No More Kings" from Schoolhouse Rock. And then I would gather a bunch of people to write a whole album of next-generation Schoolhouse Rock songs, with songs about Social Security and Medicaid and NOAA. I am not kidding in the least.

I sincerely doubt any journalist of color I know would be allowed to write "I didn't know this important aspect of US history and read the Wikipedia summary of it to catch up" in a prominent newsletter read by every important person in the nation's capital