Gods Ghosts and Ancestors is a great ethnography of Taiwanese religion. It describes people engaging in ancestral practices from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism that vastly differ in basic issues like where are the dead and what happens to them?

Happy Saturnsday and Merry May folks! In just under a fortnight, I'm convening with some dear colleagues to mark a lesser-known Feast of Cyprian with a live online devotional class, exploring this sorcerer-saint's magics and mysteries. Come join us! www.the-pact.store/vespera-2

I think it's kind of beautiful that this was Rob Reiner's final line on television

Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷

It's been a half hour since the AP called it for Mamdani and already I see some people wringing their hands about how the cards are stacked against him, and to them I say, my friends, learn to enjoy a fucking moment, they didn't come around near enough, the man of the hour is partying, take the hint

Liberals are starting to say shit like, "trans people asked for too much too fast," and I'll remind your souless asses that we actually didn't ask for anything. we were minding our own business and quietly improving our healthcare and you (cis) decided to do a pogrom against us for no reason.

Jewish atheists: God isn’t real but that’s not my business Christian atheists: God isn’t real and I’m going to make it everyone’s problem

I can’t wait until I never have a reason to think about any dipshits named Cuomo ever again

Would 100% watch a sitcom in which Cuomo and Dershowitz end up roommates, Dershowitz is denied a pierogi every episode in exactly the same way, and Cuomo runs for successively lower-stakes office each week, only to lose again.

i wanna try something. quote this post if you’re a man who hates the manosphere

I remember 20 years ago telling a grad student in a department I was applying to that the replacement for the internal combustion engine would come from China and she looked at me like I was a fucking idiot.

This is an awkward time for me (between birth and death)

Drinking strange potions from odd characters is human nature and anyone who says otherwise is a changeling

my right to call for the prosecution and execution of the president of the united states is more protected than my right to call for boycotts of industries headquartered in occupied Palestinian territory

Announcement! My film The Woods is now available on YouTube via WatchMoviesNow, Kings of Horror, and Film Is Now, as well as Amazon Prime! All affiliate links to watch it can be found here: thewoodsfilm.straw.page

“you come up with a mean nickname to call this guy on TV?” “sure did boss, real fuckin sexy just like you asked”

NYC, if you want Mamdani instead of Cuomo or Adams as your mayor, RIGHT NOW is the time to call all of your Democratic reps - local and national - and demand they back Mamdani. They need to hear from us RIGHT NOW. Find your reps here: reps.nyc www.cnn.com/2025/06/26/p...

This was great for Lander: he raised his profile among a lot of people who didn’t know him, he proved he was a mensch to people who did, he built bridges with voters 20 years younger, AND he appears to be having fun

brad lander primary chuck schumer

what’s funny is that if pro-cuomo centrist democrats were less myopic they might see that mamdani was running the kind of campaign that could help rebuild the party brand — accessible with an outsider persona and a focus on “kitchen table” issues.

They have made the world living hell for no reason whatsoever. People will ask why this happened in a decade and there will be tremendous effort to make it more complicated than “they were evil, stupid, and bored”

.@CBS8 in San Diego reports that due to Bishop Michael Pham’s presence in the courtroom, in effect, cases of migrants today were postponed.

HEY I RARELY TALK ABOUT MY DAY JOB & try to keep this account exclusively for the horror writing & film world, but i work full time as a consulting witch for a field of witchcraft i pioneered based in cosmic horror lit & film, & posthumanist crit theory! i'm merging worlds for a sec bc --

I don't think I've ever felt more like burning it all down than I have while witnessing the elite project to turn Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander into scary, incompetent monsters while turning an actual incompetent monster, Andrew Cuomo, into a merely complicated fellow who just made an oopsie.

Today is my birthday so It would mean a lot of y'all shared my art :) 🫶

Now I'd they'd only criticize him for attacking migrants, not feeding the poor or healing the sick.

Just heard someone say “he sounds like he spends a lot of time on Facebook” and hooo boy everyone’s immediate understanding of what that means should be a brand crisis for Meta

If Pope Benedict XVI could abolish limbo, does that mean a future pope could abolish other drunk party games

setting aside the cultural stereotypes (and criticism of them) these pieces never ask a legitimately important question, which is “okay, so, what do you want? what material changes do you want politicians to push for to improve your lives?”

"they also don't care about your way of life" is a total lie. they're obsessed with your way of life! they vote and speak in loathing of your way of life! small-town red America obsessively focuses on other ways of life

Reminders: "Concentration camps" aren't the same as "extermination camps." Both were/are horrific. Most Nazi camps were *outside Germany*, away from the eyes of German citizens. Those trains? Were to, uh, deport the category of people whose lives were deemed unimportant. Never again is now.

this is possible but another way to think of it is that if you're under 40 in China you hadn't experienced anything but growth until 2020. the appetite for eating bitterness for the sake of the nation is not that great, but the fuck you spirit at US actions is very real.

TOMORROW! I'll be reading something new and unpublished!

Be the funniest thing in the world if Trump legit just had a normal heart attack rn because everyone would 100% believe the deep state killed him for this, and half of us would like 👍

Why, to gloat?

Accurate.

Did we? Well, as a humble developing nation, we lack many things you Americans take for granted, like nuanced economic policy, lavishly armed citizenry and midterm elections.

~WHO ARE YOU IF YOU DON'T THINK THE MORAL CHARACTER OF OUR COUNTRY IS BEING TESTED?~ @booker.senate.gov אם לא עכשיו אימתי

Real whiplash watching the Trump message go from “we’ll fix everything on day one” to “suck it up buttercup, this is gonna hurt.”

Trump's 3/27 executive order targets the Smithsonian for advancing "the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct." Trump argues that the exhibit's statement, below, is unscientific. He's wrong. As a biology professor and population geneticist, I agree with every word of it.

The Khmer Rouge is not wrong. We should be focusing more on sustainable agriculture. This message resonates with many. But I have serious concerns ab—

I'm Kat Abughazaleh and I'm running for Congress.

VERY IMPORTANT to label this as what it is, The Police State Executive Order. it's not an exaggeration. This is the inner wiring of a police state.

Every time you see someone powerful acting like a craven coward in the face of this authoritarian menace, let it stiffen your own spine. We are all we've got.

if, ten years ago, your entire understanding of politics was that the right wing wanted to destroy everything because they were evil, you had a more accurate and more predictive analysis than functionally the entire American media and political apparatus

ICE detained Julio Noriega, a 54 year-old US citizen who was born in Chicago, for over 10 hours on January 31st. He was walking around "Berwyn, Illinois, handing out his resume to local businesses." They didn't show him a warrant. They didn't give him paperwork. And he's now suing.

What’s astounding about this is that Schumer seems to want to set an absurdly high standard for crisis so that he doesn’t have to engage in real conflict with Trump - except the standard he’s set is also one Trump seems likely to meet in the near future, and Schumer has no plan for what to do then

Nobody likes waste. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that, in many ways, government is *designed* to be inefficient. It’s structured with redundancy and complexity both for audit and control purposes and because it tries to satisfy multiple competing societal goals. 1/2

Hayes to Schumer: "All those things you enumerated are the kinds of things you'd be doing if Mitt Romney is president. There's this weird asymmetry right now."

Trump: the streets will run like rivers with the blood of my enemies. Their heads on spikes will adorn Congress and every federal building and court. Chief Justice Roberts: Actually the GSA is in charge of federal court decorations in consultation with the judicial counsel