I'm beyond thrilled to see Watermelon Truck in the @chicagotribune.com. Thanks @ninametz.bsky.social for highlighting this really special part of our collection. www.chicagotribune.com/2026/04/08/t...

@unlawfulentries.bsky.social Just notified that my backordered copy has shipped!

Today feels like the day Lehman collapsed and it was clear there was going to be a before and an after.

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

I think often of a New York Times photo of a little Iraqi girl tending to her parakeets in a bombed house, probably from 20 years ago now. I will think of this man and his sweet dog often now too. People just want to love what they love, care for their little beings, and instead we do this to them

Realizing that some of my inexplicable sadness about the Artemis II stuff is that it feels like a trans-dimensional communication from an America that took a different path and chose joy instead of fear and hate.

As always, @profsaunders.bsky.social has an excellent analysis of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. But her threads don't usually end with an ask for reasons NOT to panic.

Never has anyone spent so many words so ineffectively attempting to steal valor from the real heroes who had been caught in a drama in created by an unsuccessful mission inside an unnecessary, illegal war.

Our mural on native plants and pollinators at H. A. brown elementary school in Kensington starts today! We’re still shy of our fundraising goal, so if anyone would be down to support educational art in an underserved area of Philly, I would really appreciate it! givebutter.com/KenzoMural

The reason Moby Dick is the most American novel ever written is because it is about a violent white man enacting a confusing revenge fantasy against a cheap source of oil.

Slaughtering our golden goose: massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Untranslated headlines in German are much clearer than New York Times headlines in English

🚨 Ever Alvarenga, an asylum seeker, was driving to work Thursday morning when he was rear-ended by an ICE vehicle. He is still in the hospital after suffering significant injuries to his head, chest, back, & hands. [1/2]

Mexico’s overwintering monarch population grew 64% this winter, with butterflies covering their largest area of forest since 2018. The recovery remains fragile, but suggests there’s been a positive impact from conservation efforts in the butterflies’ core habitat. buff.ly/XoPKQ9d #ShareGoodNewsToo

Frank Olivieri, every morning:

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

This week I taught the origins of containment and the post-World War II order. Nearly 20 years of teaching it, but it struck me hard this year how policymakers of that era were trying to prevent conflict stemming from autarky, national control of natural resources, and global economic disorder.

Every story has a quote left on the cutting room floor. For this one, it's this: Me: The U.S. has sequenced 1000 measles genomes from our outbreak. Virologist @eddieholmes.bsky.social: "This is 2026! There shouldn't be 1000 measles genomes. That's disastrous." kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

adam says it much more succintly. the american right will happily impoverish the united states and make it an oversized backwater if it means they can dominate women and minorities and play act as a master class

tl;dr: NIH is running at about 60% of pre-Trump levels and NSF is running at about 20% of pre-Trump levels of funding-outlays (some directorates far below even that). Utterly catastrophic. An unforced disaster for U.S. society, and the world

No Kings in Philly! Good crowd on the Parkway, but plenty of room for more!

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵: These protests are important b/c: 1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

Crawford on pace to hit 1.000 for his career.

This is an absolute scandal; the United States government is deliberately consolidating all deportation cases of an ethnic minority that the President has called "garbage" in front of a handpicked group of judges and with dramatically accelerated timeline. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against it.

I mentioned this before, but although I wrote this as a break from grim political news, one of the first things I found out when I started on it was that the original owner of one of these cafes is detained and facing deportation. Trump truly poisons everything. lakeoswegoreview.com/2025/11/14/l...

Florida Dems flipped 2 legislative seats today, in districts that had gone for Trump by 7% & 11% in November 2024. Now a key question: GOP is preparing to re-gerrymander FL, & many are expecting a map they'll go for a map that nets them FIVE new seats. Does this spook them from going that far?

The inevitable result of this would be the creation of a permanent underclass of exploitable people, who grew up in this country, know no other, and have no education so are more vulnerable than ever before; a serf class for the rich and powerful.

I've said this before, but part of why I continue to be bleak on prospects of prompt war termination are because Iran has *very strong incentives* to continue pain infliction (against the US/Israel/GCC and the broader world) to deter a future war by credibly communicating the magnitude of costs.

An independent bookseller in Hong Kong and three of his staff have reportedly been arrested for selling seditious titles, including a biography of Jimmy Lai.

A normal Congress would simply pass the bill, have the President veto it, and then override the veto

Robert E. Lee got his ass beat at Gettysburg by a professor of rhetoric and oratory from Bowdoin College and generations of reactionary fantasists have died mad about it.

It is quite telling that since the horrific story of Cesar Chavez re: sexual abuse broke earlier this week and calls to change the names of schools and other public spaces named in his honor, not one conservative voice has stepped forward to object that this would be tantamount to erasing history.

$200 billion a year would enable a universal basic income of about $500/mo. That would essentially abolish severe poverty in America. Poverty would drop by about a third, and because the downstream costs of poverty are about $3 TRILLION a year, that would be a return on investment of $800B a year.

Attention Philadelphia! Our next Artpocalypse Now! Art Market will be on May 9th! We've got about 20 Philly artists lined up, it's gonna be CUTE. You should come. Mark your calendars here: luma.com/gsyl6dna

Good news, the Morrill Fire in Nebraska is now 98% contained. This will free up firefighting resources for fires that erupt in the current SW U.S. heatwave. The Morrill Fire burned an area 83% of the size of Rhode Island, and ranks as the 9th-largest continental U.S. fire since 1900.

@ronziegler.bsky.social Any comment?

this is a very bold thing to say -- women can't do this -- about a technology that requires the ability to issue detailed natural language instructions to an immensely powerful but childlike simpleton

French cities, by order: PARIS: Left strong. Does it need to ally to win? Can it? MARSEILLE: Left incumbent + far-right tied. Can left ally? LYON: Left beats polls. Uncertain. TOULOUSE: Left adds up to 50%.. but alliance will be tough. NICE: Far-right favored. NANTES: Left favored unless divided.

I sure do miss the Article I branch of government that has decided to neuter itself.

No, I am not worried about 'declining' birth rates, I accept them as post-modern birth rates, the birth rates that naturally happen once the conditions are set that children can be expected to survive to adulthood reliably and that women are allowed to be educated and become full citizens.

Someone at the NYT asked me a couple years ago for an opinion piece on "how to solve the Colorado River water crisis." So I made a nice little writeup on the most obvious answer: charging for water. Once the editorial board saw it, they freaked out & cancelled the piece.

THIS. Charging for water isn't anti-agriculture. It's a basic guardrail that keeps lowest-common denominator bulk goods, that can be grown just about anywhere, from crowding out more financially rewarding types of farming. That brings MORE MONEY to farms & rural areas.

Hey does anyone remember how we had like a decade of near zero interest rates? Thank god the USA spent that time investing in infrastructure! What a calamity if we had just squandered the last best chance of our lives

WBAL in Baltimore helping viewers understand the difference between watches and warnings

we remain firmly on track for 'republican president leaves the country an omnishambles, next democratic president is punished for not cleaning it up fast enough'

If you are watching Trump's presser right now, you are seeing beyond reasonable doubt a person not mentally suited for any position of responsibility. Even running a small store. GOP members of the House and Senate: You are seeing this too.

61 years ago, on a day we now refer to as Bloody Sunday, Black civil rights activists were brutally attacked by state troopers while marching 54 miles across Alabama to fight for the right to vote. Their bravery in the face of state violence was key in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I lack the words to capture it, but ... it's just endlessly remarkable to me that so many people in our society have chosen trans kis -- TRANS KIDS, the smallest, least significant, most vulnerable demographic slice you could possibly pick -- as a repository for all their fears & insecurities.