NOTE: you all should check out this interview I published today with Danielle Evans, all about a single story in her straight up amazing collection, THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS, which published in 2020, and which I interviewed her about this summer just bc I love it and wanted to.

We can’t let weird stuff like the actual, rock bottom crime rates affect our number one industry, which is the imaginary crime industrial complex

It is pretty noticeable that even as mainstream opinion on Israel and Gaza finally shifts, you don’t hear the Responsible Adults apologizing for punishing all the college kids protesting the atrocities. Quite the opposite in fact!

Amy Sherald says the Smithsonian suggested removing a painting of a transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty from her upcoming show at the National Portrait Gallery “to avoid provoking President Trump.” Sherald: “I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship”

The distance between what is in happening Gaza, fully backed with US dollars and political support, and the reaction of American politicians who by and large just don’t seem to care or support it is just completely brain-breaking. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/w...

The only not-real people allowed to be reported about as if they’re real people — it’s the law, they teach it in J school — are the Muppets

So far, we've raised $7510, which makes us 25% of the way toward of goal of raising $30K! Help us send 30 young writers to camp by making a gift today bit.ly/2025WBScamp

people seem really confused about racial categories maybe we should have some educational programs to teach how these historically constructed categories structure our entire society in insidious ways we could even do programming in workplaces to improve how people communicate with each other

Almost twice as many people ride the New York City bus every day as live in Wyoming. The bus should have two senators

ICE *already* can't meet their detainment numbers without rounding up children, veterans, people born in the U.S., people with no criminal records, people at immigration hearings, plus academics and visitors with valid visas. So who do they plan to detain with >10x the budget? The answer is: you.

Zohran's win has a message for national Dems, if they can hear it. Campaign on an aspirational platform that you actually believe in, wear your true politics on your sleeve, don't equivocate or triangulate or throw people under the bus in the name of attracting 'undecideds'.

This is basically the standard GenAI use case. Someone hoping AI will let them pretend to be informed yet actually just wasting everyone's time with nonsense. www.semafor.com/article/06/0...

Cannot work under these conditions

Also: I assume Harvard will try to sue fast and fix things, but the cruelty this letter unleashes *today* will induce lasting fear and panic not just on the 6800 international students at Harvard, but also on all international students in this country, even if there is a swift TRO. Why stay here?

Also everyone knows that if I ever write a followup to The Great Believers it will be called 2 Great 2 Believe!

Grief is strange and slippery. Wednesday would have been my mother’s birthday. I’m missing her and also knowing how much of her anger was a kind of faith in the potential of the world to improve. This is one of those years when to find any faith in the rage I have to remember who raised me.

No matter what this Administration tells the American people, the law is very clear: Members of Congress have a legal right to enter any DHS detention facility to conduct oversight without prior notice - something I’ve done twice this year without issue.

You’re allowed to argue that black people and women are genetically inferior. But you’re NOT allowed to argue they are NOT inferior because that’s divisive. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

This Rümeysa Öztürk hearing is radicalizing. I've been a court reporter for many years, and I've never covered anything like this: A student deeply committed to her studies, imprisoned solely over writing an op-ed, being made to testify under oath for her own freedom. Dark, dark stuff.

For every doll you deny me I will push another jet off an aircraft carrier

“I asked ChatGPT” well I asked the three Fates and the one with the scissors got very agitated when I told her you were using your one precious life thread talking to that cursed thing

The average American has three friends

You cannot possibly believe this man is taking race out of the federal government by installing a regime of white supremacist censorship. Only a regime OBSESSED WITH RACE treats Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo Code Talkers as subversive and threatening, FFS. JFC, this ed board is a disgrace.

Well, my main thought is that it is too mid to be destroying labor and the earth for.

Expect more headlines like this. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

It's funny how the logic of protecting expertise from political interference makes sense for a certain type of independent agency, but is largely deemed irrelevant for the other independent agencies that Trump is colonizing

NEW: Mahmoud Khalil's wife gave birth to their child without him after ICE denied their request to let him be present. “This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,” Dr. Abdalla said. “My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud."

Since the Trump admin continues to claim Mr. Abrego Garcia is a gang member, I thought I'd take the time to put together a timeline, based on all the documents filed in court, which lays out all the "evidence" the government has ever offered. As you'll find out, there's very little "there" there!

Today has definitely been one of those news days where I feel completely insane from the dissonance btw this ⬇️ and like… sending emails and making dinner

Palestinian Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a leader of the campus anti-genocide movement, was detained for deportation by ICE... when he arrived at a USCIS office for a citizenship test. He is a green card holder. theintercept.com/2025/04/14/i...

Any Democrat that only shows half-assed mealy-mouthed resistance to this--whether because they're scared or because they support crackdowns on migrants or Palestinian solidarity--needs to be primaried out as soon as possible.

Entirely illegal, and unenforceable, as long as the states say those vital words: Fuck you, make me.

Wrote this today

If you’re going to carve something into stone, wise to make sure it’s a message of lasting truth capable of standing the test of time.

Me wanting to shake my head and say “Damn shame what Americans have done to their country” and then remembering that I am also Americans.

Gonna have to go find a Brandy Old Fashioned in Baltimore to show Wisconsin I am proud of it.

watching the celtics-grizzlies, and once again struck by how all the "Al-assistant" ads are about faking knowledge. Faking knowledge in work. Faking knowledge in social situations. Cheating at life to try and get a cheaters A, I guess, but what's the point of such a life?

We are thrilled to host esteemed historian, professor, and local author Martha S. Jones for a discussion of her new book, THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir. You can see her tomorrow at 7pm at the Remington store, in conversation with Danielle Evans.

Thank goodness for this morsel of positive news in the midst of relentless ongoing barbarism in Gaza, where electricity, water, and aid have been cut off for weeks and Gazans are starving, and in the West Bank, where settlers continue to attack Palestinians with state sanctioned impunity

Once upon a time in umm, early March 2020, I wrote for an annual music tournament an essay about absurd fleeting joy in the face of grief and doom, without knowing how much more was coming and in how many forms. This month I was kindly asked to reconsider it for 2025.

Every single member of the Columbia administration should step down. Through their complicity and their cowardice, they've betrayed their faculty, their staff and most of all their students. There's no way they can lead that university in any meaningful sense from this point on.

🌟LOST WEEKEND SNEAK PEEK🌟 After last year’s hiatus, our third Lost Weekend festival will be the weekend of May 30 at our Remington store. Hold onto your hats for this first sneak peek of authors who will be joining us!

ICE has been packing courthouse cells in Baltimore for days at a stretch, lawyers in the area say, seemingly violating the agency’s own rules. Immigrants there have no access to beds, showers, hygiene products, or lifesaving medication, writes @tanvi.bsky.social.

Columbia had one of the most vicious anti-student protestor responses of all the American universities. What would Schumer have liked to see? Another Kent State?

This attack on DC’s independent budget saves the federal government $0. The money comes from local taxes paid by DC residents. Congress wants to order DC not to spend our own money on healthcare, education, and social services. We’d be legally required to sit on the money while people die.

In retrospect we should have reacted much more strongly to people being like “you’re just virtue signaling, you’re just saying you have virtue, you’re just treating virtue like it’s a good thing for an adult human being to have, you just want to run around everywhere having morality and being good”

They adopted a posture of total submission and it bought them precisely nothing. A lesson for the Trump era www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03...