Under a new policy released Thursday, the Trump Administration will test conversion therapy on trans people in prisons. It explicitly states that it aims to help trans people “recover,” all the while forcibly detransitioning them both medically and socially. transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

Fortitude. Because you know you need it! By Sandro Botticelli, whose day is today, in 1470.

I read Casey Means' book last year and wrote about her "salvation through orthorexia" ideology so you don't have to. This woman being Surgeon General will entail enormous amounts of harm buttondown.com/theswordandt...

I know I'm about the millionth person to say this, but a system where computers do the learning* and the writing and the painting and the music while humans sweep the floors of the data centers** is not freedom. * They don't really learn. **All the worst work is mysteriously hard to automate.

Noem said that federal agents had “detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself.” theintercept.com/2026/02/23/k...

Chest binders are a common first step to explore gender identity. Restricting them could push people back to unsafe DIY methods.

Looking right at you from the center of her ravishing lace collar: a woman, painted by Frans Pourbus the Younger. Today was his day.

Updating the tracker and I came across this fascinating story of trans and/or non-binary trans life woven into the Catholic practices of Naples, Italy. For the photo alone I felt like I had to share it - but it's fascinating throughout. From @apnews.com apnews.com/article/ital...

Oh my GOD King County Public Health is just wilding out for Valentines Day (and a lovely one).

If you believe in radfem ideology you should at the very least raise your daughters as boys and give them t at puberty. If oppression is really all womanhood is you're abusing them by socializing them into it.

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

I wrote about 'MELANIA' johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/my-melania...

The New Mexico Department of Health on Tuesday announced a newborn had died from a listeria infection that likely was caused by raw milk the mother drank during pregnancy.

"It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." I love this final sentence. It's bleak and lonely and yet not, I like to think, devoid of hope. 🐋 1/3

I was struck by this line in ch 134: "but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs." Ahab is boasting about his invulnerability, but in the process he imagines himself as something low, grotesque, ignoble. Typical metaphors for the soul are animals seen as noble, like hawks 🐋 1/3

I wonder how much M is deliberately playing with readers' expectations in ch 133. The language becomes that of a sentimental Victorian novel, conventional for all its excess. So M primes us to expect or hope for a sentimental and morally legible resolution where Ahab has a change of heart. 🐋 1/2

Kansas just passed a monstrous bill enabling criminal penalties and vigilante lawsuits for trans people using the bathroom according to their gender identity and requires them to surrender their current drivers licenses and birth certificates if it does not match their sex assigned at birth.

I couldn't read the whole article (paywalled, and I'm not giving the institutionally transphobic Atlantic my money), but the excerpt raises an interesting question: is there artistry in boredom? How do we cope with and value a text like Moby Dick that seems deliberately boring at times? 🐋 1/2

Man who's been fishing chats with his neighbor who spins. Unusual glimpse of male home-based labor & sociability from Quirijn Brekelenkam, 1663.

Researchers K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin document the discovery of a family unable to conceive of gender... @lateonsetgirl.bsky.social's "CONGENITAL AGENESIS OF GENDER IDEATION by K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin" is free to read now on Reactor! Edited by @pnh.nielsenhayden.com Art by Reiko Murakami

BTW when I say abolish ICE, I mean abolish it entirely and replace it with exactly nothing. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's it.

I'm fascinated by how M wrestles in chs 104-105 with deep time, evolution, and the possibility of extinction. Moby Dick pre-dates The Origin of Species by a few years, but evolution was known (Darwin's work explained the mechanism). As was extinction--but human-caused extinction? 🐋 1/5

for the weekend crowd: I dug into a new podcast that pins a bunch of notorious murders on a long-dead Jewish man from San Diego. It's the ugliest true crime property in recent memory. [gift link] defector.com/michael-conn...

I had a whole thread about today's reading almost ready to post, and then I clicked the wrong button and it was gone. I'm too tired to fully reconstruct it, but I do want to talk about how M describes Pip's experience as divine revelation and cosmic horror simultaneously. 🐋 1/3

For my fellow queer folks, I'll note that trans people are generally allowed to donate! MSM are allowed to donate, though still with ridiculous restrictions. Please don't boycott donating; people who need blood will die without it, and they didn't make the Red Cross's donor policies.

This video filmed by Ben Luhmann shows the moment a federal agent sprayed chemical irritants directly into a man's face in south Minneapolis. Three agents already had the man pinned to the ground when a fourth agent walked up and sprayed the irritants.

Melville, in chs 85-88: Whales are bigger, better elephants, except when they're people. They're mostly people, and people are mostly whales. Also, big strong dudes are the hottest, and Jesus was a twink. 🐋

This is a photo of someone being tortured, not someone being restrained

Introduce yourself with 5 concerts you've been to: Billy Bragg Black 47 The Magnetic Fields Christy Moore The Hilliard Ensemble

Today's chapters have me thinking about how M. blurs/collapses categories. Humans aren't distinct from sharks, and the supposed nobility of warfare is no different from a feeding frenzy. M details the violence of whaling as a near-murder, and whale-eating as near-cannibalism. 🐋 1/4

I am once again begging Congress for the sake of our Republic to pass a law forbidding law enforcement from wearing military uniforms.

Chs 55-60 make me think about pacing/structure and genre. Pacing: the plot is endlessly deferred. Our experience as readers mirrors Ahab's. He's impatient for revenge but has to go through the ordinary business of whaling; we're eager for resolution but get whale facts & art history. 🐋 1/2

In honor of ch. 59, have an actual sperm whale eating an actual giant squid. I like to think Melville would have enjoyed the wonders of underwater photography. A chance to properly depict a whale! 🐋

Stunning photos from Minneapolis, including this one by John Locher for the Associated Press. www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

ICE agents love to wave around paper that looks official. Most of it is a scam — administrative forms signed by ICE supervisors, not real judicial warrants signed by judges. Let's go through what that scam paper looks like versus a real judicial warrant.

A beautiful animated short film that I watched tonight. The whole channel seems excellent and sadly underappreciated. youtu.be/FPWO3kdJODA?...

A sort of post-script to "The Whiteness of the Whale." 🐋 poets.org/poem/design

BREAKING and HUGE news for transgender people: The bipartisan final negotiated text for these spending bills REMOVED language to restrict gender-affirming care as part of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. docs.house.gov/billsthiswee...

It's interesting how Melville keeps offering up rational interpretations--MD is just a distinctive and aggressive whale that has legends grow up around it, and Ahab is traumatized and obsessed--and then lets them collapse. A dumb brute, or the mask of immortal malice? You be the judge! 🐋

Related to previous about cosmic horror: I wonder if one of Melville's sources for Ahab's thinking was gnosticism? (With its idea of an evil demiurge who made the world.) But I don't know how much was known about gnosticism in Melville's time, 100 years before the Nag Hammadi discoveries. 🐋

So how are we feeling about "Moby Dick" as cosmic horror? I know that reading has become almost a cliché, but when Ahab starts talking about malevolent powers working in the world behind the pasteboard of reality, it sure feels like cosmic horror to me. 🐋

There's an excellent book bundle deal happening, but I wish I could choose to NOT include books by a notorious racist. I'd pay extra not to get them!

2/2 She has a lovely face. But please spend a moment with her gloves. You must. Because it's Pickenoy.

On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by a federal ICE agent. Becca Good, her wife, shared the following statement with MPR News.

Tonight I learned, yet again, that there is no such thing as "making a small pot of soup."