Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

Henceforth this shall be known as the Shut the Fuck Up About Chicago decision. @harebrained.bsky.social

I got you a holiday present, and it is 22 completely alarming photos from Zillow and 2 lovely ones. Please stop the doom scroll and join me! open.substack.com/pub/rebeccam...

I got you a holiday present, and it is 22 completely alarming photos from Zillow and 2 lovely ones. Please stop the doom scroll and join me! open.substack.com/pub/rebeccam...

tl/dr: Come write with me in Andalusia! Long version: After a really lovely first writing retreat with Uptrek, an organization that does artist retreats in Europe, I’m hosting a second one next October (5-12) – this time in Andalusia, on the southern coast of Spain (!!)🧵 uptrek.com/retreat/star...

All of this

Generative AI is for losers. It’s so embarrassing to watch people debase real artists, the environment, and themselves for a sloppy, rip-off of a party trick.

I kept my old Twitter handle but paid a service to delete all my old tweets. Once in a while it will mysteriously repopulate w a few (why?), and just now it showed 1 tweet from me and all 15 times I rt'ed @sannewman.bsky.social over several years, making it look like a weirdly devoted stan account.

Goldilocks waking up:

Okay, so sometimes football is actually great tho

Nobody works this hard for this long to cover up something this bad unless they are guilty.

So happy to be headed back to Lighthouse Writers’ Lit Fest, this June 12–19 in Denver. It’s an eight-day celebration of writers and readers, with weeklong and weekend advanced workshops, craft seminars, readings, salons, business panels, agent meetings, and parties🧵 lighthousewriters.org/lit-fest

Feels to me like the last quote here is more devastating and incriminating than even the birthday book and the photos and the rest.

When we all get imprisoned for posting I’m definitely gonna be going around the yard asking what y’all said that got you locked up & it better be a banger because that’s how we’ll be establishing our hierarchy

“That is what it looks like when you zoom in on a mugshot of someone who killed her whole family in a meth-fueled rage after their MLM fell apart. That is a woman who bought too many leggings.” —my wife

Biden was the kind of old where you take away the car keys. Trump is the kind of old where you don't let him near the grandchildren

So… the reason he wants a war is so we’ll be “in a state if war,” right? And he thinks that once it’s “wartime,” he can declare martial law or some shit.

Just want to share with my American friends how the Australians respond to a shooting tragedy. Action, rather than thoughts and prayers.

If you want to give someone a meaningful literary present that’s NOT a cute Emily Dickinson notepad from Amazon, I’ve got you covered 🧵 open.substack.com/pub/rebeccam...

A great night at the CHIRBy Awards! Thanks to my dates @raforall.bsky.social & my kiddo. Congratulations to Ted on your Fiction Award win! A joy to share a category with you! Chicago is the greatest literary city, with the best literary community, in the country. @chicagorevbooks.bsky.social

I did a Zoom seminar the other night discussing Writing While Parenting, and it was so cathartic to say everything I wish someone had said to me when I had 1.5 children and a nascent writing career and wasn't sure it was all tenable. myfivethings.com/class/rebecc...

A huge night for Democrats: —They flip Miami's mayorship. —They flip a state House district in Georgia that had voted Trump by 13%. —They keep Albuquerque's mayorship, while the liberal faction flips city council. —And they get big overperformances (+18 & +22) in 2 Florida specials.

"I'm not in denial, I'm in open rebellion" damn that quote goes hard

I’m so excited for this book!!!

One of the many reasons AI can't produce good writing is it can't hate its own writing. It can't think to itself "Maybe I'm illiterate" during the writing process. And that's essential

Look at this! Someone actually went and made this beautiful thing! Spread it far and wide!

If you weren't already looking forward to the CHIRBys this week, this incredible essay by @chicagorevbooks.bsky.social editor-in-chief @mbwwelch.bsky.social will certainly get you fired up -- not just for the awards, but all things Chicago writing! buff.ly/93L3Slo #hooraychicago!

Remember folks: if you have any small amount of artistic talent, any sex appeal, or can make your friends laugh, the richest man on earth is crying screaming throwing up because he can’t be you.

"The secret of Nazism in practice, as Mein Kampf states time and again, is to do the most outrageously secret things quite openly. The Nazi success with this practice has been so great that there is nothing they will not dare." - Bella Fromm, Berlin, 3/20/1938

This is what Woke stole from us

bugs bunny was literally the first guy in drag i ever saw but ok

My constituent, Wilmer, was mauled by an ICE attack dog despite the fact that, as he has consistently explained, he was not resisting arrest or trying to flee—his wife and young children, all U.S. citizens, were forced to watch helplessly as Wilmer was violently attacked and dragged away.

it might seem surprising that the people who said “look, let trans people live their lives, but i have Reasonable Concerns about sports and toilets” aren’t up in arms about this, but what you have to remember is that those people who said that are liars who were lying

The Norwegian Embassy is out here saving social media

Okay but listen, it’s TIME

All super rich guys sound the same now. It’s all “I sleep four hours a night and spend the other twenty hours a day developing a product that’s going to bring us the best widespread poverty anyone’s ever seen.”

"We're all standing. I'm just very tall."

Yesterday I posted about my Five Things Class happening on 12/7 at 8pm EST, but if you were like, “Hmm, that sounds interesting, but I could really use 10% off,” today I have a discount code! Read till the end to get it, and I hope to see you on Zoom on Sunday! open.substack.com/pub/rebeccam...

In a world awash with negative science/health news this is unashamedly great news. connectsci.au/news/news-pa...

I’m so excited for my two-hour online class for writers (and other artists), Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing While Parenting 🧵 myfivethings.com/class/rebecc...

I’ll be in conversation TONIGHT for World AIDS Day with @tracybaim.bsky.social, @victorianoe.bsky.social, and & Rosa E. Martínez Colón. Join us at the Women & Children First Bookstore in Andersonville (Chicago) tonight at 7pm! www.eventbrite.com/e/world-aids...

Please help with a family dispute. In "Frosty the Snowman" (song, not movie), does "He only paused a moment when he heard him holler 'Stop!'" mean: a) He paused ONLY for a moment, then plowed right through b) He paused for a moment ONLY when the traffic cop told him to, and not before

Damnit damnit damnit. Tom Stoppard deserved to win the Nobel Prize, and I held out hope that it would still happen. Arcadia in particular had a huge influence on my work. And Leopoldstadt was a glorious last act.

Thankful I learned Cyberstalking in Illinois is a Class 4 felony, up to 3 years in prison w/ a $25K fine, if a person says things online w/ intent to cause a person who lives in IL emotional distress. The perpetrator can live anywhere. It can be classified a hate crime if the victim is diverse.

HEY, if you're working on your first novel and you're home for Thanksgiving, do NOT tell people what it's about. Make up a decoy novel (Psychic nun who fights crime with martial arts!) and let them be condescending about that one instead. I've had too many students' novels "ruined" over holidays.

They say nothing good comes from hate, but when I see artists hating on AI, it makes me immediately like them and want to check out their work.

Very curious what will happen here. Goebbels did not intervene when his own wife’s Jewish stepfather was thrown in a concentration camp. Richard Friedländer died in 1939 at Buchenwald.

I love this. The little manbabies could not handle a mild Chicago November and felt threatened by our whistles. Whatever Charlotte dishes out, they won't be ready for either. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

There is absolutely no legitimate reason for this. It's not, for instance, being replaced by more specific language or something. This is not a misleading article.

Fun fact, my father hated Chomsky so much that until I was about 8 I was pretty sure he was a Soviet dictator. He'd talk about Stalin and Chomsky in the exact same tone of voice.