i know we're all busy but i just overheard a plumber say "parlez-vous français ? non ? you motherfuckers don't even speak french, do you" to a pair of french bulldogs

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

What if none of these things is a distraction from the other things and instead they're all just horrible things

Personally I just really love reading. But I also adore libraries so go to your library this new year. They have all the books, you can request books and they nearly all have a online service for e books these days. #Libraries2026

2025 Year in Review! -falcon hearing worse than ever -center losing 50 to 100% of holding capacity -blood-dimmed tide containment failure -the Worst with record high passionate intensity

Amazon really does deliver anything.

God bless this NYRB writer who describes the Smiths as “walk[ing] on the Wilde side.”

Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.

"The Grift Bubble: A Political Theory of American Collapse" "Those who work against the grifters... may be acting from love, or from law, because they know that these things are real. And so they should also know, in acting thus, that they are the patriots." snyder.substack.com/p/the-grift-...

There goes 90+ day credit-card delinquencies. New cycle high. (via Kev Gordon)

“For anyone out there struggling to write because you’re distracted, or tired, or sick, or scared—I’ve been there. Take care of yourself and your communities…. your book will be there when you get back.” Thx to @nickcav.bsky.social for the wise advice newsletter.manuscriptworks.com/posts/a-book...

those of you who are afraid of aging, please understand that one of the huge blessings of middle age is arriving at this exact station

Either universities are private businesses that get to set their own priorities or they’re public goods that are obligated to serve everyone. You can’t have it both ways.

History as tragedyfarce? Farcetragedy?

City gov Mt Vernon, OH after raid today: “The City remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting our citizens, upholding the rule of law, and, above all else, defending the Constitution of the United States and the principle of due process for all individuals.” www.cleveland.com/nation/2025/...

I really love Halle Butler’s books. She leads us into depression’s dark, self-violent, isolation, then signals a near-imperceptible shift, one conversation that cracks open the cell, leads the soul into a community where it can thrive.

All is not lost, tomorrow you wake up and probably get to eat oats. Perhaps an egg. The possibilities are endless.

“The challenge Arendt poses to us is to think of truth and meaning not from the perspective of the economist, financial analyst, data scientist, or sociologist, but of the historian, the kind who sees human events as a series of breaks, anomalies, & initiations” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga... Incredible. Apparently AI companies cannot control how much compute users burn (and thus how much users cost the companies). “even the model developers have no real way of limiting user activity, likely due to the architecture of generative AI”

I'm over the moon that my book, Relatability: Sharing and Oversharing with the New York School Poets, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in the not too distant future.

Reminder that September is National library card month, so you should totally go get a library card! Yes, they have books, but many also have dvds, cds, video games, game systems, hot spots, streaming services, ebooks, audio books, park passes, museum passes, and more! Maybe it's time for a visit!

I appreciate and understand zero-tolerance re: generative AI in the classroom. I'm also disallowing it; we'll spend a lot of class time with pen and paper. But I like the ethic here to be positive: students deserve and should cultivate space to think away from the machines.

mohonk curve section interior, new paltz, new york, 1978

Great thread, which debunks a number of myths re: the humanities.

We should have listened when the modems screamed at us.

feel like this goes beyond politics and into tech and maybe culture. there's a kind of future blindness it feels like. a focus on both tearing down structural things/institutions and replacing them with nothing. or building things that disrupt institutions/infrastructure w/ little thought to future

super cool to realize that the capacity for shame was a load-bearing part of our system of government and that the MAGA movement's total rejection of that is an insanely powerful cheat code

Here's the West Philly Tool Library! Brooklyn's got the Greenpoint Public Library Tool Library, the Flatbush Tool Library, the Green Guerillas' Tool Library...

I for one am tired of Humanities academics pushing their elitist agenda of basic literacy, independent thinking and an elementary knowledge of human history

The liberatory power of mass literacy has been established across half a millennia. When you begin with this fact, everything from Silicon Valley fantasies of post-literacy to MAGA book bans fall neatly in line. Literacy is the foundation of democratic society. It must be enclosed & economized.

It’s so easy to be an artist. You just do it. That, of course, is why it’s so hard to be an artist. You just have to do it. People despise how artistic courage highlights their own cowardice. Thus, crave the art, despise the artist. my random thoughts on it, better said by all the ppl in history

[1/5] We're launching a new thing @ the Metro NY Library Council: The Cross-Reference Coalition is an experimental school tracing exuberantly🤗 interdisciplinary links btw NYC's libraries + archives; connecting its knwldg workers, grad students, artists + designers. We'll also make a rad book...

the funniest thing about the “ice agents are human beings with families” line is that there is no evidence to support the claim. oh they’re real people? what are their names? as far as I’m concerned they’re the T-1000 until proven otherwise

It’s sad to see the old MetroCard vending machines gone. They were a great example of good, durable, legible, cheerful public industrial design. About 20 yrs ago we invited Antenna Design to come talk @ The New School as part of our media + public space project.

A remembrance/tribute to Joshua Clover, written by some of the @ucmarxistinstitute.bsky.social faculty: www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/j...

every now and then i get an email from someone in scandinavia or germany asking i add a fischbroten or something equally horrific to my site and the standing offer is that i will only do it in exchange for citizenship. i will make it happen the minute that passport's in my hand

New book from @uncpress.bsky.social: Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency by Robert Fitzgerald uncpress.org/book/9781469...

We're going to need a bigger Sylvia Plath poem

I’ve been thinking about the post that went around a few days ago about using gen AI to plan a child’s birthday party. This seems like the absolute stupidest way to use gen AI: to complete a pre-designed task that has already been made overly complex

This is incredible. These fumbling, foolish, god-seeming things have masters who would prefer that we forget their existence. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/o... (xAI more or less confirmed this account.)

"We are not the elites the billionaires claim we are. Most professors don’t have tenure. The humanities professoriate don’t even have full time jobs, have been known to sleep in their cars. How did these inconsequential people become enemies of the state?" www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outl...

Oh this is a nice observation. I think they’ve found this to be true for a lot of loneliness/depression? Small acts of shallow kindness (however performative) can increase our sense of belonging? I read it somewhere. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/clos...

I think we are great risk of a future where unregulated use of tech turns America’s educational system into something even more segregated and classist than it is today - poor kids get largely automated “education” and surveillance discipline, rich kids get gentle low-tech instruction from humans.

Star Wars fashion is 90% flaps.

just eat the bay leaf. nothing matters.

Wrenching, excellent piece. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/u...

The high-tech-disco-ball wedding rave in Andor cut with scenes of immigration enforcement violence is brilliant. Completely indicts the viewer.