When I lecture to students about how the apparently thriving economy of the 1920s was really a house of cards just waiting to be knocked down, one of the points I stress is how much a small number of the very rich were essentially propping up consumer spending in unsustainable ways

Hamnet (2025)

I don’t think people quite understand that the occupation by ICE in the Twin Cities has more or less erased non-white people from public life. They cannot safely exist in any space accessible to the public and moving between private places leaves folks vulnerable to kidnapping by armed masked goons.

I love when you tell people how terrible Newsom is, they're always like, "Well, it's nice to have ideals, but if it comes down to him or the Nazi in the general, *I* am going to vote for him" WE'RE TELLING YOU HOW TERRIBLE HE IS NOW SO IT'S *NOT* A CHOICE BTW HIM & A NAZI, CARL. THAT'S THE POINT.

The Hmong are here because they fought for the US in a war we lost.

You get internal bleeding when you hit your shin on the table.

good advice to read this book, from a rally in Boston yesterday. @alexvitale.bsky.social

Wharton 🙄

Just let me in www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfmC...

Holy fuck they actually did it

birds do it bees do it even educated fleas do it let's do it let's fly into a window

“It’s an all-time miscalculation.” Well that sentence is true.

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Still mind-blowing that a top admin official was revealed to have taken $50,000 in cash in a paper bag from people looking for government favors, the reaction of the administration was "Whatever losers, this is how it works now" and bigshot news media said "If you say so, we'll forget about it"

Greed particularly evokes a certain logic that can’t be undercut by vulgar psychologizing bc it maps so unevenly onto the world and is such a cause of the world’s problems that all attempts to explain or integrate it into a fabric of guilt that’s forgivable through complexity wither on the vine

Is no one blogging (or at least skeeting) about the beavers in Carkeek Park? I stopped by after a while and their old pond was totally drained and they had built a whole new dam. I can't keep up!

obvious but still significant that one of the primary and most socially tractable ways some people experience their own “whiteness” is when they decide they’ve been personally deprived something they’re owed, whereas when they get or have things, it’s what they’ve personally earned as an individual

A reminder that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America

People are harshing on some “diverse reading challenge” thing that’s going around, and I get it, but looking at what you read and asking yourself “what isn’t represented here?” is imo a good and healthy practice

As a champ from what looks now like the last years of the dead-ball era, so take this with a grain of salt: agree

Told my family I don’t really care what christmas gift they get me as long as it’s Tactical

First time as tragedy. Second time as farce. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-_Z...

Again, from Michael Grynbaum, here is Sharyn Alfonsi's full email. It must be read:

oh the CBS bosses went to dylan byers? then they are definitely lying.

the vice president is a klansman

Folks, I've done it. I wrote up my best fiction of 2025 (please clap). Long thoughts on each of the top ten, short blurbs for each of the rest. In total: 86 books. Nonfiction still to come. I have read so much this year, please benefit from my efforts. And tell me what you loved yourself!

Agree completely. When it comes to research, AI is at best a guide to received wisdom (conventional ideas) and the whole point of actual research is to produce new knowledge.

The best way to show how much you love Calvin & Hobbes is to not make a movie about Calvin & Hobbes

to be fair, I'm willing to let Brooks slide on a dinner with Epstein if he would take responsibility for frigging _grooming_ J.D. Vance

One of those promos the BBC used to be so good at making. A raft of comedy talent on display here

MY 4-YEAR OLD: *calmly, while coloring a picture of the Grinch* If baby grinches die, we can eat them. If they’re clean. That’s ok

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

I will never be as handsome as Eddie Murphy (stating the obvious), but there’s a little bit of my soul captured in this moment. To me, this frame is the black La Gioconda. It’s a great work of art.

People keep wondering why they're going after Venezuela. It's because they want to do regime change and control its oil, then use a big tract of land there to keep a tax free "network state" that looks like Dubai but operates like Rhodesia. They are saying this out loud! Believe them!

The principle that the fascist is at once strongman and smol bean is probably most explicitly laid out in this administration’s criminal charging papers.

RIP the great Martin Parr

By the end of the ratification debates, everyone understood that the 14th Amendment would grant birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants. The only live question was whether that was a *good* thing. Some senators argued it wasn’t. But they lost! applyliberally.substack.com/p/birthright...

During ratification of the 14th Amendment, senators discussed whether the Citizenship Clause would apply to the children of immigrants and resoundingly concluded that it did. The text and history all point in one direction and the counter-arguments are patently fraudulent. I am going to lose my mind

What an interesting coincidence.

I, like the District Court, fail to honor the presumption of legislative good faith of Texas

Simply amazing that the Supreme Court declared an end to legal race discrimination in the affirmative action case two years ago and now allows overt racism in both immigration arrests and redistricting. Using race to help minorities? Bad. Using it to discriminate against them? Very, very good.

Absolutely agree—easily one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years, but it’s hard for me to get anyone else to try it. [and sorry to sully with a quibble but it’s Richard Flanagan]

Question 7 is everything Colin says it is.

The CEOs of Ford and Stellantis, as well as senior executives from other auto manufacturers, standing beside him while Trump goes off on another vicious racist rant about African immigrants. Not one of them had the courage or the dignity to walk away. bsky.app/profile/just...

Released #OnThisDay in 1941

Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.

Somebody just walked into our front room and said looking round. 'Bluemoose Bookshop?' 'No.' 'Oh, I thought you were a bookshop.' 'No, we're a publisher.' She looked at the TV and our confused dog. 'Not a bookshop then.' And left our middle terraced house.