maybe I should be more diplomatic, but the normalization of ageism is really pissing me off.

I have little patience for people who think we'll solve our democracy problem by stigmatizing the elderly and reducing voter power. fuck that shit.

ageism is shit. ableism is shit. the fact that some progressives have decided its the bigotry they can embrace is still shit. Carter got rid of mandatory retirement and that was a good thing for the country and for human rights.

some jobs require very specific skills that atrophy as you age. politician isn't one. Sanders is pretty unique. not everything about him is great, but he can do a lot of good where he is. so can Warren. you roll the dice and you're quite possibly going to get someone less good.

I have incarcerated comrades & loved ones who are enduring the daily torture of US prisons. They also continue to make art. They often don't have the proper supplies and yet they make it knowing that it will never make it out to anyone else. But they continue to make art nonetheless. Keep making art

fwiw...I think it's often hard to tell what people will or won't like—ppl are different! I loved Asimov's Robot books and Lucky Starr when I was a kid because they were sitting there on my parent's bookshelf and I was reading pretty much everything...1

would that we were all this lucky.

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

every study of term limits shows that it makes pols less responsive to constituents and gives lots of power to staffers who have no commitment to constituents. term limits are a shitty, counterproductive idea. I wish ppl woudl stop treating it like god's brainstorm.

about halfway through this essay, which means I should finish... never. I am never going to finish this essay.

One of my favorite Am Lit professors at Middlebury, and one of my all-time favorite people Brett Millier, wrote a biography of Bishop published in 1993. Your piece got me to go back to it. Here’s what her book says about that poem:

This sounds like the same error populists make when they argue politicians should follow, rather than shape, public opinion. Newspapers should find news, and showing their readers what matters. If readers already knew what mattered they wouldn’t need to read the paper.

She’s being so compassionate and a supposedly responsible journalism outlet is so homophobic they can’t even use the correct term for her spouse. For shame, @nbcnews.com .

This is a fake Trump post, and the account that posted it here has been told repeatedly that it's a fake Trump post but still has it up. That's an easy block.

in a just world this debacle would prevent him from ever working in media again but it’s probably a selling point to his future oligarch bosses

still like this piece I wrote about Elizabeth Bishop. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/a-queer-ch...

rereading this poetry anthology my teachers at oberlin put together, and boy is it white. 1

The GOP is entering the “finding out” phase of gerrymandering. By the same metric, Dems got almost 40% of the vote in Utah and currently hold zero congressional seats due to gerrymandering

Having successfully completed his mission of turning the Washington Post into a conservative opinion-first megaphone for Jeff Bezos, Will Lewis is moving on.

will lewis resigning to spend more time with the darkness

I think there's a big difference between, "this is dangerous and we must fight" and "the administration has already won."

There is *a lot* already going on and Trump's stated desire to disrupt free and fair elections is beyond clear. It is very silly to dismiss the idea this won't result in at least some serious problems. It obviously did in 2020. They have more power now, started earlier, and are trying even more.

We are seeing the beginnings of a new assault on elections for this year and 2028 now. There are myriad plots, some of which could work in concert. This includes visions of the Insurrection Act and ICE at polls, the Patel/Gabbard inquiry, local election board takeovers, SAVE Act, and voter ID.

I think one thing people forget in the whole Trumpian elections storyline is it's never been just one thing. The J6/Stop The Steal model was a bunch of people trying many different wild schemes at once. It's chaos. They throw everything at the wall and hopes something sticks a bit.

Historian here President Abraham Lincoln opposed the Mexican War as a land grab for slavery when he was a first term Congressman from Illinois.

Censorship isn’t a “some say” and “others say” question. It’s measurable. It can be investigated and either shown or disproven as fact. Journalists at powerful newspapers have the ability but they should also have the conviction to report those facts as such. 4/4

Those outside groups don’t want transparency because they don’t know what it means in the context of higher ed. They want pretexts for harassment and censorship; news media helping characterize their censorship as potentially reasonable is a coincidental benefit. 3/4

Yet this article allows groups intent on censoring higher ed on a massive scale to describe their tactics, inaccurately, as mere a call for “transparency”—unchallenged. This is giving a pass to propaganda. 2/4

Misinformation can be unintentional but still damaging. Basic fact (that this article omits): professors are already required to submit syllabi to their supervisors, have those docs reviewed by admin, and are consistently evaluated by colleagues and students. 1/4

In a Democratic club meeting, LA Mayor Karen Bass pronounced herself "flabbergasted" by Nithya Raman's entry into the mayor's race. "I’ve worked closely with Nithya, helped her gain the Democratic endorsement, helped her clear an encampment in her district," she said. "I am going to fight."

I realized I can't really play because I never say anything at work. I'm just staring at a screen.

Agree.

Murder will out.

Also “Don’t talk to me about my own morality” is…odd to say to clergy. It’s their actual job?

…if you’ve been paying attention, that’s less surprising than it sounds: religionnews.com/2026/01/23/i...

An under-appreciated piece of this story is that one of the more liberal members of Congress met with clergy to discuss ICE/DHS, and she found herself to the *right* of several faith leaders whose support for abolishing ICE was so intense that they got into a genuine spat with her over it. Granted…

Is anybody ever gonna take a step back and realize the "Russia Russia Russia" people — derided as lunatic wine moms — were actually underplaying the foreign influence stuff, and the loud people who kept insisting it was all fake are now saying Jeffrey Epstein was kind of a cool guy?

Even if they wanted to go after a smaller subset of protesters they, one, had no justifiable reasons, and, two, did so with the incompetence that should result in them being criminally charged for essentially assaulting hundreds of people.

As someone who was there it was clear that ICE intended to fire teargas on the labor march, directing shots over the heads of those closest to the building and firing munitions directly at the crowd. They even chose munitions that would have the widest possible effect.

To say “I don’t do politics” is to say “I don’t do power.” Politics is another word for power. To say “I don’t do power” is to say “dominate me.” Meaning, to say “I don’t do politics” is to consent to being dominated. Precisely what these authoritarian regimes want.

RFK Jr. is a liar. He lied to me about his anti-vax Samoa trip. The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel is now stacked with conspiracists and the US is positioned to lose its measles elimination status. RFK Jr. must be removed now.

Yeah that's correct. Emily Brontë was writing a polemic against the state of the world. It's not a pleasant book; anyone who wants to be with these characters (ahem, Bella Swan) is seriously disturbed.

tbf to vance, I think he does also hate poor people as well as Black people.

Lots of people deeply committed to believing “there has to be something more there under the surface, it can’t really be that obvious” but no there wasn’t anything more there under the surface and it really was that obvious. It was just that the implications of that made them feel uncomfortable.

Yup. Back in 2016, when we still had a dominant Sober Self-Critical Liberal Intelligencia, they collectively gushed over Vance’s brave truth-telling. Anyone who had done real work addressing addiction in poor communities warned it was just repackaged racist ideological bullshit…and were dismissed

Thank you so much, Pete!

Can't say it enough, if you are going to build ANYTHING, you are going to be criticized much more than you will be praised. Do not be deterred. Build what you want to exist. Find your people and seek their counsel. Keep it moving.

NEW: House Republicans Friday unveiled an amended version of their voter suppression bill that, if it became law, would gravely undermine the right to vote in the U.S. ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

“[Pam Bondi] pretty much slandered all of us,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson. “And to me, that’s problematic to publicly claim that secretaries of state are not doing our jobs and the federal government has to do it for us. Not OK.” www.sltrib.com/news/politic...