Remember how I said I have it written into my foreign-language contracts that my work has to be translated by an actual human? This shit is why. Those book translations are gonna suck. They'll save money putting out books that are going to be painful to read. That's not a great long-term strategy.

I'm loving @pintsncupcakes.bsky.social thread asking people to post pieces of art that brought them absolute joy this year. Elsewhere in the thread I posted some works by artist Ruth Asawa, but I also had to mention this fantastic play.

my favorite thing about the benoit blanc movies is that they aren't really about benoit blanc. he is not grappling with demons from his past. we are not getting flashbacks to the husband whose murder he never solved. he just shows up and does his job like mary poppins for homicides

hanukkah is frantically googling "what night does hanukkah start" a week or so into December

Also, congratulations everyone who made something this year. A comic, a song, a film, a novel, a painting, a poem, a short story, a sculpture, crochet, embroidery, whatever it is. In this era of slop and theft, if you *make* something you are a shining jewel and I am so grateful for you.

Reminder that not only do library systems have physical media (& many also lend tools, electronics etc), your library card may give you access to streamers Kanopy and Hoopla. We just watched Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of The Rainmaker via a hoopla the other night. Pretty good!

hey so i know times are hard for a lot of folks so just wanted to recommend lasagna love. it's an organization of volunteers and you can request a free home-cooked lasagna meal from them just by filling out this short form: lasagnalove.org/request-a-me...

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.

As Justice Kagan begins her dissent by pointing out, what is even the point of trial, of fact-finding, of clear error, of standards of review, when the Supreme Court simply ignores every single part of that and decides everything purely on the papers without any real consideration of the facts?

Alt text for those who need it. This is amazing.

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

Read this post on the Young Adult Library Services blog for a just about perfect articulation of what libraries can create safe spaces and how book bans threaten them

Some good news out of Missouri!

This is, as far as I can tell, one of the first major efforts to rebuff Gen AI by a major radio broadcaster

In honor of World AIDS Day, I'd like to share a story that breaks my heart whenever I tell it. Please read it. It's the story of David Carroll.

Tom Stoppard possibly wrote a lot of your fave movie lines 👇

Five of Tom Stoppard's plays, over the course of seven decades, were awarded the Best Play Tony.

Stoppard always feels clever in a way that so so many writers mimic, but everyone else copies the surface. the Stoppard magic is that the cleverness is impossibly thin, basically transparent, and there’s this unending well of feeling on the other side

but man, to have lived a life so that when you die and people look to your work to remember you, the thing they get to turn to is Arcadia? what a legacy.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

one big part of this, which i mention in the piece, is that sometimes the episodes themselves are good! even great! even then, penultimate flashbacks turn the whole season into a seek-and-find exercise where you're looking for the real show under the one you've allegedly already been watching

IT’S HERE!!

I got a Twitter DM from the publisher of a book by Jeffrey Haas (Fred Hampton's lawyer) that I'd recommended in a thread that went viral, thanking me for the unexpected spike in sales. I'm sure we're talking dozens, not hundreds, but they were like doing highkey internet sleuthing to figure it out!

Oh, word?

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

Libraries weed books from the shelves if not enough people check them out. So using your library also helps keep writers' work accessible to others!

This is the big one for me. If you absolutely cannot afford the book, GO TO THE LIBRARY. You still get it for free, but in a way that still *matters* to publishers. The libraries are one of the few socialist projects we still have. USE THEM.

I once asked a bookseller at a large indie store how many people would have to buy a book for it to get the attention of the store buyer and cause an additional order and they said: Three.

Really simple but brings us delight every year: we use a local company's stuffing (Stearns) and usually buy it in 1lb bags. It's well known that is my favorite. One year my mom asked my aunt to pick up 4 bags. We didn't know they'd started offering 4lb bags. We ended up with 16lbs of stuffing.

I went to a baby shower like this once, celebrating the imminent arrival of the lil dumpling! Everybody brought some kind of food-in-another-food; it was great

Once again I wonder writes these headlines and where the shame went. "Lost" implies a desire to find / regain, a nostalgia for bygones, a romanticized yearning. Like it's is the equivalent of cheap rents that gave rise to cool bands. "Epstein Emails Reveal City Elite's Seedy Recent Past" it ain't.

When you write the whole piece around the idea of “MeToo” as an adequate description of what caused specific men to lose specific positions, and when you do this incredibly weird cutesy business to avoid *mentioning what happened*, you do a disservice to readers.

I want to very gently say something, and I hope nobody will be mad: If somebody on the internet says something that is NOT about politics and NOT about how terrible everything is, it’s a kindness not to reflexively make a comment (in jest or not) that brings it back to those things.

Alice is the gold standard of what Twitter was when it was great - how you could just find these brilliant, remarkable people with the kind of voices that rarely get platformed or taken seriously, and hear about their lives in their own words without intruding on them or demanding emotional labor

Best literary analysis ever

Just. How are people still using this shit lmao www.askamanager.org/2025/11/the-...

A horror story, via r/marriott, of the sudden nationwide Sonder shutdown. www.reddit.com/r/marriott/c...

This isn't "internal recriminations." It's voters expressing overwhelming opposition to what the people they elected to represent them are doing, and anyone--either in journalism or politics--who characterizes it as infighting is either not seeing and hearing what's right in front of them or lying.

Separated by sixteen years in terms of publication; edited by the same genius (Ursula Nordstrom). My students and I are talking more about white space in picture books than I anticipated and it's good!!!

Margaret Wise Brown's 'Goodnight nobody' is a dizzying leap into the void, bridging consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and dream. The whole world vanishes in a page turn. Sendak's 'and it was still hot' is home, safety, care, forgiveness. This page holds and contains both Max and the reader

Last week I posted that the image on the left was one of the single greatest pages in twentieth century literature, and I stand by that! But look what I noticed for the very first time: Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are closes with an almost-identical page layout, to wildly different ends

The verses are lit, so the song was a hit (regardless of some research errors) No tune's ever held quite so many enspelled By a ballad of freshwater terrors

The average SNAP benefit per month is $177 a person. The average ACA benefit per month is up to $550 a person. People want us to hold the line for a reason. This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. And working people want leaders whose word means something to them.

And he didn't want it named after him! He gave a bunch of other suggestions instead.

from one year ago today -

mRNA vaccines are the closest thing to *actual sorcery* we’re seen in medicine since the inteoduction of antibiotics or organ transplantation. The fact that the US govt is willingly throwing away all investment in researching them, for idiotic culture war reasons, is spectacularly boneheaded.

KBJ threaded the needle thanks to CA1’s unfinished business. -if she denied the admin stay, the full SCOTUS woulda stepped in to override her. -if she immediately referred the case to the full Court, they coulda dragged feet. -instead she boxed them in to act quickly once she does refer the case.

The Trump administration tells the Supreme Court it can’t be compelled to fully fund SNAP because paying out the money would “irreparably harm” the government, while SNAP beneficiaries … *won’t* be irreparably harmed by going hungry? The balance of equities here is completely upside down.

Steve Vladek's thoughts give me something to cling to... but yeah. FOOD FOR CHILDREN. I hate SO MUCH that we can even be forced to TALK about "strategy" when we're talking about feeding our own citizens.