Happy Lottery Day!

One rehearsal down and they’re already crushing it! Come to Maine to see some theatre this August!

i like that Paul Simon gets big cocky with his theory that there's 50 ways to leave your lover, and then when pressed for answers he's only got like six and one of them is just "get on the bus"

Washington Nat'l Opera sues the Kennedy Center alleging that the Center STOLE the opera's endowment. WNO had a longterm agreement where KC ran the opera's development back office, and in 2025 KC just ... stopped doing it and seized the funds. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This is an anti-immigrant pogrom, egged on and co-organized by the richest man in the world. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/w...

Saidiya Hartman said “critical fabulation” requires “Narrative restraint.” It’s not just “make stuff up.” Right there in “Venus in two acts” — restraint is “a requirement of this method” (p.12). Before you go all fabulating pls re-read the part about it being “critical.” Thx!!!

Another paragraph to add to the Statue of Liberty book project I hope to write one day

You have to be really committed to US violence and racism to remove these anodyne panels

if you are a man considering weighing in on the latest graham platner story i urge you to take a beat. women who are your peers are watching.

Marjane Satrapi 1969-2026

MIT (endowment: $27B) shuttering three of its four main libraries is one of those news items that just knocks you off balance, auguring, as it does, profound and permanent changes to the entire institutional apparatus of higher education in this country.

I’d like to add something else to this convo: many of people who qualify for permanent residency in the United States would no longer qualify if they went home — because their existing visa is on the basis of refugee status (fear of home) or a job they’d lose. Like it’s absurd at every level.

www.politico.com/live-updates... republicans poisoned the smithsonian women's history museum bill because they're ideologically opposed to women, history, and museums in that order

gwen does fantastic work as usual on some of the 401,000 trans people who’ve had to flee hostile territory in their own country in the past 18 months.

Cis friends, if the deliberate attacks on trans health, safety, identity and existence don't radicalize you... if you haven't noticed that "deliberately inflicting on [a] group conditions of life calculated to bring abt its physical destruction in whole or part" is a definition of genocide yet...

southern state governments are banning black congressional representation and installing statues of men who waged a war to continue the enslavement of black people in public parks

Feels flippant to use the term Streisand Effect here, but that's what happened. Japan ensured a statue very few people would've seen and even fewer would've understood won't be put up, and instead people all over the world are going to read about their system of sexual slavery during WWII.

In a country that took the humanities seriously, way more of the medievalists you’re seeking out to explain Avignon would have actual academic jobs.

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

You are a senator.

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

“The Klan monument is run by slave labor” is a little too on the fucking nose

Tapping the sign

Also who gives a shit what other countries do. In this country we fought a civil war about slavery that turned into a war for emancipation, and birthright citizenship is part of the project of making emancipation meaningful, so like, it matters that we do have this HERE. We need this here.

Calling this practice “therapy” is equal parts infuriating and baffling to me. It has shown in virtually every arena of research to be harmful, ineffective, and dangerous. Anyone practicing it should have their license revoked and be shunned from the field. 8-1…what a fucking disgrace

Happy Trans Day of Visibility ❤️🏳️‍⚧️❤️

Wrote a whole dissertation on monuments and let me just say: this is ridiculous. Literally no one needs a statue of Columbus, least of all the White House.

What the US is purposefully doing to Cuba should be considered genocide.

just a thought: no movement should ever depend so completely on the reputation of its chosen figurehead that one of its founders is forced to make a calculation like this on behalf of its survival

a preliminary survey for the next component of my research: if you're willing to tell me about your connection to the movie/musical 1776... docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

RIP to Pedro O’Hara’s, Maine’s version of this restaurant.

Sad to see the Ides of March becoming commercialised like this. I really feel like we're losing track of the true spirit of the holiday. It's not about how many knives you can stick in a tyrant all at once, it's about the whole community coming together to stab the tyrant as many times as possible.

Cis people need to pay attention to the way they communicate this. They freely admit that after all of their research, they came up with zero evidence that HRT was harmful. Then they banned it anyway, claiming their inability to find a reason is a reason in of itself.

RIP Baudrillard you would've loved this episode of imperial decline

you know, if the government’s going to fund theater for the public to enjoy, it would have cost a hell of a lot less to just do a new WPA

Edmonia Lewis virtually vanished from history when she died in 1907. A new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum teases out the mysteries of Lewis's life while showcasing her marble sculptures.

What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.

tl;dr: more people should watch this gentleman's speech and think seriously about what he is saying bsky.app/profile/slcl...

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” James Baldwin

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

btw for trans women to offer this kind of practical warning and sympathy is a serious mitzvah and we cis women really owe it to them (and to ourselves!) to step up our solidarity in kind

@toddbrianbackus.com and I are starting a new theatre company here in Portland, go give @foxbrambleme.bsky.social a follow!!!

ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings. www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...

And if you’re wondering “Why is there a blob in the back?” Well, that’s where the first woman president was supposed to go. More than a century later, it remains unsculpted.

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹) RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

rev jonathan edwards, gazing upwards from hell

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

A little under 18 months ago I was part of the care team of a dear friend who got diagnosed and then died from stage 4 colorectal cancer in a two month span. She would have turned 41 a month after she died.