You Never Have to Look at The Video

~news~: this week I started at The Guardian US @us.theguardian.com as Movement Building reporter, continuing my coverage of protest, repression and resistance against war, LGBTQ rights, policing, labor, and more under Trump. organizers, advocates—send me your stories! I’m on Signal lex.mcmenamin.68

When I taught middle school, I was already RETVRN for the encyclopedia, because my students who were used to interacting with mobile user interface really struggled to use search to find useful answers to their questions! And the search tools have only gotten much worse in the intervening periods

save the classics

If I had to pick just one book to force every USian to read in order to understand how we got here, it would probably be Jesus and John Wayne. Decades of evangelism hardcoding its lust for macho white supremacist gun-toting rugged individualist bullies.

lmaoooooo one thing i have learned in my cable news days is that anchoring direct to camera is NOT easy to do and amateurs will fuck it up if they don't have 1) the skills or 2) incredible producers

I majored in Gender Studies and did work-study at a British art museum and now I write almost exclusively about gender, with special attention on UK princesses. Honestly it was too useful of a degree!!!

Eddington underrated as perhaps the best film about social media.

I’ve had many colonoscopies in my short little life and the day when you can’t eat never gets any easier! I look forward to the jello all year and then when I eat it, it is so depressing

2-minute comic

Wow this article is one of the saddest “some of our faves are implicated” I’ve read in a while

this is why i think the Mamdani "warm embrace of collectivism" line had to at least partially be a joke—he had to know that that the most insane boomers would lose their shit to hear him invoke that word specifically, the one that an entire right-wing edifice emerged to be conspiratorial about

I've been thinking of how Achilles Mbembe says colonialism wears “the tawdry cloak of humanism" underneath which it hides its barbarism. In this respect, Trump, et. al. are nudists.

400 Ahmed Chalabis

i've been kind of obsessed with this line from Isaiah Berlin recently, and it seems to sum up this dynamic perfectly. Only incredibly venal, dumb people really want to be responsible for pushing the button on operations like this

Woof I am glad that I am not teaching the kids tomorrow morning because I need a few days in order to not be acting unwise

So much of American history is just impulsive and extremely stupid elites, who don't believe in consequences because they have never personally experienced them, doing highly consequential stuff because they're bored or believe it might make them richer. I guess a lot of our culture, too.

Will Stancil deleted his dumb post about this, but obviously this isn't a call to "get rid of" the constitution, it's an acknowledgment that it's just a piece of paper that is only as real as the compact it represents among all the people who live under it, which is clearly in great decline

something oddly comforting about knowing that amid all of this, an NFL team is still debuting a ridiculous new uniform lol www.espn.com.au/nfl/story/_/...

Entering our Too Lazy to Manufacture Consent era

Beyond parody

This is a man whose conduct would have gotten him fired from literally anywhere I’ve ever worked, any piddling school committee I’ve ever served on, the neighborhood beautification committee, anything — what the fuck why are we allowing this

Genuinely a chilling observation.

The first things you learn in journalism school •love America •never apologize for it

This is the "testing the waters" phase of the playbook. The GOP ecosystem targets groups like Somalis, Haitians, and trans people specifically because they've calculated that the average person's passive disapproval won't ever turn into active defense. They're exploiting public apathy.

The idea that faculty hiring should be determined by SAT score would be something that would read as over-the-top in a satire about conservatives! But someone really proposed it! Insane

Reveals how so much of American “secularism” is just unselfconscious protestantism

Max and I have never seen Hamilton and as a joke we just put it on the TV and god this is awful

thin skin, white masks

i used to think the "oh, satanic panic happened because people were mad about daycare" was a psychoanalytic answer, arrived at far later, but living through the redux has made it clear that daycare hate was never subtext. they were just going around saying it! i loved this book so much!

I didn't know Tatiana very well, but back in 2009, she was the first person ever to edit a music essay I wrote! She encouraged me to start writing and to keep going, and it was a gift I will be grateful for until the day I die www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

We should all be asking ourselves why it is that university leaders and even some members of the professoriate have been happy to jettison entire fields of humanistic scholarship on the grounds that "no one cares about the Middle Ages", when it is very clear that many members of the public DO care.

I agree with all this, though at some level there needs to be a tacit understanding that mistakes are baked in — these are large imperfect institutions after all. More importantly for coalition, though, is admitting nobody considered the political economy of diversity in a shrinking pie.

as silly as this story is, i do really think we have to grapple with how many people feel comfortable saying "a generation of white guys just won't be academics" as i have heard people on the internet insist. That is essentially an admission that academia doesn't matter to society and will decline

To If Books Could Kill Patreon subscribers: I used to date the guy who wrote the Wife Guy essay, and he seemed like someone who would be a great Wife Guy in the future but kinda detested me, his girlfriend? It was funny and I think explains why his friends make fun of him for being a Wife Guy now

I don't want to *censor* Christopher Caldwell, I just propose that someone who could write this paragraph is someone that should probably have to go touch grass before he is allowed to publish claremontreviewofbooks.com/mayor-mamdan...

For work, I spend a lot of time in the Evangelical circle jerk media and it is crazy how much time they spend saying that we're at the beginning of a religious revival and the numbers just haven't caught up to what we're seeing on college campuses

"There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of U.S. educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled."

you can't spend nearly a decade feeling continuously under siege without becoming a worse person, and you can't spend nearly a decade watching various social institutions collapse without feeling apocalyptic

Oh wow you were forced to apologize for being white. How did you phrase your apology? Where were you? Who demanded it of you, and what law compelled you? Was it a local ordinance? State level? Was it court-mandated? Tell me more about this apology you made for being white.

So many good teachers follow me on here, so I have a question: let's say you knew someone who isn't a great reader but got a bachelor's degree (with the help of ChatGPT unforch). What suggestions would you give to them if they wanted to self-study with the goal of eventual professional advancement?

there’s a kind of person who funnels all their moral impulses toward animals and reserves basically none for people… and in fact their work for animals actually seems to function, in their mind, as a karmic source of credit they can draw from in being actively evil toward certain humans

Another way AI leads to suicide is that hearing people talk about it makes you want to jump into a jet engine

officially at the point in my annual "winter break dissembling" where the tigger movie is making me cry lmao

Zohran: Hasta Luego Liam my constituent Liam: Bye Mamdani

To understand Nicki Minaj’s MAGA turn, just look at the cheeky formula @naomiaklein.bsky.social created to explain right-wing radicalization: Narcissism + social media addiction + midlife crisis + public shaming = right wing meltdown.

post a perfect album from the 90's that isn't Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains. Legit 0 skips unless you've been brainwashed too.