i'm taking a social media break for ~mental health~ so i won't be around here for a while! let's try to manage these stress levels! i will be checking email occasionally though so if you need to get in touch with me, try me at vanderhoof.e [at] gmail thanks for your attention to this matter!

I always forget that the difference between feeling sad and clinical depression is that it's like your body starts shutting down and doing the barest of effort feels like trudging through sand

are we sure Charley Crockett isn't an NFL wide receiver obliquely tweeting about a salary dispute during training camp stereogum.com/2504853/jack...

if christopher nolan doesn't do a travis scott original song over the credits, i will NEVER forgive him

Whenever I’m really sad I feel like a medieval peasant in that I feel closer in time to all the other times I’ve ever felt very sad than I do too like, last week

Omg there’s a review www.theguardian.com/food/2026/ju...

I really think this comes downstream of abandoning newsroom specialization. Like you used to have people whose job it was to write, edit, manage, copy edit, etc. and all of that was destroyed in the traffic era, and now no one knows how to bring it back

A lot of STEM professors seemed to weirdly assume LLMs could only be used for english papers....

I hadn’t heard this before. Particularly vile.

This is what I've been trying to tell the Christians... if you are having a good time... and your neighbor is having a bad time... you are a bad Christian ... i don't make the rules... but i know the rules

I am Not Doing Great and just had a stress dream that was so insane it ended with me meeting Bruce Springsteen and bursting into tears because I was so stressed out about making a good impression

yes. each time the culture makes a rapid jump to a different medium, most of the earlier work is left behind. people forgot that reading and singing nursery rhymes to children was a mode of cultural transmission. they thought they were the equivalent of background Muzak to soothe a child.

i have my quibbles with this, but the thing about kids not knowing nursery rhymes is totally true and SO WEIRD to experience in person. the kids i taught mother goose stuff too ask me for it every time they see me!!!! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

my favorite thing about the church we’re rehearsing in is this gallery of paintings of the apostles where they all look like the Oak Ridge Boys

if i can offer a heterodox-but-informed opinion— youth sports have gotten worse as they have become an even bigger part of the College Admissions circus. This, in turn, has ramped our Toxic Sports Parents problem up to 11.

not gonna lie, we deserved this one

Is it possible that the USMNT thought this was going to be an exhibition match at the Great American State Fair rather than the World Cup?

This is about anti-trans bigotry but it really is applicable to so much! Weird fandom brainworms, white supremacy, etc

bieb's justice and styles's house did tentpole male adult contemporary nostalgia routines. see also certain nick jonas and alex warren. abel hits depeche/city pop/new wave. miley on that bonnie tyler. sabrina has dolly/tina (among others!). doja/janet. particulate heartland rock airs from selena...

well that was quick

People should understand that the GOP obsession with communism has basically nothing to do with Mamdani or the DSA and everything to do with the fact that the entire American conservative movement rests on a foundation of rabidly paranoid anticommunism. The John Birch Society just *is* the GOP now.

i’m all for breaking from tradition in support of my preferred politics, which is why i take seriously the fact that the founders, in all their imperfections, broke radically from tradition to spark the modern democracy

From 2020 to 2023 I wrote a lot about the emotional valence of keeping up with politics and then eventually someone was like "idk Erin if you're struggling with guilt about the impossibility of building a better world, maybe you should just go to church" and that literally changed everything

So fun to watch the diaspora show up for the matches too!!! What an incredible thing to experience

you know she let him pick one thing and this was it

I’m no soccer expert, just a committed casual but Cabo Verde is playing an incredible game tonight, like everyone is firing on all cylinders

This will be on streaming as a special event, there’s no way this will stay private, it was a production with camera crews, I am sure of it

Congrats to my best friend, Taylor Swift, sorry I couldn’t be there I was watching Cape Verde

Lmao I interrupt your hot ass Friday to inform you that ADAM SANDLER officiated Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding people.com/taylor-swift...

At some point we're going to have to reckon with the fact that part of learning, part of educating yourself, is figuring out how to deal with the friction between yourself and the world at the limits of your knowledge in ways other than retreating from it or making it someone else's problem.

US legal history is not linear and one of inexorable progress. For wins like the Voting Rights Act and Roe v Wade, there will be a long fight to roll it back, and we must fight anew once more. There is no "deep precedent" that can stand the test of time if the losing side doesn't stop fighting.

Age gap discourse is back!

sorry, I do think "don't call your book the same thing as another book on the same topic" is one of those issues of basic courtesy that should be defended vigorously! Especially when the book is just 12 years old

if any brits get fresh about the quality of England as they face Mexico on Sunday, i will simply show them the most ungodly abomination i saw on the isle last i visited: Wahaca Tacos www.wahaca.co.uk

especially when bad bed-stuy discourse comes up, I think so much about how central Brooklyn is about as good as we're going to get for uneasy but real diversity in America. Everyone should thank us for how down to live together, human and literal rat alike, we all are

OH MY GOD GUYS okay so priests who want back in have to find a bishop willing to vouch for them, swear fealty to Vatican II and then HAND-WRITE THE POPE AN APOLOGY LETTER (I gues so he knows they didn’t use AI? 😂) and are on probation for 1-3 years this is ten times spicier than I even thought

every time i get bummed about the fact that religious ecumenicism feels like a super niche thing, i remember that Jonathan Edwards's Yale masters examination in the 1720s was about "the heresy of Episcopacy"! we have come a long way in, like, chilling out about intra-Christian disputes

The best part of my humanities education was discovering this grand conversation happening throughout time that didn’t depend on me or even involve me *at all*. I think eliminating that is a reason why society trashes the humanities constantly

lol the last two hours are the ONLY way i would end up rooting seriously for the USA in this whole rigamarole

Trump: It's not working! Why don't they love the fair? How do I make the crowds cheer? Oracle of DC: If you test your strength against the heat with a very long speech, the nation will celebrate harder than they ever have. They will party in the streets. No one will ever forget the night.

Check these refs Polymarket accounts. Because that wasn’t a red card.

my grandfather was a non-scientist stationed at los alamos for part of the period depicted in Oppenheimer and honestly hanging out with Minions is what it was like in his lore. Also much better than the Pacific Theater where he spend the rest of the time

Yikes!

The ultimate goal is a single line going up perpetually, while/because everyone else is dead

man it's hard to see this as anything other than a sign of total and complete failure of so many american institutions. like, MGP is funny, but this sentiment is not even funny, just sad

live-streaming a schism. what a time to be alive