Still floored that director Roberta Findlay says this is the book she's always wanted to adapt, so this is perfect.

Fixed it for you

Checking out Bentley Little's bibliography thanks to the new Just King Things bonusode, and it looks like a fun-house mirror version of Frederick Wiseman's filmography.

Powered by baths and full of ass - the Clayton Cubitt promise.

Read for filth by Nietzsche yet again

shelved by genre is a good podcast

It should also be noted that this piggybacks on a well-known human trait - folks will ask a human, however unreliable, before they look themselves for a more authoritative source.

Particularly devastated by Todd Snider's death - all the headlines are (somewhat understandably) playing up the "satirical" aspects of his songwriting, but for me, it was the always the quieter songs of questioning that landed. Dude wrote "That Was Me," "I Spoke as a Child," and "Horseshoe Lake."

Probably cause I'm in the middle of a TWIN PEAKS re-watch, but I can't stop the David Lynch voice in my head: "Coop! Coop! They're trying to bring back James Bond! But they blew him up in the last one, Coop!"

Reminds me that the last time I read LotR was in spring of 2003 for a Tolkien class - the professor would bring in a newspaper each class and fulminate for 20 minutes against the invasion of Iraq before connecting it to the day's work.

Apropos of nothing, when I worked at Target, the backroom team was almost entirely composed of Arabic-speaking immigrants. Unsurprisingly, they spoke a lot of Arabic to each other, and one of my non-backroom colleagues complained one day that they didn't speak English over the walkies.

Serendipitously just started WAR & WAR yesterday.

“Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is fully convinced that *even the dead* will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Walter Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

My first week of fundraising to stay in the US went better than I ever expected. I’m humbled and grateful and I wish I could stop there but… Shares/reposts/signal boosts are greatly appreciate 🙏

Seems like a good day to remind people what Brian Yuzna had planned for HOUSE OF REANIMATOR “…a Bush-like president would die in office, prompting the U.S. government to call Herbert West in to do what West does best: bring the dead back from the dead” bloody-disgusting.com/news/3413822...

The one time we did encounter a mentally-unwell person who started ranting at my partner's 4yo, a calm business-suited gentleman silently interposed himself, back to the ranter and just read his newspaper, didn't even look at us.

I refuse to put the 80s nostalgia AI video on the feed, but know it is (unintentionally) the best horror film of 2025.

Second time in NYC after growing up in rural Florida, I'm 21 and with my partner taking her 4yo to the Bronx zoo on the subway. It's winter and I'm wearing cargo pants and big leather jacket, beanie over my hair (which was, admittedly, pretty long). But I'm roughly 5'10 and ~200lbs.

The way academics have shown their entire ass in response to fascism…your institutions deserve to die. You’re weak and ineffectual and cowardly. You have no solidarity with each other or with anyone else. You have no analysis of power. You’re obsolete and the world needs new intellectuals.

People who think of themselves as intelligent are more likely to be uncomfortable around smarter people than those who don’t. This is why many people who think of themselves as smart and rational end up choosing mid intellectuals to engage with. This in turn explains the circle jerk of academia.

Increasingly, when we look inward to seek the source of our distress, what we find isn’t Mommy and Daddy. It’s fascism. It’s inflation. It’s climate change. The mechanism that converts global social problems into personal familial problems is being overwhelmed by the brute force of reality itself.

I’m an immigrant writer who doesn’t have an Atlantic Monthly staff salary or Atlantic Monthly health insurance. I’m about to put my phone away and do several hours of heavy manual labor so I can eat this week. Maybe you wanna subscribe to my Patreon while I’m busy?

One thing I loathed about academia from the first second was the the tacit agreement that you’re supposed to flatter other scholars’ egos and avoid making them feel bad no matter how terrible their ideas or how bad their work. This mutual ego-shielding pact is a relentless driver of mediocrity.

Saw the most recent Rothko exhibit in DC and almost offered to buy a catalog for the woman who was going up to every single painting and taking a shitty, off-kilter photo each time, just to get her out of the gallery.

we all joke about this stuff (“why spend hours reading a book when I can spend two min reading an AI summary” etc), but, sincerely, I don’t really see how this line of thinking is different from suicidal ideation. what argument is there for life at all, if the only goal is to eliminate wasted time

Don't rank Cuomo!

The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine are directly responsible for the war on trans people in the US, which they deliberately initiated after seeing how many clicks the British press got for doing the same in their country. Both these publications MUST die.

My favorite was in grad school, where prof's only instruction was "Write a paper. 12-15 pages. Make it beautiful."

Cutting lines or even whole departments is the frontal assault on higher ed, but another low key war of attrition is the slow accumulation of grinding, meaningless additional tasks concerning syllabus templates, learning outcomes, institutional pablum, and ever more intricate evaluation hoops.

I would like one of the hand-wringing academics to explain to me how assigning only one chapter because students don’t like to read a whole book is ethically different from students reading a chatgpt summary of the same book they don’t want to read.

If I were to describe what I wished would happen to the dean who insisted I not be offered future contracts for grading essays that don't meet the minimum requirements of the assignment as Ds, I would be arrested.

we once did a thing where we said if we hit X patreon subscribers we would immediately begin a homestuck show, which created Homestuck Made This World what if we also did this for Twin Peaks

Look I get it, I used to be an academic: I used to wake up with that same feeling of useless, insignificant self-loathing. It doesn’t end until you leave and start a new life. Then the things you used to think mattered, like MLA and appeasing your advisor, become plainly visible as an absurd farce.

Folks need to stop with these garbage Omelas re-runs and instead do a re-write A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ that takes the role of Islamic scholarship in knowledge preservation during the "dark ages" seriously.

What I love about SHELVED BY GENRE is that they get me to read stuff that I've been meaning to read for years and/or return to things I've read with new eyes.

Book resellers who show up and scan 400 books at the library book sale? Immoral.

If, Jurassic Park style, I had to reconstruct Stephen King's whole deal, I might actually start with DUMA KEY - it's got Supernatural Steve, Crime Steve, Pseudoprogressive-on-race Steve, and is based on his experiences in a way that feels richer than his numerous drunk-writer avatars.

Today’s Patreon post is called “On Christian Resentment.” It’s about that deranged profile in Christian grievance the New York Times put out this week. www.patreon.com/posts/124312...

The entire 9+ year process of going from undergraduate to Ph.D. is a relentless selection mechanism that always chooses the complacent, the milquetoast, the obedient, the formally consistent. And yet academics are truly convinced they are each a special, strong-willed snowflake.

Do you want to keep the fire of knowledge and reason burning or not? There’s $15 billion worth of firewood right there in your wallet.

I wrote one of my period rants about academia, inspired by today’s Trump screenshot. Free this week, no paywall. www.patreon.com/posts/123026...

It truly does need to be emphasized that for all their power and all their evil, we are not fighting supervillains. We are fighting misshapen, weak, cowardly little men who are fundamentally useless and incompetent.

I’m gonna level with you: at $2 a month you’re actually losing value every month by NOT subscribing to my Patreon

today of all days I fully recommend being a greedy indecisive fully practicing bisexual slut 💞💞