Strong Bad after December 2010

A heartbreaking story about Kenneth Grahame (of Wind in the Willows fame)’s son. As a child I loved WithW but Toad’s recklessness and manic energy always made me very uncomfortable. I later assumed he was patterned after Grahame’s alcoholic, neglectful father—another layer to the this story.

Did anyone have "Dua Lipa gives a shout-out to Jeffrey Zuckerman for translating Ananda Devi" on their bingo card for this year? I did not, but I'm hardly complaining! www.service95.com/best-new-boo...

Fifty years ago today, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" was published in the pages of @newyorker.com. What a poem!

Was just shown a video of a long-dead author I translated, being interviewed on live television in France. Hard to put into words all the feelings right now.

INTERVIEWER: What do you have that John Donne didn't have 500 years ago? TOBY MARTINEZ DE LAS RIVAS: A dead God.

Gordon Lish replies: “Captain Fiction’s powers? There are seven of them. One is the power to see the heart of the writer through a single word. The other six I forgot.”

Jimmy J & The Petty Grievances

“It’s wild how both of them are super kind over email and in person… but they turn on tracked changes, and all of a sudden it’s a bloodbath.”

NASA just dropped this image of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch looking back at us. The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety. I’m not crying you’re crying 🥹🔭🧪 📸: NASA

A painted ship upon a painted ocean ~ the sea turns to mercury in this luminous image of a fishing fleet by Californian impressionist William Ritschel (‘Boats Returning Home’ c 1915, Irvine Museum, University of California)

Thesis #17: Translation is the closest form of reading.

Palestinian Man Recounts Brutal Sexual Assault by Israeli Settlers www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/w...

The law backing up what everyone who makes stories will tell ya: ideas ain't worth the fig in a newton, the execution of said ideas is all that counts

"On the road, they stopped for some coffee. Got out of the car and felt the hot, bracing desert air in their throat as a fact and I everywhere above them, everywhere, as if there were no more borders, no more barriers, just an earth as unbounded as the heavens..."

Great thread from @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social in the replies here.

Super touched to receive the physical Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize certificate in the mail… should I get it framed?? Allez les méduses !!! 🪼🪼🪼

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

Steller's Sea Cow. © Leonhard Stejneger (1851–1943)

FWIW, newspaper book review sections are part of the mission of journalism. Every year, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles tell us something we didn't know before, or advance the craft of verse and prose in new ways. This is the purpose of reviews: to alert us to the shaping of our culture.

We are proud to unveil the world’s longest underwater timelapse, starting May 1st 2023 and running 1,000 days through January 28, 2026. This 10fps period covers summer 2023’s coral bleaching mortality event, but then recovering and growing through ‘24 & ‘25 into ‘26 #coralcitycamera

Media coverage of Gaza has plummeted. So today on @thenation.com, we're doing something pretty special: we're only running pieces by people in and from Gaza. We're calling it "A Day for Gaza." You can find links to all of the incredible pieces here. Please read! www.thenation.com/article/worl...

"The day is like wide water, without sound..." Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" in HARMONIUM (1923)

“What does anger look like when it’s used for beauty?” www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

The Grey King, honestly… he opening page is etched in my memory!

oh no, are publishers getting squeamish about buying queer books right now for some impossible-to-guess reason?? sounds like our books need to get even more queer, relentlessly queer, battle-axe queer, cackling queer

Wind and water raged with storms, Wave and shingle were shackled on ice Until another year appeared in the yard – Beowulf, tr. Heaney

I think about this quote from the Luddite movement all the time

Hi there. Isn't it interesting how the most popular TV shows and movies this year (Sinners, Kpop Demon Hunters, and Heated Rivalry) were all hyper specific stories, proving that "universal appeal" (i.e. appealing to white straight folks) is not actually that appealing?

Good thread

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Of course I got Volume Three at Three Lives on November 18th Happy ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME Day to those not doomed to repeat it forever…

If Not, Winter (Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho) & Enig Marcheur (Nicholas Richard’s translation of Riddley Walker)

The guy who got famous betting against the housing market in 2007 just before that bubble burst - played by Christian Bale jn “The Big Short” - just wagered $1 billion on the collapse of the AI boom. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

"Don't do it with publication in mind, don't do it for posterity, don't do it for the likes…Just write for the sake of it. Write to see what your own thoughts look like when you force them into sentences" Joan Westenberg on how regular writing debugs cognition www.joanwestenberg.com/p/why-you-sh...

You want a special Halloween early-voting sticker, don’t you? Go vote Mamdani before the polls close at 4!!! 🎃