“Black lawmakers and activists across the Deep South argue they have been abandoned by the Democratic Party to fight an existential crisis on their own. They say they’ve been let down by nearly all corners of the party.” Essential read:

It's conference season, so I wanted to share the AI refusal statement I put at the end of my presentations and book talks. Feel free to use it!

This. When I had my problem phase I started with black lipstick and smuggling VC Andrews’s into the house. My parents reacted by putting me in youth group and started taking me to bookstores on the weekend. what kind of nonsense is a “Nazi phase”?

I think as a Community, as a People, we need to have a conversation about our habit of claiming "black people tried to warn y'all" every time a politician turns out to be bad. Cos I think we just generically tend to say mean things about politicians. That don't count. It's stolen valour from Apollo.

When people ask me what the phrase "artificial intelligence" means, my short answer is, it means "venture capitalists, give me some money". But OUP asked me for a longer answer, given here and summarized in the section headings: doi.org/10.1093/9780...

Human beings were never supposed to be exposed to the opinions of this many strangers on an hourly basis. Especially strangers who have opinions about who YOU should be/act/think etc...

when someone shows you their nazi tattoo, believe them

has there ever been a man so effective at demolishing the vibe. historic scarer of the hoes

People are always telling me the tech guys need to take humanities classes like Peter Thiel didn’t study philosophy. Perrhaps the folks advocating this line of bullshit are maybe just sort of doing the same “the solution to the problem is that I should be paid” as everybody else. The issue is power!

so philadelphia held a ben franklin look alike contest and i truly have to say, we are at our absolute best when we are both unserious and whimsical 😭😭😭

There's a perverse symbolism in the legacy of White racism sheltering under the bowers of all African Americans have done for this country while patiently waiting for the chance to go back to insisting we are a drain upon their society and that they never needed us at all.

The people who have tried through hook and crook to transform this country into a real multi-racial democracy are worth uplifting.

It's not appropriate for cis people to say that trans people are too alarmed, or that certain trans writers are irresponsibly causing trans people to think the sky is falling. I want to take some time in this 🧵 to write personally about how my skies have fallen.

America keeps trying to get me to go to her birthday party and I’m like no girl u need to go to the hospital

I’ve covered Black women and democracy for much of my career. And in my time at The 19th, I’ve kept returning to one idea: The journey to belonging is the unfinished business of our democracy.

I truly don’t see how it can be done and definitely not in manner that is affordable. E-book vendors, despite what they may admit, depend on libraries for discoverability. This type of digital media doesn’t have the same incentives.

People, for the love of God, please stop treating birthright as some kind of sweeping victory. It was 5-4 on the constitutional issue. The dissent laid out a fucking ROADMAP for what Trump should do next. The court always gives Trump multiple bites at the apple WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU HAPPY ABOUT?

Guaranteed: 1) Black girls will be harassed and demanded to be tested over and over again regardless of how competitive they are. 2) Winners from public schools will be relentlessly hounded by the parents and coaches of losers at private schools, with the goal of making them quit the sport.

With this ruling, the birthright issue is not going away. The right hasn't really begun *organizing* around getting rid of the citizenship clause. Like Roe, this will be their fight for a generation. And if the Democrats just say "we won" and ignore it, like Roe, the Republicans will eventually win.

I do not think ANY of the decisions of this court are legitimate no matter whether some lawyers like how they ruled or not. It's the fruit of a poisonous tree. Gotta uproot the whole thing.

Come work with me at one of the top SLACs in the nation! We’re hiring a Teaching, Learning, and Research librarian. Apply today!

Sometimes I rewatch the 1997 Fleetwood Mac live of Silver Springs, mostly because it is one of the all time great performances. I mean, Stevie Nicks made Buckingham sing backup at his own funeral, and we all got to see it. As a professional grudge keeper, this is a level I can only aspire to.

I’m tired of people calling Black voters moderate. No, they are *risk averse*, and they’ve got 407 years of reasons for that. My guess is they, like lots of other Americans, now see the risks of inaction and of the status quo.

Everything I know about AI n libraries I learned from @mmelibrarian.bsky.social! This is a must-listen: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

BIG update + good news following email ending volunteers to Jail & Prison Services: NYPL affirms JPS will continue with *same* number of volunteers, just from central NYPL, not branches. Per source, internal email which provoked the uproar among librarians should have never gone out.

All this heavy state repression increasing? Pretty scary right? Hang on to your hats. It's a sign of the fact that the state has caught onto the fact that we're in place with decent strategy to win & feels a threat. As @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social says, I regret to inform you that we are going to win.

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

In a surprise 6-3 fifth decision this morning, the Supreme Court majority has reinstituted prima nocta.

Another important step is a values examination. What is important to you? How are those values supported or not by entering the discourse in a way that holds space for OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Meta and all the others in this massive push to shove "AI" into every part of our lives as "not all bad"?>>

👀👀

A cartoonist named Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada was tried as a terrorist and sentenced to 30 years in prison for having anti-Trump comics in his car. Prosecutors connected him to a 2025 anti-ICE protest he didn't even attend because he was in the same book club as others who were.

I'm so fucking tired of hearing that trans kids need to eat shit. That we need to let lawless bygones be bygones. That data centers get all our water and we just need to adjust to the future. That the Supreme Court is static and we just need to sit there and not have rights.

Something I’ve glimpsed during the NBA finals and the World Cup are how much we need—and how much cities thrive on—experiences of shared joy. The understanding of how important this is (which might simply be the state of not being a sociopath) should be a big priority in 2028.

every time you see a headline that begins with “we have to,” replace the “we” with “you” and you’ll immediately understand the purpose of the piece and the power dynamics at play

Since he's returned to office Trump has attacked the Smithsonian as "out of control" where everything discussed "is how horrible our country is, how bad slavery was." Lonnie Bunch has been the person who has put himself between Trump and the Smithsonian. This is the story of his work to protect it.

It's rare that a newspaper says this out loud.

when people say that there is an entire welfare network for far right cranks that are bankrolled by local car barons and billionaires, what that means is that every university is prone to opening a Center For Freedom Thoughts Studies that focuses on how to ban trans people and put migrants in camps.

Last month two library workers reached out to Public Collectors to ask about making a booklet version of Fobazi Ettarh's essay "Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves" for a Celebration of Life event. We did, and it is now available for all: halfletterpress.com/vocational-a...

"Be beige, not rainbow" is the outcome of librarians saying libraries should be neutral. We cannot and are not neutral, and we gotta stop insisting that we are. At this point, it is part of the book ban playbook.

Everybody likes to mock the girls who passed VC Andrews around like contraband but no one understood Trumpism better, on sight, than did we. 🫡

Now-annual reminder that if you're at ALA and someone you don't know begins asking you weird questions about book bans and censorship...and they're wearing glasses...they may, in fact, be recording you.

“The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.” - Rod Serling www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...

help needed, please share. "IRB has been approved, now its time to recruit! I’m looking for Black women who currently have, or formerly had, a professional connection to math education to participate in my dissertation research study."

one thing i genuinely wish both Labour and Dems would do is stop over-relying on electoral gurus like Morgan McSweeney and actually hire political scientists and sociologists to investigate "okay, how does class formation happen now, and how does it shape political votes? how do we win?"

I AM GOING TO GO BANKRUPT --- American Library Association partners with Heritage Auctions for sale of historic READ® posters www.ala.org/news/2026/06...

Teacher with school tour group outside the Supreme Court: ok everybody! Who can tell me what the Supreme Court does? 16yo, under his breath: fuck things up

I don’t have time to write a rebuttal <https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/06/16/6-reasons-libraries-should-look-beyond-mls-opinion> But anyone who claims that opening library jobs to PhD’s is a way to diversify the profession is an unserious person

sweet baby deserved the world