This books connects some dots for me, on the rise of a lawless America, on special forces over conventional army(/police) forces, helps me see the line from the war on terror to our current political moment.

Here's a thought: the challenge of teaching is the problem of trying to use language to create habits.

Getting into pataphysics.

My school is big on anecdotal reports...it's one of its things, quirks, whatever you want to call it. Anyway it's a huge lift! I just did word count, I hit 25k this year for 75 kids.

Didn't make the Robert Coover/Percival Everett connection but that feels very right. (Also I need an interesting hobby.)

I think I need to give up on more writing. I feel haunted by problematic drafts.

"I don't think you should like most comedy. Comedy, it's not like food...You should only be gravitating to the voices that speak to you. And if a lot of voices speak to you, I'm like, honey." I love this, from James Austin Johnson.

All week I've been thinking about this video of some fitness influencer the algo served me, the guy said he'd torn his ACL three times and now he's never been faster, here are his workout tips, and to me that is probably the funniest thing I've ever heard.

case in point

Give it a read!: www.outlooksprings.com/stories/stup...

always a treat to get to feature new Tom Snarsky! "Scared of maps, I draw a bath and think of a very weird thing, a future child I’ll change and draw baths for and feed and, surely eventually, disappoint." https://www.havehashad.com/0wich

I'm very into this!

"In the fifteenth century, however, the universal reader had to be a universal book hunter--a haunter of dark shops, a patron of elegant scribes, and a habitue of established collections." -Anthony Grafton in Commerce With the Classics

Been doing a lot of reading about renaissance scholarly life, a notable fact is it was tricky getting your hands on texts in the first place so that every scholar was also trying to win at an intense game of manuscript pokemon.

Here's the version I heard: Mean Pharaoh, he lifted his cup for a drink There was blood in the cup and blood in the sink Blood in the Nile with the crocodiles Blood here, blood there Blood was truly everywhere. michaelpershan.substack.com/p/verses-of-...

I'm currently losing an hour or so browsing through this giant index of mathematical fiction. kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/new...

"Window Boy" by Thomas Ha. Love the moral layers in this. clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha_08_23/

Let's get REAL.

This book is really cool and weird! Buy it!

Ah the classic "of course correllation isn't causation.................but"

Good way to start the morning.

Yeah yeah yeah i'm fine just listening to 'mr. november' over and over again tonight.

I strongly identify with the too-muchness of this song and the extremely on the nose jekyll/hyde metaphor. www.youtube.com/watch?v=57eX...

There is a whole orthodox jewish dialect that I constantly think about (sometimes called 'yeshivish') and it's totally incomprehensible to the vast majority of americans but I love it. here's a video of two guys humorously using it to describe an NFL rule change. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvvi...

Tremendous thread, tremendous writer, gotta get my hands on this collection.

Nick’s latest story as he keeps the streak going, and it’s a great one. Sometimes all you need to improve your luck is a lie.

How about instead of writing report cards or struggling over the same stalled-out stories we just share our favorite Ezra Furman songs? I'll go first: Take Off Your Sunglasses Jekyll and Hyde Take Me to the Real Forever in Sunset We Should Fight www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqUT...

stegostory

From calculus today…a sort of lazy lesson hack is to add structure, completed steps, and questions to a conventional worksheet, both to help kids step up to the work and also to draw attention to subtleties. Went well even though I was in a rush so had to do it all by hand really fast.

Picked this up after seeing this bskyweet and it's amazing.

Pershmail recently hit 3,000 subscribers, guaranteeing that I will try to chase some of you away with weird shit in 2026.

Donne would have loved Torus tic tac toe. chalkdustmagazine.com/features/top...

John Donne, wow.

You can't stop this

Early highlight in the January 8, 1927 issue of Liberty Magazine.

the father with his dreamy gaze and his left hand idly buried in the fur of his dog ordinaryplots.substack.com/p/jim-moores...

My reading this shabbos. Hey, Jon Klassen is amazing.

@mattbarnum.bsky.social with a sensible take on declining test scores...no one knows what's going on, and it's probably complicated. cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-expla...

America needs more nurses, electricians, welders…but this isn’t reflected in the labor market because these jobs pay less…which is why many people prefer to go to college…so the plan is to…allow more people to enter these professions without having to go to college which will…depress wages further?

Kids who finished the assignment early in 8th grade today got a set of these classic imbalance puzzles from Paul Salomon. The goal is to rank the shapes in order of weight. lostinrecursion.wordpress.com/resources/im...

Had some good reading on my commute, "Daisy's Valentine" by Mary Gaitskill. It's collected in this awesome craft book by Madison Smart Bell that offers his own notes and line-by-line analysis.

There's a facebook group where people post photos like this of Skokie, the place I grew up, and with my adulthood spent in cramped urban conditions -- I'm so nostalgic for this low density crap.

Relatable!

In other news, my kid came home from kindergarten reporting he and his "BFF" have a catchphrase: "open up, FBI, give us your money."

This is one of those parenting situations where, the way things with the kids are developing, I'm pretty sure I'm about to be hit in the head with a globe.

Mikki Aronoff's story, “I Keep Asking My Doctor What to Do About My Problem,” will be included in the 2026 Best Microfiction anthology: www.bestmicrofiction.com. You can read the story, from our October 2025 issue, here: newworldwriting.net/mikki-aronof.... Congratulations, Mikki!

Check out @dylanpkane.bsky.social's mailbag post: "There’s this idea that the ideal education meets a student where they are and lets them work at their own pace. I don’t think that’s true." fivetwelvethirteen.substack.com/p/mailbag-ac...

The “Betty MacDonald bros” don’t want to hear this but there’s a huge jump in quality between MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE and HELLO, MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE, the decision to introduce genuinely magical cures (as opposed to psych ones) allows her to give the children truly awful (so more realistic) behavior.