the heart of the issue

What ICE does to children.

Every Palestinian knows someone who was murdered, raped, disappeared, and violated in death. Unburied, decimated. Every single one. /// What does Israel do with these bodies?

Rainer Maria Rilke said, What is within surrounds us. I used to interpret this as a psychological insight. Now living in the Ice Age a few presidents in, each bringing the States to new, despicable lows, I find hidden meanings emerge. #deepthoughts #readers #booksky

Bluesky makes you write #alt text for each image. I enjoy practicing that, but often find myself editorializing the image, rather than simply describing what is there. Hard not to do that for a book cover. People who use #alt-text, what are your thoughts on this? Is it annoying? Distracting? Fun?

The children didn’t listen. They rushed from the table the moment they were excused and took advantage of the holiday goodwill to play forbidden games, jump on beds, swinging upside down. But they remembered every detail.

Love it ! // Sleepless Nights by Uy-Vinh Landru. bombmagazine.org/art... #illustration

I remember fucking this dude who wrote a book on atheism. He claimed to have arrived at a scientific explanation for the nonexistence of a higher being because he was hospitalized after a bad trip. He wouldn’t stop talking no matter what I did. Never saw him again.

Atheism in the U.S. is as white supremacist as all the iterations of Christianity that emerged from the U.S and premised on the same assumption: white people are in charge - and deserve to be - because they are smarter and more moral. #deepthoughts #colonialism #race #murica

BTW anyone who leads with “But I hate netanyahu” is a zionist. It is the “its complicated” of the zionist genocide era.

Below is only interesting excerpt in a book that equates members of the #islamophobia industry with Thomas Aquinas and Augustine in its discussion of “atheism” —

The Minna (from us) exhibition in NYC was dope. Check it out if you can.

"A modern-day concentration camp ... People have been killed by the staff here." Irish citizen Seamus Culleton has been in ICE detention since September, despite having a valid work permit and his own business in the US.

Love this so much

New followers: What sort of things are you curious about? What do you like to read? What brought you here?

The Sky’s Assault on the Reality of Men by André & Evan Lenox-Samour Mother of pearl (pearl oyster, abalone, and mussel shells) on pigmented paper)

Has anyone here read #ForeclosureGothic by Harris Lahti? I am in the middle of reading it, but am wondering whether there is a pay off in the end for all the gloom and foreboding. My sense is there is not. It is making me question my expectations as a reader in general. Thoughts?

sigh

How I feel about that last sentence I don’t know, but I’ve been tetrising the words in my mind to better it for an hour now. — A hundred years ago, apparently, the entire town was underwater. Now the onions bubble up in the black dirt fields. And every few days,Vic must mow.

The writer/director seems please with his next taping. The other recurring cast as well. Afterward, the actress Vic kissed at the last taping comes to his dressing room to congratulate him. And while she shakes his hand, he thinks he recognizes a remnant of real passion in her big blue eyes.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.

Five years ago, I spent an awkward night with a student who had been writing to me for a year and wanted to see me. Often I had made love to force myself to write. I hoped to find in the fatigue, the dereliction that comes after, reasons not to expect anything more from life.

The piece that most beguiled and frightened me was a blank-faced, pure-Iwhite mannequin in a suit of inky feathers. In this ensemble, plumage forms massive shoulders that could be wings; the body displays a nipped, severe waist. There is nothing charming about this aviary costume.

To the great relief of all, a useless occupation was found for the homeless, selling The Streetlamp and The Street, newspapers whose content was as shabby and stale as the vendors’ clothing, and which one threw away without a second look.

Big advocate for bodily autonomy etc, but um posting this without comment /// The Reddit community r/FuckingFascists is for people with a kink for roleplaying sex with fascists. The subreddit’s description explicitly states that the sub is “about making porn or making fun of authoritarians.

Those who deny or underestimate the function of the mass basis of fascism claim that the middle class—because it neither possesses the essential means of production nor works with them—cannot really make history and thus oscillates between capital and the industrial workers.

Thinking about elements the best writing on grief and sex share: images are arresting and surprising, the reader’s feeling of discomfort or cringe is carefully managed through arcs within the scene, and there is no forced redemption or air of abjection. But it is so hard to get there. So so hard.

Until, eventually, there’s a knock, and she’s there: returned to him, a place where it feels like she’s always been, and maybe never been at all. With another bottle of cheap tequila under her arm. A bag of ice to shatter underfoot on hte carpet. More laughs to laugh and moans to moan.

I am allergic to news about celebrities.

#Booksky: What books left an impression on you this year — a memorable passage, good story, terrible character? I am curious. #writing #novels #booksky #literature #litsky #books #writer #reader #bookreaders #readerscommunity #poetry #poet

Most carers go into the role, and training, to become staff because they have their own need to care for, help, and restore others. For their own purposes they require an acknowledgement that their caring is good. Instead, so often they get the message from adolescents that it is not good.

After Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books in Minneapolis was photographed walking through a cloud of tear gas to a protest following Alex Pretti’s murder, he and his store became “a sudden symbol of an ongoing struggle: neighbors vs. the ghouls of ICE.”

To convey what my life was like in those days, the only reliable method I have is to explore the laws, rites, beliefs and references that defined the circles in which I was caught up—school, family, small-town life—and which governed my existence without my even noticing its contradictions; to

My overriding concern is to find the words I would use to describe myself and the world around me; to name what I considered to be normal, intolerable or inconceivable But the woman of 1995 can never go back to being the little girl of 1952, who knew nothing beyond her small town, her family

For me the word “private” will always suggest deprivation, fear and lack of openness. Including in the expression “private life.” Writing is something public. — From Shame by Annie Ernaux #writing #novels #booksky #literature #litsky #books #writer #reader #bookreaders #readerscommunity

Zionism is nazism for the 21st century. Great essay by Yoni Gelernter The Drift

Trying to read John dos Passos now — a member of the “lost generation” who fell into obscurity because he aged into rightwinghood at a time when you couldn’t be rewarded for it in quite the same way (i.e. Christopher Hitchens, Fouad Ajami, etc). So far: I kinda think his writing is just bad.

“My body had become ageless.

From Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man: Our relationship could have been considered from the perpective of mutual gain. He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again.

You can be a war criminal and zionist and still win the Nobel. There is hope yet for Mr. Trump.

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today. This could be you.

Hiii I'm back to work tomorrow, for any editors looking for writers and/or journalists.

I was hoping when large media covered Mobile Fortify, the ICE facial app we revealed in June, it would add substantial information. Instead this front page WSJ piece rehashes our reporting, presents it as new attributed to officials, and forgets to capitalize M in 404 Media bsky.app/profile/cori...

The evolution of documentary in the US is a good example. // 1/4

60 Minutes aired a propaganda piece celebrating the pager the attacks which blinded thousands of children. They lost credibility ages ago.

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

feeling this hard today 🌈

In the era of rollbacks on science, rampant transphobia, sex negativity, tradwife horseshit, and a rapid social regression to old forms of white patriarchy, talking frankly about sexuality, “alternative” sexual practices & queerness with physicians feels like a radical act.

The theme of the year.

I have been thinking a lot about how violence is reported in this country - what is deserving of horror and what is deserving of a shrug. The entire media system in the US is going a massive restructuring because Americans started expressing horror at the deaths of people 1/3