It’s been fun to see folks discover language ideologies in real-time thanks to The Odyssey lol. It seems like we go through this process every time there’s a big “historical epic” Hollywood production

Neil Gorsuch was on Megyn Kelly’s show today.

The odyssey accent thing is weird. They’re supposed to be speaking ionic greek, why should they have british accents

"When I reached a former longtime senior FBI official to ask whether he’d ever seen personally branded liquor bottles distributed by a previous FBI director, he burst out laughing." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Again, the idea of hundreds of thousands of missing migrant kids is MADE UP. This whole thing came from a misinterpreted DHS OIG report that said that from 2019 to 2023 (half Trump, half Biden), ICE failed to start removal proceedings for 291,000 unaccompanied kids — not that they were "lost."

Aside from the embrace of Wellness Eugenics I think RFK jr's moves all make sense if you are trying to destroy actual medical industries and replace them with wellness snake oil. We can all agree on the greed of the former but at least they create actual usable products

To this point, here is populist godfather Andrew Jackson's inauguration speech in 1829. millercenter.org/the-presiden... bsky.app/profile/norm...

Right. What's changed are norms surrounding representation & aspiration. Being an educated, cultivated person has become widely politicized in a wider environment of transgressive populist contempt for conventional respectability

More here: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

This was a hard story to report. Newborns who don’t get a vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop a condition where they bleed uncontrollably. But more and more families are declining the shot. And babies are dying. www.propublica.org/article/more...

Would that be the same Patrick Henry who abhorred slavery so much he famously feared the Constitution's power could be used to "free your n----rs"? THAT Patrick Henry?

cool

Oh, the people who blow up ships are the bad guys? Huh.

The Supreme Court is trying to *fast track* the elimination of Black Congresspeople in the upcoming midterms. Its destruction of the Voting Rights Act has devolved into a pure political power play for Republicans BY the Republicans on the Court. I explain in @thenation.com

What's notable to me about the Alito-Jackson spat on Monday is how little Alito's opinion bothers with anything resembling legal analysis. He doesn't respond to Jackson, in any meaningful sense. It's just an angry blog post about how she really ought to be more respectful to him.

wait

YouTube has removed one of my videos because I reported that women can still access abortion pills. I shared *factual & medically accurate* information about women's health—yet the platform says I'm "facilitating the sale of illegal drugs"

The funny part is every example of her being stupid is her being correct bsky.app/profile/bill...

i would simply wish for infinite wishes. bsky.app/profile/karl...

A reminder www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Not only does the Roberts Court selectively apply the Constitution, even when they determine something is unconstitutional, they selectively decide when that matters

Breaking: Supreme Court Over the Dissent of At Least Justice Jackson, Breaks Its Usual Procedural Rules to Allow Louisiana to Minimize Black Voting Rights in the Middle of an Ongoing Election electionlawblog.org?p=155898

This is partisanship at its rawest. SCOTUS has clamped down on lower courts for rulings that could alter maps many *months* before an election—even when those maps have been judged illegal. Here, it's rushing to let the Louisiana GOP change a map *while an election is underway.*

Niccolò Pisilli puts the finishing touch on a brilliant delivery from Donyell Malen 🎁

Then on May 17th, a talk with (IMHO) the two best lay writers on American law and history working today: @jamellebouie.net and @adamserwer.bsky.social. www.chicagohumanities.org/events/atten...

so far, much of the analysis of Callais out there is focused on what the Court's rulings did to the Voting Rights Act, which is reasonable but now I want to talk about what the Court did to the Constitution bc the threat of Callais goes far beyond the VRA alone ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito...

My AI chatbot is conscious. I know because it is always telling me how smart and pretty I am;

We have friends everywhere.

Alexis Goldstein, a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employee, was fired this year for recording DOGE’s incursion into the agency. www.wired.com/story/a-fede...

Thinking, with sympathy, of the abundance of non-white workers in the healthcare system who look after - and look out for - men like this every single day.

… and then what happened? bsky.app/profile/joel...

Both mainstream media and especially MAGA media are hyping claims that there's been a big resurgence in religiosity among young American men. But a deeper look at the data shows they don't go to church more than young women. I have answers. www.salon.com/2026/05/04/y...

“A Justice Department that is willing to stretch both the facts and the law to mislead a grand jury into returning an indictment could literally charge any American with a crime"

Few things are funnier to me than the way Vision walks in CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE AVENGERS.

Todd been expensing wings at Magic City? bsky.app/profile/atru...

In its latest ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Court has inverted the Reconstruction Amendments to justify the same racist devices and practices they were adopted to dismantle (🎁) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

pride vs spirit is living up to the billing

a key to understanding the reactionary right, for me, is the realization that there are pleasures in cruelty "and no you are not immune." there's something in the human soul that delights in having someone to look down on--or at least, the capacity for this exists in us

Uno is a game where having all the cards means you lost the game

Alito has now written two opinions drastically limiting the fundamental rights of ethnic minorities and women, which was the kind of thing you would have expected from a guy angry about both groups being admitted to Princeton, something known at his confirmation www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/p...

Of course there's a subreddit. www.reddit.com/r/airplaneea...

The eyes say love but the ears say 🔪

clear goal of republicans in these states is to, in the words of carter glass, “eliminate every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”

By gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court is killing the Second Reconstruction. The first Reconstruction shows how Congress should respond. Me and Daphna Renan in the NYT on the tools we have to save democracy from a hostile Court.

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

Donald Trump’s broad economic and foreign-policy agenda is accelerating a “budgetary death spiral” for many child-care programs, leaving parents in desperate straits, @ehaspel.bsky.social writes:

It's not just the Voting Rights Act. On Friday, the Supreme Court finished the Republican Party's quest to erase every tangible legislative achievement of the civil rights movement But we've been here before.

People should consider that a consensus around treating diversity as “bullshit” contributed to an environment in which the court is comfortable doing this politically. Maybe.