I look forward to reading this new monograph from the always excellent @littletollerbooks.bsky.social about one of my favorite birds. (I hold out hope that someday my own osprey manuscript might be a book, too.)

So many times

apologies to the neighbors startled this morning by me yelling to drive off the coyote my dopey dog just tried to pick a fight with on our walk

The sidewalks are temporarily torn up for a long stretch of the main road on the peninsula where I live, leaving rutted, rocky dirt paths full of obstacles, and one guy in full on mountain bike gear is riding back and forth making the most of it.

From a distance I thought a cool midcentury modern chair was on the sidewalk for trash day but then I got closer and

What a way to end publication day! For the Guardian, I’ve written a piece on navigating the weird and wonderful word of Muriel Spark. Read it, and do give my book a read, too. LIKE A CAT LOVES A BIRD: THE NINE LIVES OF MURIEL SPARK is out right now! 🐈‍⬛ www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

Porch season is upon us, friends

This round goes to you, sword

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

hello. I am now the editor of South Dakota Review, a bonus job that came with my job. people keep asking me about "submitting" (huh) "poems" (hmm) but I only want to read about the weather. southdakotareview.wordpress.com

My traditional Easter reading, from James Tate.

There's work I could be doing for a jump on the week but on the other working out how to play this tune is more fun

Brainstorming my gameshow idea Damn That Song in which contestants bid with how long they’ll risk listening to a guaranteed ear worm.

It's time to repost this Easter masterpiece

A guy just stopped me on my way into the train station and asked, “Santa, can I finally get that bike I’ve been asking for for the last thirty years?” so I guess you could say I have aged into a certain look.

It's a little surprising how often I catch myself thinking about Skara Brae Buddo, but then again not so surprising at all because have you seen how cool Buddo is?

I don't have a great many regrets in life but one is not keeping the little PLU code sticker from every piece of fruit I've ever eaten.

That feels like a threat

Currently seeking the state of beatific enlightenment that Walter Becker found in Parkgate Studios in early 1985 whilst producing China Crisis’s Flaunt The Imperfection.

The neighborhood osprey are back after wintering away. Just got swooped by one in my yard which I'll take as a personal greeting.

Updating with some recently observed variations: Vertical fist within loop Vertical fist around loop Vertical fist above loop Two hand stack, both hands pointing forward Two hand crossover stack

Technology gave my generation a ladder. Who is building one for the next generation? open.substack.com/pub/everscal...

Water main wearing a ghillie suit

Reading the news these days reminds me of that old saying "oh no why"

"When you feel hopeless, it’s easy to feel alone. Everyone else appears to be basking in the sun." I got to interview Sara Levine about her hilarious--and dark!--new novel THE HITCH for the Brooklyn Rail! brooklynrail.org/2026/03/book...

What is going to make university degrees worthless isn’t niche subjects like languages or the entire human past, it’s charging to teach people “content-creator” skills they can learn on the can

We are open for submissions again! Send us your prose and poetry about The End of the World by the end of March. More details here: www.elsewhere-journal.com/submissions

I'm thrilled to share some research notes from Brian Kiteley at NF today. He's a writer whose work has been formative for me, as I wrote about on the site way back in 2011: web.archive.org/web/20140204...

‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

let a few chimney swifts fly into your morning

At last, real evidence of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

New ChatGPT analysis of Robert Frost poem just dropped

I'm excited to get into this ARC of @isaacbutler.bsky.social's THE PERFECT MOMENT, if I can keep it away from someone else in this house who is aleady eyeing it. bookshop.org/a/8189/97816...

Preordered this months ago when the paperback was announced then forgot so I got a very happy surprise in the mailbox this morning

awards from indie bookstores are great but if you have to shell out (thousands!) to participate in Indie Next to qualify, how indie is this really

Long ago, when I worked at Merriam-Webster, The Onion took my name and those of five of my editorial colleagues (presumably from the front of the dictionary) and used them for the phony people in the Voices in the Crowd section. Even better, they gave me my boss's job.

Why not double the guaranteed profits?

I'm always glad when spring comes and I can read outside again, but even moreso now that my eyes are older and direct sunlight means I can leave my cheaters behind for a while.

Very much enjoying Trish Ready's NOBUKO, picked up thanks to a review by @mattdbriggs.bsky.social. This paragraph full of surprises, for instance:

#InternationalBagpipeDay, you say? May I recommend Julia Wolfe’s LAD? Which sounds like giant monoliths in space slowly moving into a jig

Putting this out there for the #STS and #astronomy folks: If anyone knows great readings on space telescope and Mars rover images, how they're constructed and how we make meaning of them, I would love to add those to my research! (I already have Seeing Like a Rover and Picturing the Cosmos)

Both of the options here are human writers. The first option is unprocessed human writing and the second option is human writing run through a language model to reproduce the same outputs with different words If it couldn't have existed without training data, it isn't creating anything at all.

54 degrees and at last my reading chair isn’t buried in snow

Still lots of copies on sale at @rosemetalpress.bsky.social AWP table, which I'm gonna say is ... 648?

I am here too.

Delightful that an object as consistent as the subway strap inspires so many different approaches: two fingers in, two fingers out three fingers in, pinky out three fingers in, index out four fingers stacked vertical fist one finger hook wrist drape but never, in my experience, the thumb alone

"In a small town, each of us is a biography, a row of photos, a continuous thread, our identity affixed to a story, to a history. Three, four, five moments in a person's life that, in some way, make up enough of a sketch to identify us." ~ Federico Falco, THE PLAINS, tr Jennifer Croft

Uh oh, that car is going to slip and crash

one of the neat things about submitting to the fancier lit mags is that by the time they send you a rejection all the cells in your body have been replaced with newer cells, they're not rejecting you but as past version of yourself, how quaint

This snow knows what it did