LET 👏 THE 👏 LAMP 👏 AFFIX 👏 ITS 👏 BEAM 👏

"We need to expand the tent" is, like "we should encourage free speech," a perfectly reasonable suggestion. The trick*, as ever, is hearing what's actually being proposed. In this case, the real message is, "We need to accommodate people to our right if we want to keep scorning people to our left."

The common theme being, of course, "You can't say that anymore." It makes me just mind-blisteringly furious that so many people who should have known better—who, honestly, probably did know better—lapped up the centrist-conservative "free speech" con for a decade.

It's completely understandable that the Kimmel situation is getting all of the attention right now, but what's happened at Texas A&M over the past week is potentially even bleaker. www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

I love America*! (*The magazine, which just published this fantastic review of THE NIMBUS: www.americamagazine.org/books/2025/0...)

😲😥🫡

Journalism was a viable profession.

when power accumulates relentlessly to the state and to reactionary forces within it in order to crush the possibility of successful domestic unrest, that's not Calvinball that's Hobbesball

I was tickled last year to find that phallogocentrism is literally an empirical phenomenon—Deconstruction i think is partly about excavating this

According to this Supreme Court, President Biden's Department of Education was exceeding its power by trying to forgive peoples' student loans. President Trump, on the other hand, has the power to just completely dismantle the entire Education Department.

Not just EWR. I landed at JFK 90 mins ago. My flight left an hour late from DEN bc of an ATC hold. (Initially we were told it would be a 4 hr. delay.) The pilot specifically said it was not weather & that all NYC was affected, and later said it was something at EWR causing the trouble. Thanks Trump!

It's just remarkable that the president of the United States is running an extortion racket in broad daylight and not only is the nation apparently unable to stop it, hardly anyone will even call it what it obviously is.

Echo chamber? ECHO CHAMBER?!? This site has BOTH people who think Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written AND people who know the real GOAT is Middlemarch!!

A California farmworker died on Friday from injuries sustained a day earlier when US immigration agents raided a cannabis operation and arrested hundreds of workers, according to a farmworker advocacy group. @leahjdouglas.bsky.social www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

This is literally the definition of a white nationalist police state.

The basic fallacy in chasing votes by being "tough on immigration" is that the modal American's position on the issue is "Deport the Bad ones and keep the Good ones," and they alone know who is which, and that simply does not translate into workable policy. So this kind of gestapo stuff (1/2)

Landed in Chicago 45 minutes ago and the man next to me on the Blue Line just ended his phone call with “ya, I gotta get home to give Butkus a steak” which is in the top 5 percent of Chicago sentences you can hear

This is vile. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Every "tech" guy is just a VC guy in a subculture that gets called "tech" for no particular reason. Most real "tech" - like, i dunno, cutting edge materials research - doesn't get called that while "a new pizza delivery app" does

“US antiaircraft gunners at Pearl Harbor appear to have launched a sudden war with Japan yesterday” — NYT headline, December 8, 1941. “Polish border guards launch surprise war with Adolf Hitler” — NYT, September 1, 1939

It’s far down on the list of Trump’s crimes against the Republic, but the extent to which he’s convinced other rich/powerful guys that whiny grievance in the service of selfishness and bigotry is an acceptable way to carry oneself in public is unforgivable. www.businessinsider.com/shaun-maguir...

Her work, as I wrote last year, is so full of wisdom. There is a presence in her verse that is full and open. You can check out Come and See, Introduction to the World, and a few others from @archive.org

Her poems about migration are so generous. She wanted to make a home, and to know how people felt they were at home.

Heartbroken to hear of the death of Fanny Howe, a great poet and a kind soul.

“The writing just kept coming to me. It was almost no effort at all. I would just not get up out of bed and write, write, write, write, write.” From our Art of Poetry interview with Fanny Howe in our new Summer issue. buff.ly/sYF3v1U

Beloved, visionary Fanny Howe, a beacon of ferocity, honesty & integrity—a fighter in all senses of the term—has moved on. Read her. The powerful voice does not depart. It only grows louder…. 1940-2025 www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

My new book — an oral history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings — comes out one month from today. More info (and information on preordering!) here: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/coming-in-...

Shooting our videos is a little bit different now.

Surprise (not)! The Trump administration was lying about not having control over the detainees it shipped to El Salvador.

Congestion pricing by the # ‘s 6 months in: * 67k fewer drivers entering zone daily * Delays in Holland Tunnel down 65% * Traffic deaths down 32% so far in 2025 * $500m projected this year for MTA capital improvements * B’way attendance +12% * Subway ridership +7% So yes this program is a SUCCESS.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

In a horrifying article about the dangers of Teslas, one point stands out: Teslas automatically disengage self-driving mode <1 second before an imminent crash--not enough time for the driver to react, but enough for Tesla to deny responsibility for fatal crashes, since self-driving "wasn't engaged."

Very possible that a six-year-old Zohran Mamdani had the optimal response to the kind of nonsense he’s facing three decades later:

Oh damn, Mahmood Mamdani is coming out with his "firsthand report on the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialization" in October: www.ebbooksellers.com/item/JL26HbJ...

I don’t think this is the issue: as the son of a Columbia prof who was an expert on identity in politics, Z. surely “knew what they meant.” But “what they meant” is the absurd illogic of racial categorization that allowed the Supreme Court to say that an actual Aryan didn’t count as white in 1923.

Mahmood Mamdani on Ugandan fascism and the Asian expulsion:

Peace demonstrators have been beaten, foreign students have been disappeared, and educational institutions have been broken and tarred for being "antisemitic" through a series of tortured jingoistic inferences, while Donald Trump constantly and explicitly tells us what he thinks of Jews

If it weren’t so ugly it’d be almost funny that they ran this particular dirty trick on a person of Indian descent who grew up in Uganda & S. Africa and happens to be Mahmood Mamdani’s son. Hard to imagine anyone better prepared to anticipate that his identity might be weaponized by white supremacy.

no guard rails. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I was astonished to see this in real time. And astonished all over again to discover how many people saw it and said to themselves, "ehh, they don't really mean it." And now here we are.

It's smart that Zohran is running on a pledge to make NYC more affordable, and I hope he succeeds in that effort. But I doubt that even he thinks that affordability will be the biggest/most important challenge he faces once he's in office.

The really depressing thing is knowing, with something approximating certainty, that the ratcheting incentives of American politics mean that the next Dem administration will cut these numbers by 5M/$10B and insist that in so doing they’ve reclaimed the moral high ground.

They're building concentration camps with money they stole from medicare.