Confession: I love Ursula Le Guin but I am uncomfortable with elevating her to a perfect woke secular saint. Great art - and she was a great artist - is more complex than that. See also: Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ.

And of course the Patreon version! www.patreon.com/posts/hasan-...

But you can cat a train, if you're daffy enough

‘An overwhelmingly negative and demoralizing force’: what it's like working for a company that's forcing AI on its developers: aftermath.site/ai-video-game-...

I too have some thoughts on the Shy Girl mess (free to read) www.patreon.com/posts/mia-cu...

really good essay on romance novels, women’s basketball, and the wishes fulfilled by both

THREAD. In her exclusive interview in today's Daily Telegraph Magazine, the actor, influencer and designer Philippa Islington-Smythe (pictured) discusses the price of fame, her controversial new perfume, working with Margot Robbie and how becoming a parent changed her perspective on the world...

I want to be clear about one other thing, then I'm gonna drop it and go play some chess. This man is not just accepting support. He is actively liking comments from other men that call me, a queer woman, a "homophobic bitch" for checking whether publicly available Instagram posts exist. A bitch!!!

This is what your family members voted for but you don’t bring it up at Christmas This is what you’ve been kowtowing to This is what you’ve been trying to placate This is what you’ve been trying to blame the most vulnerable for This is what you’re yearning to meet halfway

“Insofar as LLMs are used to avoid reading, thinking, and writing, their use is incompatible with liberal education. It is not more complicated than that.” open.substack.com/pub/mattdina...

These are the sports moments from 2025 that the Defector staff enjoyed. defector.com/our-favorite...

Welcome to the year Twenty X-ty Six.

New, from me: Time for something fun - I wrote about themes and fashions of the Knives Out Universe (KOU). 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/exploring-...

resurfacing the dark academia fantasy novelette i published earlier this year, about identity, assimilation & pursuit in a colonial institution ❤️ reactormag.com/the-name-ziy...

Ursula Le Guin's short story "Solitude" presents a fascinating counterpoint to the concept of the Happily Ever After ending, imagining alternative ways of thinking about the world, relationships, and the self:

ICYMI: One of the most interesting things about sci-fi is that ideas like a space elevator or an O'Neil cylinder can "exist" as discrete, almost Platonic concepts without ever taking on physical manifestation. The folks at Heat Death very kindly gave me space to talk about the implications of that.

from suffering eagles fans began, and to suffering we shall return

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

moar

This morning, I stopped by the Share Food Program to learn how you can get help and give help to your neighbors in Philly right now during the government shutdown.

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? "Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves" by @p-h-lee.bsky.social is out now at Reactor! Art by Rebekka Dunlap Edited by @malf.bsky.social

I wrote about the degrading choices our political system forces on us, the importance of respecting yourself, and the time I experienced a mild Oliver Stone moment at Sammy's Deluxe in Rockland, Maine. defector.com/what-job-is-...

Retention elections for supreme courts tend to be sleepy affairs, but that's changing. Last year, a justice lost for the first time in Oklahoma history, while progressive campaigns fell short in Arizona and Florida. This fall, eyes are on Pennsylvania.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

We're live, folks! @matthtaylor.com and I have a blood-curdling body-horror story in this talent-packed anthology, about TRANS WITCHES hunting a MONSTER. Of course, that mission goes horribly, horribly wrong.

One of the things about this study is that a lot of baby and toddler books are written in house, by editors. So the study reveals the whiteness of editorial in kidlit even if not explicitly. But, big picture, this trend is unacceptable. I remember so many promises www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

feed me your booooooooooks

PHILADELPHIA — By the top of the ninth inning, the stadium was visibly pockmarked by absences, and people were booing Jhoan Duran's walkout show. defector.com/never-bunt

Video taken one hour ago outside the Portland ICE facility of the violent insurrectionists in question

Bertrand Russell once received letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

Sharing this excerpt from my foreword to Alaa Abd el-Fattah's extraordinary collection of prison writings, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated." Stay tuned... lithub.com/naomi-klein-...

just absolutely furious with @alixeharrow.bsky.social for being such a goddamn genius "the contradictory heart of what prose does, which is to waste the reader’s time as efficiently and sexily as possible...a reader gives you their time, and you tell them, word by word, how to spend it." y E s

One insurance denial for Teressa's husband stated, “your newborn does not meet the criteria for coverage.” “This is when I really start to think they’re just denying,” she recalled. “They’re not even looking. They’re just ‘deny, deny, deny.’” ➡️ Full story: www.propublica.org/article/ment...

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

oh well, onward and upward

Had three drinks at a work thing and came home directly to the Zapruder film of Jalen Carter spitting on Dak Prescott

this is an interesting idea re: marketing but i don't really agree with this and actually think Pixar's mistake has been over-reaching in trying to appeal to adults over kids in terms of tone and sensibility (along with a couple genuine duds quality-wise)

We'll never know if Travis Kelce would have proposed after winning the Super Bowl, because Kansas City got absolutely stomped by the Philadelphia Eagles. defector.com/travis-kelce...

Not an exaggeration. If anything, this understates how unhinged the video is. It is, quite literally, five white guys talking about how to free the states from the burdens of the 14th Amendment so churches can effectively be given ownership over "gangbangers in Baltimore."

This is one of the absolute toughest things about predatory inclusion — the predation is often fun or a little useful. Criticism makes a reasonable person sound like an asshole. LowerEd weathered me for this kind of social death. So I’ll say it: your enjoyment does not matter & should not matter.

In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke. A few years later, I filed to have the paper declassified, and the NSA eventually agreed, and even put it up on their webpage: media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/...

Nerves, nerves, nerves: On autobiographies of trans female sexuality defector.com/nerves-nerve...

the iron rule of lord of the rings is when you go someplace you have to stop and declaim exactly where you are and its significance

Erotic, you say? Queer, you say? Cosmic horror, yo kshidnd wit zilll l kg uiwoqp jjjjjjj r'lyeh

Hot Girls with Balls is an expertly structured text. Reading it is a dizzying experience, as overwhelming as scrolling through a constantly updating online comment section, while straining to follow the various polarized arguments that are being thrown around.

Verily I have blogged it ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/mahmo...

"Is the sex scene relevant? Does it move the plot forward?" Does it matter? Tiffany Fritz discusses two key moments N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season–and how blending intimacy and narrative builds a story more honest, emotional, and true to the themes of her work: reactormag.com/the-necessar...

It's a very modern tradition! Not until we got home kitchens did we do this I wrote a whole book on restaurant culture and foodways (Lost Restaurants of Napa Valley) so trust me when I tell you almost everyone ate out all the time until fairly recently.