Patiently sitting at my computer, waiting for Ralph Fiennes to show up, wondering why he sounds so much like Matt Damon, not realizing that this is a totally separately Odyssey movie and the Fiennes one passed me by entirely.

Almost six months as a Pennsylvania resident, and you know what that means: getting a form response from Ted Cruz's office at least half a year after I wrote to him to yell about one thing or another.

My response to anything over the next two weeks

bsky.app/profile/mona... Should not have risked car sickness to skeet that; he was a champ.

“Let’s take a taxi home from the airport. We don’t know how icy the roads are, and it might be safer to have a professional driver rather than a random Lyft.” *taxi driver almost immediately initiates complicated three-way call on his cell phone*

Another year of me recommending NORTH WOODS and GREAT CIRCLE to fans of literary historical fiction. IN MEMORIAM now enters the rotation too.

Incredible sights from the New Jersey turnpike: a woman driving a car with a lit cigarette in one hand, her phone in the other, and her back window taped over with a garbage bag.

Every year, one of @andreamontoro.bsky.social's favorite things to do is staff the Penguin Hotline, where PRH employees field recommendation requests for the holidays. If you're looking for gift ideas from people who sleep, eat, and breathe books, submit a request! It's free!

@monagle.bsky.social and I just celebrated our fourteen-year anniversary. My second-longest relationship:

Yapping till the end. I could have written 12K words for New York myself.

Five episodes into BLACK RABBIT and the brothers are an eavesdropper’s dream, having sonically clear, full-context screaming matches on public streets. I’d follow them everywhere.

Went to the Christmas tree lighting down on our Main Street, which was inexplicably prefaced by a full-throated crowd rendition of “Fly, Eagles, Fly” and then, when it happened a few minutes later than the planned 7:00 pm, derisively heckled.

Why do journalists have no apparent solidarity whatsoever? This rancid POS jabs his finger in a woman reporter's face and calls her "piggy" and none of the other journalists there says a word?

I have one more freelance job to complete by Thursday and then I’m taking the rest of the year off, and instead of tackling that I wandered downstairs to interrupt Matt watching this to update him on the latest with that former couple with too many z’s.

Aiming for Joan Didion but landing on Eva Braun.

I read the Nuzzi excerpt in Vanity Fair, and there is something maddening about her choice to refer to RFK Jr. not by name but with mock coyness as "the Politician." It suggests that the chance to actualize some Carrie Bradshaw-meets-Big fantasy fueled all of this. Anyway, I don't need to know more.

Once again, with the AMERICAN CANTO (lol) excerpt publication:

along with the heinous literal crimes i think a lot about how there's a kind of moral, national crime in subjecting all of us to this, to this consuming our politics, committed against us by a number of powerful and connected people up to and including the president

Nice one, Zadie Smith.

Passenger hostage.

Sometimes I think I’m not so queasy that I can’t watch THE PITT, but then I start ST. DENIS MEDICAL and a surgeon gets bit by a rattlesnake and needs antivenin in the third episode and I about pass out when they show her (comedically) bruised and bloated ankle for two seconds, so.

MAGA wants to end competitive elections because they know people hate what they’re doing.

Tonight seems to be a strong rebuke of the Republican Party’s “make shit as bad as possible as quickly as possible” strategy

Mike Johnson: ‘My Christian Faith Is More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor’

i should be able to click a button at the beginning of a sports season that says “i’m normal” and i don’t get served any ads for crypto or gambling

I don't often eagerly anticipate the release of new music, but where is the del Toro FRANKENSTEIN score? Where is it. I want it.

Finally, finally hung @mrtylercrook.bsky.social’s original artwork from “Gray Green Memories” in the second issue of EPITAPHS FROM THE ABYSS. I’d never bought original comic art before this, but from the first panel, I knew I needed to have it. It’s a devastating little story lovingly rendered.

Hemingway’s editor asking when he’s gonna be done with those, whaddya call it,

i really resent the continued assertion that there’s so much anger on both sides, as if the causes of the anger are equally legitimate. we’re angry because masked maniacs are violently snatching our family and neighbors off the street, and they’re angry because we’re calling them out for it.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025): Look, all else being equal, it’s kind of insane to give the epigraph for a Mary Shelley adaptation to Lord Byron. Right? Right??!

The prettiest pup.

Sometimes you gotta get tossed to fire up the team. Ask me about other bad-sportsmanship tips!

No one is on my level. #GOMs

The street that had a broken water main in July will go unrepaired until morale improves.

After this morning's trip to the DMV, I am pleased to report that Pennsylvania has two new registered progressive voters.

(Finally) going to the DMV tomorrow to get my PA license, and it looks like my sweet, precious print media, which Matt says I should "cancel yesterday" because I "never read any of the issues," will be my saving grace.

The stadium is in Foxboro, you fucking dunce.

We heard fireworks, but we’re doing better now.

Took a little longer to reskeet than expected, but

It’s been years since I’ve actively watched a full televised baseball game, but I’m here to declare that FS1 has the worst sports camerawork I’ve ever seen. Deeply unpleasant POV shots, delayed cuts to action (you didn’t want to see that attempted pickoff at first, right?). Tomato, tomato.

Dangling modifier in the second sentence. Disqualifying.

Mood.

Alternately, Brian Cox at the end.

"There's artificial intelligence, and there's actual intelligence."

The basic infrastructures that allow women to be participants in public life—birth control & abortion access, no fault divorce, childcare access & affordability, civil rights law in employment and public accommodations, the minimal efforts to mitigate sexual and domestic violence—are all crumbling.

you know what probably isn't great for military readiness? turning a blind eye to violent hazing, sexual assault and bigotry, while purging leaders on the basis of race and gender.

One Battle After Another and Sinners both lay out a formula for cinema success: diverse movies where white nationalists get duffed in the most graphic way possible shot and presented in increasingly baroque high resolution formats.