every time I read a book by Ian McEwan I picture Ian McKellen writing it www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796211...

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

told my landlord he no longer has to apologize for being white and he lowered my rent by 25%. told the grocer it's now the trump kennedy center and he sold me potatoes for $1. told PG&E it's a christian nation now and electricity is free. try it sometime

I appreciate folks following the breadcrumb trail and not trying to jump to conclusions, but I’m not bound by those rules and I think “a media toady nuking a story about American concentration camps” is pretty self-explanatory

The Trump supporter who runs CBS news just killed a story about Trump’s favorite torture prison. Here’s why America has a liberal media bias problem.

Had my first experience with a student bringing a meeting bot to zoom office hours Nope

Former NSA employee (16 years) with a pro tip for you. Released controlled document on the left, Epstein on the right. See the difference? In real redactions, some words, headers, and bits will almost always still be visible, but especially classification headers. These documents are UNCLASSIFIED

It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

Across the country, women are dying of sepsis, losing organs, being arrested for miscarriages, and used as brain-dead incubators. Corpses have more rights than women living under abortion bans. What better moment to run a full court cultural press about how freedom isn’t that great anyway?

If we treated him like a normal president he’d be in prison right now

Bank of America first started offering credit cards to women in 1974

A former Brown doctoral student in physics has been identified as the MIT/Brown shooter. Some reports that he went to school in Lisbon with the MIT victim Brown victims were in an Econ class that was meeting in a Physics/engineering building

Oh shit www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12...

By 2011 Epstein had already: -registered as a sex offender -plead guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 -settled multiple civil lawsuits brought against him by victims www.npr.org/2025/07/25/n...

absolutely wild move by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov to allow comments on the dropbox folder with the epstein photos

I don’t know how it works at the New York Times, but my editors at The Guardian would never let me publish this if they knew that I was one of the elites who spent time with Epstein. And if I published it without telling them, I would be out of a job.

My inbox

NEW: The FDA won’t tell Americans where their generic drugs are made, so ProPublica did it instead. Use information from your prescription label to locate the factory and see if the plant has a history of inspection violations.

Someone see if the Hunger Games was on cable in DC last night

The public: "We are desperate for help with the cost of living. Please do something." Trump administration: "Penis."

You’ve lost the plot as a presidential administration when Dr. Oz is on stage handwringing about the cost of balls

He never disclosed that he’d visited Epstein in that column and did a lot of hand waving to insist that he and his fellow elites had nothing, nothing at all to do with him.

Science you can use www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Role model, from leather boots to gray hair

I am this close to Patti Smith I am over the moon

Today is jury duty at Cambridge District Court (which is inexplicably in Medford) I hear the accents of my childhood all around me Sadly I now speak in the boring Midwest newscaster “non-accent” College classmates made nonstop fun of my Somerville accent & it went into hiding

reward for getting grades in is a call to jury duty at 8:30 AM tomorrow

College costs are soaring! www.brookings.edu/articles/wha...

Brown and now an MIT professor Not getting paranoid at all nope

Susie Wiles is a canny political operator who knows exactly what she’s doing and bears a ton of responsibility for the way Trump has been normalized by the press that she sees the writing on the wall is maybe the clearest sign of where this ends and the coming knife fight to inherit MAGA

This weekend has been a year long 😥

O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!

CALL FOR SESSIONS WORLD ECONOMIC HISTORY CONGRESS 2028 MONTEVIDEO, 24-28 JULY The International Economic History Association has opened the first Call for Sessions for its 2028 World Congress. The submission deadline is September 14, 2026. The selected sessions will be announced on December 18, 2026

the good that you do persists in this world

Rob always turned the knob to 11 💔

Baking therapy dose today is four loaves of sourdough and five balls of pizza dough

To me this is Australia Tattooed surfer comforts wounded Muslim shopkeeper who single-handedly tackled and disarmed one of the Bondi shooters www.middleeasteye.net/news/praise-...

The kind .. you find … in a second hand store

Ahmed al Ahmed, a Lebanese Muslim who owns a Sydney fruit shop, risked his life to disarm one of the Bondi Beach shooters. His courage gives me hope amidst the horror and darkness. Muslims and Jews are not enemies. Our futures, in the Middle East and beyond, are intrinsically bound. A true hero.

They used to "laugh and call him names." Now they're all dead

Extraordinary courage from Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim, 43-year-old father of two, who bravely risked his life to save his neighbors celebrating Hanukkah. Praying for his full & speedy recovery. And so deeply inspired by his example.

NEW: Brown econ prof Rachel Friedberg says the shooting happened in a finals review session: "The room has stadium seating with doors that enter at the top. [The TA] said that the shooter came in the doors, yelled something ... and started shooting." www.oceanstatemedia.org/news-and-cul...

I am numb with grief and horror and rage. Brown has been my home for thirteen years. I've taught in Barus and Holley. It was an econ class. Hug your loved ones and tell them how much they mean to you.

Lots of new roles just went up at Code for America! codeforamerica.org/jobs/

And we have lots of open roles at ACLU, including roles on our Technology Team: www.aclu.org/careers/

From the Oklahoma U student paper: the school is now saying it will automatically suspend faculty (with pay) in response to student complaints www.oudaily.com/news/ou-poli...

i don't want to be like "nothing matters" but the problem is really that domestic politics in the US makes discussing any kind of really serious policy issues at the moment impossible

Took a bus downtown to pick out a Christmas tree that will be delivered by bike Then headed to Time Out Boston for dinner Now on the bus home husband headed to a book talk at the museum of fine arts I adore city life

I miss tinsel. We have garlands and lights and bulbs but no tinsel. Did anyone else have a childhood dog that ate tinsel? Our dog Peppy festively walked about with tinsel hanging from her anus all during the holiday season. I learned self-control from this experience.

European news on social media A good look at which outlets are on Bluesky, wish it were clickable. Is there a good European news starter pack/feed?