I have long argued that this is the best and most faithful to Dickens’ of all the adaptations; I love this so much and could not agree more! The uncanniness of the Muppets transcends the archetypical nature of this story - and Gonzo as Dickens is the cherry on top

I didn’t know this speech, to my shame. Remarkable reading today.

Proud to have this essay out in @tricyclemag.bsky.social. Hope it brings someone comfort today 🫶🏼 tricycle.org/article/free...

The ice shelf has finally melted in Rogers Park and the colors are magnificent. (Now if we can only say the same about the other forms of ice infecting our neighborhood.)

I’m not sure if this is going to work but: Does anyone from Lexington, KY have a photo of The Bar from the 1960’s?

How can you address men's emotional needs at a time when the "feminization of everything" has become the consensus source of all society's problems, and emotional needs are coded as feminine?

Mid-winter reads: The White Book by Han Kang, Being Human And A Buddha Too by Lama Anne Klein, The Master Butchers Singers Club by Louise Erdrich

Wrote a little piece about what I keeps me on Substack (the community, the readers, the excellent writing), why I’m cautious about this platform, and why I started a blog like it’s 2007. www.sarahkokernot.com/sarah-kokern...

My brilliant partner @fulmerford.com wrote a chilling work of short fiction on ICE in Chicago which you should absolutely read

Normally, on a break during a craft talk, I would hate it if someone came up to me to tell me that I was pretty & that I was killing it & then give me parenting advice. But when this comes from kind female elders, I feel like I’m receiving a blessing 💙 Elder women hold the world together.

Actual Soviet poster about achieving the five-year plan in four years, just in case anyone wanted to know the origins of that famous example in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yakov Guminer, 2 + 2, plus workers' enthusiasm = 5, 1931

I spent three hours with an insurance company and two hospitals this morning just trying to find the price for a diagnostic exam that I need

Writers! Take a class with me this Thursday 12/4 on my favorite MFA taboo writer word: “plot.” We’ll talk about how a good plot is animated by character, and how to create tension in your story by listening to your characters talk to you about all their many problems. ocww.info/event-6282786

Today is the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest. Six myths: 1) She wasn't old or tired. 42 years old that day, she had a "life history of being rebellious" & had spent two decades helping to turn the Montgomery NAACP into a more activist branch alongside ED Nixon and Johnnie Carr.

The death of browsing is part of the reason art is the way it is now. Our opinions are largely fed to us by algorithms. Spending a spare 15 minutes wandering around a bookstore or comic shop or video rental place was how you found stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up and thereby expanded your taste

If you’re going to shop today, buy a Sally Rooney novel while you still can. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I just emerged from the underworld.

Today’s #postitdoodle is the failed attempt to introduce Thanksgiving to the deepest part of the ocean.

I hope these families find peace and accountability. And I hope people are prepared for the next devastating flood.

I was out raking leaves, not thinking of anything in particular, when out of nowhere, the exact line of dialogue I needed for a scene came to me. I love how not thinking of anything particular is how we can find the particular. Or maybe that’s how it finds us.

A great analysis and advice on resisting the normalization of misogyny: "If women are regularly talked over in meetings at your workplace, call attention to it, or champion their good ideas directly. If women are regularly discredited behind their backs, refuse to engage in it."

Teasel in its winter dress 🩵

Durham, NC tonight. A massive and righteously joyful crowd. So so many young people.

This was incredibly entertaining to read and it would have gotten a hearty 300 likes and at least 20 separate rants back in the day.

Something lovely to start the week! 🐙🏺❤️ Ancient clay pots with octopus decoration, made by artisans from Bronze Age Crete some 3,500 years ago! Heraklion Archaeological Museum 📷 by me #Archaeology

I always like writing something, putting it aside, and then looking at it two weeks later. I’m always smarter two weeks later.

Antonio Pérez de Aguilar, Artist's Cupboard, c. 1769 (Museo Nacional de Arte INBA, Mexico City)

A book group in Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, commenting on Eat, Pray, Love: “As for the pray part, I kind of asked myself, why go to India to get enlightened when you can stay home and be a Catholic?” 🔥

Once, as a grad student in Las Vegas, I sat in the back of a Subaru sandwiched between Edmund White & Joyce Carol Oates & her enormous visor & she was TERRIFYING (complimentary)

Hi! The deadline was extended to November 21! www.storystudiochicago.org/advanced-wri...

From LOLITA itself: "An expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face... I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,”... This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning."

“I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” - Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

This point absolutely correct and I will add that Mamdani demonstrates that an insurgency, even one with real moral clarity and anger at the status quo, can still be cheerful and inviting.

Writing is never as hard when there is a real deep love for your work 💘 I can’t wait to teach this four-week class in February on falling in love (or back in love) with your writing! @storystudiochicago.bsky.social

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

"Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity, not clarity." -Elena Ferrante Amongst the final sentences of the final passage in the Neapolitan Quartet.

I wrote this piece for anyone who has questions about how solitary dharma practice benefits others, and why practicing outside of group settings should not be considered selfish or isolated or self-help. I look at how meditating alone in a cave for forty years can help awaken the whole world.

I curated a list of some of my favorite things I read/heard/saw lately and put them in post. Highlights include: books on spiritual ecology, a short piece on solitary dharma practice, links to non-dual activist resources, Sufi poetry with translation, a link a soberly funny pep talk for writers ❤️

Excited that we can finally share the news! So proud to work with the amazing team at @storystudiochicago.bsky.social! 🫶🏼

Halfway through the second draft of a novel, wandering my house unshowered and unshaved, muttering John Barth's "mere busyness in a story’s middle does not necessarily advance the plot" over and over...

Recent major dudes / lesser demons

I like that republicans keep calling mamdani a “literal communist” because they’ve been calling everyone to the left of william mckinley a communist for a hundred years and they need to distinguish

WOW. A federal judge says he's going to issue a Temporary Restraining Order requiring ICE to make changes at the Broadview facility in Chicago, a facility that until January was only for stays under 12 hours "absent exceptional circumstances," but has become, in Judge Gettleman's words, "a prison."

And again, a pattern of putting out statements accusing people of serious Federal crimes and then releasing them hours or days or weeks later with no charges. And no retraction.

I had so much fun designing my website and writing the copy that I'm now fighting the delusion that I can make money doing this as my fifth side-hustle. www.sarahkokernot.com

I came out as a poet to my novelist husband and he looked at me tenderly and said it’s okay, I’ll love you no matter what.

So proud of my partner doing this interview on why he’s a horror writer 💀🥀

"Do Democrats know what the working class actually looks like?" Nope.

Make that $150!