one of my recent preoccupations is the visceral hostility the MAGA right has for the histories and traditions of the United States. these are people who spit on the Declaration and salute third-rate European despots!

they’re going to want to kill him for this but he’s so right, individualism as an ideology needs to end

Featuring a trans woman so prominently at his inauguration like this was an absolutely baller move by Zohran

In my lifetime syllabi have gone from a thing professors joked about in exasperation to a bizarre form of state surveillance equally loathed by faculty and students

i was just thinking about this. when a fascist squeaks by, it’s a mandate. when a progressive wins by a landslide, he needs to be deferential. it’s such bullshit.

Fuck off, 2025. But huge high five to everyone who pushed back against fascists and bigots and will continue to do so in 2026 and beyond! We are going to win. All these fascists bound to lose.

So long, 2025

May we all move with fierce love and solidarity in 2026. It's been a brutal year, but I am entering 2026 with more hope than I had at the end of 2024, because the people of my city gave me that hope. I love you, Chicago.

I wish you, and me, and all of us, strength & solidarity & joy in the new year as we find our way together: which we have done this year already, and will arise tomorrow to do again. /thread

the point is that together we can find a way. the point is that. together.

you are here at the end of a year in which I'll bet you wondered what the point was, at some point

no tunnel but the tunnel whose contours we identify for the purposes of finding its exit, no light but the one we follow to better times

together? in solidarity? is there anything we can't do: for those suffering in an increasingly inhuman justice system; for our trans kin targeted by this wretched government; for immigrants scapegoated by the callous and the cruel? for, in and through all this, ourselves?

you have done it before, squared the smooth circle, navigated the hard corner, slipped through and lived to see another day

but look at yourself, consider your life

we in this country (and, I'd argue, the world, but I'm not here to argue tonight) are challenged to make of our present situation something better. it's a tall order

snakes leave behind whole skins. all manner of flying creatures, not just butterflies, do them one better, whole new selves from wriggling worms. rocks into gems. mystics die to the flesh to be reborn in the spirit. rebirth is the rule, not the stray exception, if we can grasp it

it is a contradiction! make it through or get killed: these aren't compatible, are they? but yes in fact they are and we know they are. it's easy to forget but we know.

hence the occasional usefulness, I'm told, of the phrase "if it kills me" in a song I know people play on new year's eve, for which tradition I am so immensely grateful. Thank you.

"possibilities, not hard stops" -- this is one reason why a recent trend in interviewing on album cycles has been kind of mystifying to me: people will ask me to sort of summarize the song. but that's not how songs work! their job begins where the tidy explanation ends!

but for me this is fact where these ways of describing the world become more, not less, useful and instructive. questions, rightly posed, are about possibilities, not hard stops

the use of these metaphors seems limited! strongly limited! when you get through tunnel to the light: what's out there? when you find the key in the drawer: do you actually want to open that door?

there's no tunnel, to be clear! nor light! these are metaphors! we could as easily say: the surface above the water; the doorknob in the darkness; the key at the bottom of the junk drawer; and so on, and so on

well as you might imagine, because of the way I am hard wired, I think it's good and useful to figure out a way of imagining the light at the end of the tunnel

When you get the reputation of being the guy with the encouraging words on New Year's Eve, it can start to come through as a little pressure -- what if the situation on the ground is worse than usual? what if people are more scared than they usually are, and with cause? what use are good vibes then?

UPDATE: grandpa also sometimes burns a covert action

CIA bombing of Venezuela is also a war crime. I know it's largely symbolic but the Dems need to introduce articles of impeachment for everyone involved. It's literally the lowest bar for an opposition party.

Trump guys are about to Comet Pizza every third daycare center because they think they are all fronts for Somali money laundering. They're only doing this near cities with progressive mayors. This is straight up Government by LibsOfTikTok.

“financially devastating but morally exhilarating” is the mood to aim for

sam altman is just a sales guy with one goal: getting obscenely rich in silicon valley. his big thing previously was an app where you can find your friends on a map and after he sold it it turned out to have 500 users. he's not a stemlord he's just a run of the mill song and dance flim flam man

I dunno, I think being on the internet kind enough you start to clock when people’s values are not tethered to real people or communities because they throw around sociological terms and politics like a card battle game

Here is my reporting for @us.theguardian.com which was cited by Professor Jane Kirtley in a discussion of how the Minnesota fraud story has been repackaged as new by pro-Trump influencer Nick Shirley www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

You can't appease people who don't know what they want in the first place.

The GC movement is totalitarian in its instincts. It cannot bear the idea that, even when they get what they want, there will still be dissent. That's fascism for you tho 🤷‍♀️

It is a heartening thing to see more academics dropping habits of being overcautious in their writing and instead speaking the truth clearly and forcefully. Stank as style

And as an aside: if you're a creator of silly stories or drawings or videos or games and wondering why you're bothering when the world is on fire and everyone's screaming? This is precisely why you should keep doing it. You're helping more than you know.

To be clear: I'm not saying you should be consuming nothing but fluffy bunnies and feel-good slop. The goal isn't some Panglossian "best of all worlds" outlook. It's to be aware of the ways you may be restricting your ability to feel joy or confidence or hope, damaging your soul.

Holding onto "masochistic epistemology" as a great specific thing to name and keep an eye on, here.

Problem is: now the algo sees that you interacted with this and it's going to serve up more, related content. Content that may not hit or confirm that SPECIFIC fear but ones that are related to it, tangental to it or touches on anxieties that you may not have realized you feel.

I mean: how many times did you google something that you were worried about and saw a TikTok video or reel that confirmed some aspect of that fear? I'm sure some part of you felt relieved – you now feel like that fear was justified and not just you being foolish, yeah?

Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are another prime example, but often worse because of the algorithmic nature of it. It's all too easy to forget the algorithm is serving us more of what we interact with and not think about WHY we're interacting with it or how it hits us.

We use irony as a distancing effect, but we're still DOING the thing. The irony doesn't undermine it in the slightest. We joke about deliberately inflicting psychic damage AS WE INFLICT PSYCHIC DAMAGE. It just convinces us that what we're doing isn't "real" or "significant".

We make jokes about how we open the psychic damage machine whenever we get on Twitter as though that lessens the effect on us. By stating the obvious, showing that we're aware of what we're doing somehow transubstantiates it into harmless fluff. That's the Veil of Irony.

And that's the problem. It's not that there's one thing that provokes a massive cortisol spike, it's the constant, low-level hum of despair that builds over time, like heavy metals accumulating in our bloodstream and our brain, that diminishes our capacity for hope or optimism.

It's a silly name and that diminishes it in our minds... but that diminishment tends to mean that we aren't as cognizant of just how much it's fucking with our chi. We don't think it affects us because we don't have a major cathartic reaction to what we read. We just feel bummed.

I mean, the very *name* is an example of ironic detachment. Calling mindlessly scrolling through Facebook/Threads/Twitter/Bluesky as folks yell and prophesize and wail and gnash their teeth at the latest upset or scandal "doomscrolling" makes it feel like it's not "serious".

And I don't just mean brain rot content either. I mean the stuff we consume daily without thinking about it, like social media. We see ourselves as being above it, detached, viewing it through The Veil of Irony. "Doomscrolling", for example, is a prime example of this.

I'm a big believer in being careful about what you feed your brain, because it affects you in ways you may not even be aware of. But even folks who are very curated about their media diet often don't realize what else is getting ingested beyond books, movies, tv and music.

Since we're in the grundle of the year, there's something I want to suggest to folks that will make the new year a hell of a lot better all around: pay attention to what you're paying attention to. That is: be aware of what you're consuming and WHY you're consuming it.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich not to throw a huge embarrassing snit over not having his ego fluffed.