Canvas is down, ye say? Aye lad hearken to me and I'll tell thee of a time when a man might say canvas was down! When the leviathan booms his bulk upon ye an' thy splintered masts surrender their sails to the foaming, merciless drink!! then, lad, ye say might say with some authority that can (1/135)

Look, Middlemarch is a great novel. It complexly mediates class conflict, the commodification of all life, emerging ideological structures in Victorian capitalism. I just personally think it’s more impressive when a novel does that through a story about a guy who hates a weird fish.

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller May 17,1944

Got carpal tunnel from playing too much Stardew valley on my phone and/or writing

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’ https://theonion.com/supreme-court-overturns-right-v-wrong-1819573211/

Possibly the best thing in Moma's current Duchamp show is this 1913 newspaper cartoon poking fun at his "Nude Descending a Staircase"

Orbán's electoral crushing is a far greater achievement than most people outside Hungary realise. He systemically consolidated power for 16 years, fixed the electoral map, abused govt power for political purposes & censored media. The hurdles that Hungarians overcame for this moment were immense.

Make sure you know your rights before taking to the streets on No Kings Day. Join an @aclu.org training to learn about your constitutional right to peacefully protest and best practices for reducing risks.

Donald Trump letting you know how the authoritarian capture of the media is going, in case you missed it. Unlike other authoritarians in places like Hungary and Poland he has no worries about advertising his authoritarian take over of the media.

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Transgender residents of Kansas have received letters informing them that a new state law requires them to forfeit their driver’s licenses if they include a gender marking that doesn’t match the sex identity they were assigned at birth.

frog forcing himself to like a book and the sentences in it no longer make sense because he can no longer pay attention

this came to me in a dream

He’s a queer man, Captain Ahab—so some think—but a good one.

the overseer of project 2025 is telling you out loud that every inch you cede on trans rights is part of the plan to create a white christian fascist state

Kevin Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation, claims that evidence suggests a correlation between undergoing Trans Medical Care and acts of violence. He states Heritage's public policy solution is to ban it for all ages and they're willing to work towards this goal on an incremental basis.

These are concentration camps and its our duty as citizens to ensure these things don't get built.

‘The analytic hour is a mere fold in the day, but also borderless and tenseless. Like the dream, it has no outside.’ Paul Keegan on recollection and psychoanalysis. granta.com/the-perec-ca...

In 1979, the “New York Times” asked Isaac Bashevis Singer if he planned to watch the Super Bowl.

Former Washington Post journalists have launched a GoFundMe to help repatriate fired staff members who are effectively stranded in foreign countries. One of the richest men in the world fired them from the paper and didn’t even pay to ensure they got home. Abolish the billionaire class:

Concentration camps: “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick."

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

if the temple police had to block your number because you kept reporting the Sav-On for putting sunscreen on sale, you might be a redneck. if all that scares you is the IRS and the influence of the primordial chaos serpent Apep rising as the sacred Aten dims in eventide, you might be a redneck

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

I never understand why people who tout their moderate and centrist credentials aren't directly asked about this.

You know, this right here is an exceptionally good theory of power and might need to get added to my public policy theory class on social movements

Always a test of how long before I'm fighting angry tears

Such an unreal, death cult headline

Emily Heller, an eyewitness, is speaking out to set the record straight. Officers were screaming at Renee Nicole Good, “Move, move, move.” So she moved, and they shot her multiple times? Then Noem and Trump branded her a domestic terrorist. Does everyone see how absolutely insane that sounds?

Wow

if any crave redress of injustice, they should exhibit their petitions in the street

This is a vetted fundraiser for the family of Renee Good, the woman who was killed by ICE in Minneapolis. www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...

…it should break your heart to kill.

ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries. Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves. "Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks. "No, guess he should've complied," agent says. Yakima, Washington

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

I don’t mean to sound extreme, but I don’t think we should have torture camps for people with criminal records either.

This has been made available, so for purposes of commenting on Bari Weiss's decision to spike the story, here's a live-post of that segment. It begins with a "you may recall" summary of the deportation to el Salvador. Describes the admin's claim that it could deport the men without due process

I think it's a lock

When the NEA asked us to promise not to publish trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid authors, we told them to kick rocks. (Actually, formally, with a unanimous vote by the Board of Directors, we told them to kick rocks.) So the NEA rescinded our funding.

Jesse Hamm had the take to end all takes on children's media. "People who disdain writing ‘just for children’ fail to realize that those children will remember what they read, maybe for the rest of their lives. You’re not writing for permanent children; you’re getting an early start on adults.”