Crazy. It appears the secret police had a secret boss. (Someone with no law enforcement experience.) And that Bovino baldly lied about it under oath. abc7chicago.com/amp/post/ope...

This month sixty years ago, Goldwater '64 supporter Raymond Massey became the first Los Angeles resident to receive a Medicare card. cc: @rickperlstein.bsky.social

This looks promising. apnews.com/article/ice-...

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

theresalcrater.com/2011/09/06/w... cc: @rickperlstein.bsky.social

Here's the tragedy: Timothy Crouse made exactly the same argument, for similar reasons, in 1972.

Google book search: People inquired. Google's media people said it was a bug, being fixed, and now it's been fixed. I'm abashed, but also pleased at the thought my alarmism sicced a mob on them, alerting the suits that this service has a badass activist constituency base....

This is a good explainer of Google's latest theft of the commons. THE COMMONS: Not private property. Most of the books and documents are public domain. They could have written a few lines of code and just limited to those. They did not. The long game is to own us. winbuzzer.com/2026/01/28/g...

this is a good explainer of Google's latest enclosure of the commons. winbuzzer.com/2026/01/28/g...

I don't mean to seem alarmed, but it appears Google's book search function is, just...gone. In a sane country it would be a huge deal, front page news, that a privately owned utility that millions researches, from journalists to scholars, rely on every day to advance knowledge can just disappear.

"Nouvelle Vague" was awfully weird, given that there's nothing on the music, which is half the experience of the "Breathless" film.

Seriously, I'd sneak in to watch it again just to study Baron's eyes. A mystery just out of reach.

I just blew a gasket about an acculaton of stuff and lost my temper at a writer named David Avallo. I apologize to him. I deleted the half- baked list post.

Don't say you weren't warned! :-( www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/o...

AI is literally a consent manufacturing machine.

The "Melania" movie is getting subject to perfectly reasonable mockery for its ridiculousness and perfectly reasonable rage for it corruption, but I'm here to say that if you are interested in how the American presidency works you should absolutely see it, and not to enjoy the camp. 1/x

A mensch has left us. Here is a profile of him from 2022. progressive.org/latest/chip-...

I made the Epstein files!!

I'm watching "Misery" for the first time. Immediately recognized the author character is basically the same protagonist as "Pluribus," right down to the personality. And because I, too, know authorial misery...

Thread about the first investigation file on Epstein, if you can stomach accounts of powerful men reducing children to quavering shells. Here's a good detail about a gentleman who retains great favor with the Senate Minority Leader. (Schumer loved his idea of judges issuing "storture warrants."

I have a riff in "The Infernal Triangle" about a Timseman writing around an obvious fact in so artful a way it's like he's mastered a journalistic version of quantum physics--all for the benefit of not telling the truth.

Okay, I so need to know more about this "Melania’s exclusive senior adviser" character. youtu.be/B5ESGW6Uk-0?...

It is a characteristic of Washington Post Style Section reporting, in is purest ore, that the observation in the parentheses is NOT a sneakily subversive criticism. No--this author, in the Sally Quinn tradition, is reporting that as a good thing. I have a lot about this in The Infernal Triangle.

This asshole can fuck fight off. Right off into a Twighlight Zone episode where he spends eternity being forced to watch "Soundtrack to a Coup d'État" with his eyelids propped open.

So, America now. (The headline, too: French kiss. Please don't hur us Donald!)

Worst. Paywall. Ever.

Now they're releasing Epstein files to distract from the distraction from the Epstein files. (My point: "don't talk about X because it's a distraction from Y" is often dumb politics. )

This is a piece of intellectual journalism of rare richness, nuance, and moral insight. www.thenation.com/article/cult...

The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

If this interests you, read this. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Once, visiting my parents during college, my late father asked me what I did that day. I told him I visited the Black Holocaust Museum, a Milwaukee institution whose sign was prominent along the freeway to downtown--so both of us would have seen it a million times. I had never been there...

I felt better prepared for our current time because @rickperlstein.bsky.social did such a phenomenal job chronicling the rise of the modern right from Goldwater through Reagan. It's all there.

I'm not really a prediction guy, but here's one: on "The Pitt," there's going to be a huge cock-up caused by AI. (Chekhov's pistol.) Bonus prediction: everyone will be talking about the episode.

Let's put it plain: Axios is acting as conveyor belt for regime propaganda.

They assaulted him once. He went right back. There's a great old word to describe that: "valor." The kind they give medals for in wars. The other side are such cowards. We will win. edition.cnn.com/2026/01/27/u...

I missed the Pravda in this headline at first: "misleading claim." Normal people don't use fascism-laundering language like that. It sounds cult-like. The elite cult of consensus. It comes down to power worship. As if the alligator will eat them last. www.axios.com/2026/01/27/t...

I've seen this movie.  It didn't end well for Rohm, but it didn't hurt Hitler. www.axios.com/2026/01/27/t...

This free-solo climb of a skyscraper in Taiwan on Netflix is exquisitely beautiful.

(1) Hot Type books coming out this fall with a new edition my first book. A new afterword will reflect on it in the Age of Trump, 25 years on. (2) Anyone finding new typo or mistake wins a steak dinner, Or, you know, a signed copy. Go! Go! Go!

From this I surmise that the two shooters heard "he's got a gun!" as, "you can shoot this person who humiliated you and get away with it." (And, of course, they might be correct.) www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...

"ICE has to take off the kid gloves" is pretty much the take these days in the right.

Does he get to keep the coat?

Dig it, Chicagoland. www.semcoop.com/event/michae...

There's no way you can follow right-wing discussions and not fear that if, ICE withdraws from Minneapolis, a small but heavily armed group of people may say that, since the Globalists have sold us out again, we have to start shooting the invaders ourselves now.

It's great that some GOP officials are pulling back from what the secret police are doing in Minneapolis. It's great that it is unpopular in polls. But under conditions of fascism, those are not the only incentives from which decisions will get made. 1/x

Opening Day for my favorite sport!! www.youtube.com/live/CF3yD2Y...

Don't look away. Polling is important. But you can't have a horse race if they burn down the track. Two guns for every person now in the U.S., most of them in the hands of people taught that they are for protecting themselves against...us.

All is explained here. Feature not bug. WIlhoit's Law, firearms edition. bsky.app/profile/rick...

P.S.: Kash Patel: "You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple. You don't have a right to break the law." bsky.app/profile/did:...