And yet Bookshop just partnered with Spotify, a company that aided in ICE recruitment by running ads, whose founder invested heavily in AI-powered weapons, and which pays artists literal pennies for their music. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Our latest FlytrapxBitch reprint celebrates the power of fanfic: "The ability to draw a convincing portrait of a better world is, after all, a crucial skill for making a crisis feel just livable enough to keep on for a little bit longer."

Why can I turn off spell check in Word but not Copilot?

It's the first snow of the year, so all I want to do is read Narnia on the couch with a hot mug of tea and my dog snuggled up next to me.

Pierre's voice was a constant presence on the radio through my formative years. After I moved to Pittsburgh, I'd tune in when I visited home, and Pierre was always there waiting for me like an old friend. His shows taught me so much about music and music history. Going home will never be the same. 💔

ANMLY is now open for new work! We're especially seeking more from writers outside of the US, more nonfiction, & more translation! > anmly.submittable.com *Fee waivers available* Check out our latest issue to see what we're into! > anmly.org/ap41

It's kind of insulting that Slack thinks I need some dumb LLM to summarize 4 unread messages of approximately 1-2 sentences each. And clearly it thinks that, since it keeps giving me a pop-up to upgrade so I can use said dumb LLM.

One hundred and seventy. That number will only increase.

“I was with you, until you said ‘pregnant people.’” I get this a lot. I’m an abortion provider, and the CEO and President of an org known for abortion advocacy. Let’s talk about why I use inclusive language — and why I’m not stopping. 🧵

Rescue the future. Confront the past. THE LAST ORDER is in stores everywhere today!

I intellectually understand why corporate media is scared of Trump and why they regularly pull punches, though I find it deeply cowardly. But I do not understand why they refuse to describe in plain, factual terms the things he says and does www.404media.co/trump-no-kin...

Every Jimmy Eat World album is fantastic. Placebo? Loud Like Love is gorgeous and Never Let Me Go is a masterpiece. Also lately have been obsessed with Garbage's newest album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light (and No Gods No Masters is a perfect album for the current moment). I could go on.

Impersonation alert! Writers, if you get an email from someone recommending you contact literary agent Annie Bomke at either [email protected] or [email protected], it's a SCAM. Both emails addys are fake. Annie's real domain is abliterary.com writerbeware.blog/2024/03/15/t...

Perpetually relevant

@emilylhauser.bsky.social in case you haven’t seen, I have yet another zine out! It was commissioned to be distributed during the No Kings 2 protests. It’s called “We Marched! Now What?” and is filled with stuff people can do. drive.google.com/file/d/1TJnH...

1 week before my BPhil (undergad version of a phd) thesis was due, I banged out 13k new words, revised all 38k words (twice), created my defense presentation, met my future spouse, and spent a lot time flirting with him. Only 30 students out of thousands graduated with a BPhil that year. Fuck AI.

Walked through the airport and saw my face in Time, on the cover of USA Today, and my book on the shelves. So surreal. I’m counting every blessing and grateful for all who stand for truth and intellectual freedom. They tried to silence me. Wrong one. Cheers to the haters! 🥂 #Invictus

I've actually been thinking a lot about utopia (because of Le Guin, of course), specifically in the context of dystopia—both because of the dystopia we seem to be living in and because of how popular dystopian fiction has always been compared to utopian fiction.

Governor Shapiro needs to get on this. Just because PA hasn't been targeted for this yet doesn't mean we won't be. "Bad things" happen in Philadelphia, after all.

"How do you do it? / You get through it then you put yourself through it again"* FOREVER by Charly Bliss is the '90s vibes pop(ish) album I need at the end of my 30s. *This lyric is talking about love but it applies pretty well to life in general. charlybliss.bandcamp.com/track/how-do...

I am in danger of turning into a person who listens to specific albums with specific audio setups based on minor sound differences. Is . . . Is this my mid-life crisis?

TIL I am a single gay male. Guess I have a lot of self-reflection to do.

Records obtained by ProPublica indicate that food banks across the country were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 60 million eggs that never arrived.

@librarianjones.com is a hero and a well-deserved Time100 “The World’s Most Influential Rising Stars”! time.com/collections/...

And here is a helpful list of Banned and challenged books by living marginalized authors!

Started reading THAT LIBRARIAN by Amanda Jones (@librarianjones.com) yesterday in honor of Banned Book Week. Librarians and library workers have been on the front lines of the modern fight for intellectual freedom for decades. Follow them, read them, listen to what they have to say.

As someone who grew up in a strict Evangelical household, I have some big cultural gaps, but I've been working on filling them in. I've still never seen more than 5 minutes of Friends or Seinfeld. I guess it's also culturally weird for me to have never seen Elf.

It's like she's talking about AI here, but this essay is from 1982. From Le Guin, "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be," 1982.

It’s always hard to start up a lit mag and get momentum, but we think these folks have cracked the code 💥💪 Here’s 10 amazing places to submit if you want to support publications that are coming into the spotlight! ✨🩵 www.chillsubs.com/lists/new-li... #writingcommunity #publishing #poetry

I'm picking up albums from Charly Bliss and Driveways today! How about you?

"Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets." This is supposed to be a selling point, Microsoft? 57.2 percent accuracy?

I'm reading a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin right now (because I want to begin my 40th year the correct way), and the amount of wisdom and foresight this woman had in the '70s continues to blow me away. What a gift she is. What a gift her words continue to be.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Anyway! I like this idea of being a utopian: doing the work, following the process, building toward the better world. The point isn’t that the better world doesn’t ever fully arrive. It’s that you did your part to inch everyone else toward it.

Hey you! You can now read issue 1 of MUSTN'T TELL for free! Right now! Click this link! If you enjoy it, there's a link to back the Kickstarter right there for you! Also let me know what you think about it. We're really proud of this story and I love sharing it. bindings.app/read/s76RCTjM

I saw a production of Bug in a former goth/punk night club in Pittsburgh sometime between 2007 and 2009. I think it was the Pittsburgh premier. I've seen a good number of plays, including a bunch of Broadway shows, but that production of Bug is the one I think about the most.

Currently my postcard parties are me and Jeopardy, but if anyone wants to join me this weekend, I already have the postcards, stamps, and colored pens!

I have a number of short stories published in digital journals that no longer exist. I wish I made pdfs of those stories. Some are still there on the Wayback Machine, and a few I took screenshots of, but still. Back up your work, even if it's published!

Not to add to the discourse, but… It’s ‘toe the line,’ not ‘tow the line.’ It’s ‘free rein,’ and not ‘free reign.’ It’s ‘eke out,’ not ‘eek out.’ It’s ‘sleight of hand,’ not ‘slight of hand.’ It's ‘Anchors aweigh,’ and not ‘Anchor's away!’

There's a Pittsburgh version now!

DC won’t back down to a wannabe dictator.

Who can blame them?

Ask ChatGPT? No thanks, I'd rather spend three hours doing a library database deep dive on whatever small curiosity sparked my interest. In related news, the Pittsburgh Courier had an amazing gossip section.

I've been thinking about the work I did with the VIDA Count a lot lately. It was good work. I miss it.

And we're off! Start a 2-week deep dive TODAY into a favorite online flash journal older than 10 years and get your name in the hat to win $400! Please share at least 1 flash daily (up to 4) and tag SmokeLong so we see you! Get on it! www.smokelong.com/the-archive-...

Thinking and writing are inextricable. You can't have good writing without the thinking part. So much of writing happens well before you ever start putting actual words down.

I ordered signed copies of both from @caprichosbooks.bsky.social! I've decided to wait to read Wayseeker until after Trials of the Jedi, but I'm so excited for both titles. @justinaireland.com always delivers. ✨

Switching from using Gmail as my primary email provider to @proton.me. The first thing I changed over was my @libro.fm account. I have my priorities. 📚🎧

Read and share our books! All of our books are currently 40% off: www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/140-ha...