Good cover

A story about KY GOP Senate nominee Andy Barr: In 2019 he got mad at AOC and demanded she come to his district to visit a coal mine. She said yes, which he didn't expect, so he withdrew the invitation. Then it turned out there were no working coal mines in his district. Because he's an idiot. 1/3

RIP

This is such a good idea. We should do this in NYC. "All Chicago Public Schools students now have access to nearly everything the city’s libraries have to offer — including physical items like books as well as extensive digital resources." blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/08/c...

Just finished this very rewarding read by @vjoshuaadams.bsky.social and can’t recommend it enough. The poems chosen to discuss are lovely to read, and the close readings taught me so much.

Moving my library and came across one I forgot about

Didn’t think I could feel worse than when we invaded Iraq for transparently bullshit reasons 23 years ago. But I do. We have learned nothing.

Annulet returns with Issue (9) and (10), a double decker that features the first iteration of our open folio "American Poetry & Poetics, 2008–2025." So much is here for you to read. We're so happy to be back.

CBP didn’t exist until the creation of DHS in 2002 as part of post 9-11 right wing fever dream. It became operational in 2003 and effectively has been a bastion of misconduct and human rights abuses every sense. Throw the whole thing out and start over.

Sunday

A barn-burner essay from @manshel.bsky.social in the recent issue of ALH!!! “High School English and the Making of American Readers.” academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

Saturday

Mom turned up an end-of-term comment from my freshman year of high school 😬😬😬

Bro almost had it

seeing conservatives admit alex pretti was disarmed and need to change their message to “well you know where you won’t get shot? at home” is just an impressive level of pathetic allegiance to their dictator

Nasra Ahmed, 23, was walking through the parking lot of her aunt’s St. Paul apartment complex when she found herself surrounded by 12 agents. Ahmed, born in the USA, says she showed them her I.D. She was forcefully detained and jailed anyway for more than 2 days. www.twincities.com/2026/01/18/s...

Jesus. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

He really is doing all of it.

At least Obama's hypothetical Death Panels would have decided who deserved to die based on a rubric more complicated than "did they just piss off a high school dropout armed by the state"

They keep saying this “didn’t you learn your lesson?” bit like murdering Renee Good was a flex and we’re all supposed to bow to their dominance.

Naming a police officer is not doxxing. We aren’t supposed to have secret police in America.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

Minneapolis.

AOC: This has now become what we feared most about ICE for a long time—that it would be used as an anti-civilian force with no accountability. At the end of the day, what we saw today was a murder, and murders in cold blood need to be prosecuted.

It’s genuinely wild that the United States spent decades building an elaborate rules-based international order which de facto cemented its permanent status as the dominant global hegemon, sustained by ideology rather than might, and now is just blowing it all up for literally no reason

This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it. Don’t miss it.

Time to start this one

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” - Mark Twain

Liza Hudock:

Went to the woods

Dean Martin, born Dino Paul Crocetti, son of Italian immigrant Gaetano Crocetti Frank Sinatra, son of Italian immigrants Antonino Sinatra and Natalina Garavanta Merry Christmas to everyone except Stephen Miller and his enablers and handlers

Thomas Merton, translating Chuang Tzu

I find it funny that Bari Weiss's new initiative is all about bringing SERIOUS DEBATE about IDEAS THAT MATTER back to television news, but the combatants are all podcasters or dudes like Stephen Pinker, who is being asked to weigh in on a subject very far outside his actual lane.

Gorgeous new handmade book from Ange Mlinko and Foolscap Poetry www.foolscap-poetry.com

Chicago is having none of this administration's BS.

Pantone just updated their Color Of The Year

Year(ish) in review: published a monograph, concluded a reading tour, read Hegel, took a good office selfie.

one of the great, pernicious myths perpetrated about higher ed—which media, higher ed administrators, politicians, and a number of faculty are complicit in spreading—is that humanities departments close due to some combination of cratering student demand and unjustifiable cost. It’s not true

"Die Hard is a Christmas movie" Die Hard is a nostalgic allegory in which the mythical values of the American frontier triumph over technofuturist global capitalism. Grow up

George Oppen, doing his thing:

✒️ 📔 Today's the day of our C.D. Wright cluster! Ed. @aliciawright.bsky.social ft. 11 contributors—the list is too long to fit into a single post! But you're in luck, bc the thread below tells the tale of this exceptional homage for an exceptionally talented poet! post45.org/contemporaries

Am I the first law professor wanting to assign parts of this book to law students, esp. the Introduction by @johannawinant.bsky.social and @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social

No one will ever sum up Bari Weiss's career more succinctly than "what's the point of standards"

Passerby snapped a good one of the Ghia

It’s a beautiful evening to be a democratic socialist

what terrifies these people most is that Mamdani started off in single digits and now he's got Staten Island magas liking his policy proposals. there's no role for the consultant class in an ecosystem where people run on principles

Sunday

No university that signs the compact will be a university, in the accepted sense, anymore. They will be mere Trump Institutes, teaching only what subjects Trump doesn't bar them from teaching -- and only until he does. Signing is an abdication of responsibility and an act of great moral cowardice.