After taking a couple months off to finish my dissertation, I'm back on noise duty in this issue.

Happy birthday Salome Jens, who happened to star in the two greatest TV shows of all time — Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Wrote entire books about how people who believe fairies live in gardens are idiots only to fall in love with a calculator that calls him smart

Congress is about to vote on renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally meant to monitor foreigners overseas, it’s been abused to surveil Americans. This is a chance to finally protect Americans’ privacy. bit.ly/4tASUmW

Resonance (UC Press) is looking for humanities research across the following topics: Sound in Political Crisis, Sound and Social Justice, Experiments in Sound, Sound Archives and Preservation, and we're convening a permanent series that'll examine "Film and Cinema Sound" this Fall. Please circulate!

Unlimited Editions: Drowned By Locals To accompany his article on Drowned By Locals in The Wire 506, @miloshroch.bsky.social compiles an annotated playlist of tracks from the Jordan based label www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks...

Who else remembers Catherine O'Hara's greatest role?

(Dude suddenly stops pushing his broom across the floor of the Death Star) Does this look like a big laser to anyone else

This is the news story that all the other stories fit inside of. www.zig.art/p/my-final-m...

I can't explain why, but I find it very therapeutic to make these and I will definitely be making more.

I LOVE CAPITALISM (is what I loudly proclaim online in hopes that the authoritarian capitalist regime won't execute me then deepfake me into tacky swimwear)

I do not think that the president's secret immigration police should be allowed to kill people any more than I believe that the regular police should be allowed to kill people, which is not at all.

The "one weird trick" of Republicans since Reagan has been to market aristocratic policies using vulgarian language. It's body-snatched populism. Actual populism is about material conditions and solidarity. Fake populism is saying "uninformed prejudices are more valid than well-researched views."

Good morning, Utopian Society!

For the third year in a row, we've gathered an ensemble of cosmic improvisers for a night of sounds conducive to dreams and other nocturnal visions. If you happen to be in the Bay, come join us! momence.com/Berkeley-Ale...

So so pleased to see this! Chloe deserves all the plaudits for this incredible album, such a honour to help put it out Huge thanks to @emilypothast.bsky.social and @thewiremagazine.bsky.social 🙏🩷

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

My piece in Jacobin published today on Peter Thiel's apocalyptic geopolitics w/ Rory Rowan (just 17 years after we agreed to write something together on the End!) jacobin.com/2025/11/pete...

Important piece of reporting by @sfstandard.com

If you happen to be in the Town o' Beans for #SBLAAR, I'm presenting on the Antichrist today at 9 am sharp.

We just live in a john carpenter movie now.

Oldish news at this point, but I'm hono(u)red to have interviewed Natural Information Society for the 500th issue of @thewiremagazine.bsky.social

Please take the time to read about how these orders effectively criminalize all dissenting political speech and activity, allowing Trump to take the same actions he has taken against foreign terrorists against any citizen suspected of being opposed to fascism www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

ICE is sending people to a prison in Africa’s only absolute monarchy. A copy of the arrangement with Eswatini that Mother Jones reviewed shows that the US has agreed to pay the monarchy $5.1 million to take in up to 160 ICE detainees.

KATU TV, a Sinclair-owned Portland station, has started broadcasting a livestream of the ICE building to let viewers decide if what is happening warrants a military presence. I just turned on the livestream and this is what I saw. katu.com/watch

Today's word is plenary authority. plenary authority | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute share.google/E3GPEbFBmWNn...

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious" I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge. We know exactly how LLMs work.

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

really enjoying all the people trying to explain the bible to the pope today

Trump's NSPM-7 represses freedom of speech & association, investigating any organization with "anti-capitalism" or "anti-American" views. I ran a primary in 2003 against the Patriot Act & war in Iraq. NSPM-7 is a greater infringement on freedoms than the Patriot Act.

I'm 30 minutes into watching Lost Boys for the first time, and there's no heterosexual explanation for every single moment of this so far. Every single person looks like someone in my friend group and my friend group is queer as hell.

You guys I have a theory about where the political violence is actually originating. newrepublic.com/post/201016/...

The new directive NSPM-7 targeting "anti-Christian," "anti-American" and "anti-capitalist" speech as terrorism is being taken very seriously by top DC law firms — but Congress is silent. www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nsp...

Here's what appears to be a good legal explainer regarding the new 'antifa' executive order and NSPM-7, and how they are likely to be used. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

I do understand how we got here and I did watch it happen incrementally but it's still pretty disorienting to go from "free speech is the cornerstone of our society" to "if you say you do not like fascism you will be hunted down as a terrorist" but I guess them's the breaks!

In other news from Portland...

According to the Portland police, federal cops are are currently attempting to 'instigate' confrontations with protesters outside the ICE building.

Is this going to be the pretense for literal AI-powered witch hunts?

This might be the single best thing that has been written to date about the technologies marketed as AI.

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

Help fund it here: www.thewire.co.uk/subscriptions

love that marshall allen is entering a new far-out experimental phase at age 101. long jams inside dreamy/almost-dubby atmospheres on "the onniverse orki" with the ade ilu ensemble & the arkestra's dm hotep (pairing well with the recent ghost horizons collection) hightwo.bandcamp.com/album/the-om...

Grading student papers and I keep getting startled by the uncanny quality of "AI"-assisted prose. The difference between a paragraph written by a human and a paragraph written by an LLM is like the difference between a photo of a human face and a photo of a latex Halloween mask of that face.

🗿🌋 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗼 𝗟𝗮𝘃𝗮 - 𝙐𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙤 𝘿𝙚𝙞 - reviewed in the new issue of @thewiremagazine.bsky.social by @emilypothast.bsky.social 🥳 Consider subscribing to the greatest music magazine in the world. We love our digi subcription and all the rare Aphex photos we can pull up. 𝙐𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙤 𝘿𝙚𝙞 comes out next Thursday!

After some 8 years of contributing to the magazine, my household finally has a physical subscription of The Wire. In this one, I reviewed the new Pharaoh Overlord.

Excited to read this!

Wake up honey new Sumerian underworld myth just dropped, translated by the Assyriologist Jana Matuszak!

As the dominant narratives around Gaza shift, please don't forget that the Israeli historian Raz Segal called it "A Textbook Case of Genocide" less than one week after Oct. 7, 2023. We knew what was happening. We just lacked the political will to stop it. jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-c...

When the couple buying you drinks at the Coldplay concert gives you that look 😏

This is genuinely the news every day