A new installment of @bdmcclay.bsky.social’s column on speculative fiction, on the true aliens among us and Craig Strete’s talent for depicting them: thepointmag.com/criticism/th...

I wrote a short essay for @lukeoneil47.bsky.social's Welcome To Hell World about Minneapolis' opposition to ICE. www.welcometohellworld.com/there-is-no-...

the mirror crack’d from side to side / my fate has come upon me cried / the lady of shalott

Has everyone bought their copies of Moon Songs?

a short history of the word "spooktacular" books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

tfw you’ve got a ball

"Politics is not the nursery." www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-is-it

Announcement: my new book is BEAST MODE

The weeks round up: @bdmcclay.bsky.social on Sydney Sweeney; @jackhanson.bsky.social on "perfomativity:" @williamhogeland.bsky.social on TCW's bad history and more! www.unpopularfront.news/p/good-takes...

I’m a firm believer that with SHIN GODZILLA returning to theaters, Toho should also re-release the figurines of the kaiju giving apologetic press conferences.

had a pretty good day but I've concluded I can just never tell when my vizier is being polite or scheming against me

My NYT op-ed this morning I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

"It has a really nostalgic feel" this thing is from before you were born you have nostalgia for that like you have nostalgia for Narnia

I hate anxiety! I was just drinking paint and I got this awful feeling that it has lead in it, even though I know I would never buy lead drinking paint, but the feeling just gnawed at me until I checked. I wish I could just be normal and enjoy my paint.

I laughed so hard I dropped my phone into the abyss under the ottoman

Next year we're reissuing Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints along with a new book, The Oyster Diaries, two sections of which were published in The Paris Review.

I like all 3 types of movies: Period, Gay, and Fincher

submitting a "chaos" ballot to the nyt thing bc i don't watch enough movies to do an informed one

CHILDREN OF MEN is going to place “surprisingly” high on the NYT Best Movies of the Century list (like #7) and it’s going to formally occasion the Strange New Respect that we all know is coming so I just want to say I have been riding for that movie since I was a sophomore in high school

Breaking News: Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, was detained by ICE agents at an immigration court as he tried to escort a migrant out of the courthouse to prevent his arrest. nyti.ms/4jWkANE

Lander and Padilla have set the standard that absolutely every Democratic politician should meet or exceed if they don't want to get primaried.

i can't read the words "A Deskful of Girls" without seeing in my head this scene from Dames (1934)

at @thepointmag.bsky.social I wrote about my fav fritz leiber story thepointmag.com/criticism/hi...

Hi everyone I was denied entry, detained, and deported from the USA over the last 48 hours because of my reporting on the Columbia student protests I arrived back in Melbourne hours ago and had my phone handed back to me upon landing

wrote about my favorite Austen novel www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/06...

New pricing policy: a book's retail price goes up by $1 for every 100 words I have to manually italicize in it. This one will be up for preorder soon for $499.99.

Today I had a customer who was carrying a jar of pesto which looked incredible: it was coarser and somehow funkier than usual. I said "Wow, that pesto looks amazing. Where did you get it?" "It's not pesto" he said, and he opened the jar, reached in with his hand, and pulled out... a newt.

Junji Ito’s The New York State Real ID

The piece of fiction published last year that gave me the most surprising jolt of readerly pleasure was a 15,000-word novella published directly to Substack. This got me wondering what else was happening literature-wise on the platform -- the subject of my piece up today at @newyorker.com.

Percy says ACAB includes McGruff

I love conclave live coverage so much. Nobody knows anything. Live video feed of a chimney. Endless vamping. This is what it’s all about.

los angeles getting a new upscale food hall in a converted juvenile correction facility is a metaphor for something i haven't figured out exactly yet but i bet it's grim

SATURDAY’S RANDOMLY STRANGE PANEL

forgot I made this lol

RIP to one of my favorite novelists. Every sentence of hers felt totally new, and every character, too. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/b...

We shipped a Mixed Reality game on Thursday, where a magical animal shows up at your house and needs a place to stay. It doesn't have any guns, or even any murders, except about a thousand years ago in the backstory that hasn't been revealed. www.meta.com/en-gb/experi...

I reviewed Sayaka Murata's Vanishing World for the Wall Street Journal: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

this 1996 commercial for claritin sent me into flight or flight. an absolute psycho directed this

Ursula drawing from the 1970s.

there are many places i don't expect to encounter kristin lavransdatter but the letters page in a 1939 issue of astounding science fiction is surely chief among them. and yet.

Even assuming electoral victories in 2026 and 2028, if Democrats don't start taking away badges and putting people on trial the instant they take power back, we are going to be right back here on January 21, 2032. I don't know how many more chances they're going to get to not learn this lesson.

thinking back to the one use solid use case I have encountered for AI: breaking down complex, highly specific tasks into manageable steps. Here are some of the many things I've been able to accomplish as a result

I’m thrilled to share that Heatmap News — just in time for its second birthday — has won a NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD! Our project “Decarbonize Your Life” has been received the 2025 award for service journalism! You can find it here: heatmap.news/decarbonize-... asme.memberclicks.net/american-soc...

We've been to 100s of antique shops and we can no longer ignore the glassware crisis. Noone wants exotic candy dishes anymore. Paperweight market has died. Nobody wants a sorta peacockish glass thing for some table or shelf. Everyone used to have these. Now people just throw their candy on the floor

WHIRLING SLUGGO WEDNESDAY

young people, i urge you to stop watching anime. it is liable to have a corrosive effect on your developing brain. you must instead study the great texts of western civilization: The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and so forth