Early 2000s, I was working in an office and we had a local jazz station on as background noise. They played a hip-hop-inflected remix of a Herb Alpert song and it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard. I called the station to ask the name. (But now I can't remember the song and Google is no help. 🤷‍♂️)

So, will music help us, will it save us as a society? “Of course it’s meant to make us better,” Alpert states without hesitation. “Music has so much power that only good things can come from it." 1/2

“You’re probably thinking, there’s no way people actually do this. It’s hard to get an accurate sense of how many people actually hit themselves in the face with a hammer, but it’s not zero.”

👀

I think they should just put it back every day--put a new one up each day--and let them take it down every night. Will show how completely obsessed they are. Also, just ring the park, on city property with a hundred massive flags. equality.house.gov/media-center...

“Fashion without narrative, context, or emotion is just clothes. And Mrs. Trump manages to flatline an entire industry. When she enters a room, she does not brighten it; she dims it. She is a fashion asphyxiant.”

ICE at every polling place? Not nearly enough goons. Refuse to seat winners? No mechanism and would crash markets. Lie about the vote, falsely claim fraud? Very safe bet. Seize ballot boxes in certain locations? Worryingly plausible, as @rickhasen.bsky.social and @gregsargent.bsky.social explain.

“The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave.”

We need to talk about the rise of "smol bean fascism" where you have all the guns and the immunity but the really scary people are the ones with whistles and phone cameras and they're giving you generational trauma and ptsd by filming you killing people for no reason

“His debilitating solipsism is a threat to the stability of the entire world. A functional Congress would impeach and remove him. But the Republican majority is in a codependent relationship with the president, unable to separate his identity from that of their party.”

“If we can endure this crisis, there will be a time of reflection and reform. It happened after the Civil War. It happened during the civil rights movement. It happened after Watergate. And when the time for reform comes again, it must focus on the abolition of the prerogative state.”

“Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows.”

The Difference Between Renee Good and Ashli Babbitt Is Fascism What a title. Really illustrates the point.

“In ways large and small, the United States has seen serious democratic backsliding. But while the Trump regime’s desire for authoritarian dominance is bottomless, its capacity is not.”

I’ll take any bit of good news I can find these days “Josef Centeno has transformed his downtown restaurant Bar Amá into Le Dräq, a new place that combines a version of Bar Amá and Bäco Mercat, the restaurant he closed during the pandemic.”

A beautiful essay by @vinsoncunningham.bsky.social: Birth Pangs www.newyorker.com/culture/2025...

“He’s still a supremely dangerous [figure], especially as he comes to feel increasingly cornered and aggrieved... But it’s become, over the past year, easier to imagine the moment when his mystique finally evaporates, when few want to defend him anymore or admit that they ever did.”

“According to historians and political scientists who study protest: very. From emancipation to women’s suffrage, from civil rights to Black Lives Matter, mass movement has shaped the arc of American history.” @justprotest.bsky.social

The Trump Country Diner trope has returned

“Shopping was once a feast of possibilities and has instead become a test of patience.”

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

Speaker Mike Johnson Campaigns for Democrats in Upcoming Midterms

Jared Kushner’s firm means Saudi Arabia’s in too. So America managed to transfer control of TikTok USA from foreign billionaires in east Asia to foreign billionaires in west Asia, and from Chinese ruling party-connected oligarchs to US ruling party-connected oligarchs. Congrats?

I appreciate Trump settling the political violence argument with barely disguised hope that someone murdered the Reiners because they were mean to Trump bsky.app/profile/eric...

Everything wrong with political journalism in one graf. This is not a policy proposal that exists but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that someone “won” by asking it bsky.app/profile/larr...

I wrote about the "Appeasement Eight" Senate Democrats getting the party to fold to Trump in the government shutdown, and why it shows that pro-democracy Americans badly need a real opposition party, full of leaders who recognize the United States isn't a normal rule of law democracy anymore.

New: The Supreme Court DENIES Kim Davis' request to overturn Obergefell, the marriage equality decision. No noted dissents. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

Unfortunately still true bsky.app/profile/adam...

look I know being an engaged citizen IS the work of democracy but it is also the work of elected officials not to create situations where everyone has to be mobilized all the time to prevent them from allowing some kind of Dickensian horror on a Sunday night while you're in between loads of laundry

The depth of the shame of a country this wealthy and abundant allowing its people to go hungry is impossible to measure. The fact that a handful of people could fix this by paying their fair share of taxes while still remaining obscenely wealthy makes it even worse.

What, if anything, did the No Kings protests accomplish? I've seen that pop up in everything from genuine inquiry to sneering dismissal. For anyone asking or facing that question, here's an answer. Everything isn't all fixed, of course. But the protests accomplished at least these seven things:

"The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better."

if you’ve ever watched the apprentice, that’s the world without arts or humanities degrees

the thing about the “official antifa” citation is that it is just definitive evidence that she’s a stone cold dumbass

Let it never again be said that a woman with no real reporting experience who fell for a Twitter account called "Official Antifa" cannot be the head of a huge news organization

I think it’s very interesting how emphatically these conversations are about inevitability—it’s time, it’s happening, like it or not, and in particular, a sense of: “You have to.” When it comes to treating an AI product as a person, I assure you that I do not have to. And you do not have to.

I love that there are millions of Americans over the age of forty who can be manipulated like 3rd graders in 1996 by deploying “that’s gay” in euphemism and that’s enough to make them think something is bad bsky.app/profile/atru...

The people calling for a cool down of public and political rhetoric just spent a week honoring their hate speech hero by threatening those with whom they disagree.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

It's very easy after a shooting for authorities to say "we're looking into it and will keep you informed" and wildly irresponsible to make confident declarations and level accusations when they don't know. A conscious choice to stoke division, and try to use violent incidents for their own ends.

Same, Annie 🍂

NEWS --> Anna Gomez, the lone Dem on the FCC, tells me the Trump admin's pressure to oust Jimmy Kimmel may be unlawful as well as unconstitutional. FCC chair Brendan Carr may be committing censorship in violation of federal law. That and much more in my new piece: newrepublic.com/article/2006...

“While thanking his colleagues onstage, Hiller noted that with Somebody Somewhere, the writers had put together ‘a show about connecting and love in this time when compassion is seen as a weakness.’ He lingered on the last word, letting it hover for a beat in the room.” Couldn’t love this win more

“But along with its creator and star, Bridget Everett, Somebody Somewhere's beating heart was Hiller, whose work as Joel was indelible, unforgettable and utterly unique. It is exactly the kind of performance that should win and very rarely does, and the win is cause for celebration.”

the person behind this unhinged, anti-factual editorial is set to decide coverage at one of the nation’s major news networks

You can write this only if, by virtue of your income, identity, or both, you are utterly removed from the consequences of politics. To pretend that the racist, misogynistic, anti-gay vileness that Kirk spent his life spreading is secondary to the fact that he spread it "the right way" is appalling.

Explicit calls for violence, even war on many Americans, is very bad. Even worse since they have no idea who killed Kirk or why. But if you’re not familiar with these prominent right-wing figures, they regularly advocate violence and repression against the broadly defined Left, often based on lies.

No people on the planet will ever be AI. This is Orwellian bullshit. Zero people will ever be AI. This is no different from saying half the people in the country are television characters. Do not let anybody convince you that you don’t know the difference between a human being and a machine.