A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ

It is 2006. I am Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. I am perfect and right about everything. I and I alone will survive the 2020s.

I’m Adrian Grenier’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, and I’m moping around because my girlfriend is wearing nice clothes and doing well at her job. I refuse to get a haircut.

certainly this is the first time an imperious madman has tried to fight the Roman Church

One of the ways news media often fail us is by giving us the microscopic rather than the telescopic view. Everything I mention in this essay is well-documented, but the dots are mostly not connected to make visible this death by a thousand cuts our country is undergoing.

Helen DeWitt, boundary queen.

Loving reminder from a medievalist to use a non-Google search engine to look up the Avignon papacy ☺️

Poem by Andrea Cohen.

Me and my writer friends achieving our goals in 2026

move slow and repair things

Sometimes you start reading a book so gorgeous you just have to stop. Brains weren’t meant to process this much ache and beauty all at once. Must go lie down.

Is this a new floater or just another toddler fingerprint on my glasses: A Me Story

Caregiving dissolves illusions

every one of these guys is like: I'm a genius. you should do whatever i say about business, finance, research.... because i am so smart i have it all figure-- oh, jeffrey epstein? man that guy totally pulled the wool over my eyes. Is that what he was up to? wow.

If you don’t already have a recurring donation set up for a local food bank or mutual aid network, now’s the time!

When you’re a New Yorker and see the Mamdani era take flight but you also grew up in conservative circles in Minnesota and are seeing the best of that state courageously shifting narratives and then find out you were right to hate the Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie aesthetic in the early aughts

I hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.

@summerbrennan.bsky.social on “Cat Person” and discourses of yore (and ongoing projects to deny women as artists)

“In fiction, female authors are constantly asked to explain how their personal experiences have somehow qualified them to tell the stories they are telling, and live under the constant suspicion that their fiction isn’t really fiction at all…” open.substack.com/pub/summerbr...

🎶 because I knew you I have been changed for good 🎶

The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn’t. Pretty much solid elephant. So there’s no room to talk about it. -Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room” #everynightapoem

So proud of my Tin House baddie @sumaiya.bsky.social for fighting for this story and doing a public reading for Brooklyn and the world last August. Now everyone can read it online, thanks to @vol1brooklyn.bsky.social 🩵 www.vol1brooklyn.com/2025/11/02/s...

The last push happened as my infant son became a toddler, I held down a full time tech job, and worked towards a draft of an unrelated book project. It sounds impressive until you consider I may have not done any of these things well at all. Anyways, to eventual publication!

Just got proofs for an academic article that’s somehow been 8 years in the making. Slow and steady work, full of second-guessing and double-checking and anxiety. Many research trips, conference presentations, revisions—all boiled down into 23 pages. How do I feel about it? At this moment, tired. 😅

Did women ruin the workplace?

Children are the largest recipients of SNAP benefits. Also: Seniors, the disabled and the folks who care for them. Because that's what civilized countries do: Support their citizens when they need support and ensure they can live with dignity www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life”

our new, supple mayor

reminder to all my trans friends that a man who campaigned with this much support and love for us just destroyed the most machine politician to ever exist in spite of all odds. turns out vocally caring about us is a winning strategy!!

Dick Cheney dies, Zohran Mamdani wins, a beaver moon shines in the sky… I just know the Etsy witches have been busy.

I love this

"Never miss a new book by Augustine"

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

I might lose sleep over the list of institutional barriers to assigning physical books to college students detailed in this thread (at a SLAC, no less!). Remarkable to think about how much has changed in the 5-6 years since I taught. Though there were harbingers of this before the pandemic.

Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin, “Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum)”, a deerskin map a floor plan of the British Museum and possible escape routes for various Indigenous cultural belongings held there.

1 of 2 On X, Alice Gainer, Anchor/Reporter for CBS New York, was down by the courts and happened upon this bonkers fast-moving scene of ICE being pursued by a large crowd of New Yorkers who are yelling their heads off. I'm guessing the crowd was 70–100 folks. With some press mixed in.

Not sure if it’s a good idea, but I read every Oct 21 entry I could find in my old journals and this time of year, I’m typically contemplating: the end of friendships, the death of family members, my inability to meet my expectations, the disappointment of others. Anyway, PSA: take your vitamin D.

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually. The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

I call it “joyful rigor” when I explain this effort to my students. I don’t believe in or rather, I’m not a “suffering poet.” I’m a writer who enjoys writing. The work works on me and I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the process at my own pace and to be changed by it.

Holy crap Kara Walker chopped up a Stonewall Jackson statue and revealed a monster

A take that I’ve had since I was about 16 or 17 that I’m learning is “unhinged” (though I’ve known I’ve been out of step with the culture all my life): society should kinda revolve around the needs of young kids and the people who care for them

Love is when you tell someone in your writing group about your most recent rejection and they respond, “Wow what haters and losers”

Reading about 19th century garment industries in Manhattan and remembering how much of today’s fashion industry (standardized sizing, ready-to-wear, the pivot of Levi-Strauss to clothing outfitters) was either pioneered or expanded as a direct result of uniform production during the U.S. Civil War.

I started wearing hats regularly at the beginning of 2023 and I do think it is a small thing that has improved my life. They’re my protective little skull buddies. Shielding sun and strangers. If you have a lot of Scorpio placements, maybe try hats.

Nine years ago exactly, I was listening to the same rhetoric from Uzbekistan's dictator Islam Karimov, who had died. The regime would have hidden it longer but they had the misfortune of him of dying right before Uzbekistan's independence day, when he would come out and wave to show he's alive.

If you’re a feminist you can spend your whole life grappling with the inadequacy of narrative to convey reality or summon enough political will to enact change. But if you’re a fascist you can just use narrative as a hammer to claim ownership of reality and beat material conditions into conformity.

Why are so many AI people trying to get into hobbies they absolutely despise? "Fuck reading just give me the summary", Fuck art just make it for me", "I got ideas but fuck actually writing" like??? Maybe just find something you enjoy doing and do that?????

Today, I ran an errand where the presence of my child in a waiting room pissed some boomers off and it has plunged me into mom rage all day.