Why do we feast and overindulge at Christmas? To emulate the hobbit heroes who saved the world. If Pippin can eat ten thousand calories a day, so can you.

The Naughty List has a surprising amount of redactions this year.

First learned the word from this poem, which I dig.

a lot of people don't realize that Christmas carols and traditions are actually folk memories of suppressed pre-Christian events, namely the end of the Third Age and the Fall of Sauron.

wow dickens would be turning in his grave (link unrelated) bsky.app/profile/ryan...

I was not aware of this but it looks genuinely, hilariously bad. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Chris...

Two of the four signers of this letter to CBS News staff — Weiss and Rubenstein — are conservative oped writers who have done little, if any, actual news reporting in their careers. It’d be like having a sophomore biology major telling a cardiologist how to do a heart transplant.

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, but slumbers eternal until the stars are right.

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

I'm watching folks steadfastly insist that 'actually military history isn't popular' and, like, just the most casual glance at what public-facing history content and books draw views should tell you that if this is your experience, something is probably wrong in your department.

it requires an absolutely staggering lack of self awareness for chatterton to complain that he has lost elite opportunities because he has anti-woke views.

Since we're apparently debating the popularity of military history, the department I generally teach for probably fills close to 300 seats of military history each year. It also has no tenure lines assigned to the field and no intention to assign any in the future.

“Polyamory or refugee” is the funniest of these for me but “genocide or library” is close

it's christmas eve so it's time for me to go on and on about my favorite nativity story hobbyhorse, which is that there are two nativity stories in the bible and they very clearly are entirely different from one another

The Telegraph highlighting - yet missing - two vital points here. 1) We're not calling for £476m to be spent. It already is - this is about diverting it to actually helping. 2) Why "cruelty" in question? The £476m we're spending is part of an operation tear gassing babies.

Folks, THIS is how you respond to good faith criticism correctly. Should be applauded, and it's deeply appreciated

Forcing attribution to America in general leads to bad both-sides-ing. The Trump admin is doing, and GOP supporting, blatant Constitutional violations, rights violations, and war crimes. Some Democrats were disappointed in Biden, and Ezra Klein wrote a book. These aren't remotely equivalent. 3/x

“CCTV News sets aside five minutes a day to scold her. This has been going on for a month, so she must be utterly ashamed by now.”

The thesis of the book is that early COVID lockdowns weren't worth it and mid-COVID mitigation measures like masks, contact tracing and business closures don't work. This is laughably false and the authors have endorsed the people now running Trump's HHS.

This is genuinely horrifying. Fact-free far-right agitprop given accolades by credible media across the political spectrum.

There was a novel about WW2 with magic set in the UK where two of the protagonists got married in the back garden of their house by another protagonist and it was a bit "tell me the author is from the US without saying he's from the US"...

so one of the interesting cultural differences between the UK and US is that the ability to perform a marriage is *way* more limited in the UK - you basically have to be either a registrar (the civil servant option) or an actual minister in charge of a registered physical building

Fewer than 150 murders in Baltimore is wild. When I was a kid it was almost always more than one a day

there is a reason that Trump is striking out in front of his own district court judges and that the Heritage Foundation is imploding. it's because this isn't true. people have been saying this for years. they were right for Gettier case reasons.

When you’ve gone to this place, it’s time to just admit your only interest in antisemitism is claiming it doesn’t exist

It's funny how us parochial Americans generally seem to perceive that the EV revolution is stalling or reversing when in fact it's accelerating rapidly worldwide. 25% of cars sold globally in 2025 were EVs! It's mostly just the US that's being left behind

The administration’s main goal, and primary product, is the creation of fascism-flavored content

See one thing every media outlet loves is a story about another outlet fucking up. It’s like catnip.

The cat and dog have started napping together but the cat is clearly a little embarrassed about it.

I would like to pay more money and for games to be super-fancy. I like my fancy graphics! Every time I see pixel art I die inside a little! I didn't bribe the TSMC staff for my graphics card for this!

A genuinely dispiriting thing about covering sexual violence is how often the suffering of women and children is metabolized as political point-scoring or titillating entertainment.

And then the tempter took him to a high place, and placed the football before him.

The hypercompetent evil genius is more of an action movie / comic book creation than reality. Or evil governments’ propaganda. Did you know that Mussolini and the Italian fascists didn’t actually make the trains run on time? They just said they did, and people remember their words.

So D&D is medieval (kinda sorta) in its clothing and technology, with castles and knights and things you might find in medieval *literature* like wizards and dragons, but it has a lot of elements of the western in how it thinks about "civilisation" and "wildness" and whatnot.

Related to conversations about fantasy adventure and colonialism: one thing that is very interesting about D&D's medievalism is that its default geography -- frontiers, large areas of wilderness, etc. -- is not particularly what medieval W. Europe was like.

In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

Isn't the cutting edge of the American Right now more extreme, more openly bigoted and antisemitic, than the AfD? And the "Heritage American" / "Don't apologize for being White" stuff --bad as it is-- is it's more respectable face. What's underneath is worse. open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

About ten years ago I had lunch with a well-known Hollywood actress and when she saw Russell Brand in the restaurant she literally slid down from her chair to hide from him - said he had recently saw her in a cafe during a meeting and barged in to demand she gave him her number. (she did not)

Bari Weiss is incompetently debasing herself for her evil boss, and ironically enough so is Kat Rosenfield, the FP's "culture writer"

the best bit is that this is from GURPS Furries, suggesting that they were writing for some innocent reader who just loved GURPS so much they bought every supplement

If you had come to me twenty years ago and said “in 2025 Russell Brand will be a far-right pundit spreading antisemitic conspiracies and accused of multiple rapes” I would have said “seems entirely plausible, how about those future cars, are they cool?”

ok fair dos Amazon, these are good picks for me

There is only one working class, the professional managerial class, and there is only one working class party, the Democratic Party, and there is only one working class paper, the financial times

NEW: By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court blocks Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Chicago to assist immigration agents. A majority holds that he likely lacks authority to do so. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Sing John Ball, and tell it to us all Long live the day that is dawning A crow like a cock, a carol like a lark, For the light that is coming in the morning.

what's a bit of wisdom from a place you wouldn't expect that's stuck with you? I think of a line from a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend song, "People aren't characters. They're complicated And their choices don't always make sense" all the time.

keeping this around for the next time i'm asked what Bluesky is

Marvel is an experiment in how bad a studio can get and still coast off past failures. By 2028 their movies will be AI-generated ten minute shorts in which Dr Strange and Thor seem like they might kiss but don't.

a) this is pathetic regime shit from CBS. b) this is genuinely his dream, he would so much rather be a TV host than president.