Health insurance is a tax which is why i could never understand the insanity about national health insurance raising taxes. Swapping one tax for a different lower one is a net win!

update: here is the AI policy i wrote for my doc seminar this term (i have already located the typo and fixed it, which tbh is like 60% of the point of posting it in public)

This is great, "Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death," a story where Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy who administers the lottery from "The Lottery" archiveofourown.org/works/733964...

You’d have no idea reading the national media that there’s a massive network of right-wing colleges and universities, just like you’d have no idea that the vast majority of TV news is run by right wing corporations

If you haven’t caught the portrait of Temple Grandin by David Lenz in the National Portrait Gallery, it’s absolutely gorgeous. My brain struggles to wrap my brain around the fact it’s not a photograph. The light is just… *chef kiss*

The state is destroying all of our media institutions to make advancing their agenda easier If you want to protect trans people, stop paying for cable/streaming services that work for the state, and start supporting independent information sources that push back against state power

Quality footnote

Merriam Christmas

Alright, looks like we're getting another wave of Twitter migrants, so I suppose I should make my pitch. I'm Iris, I write about tech, social analysis of tech and whatever other fevered ideas come to mind. My most popular article so far has been:

guess what i’m doing wikipedia themed comedy/trivia shows again! i think you should probably come!

As the year comes to a close, we want to share something with the rest of the Fair Food community that has deeply moved all of us here in Immokalee. ciw-online.org/blog/2025/12...

I briefly worked in the archives at the Catholic University of America, and during some renovation work the staff found the dress worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. There was a story that it was gifted to the longtime theatre director, but the dress had disappeared 1/2

<flirting with a robot girl> let me void your warranty

In case anyone ever fears you’re not supporting the author by reading from a library, you absolutely are! And the more people request a book the more copies they buy!

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Back in the mid 90s when the web was still very young and small the British Trust for Ornithology was surprised when the traffic to their site (bto.org) increased ten-fold overnight. Then they realised the search engines had indexed their latest article on great tits.

Excited to have another short story up on AO3! :3 It's a pet play story about long-term chastity and orgasm denial. (CW: memory alteration play) archiveofourown.org/works/75723921 Sample below! 🧵

1. For at least 10 years, Pepsi has conspired with Walmart to force up grocery prices. That’s the shocking evidence made public today in an unsealed FTC lawsuit. The suit was abandoned in May by the Trump FTC just before it was to be un-redacted. We went to court to get it unsealed & won.

UPDATE — For those who want to help, there’s now a way to donate directly to the 7500 South Shore Tenants Union to help with emergency relocation costs as residents “vacate in one of the snowiest winters in Chicago’s history.” Details in our story. thetriibe.com/2025/12/judg...

Every time a guy on Wikipedia from the 19th or 20th century is described as a "polymath," it almost always means that he spewed pro-eugenics propaganda as a side hustle.

If you've heard about RFK Jr's "wellness farms," have I got a story for you. I've worked on farms where most of the crew were put there as rehabilitation for various issues. So I'd love to tell you all the various ways those farms made us all worse! youtu.be/pDNoVqiGb_c

Now offering remedial training for the USDA Secretary

#deer 🦌

I'm also surprised that Roger went with a Hong Kong factory (I called the factory today to confirm). If MAGA is about making America great again through reindustrialization, why not use a US factory? Over at O'Connell's, you can find MiUSA tailoring for half of Roger's prices

Nightshade, The Dragon Slayer

WAIT. He did WHAT?

This is why I pay for the World Wide Web. Because it delivers ART!

In 1657, Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆 broke off from his commentary on 'The Romance of the Western Chamber' to list "33 Nice Things" 不亦快哉三十三則. It's one of the most likable things I know of in any language. I translated it to cheer myself up a while ago, if anyone could use it. www.burninghou.se/p/whats-good

tldr Poverty line is calculated as 3x a year’s food budget b/c the calculation dates to the 60s when food was 1/3 of spending. Food is now 1/16 of spending due to other costs rising hugely, so the official US poverty line for a family of 4 is $35,000 but updating the logic it should be $140,000!

Our USDA Secretary who doesn't even know what the cattle cycle is What a time to be alive

Absolutely wild that in 1999 we were dreading Y2K and now wiping out the world’s computing systems would feel like finally exhaling

nways excited to see how lina khan figures out how to idk end nypd’s qualified immunity via a law regulating pneumatic tubes or some shit

Have any of you ever FOIAed visitor logs at an agency? I realized I should have FOIAed OPM and GSA, given the reports of DOGE workers from other agencies working there, but is that going to be fruitful at any point soon?

Very excited to announce my debut publication to AO3! It's a 2nd person POV transfem gender TF story, where you encounter an intelligent slime symbiote that attaches to you bringing sexual pleasure, body changes, and new instructions. I hope you like it! archiveofourown.org/works/746697...

Someone in the Costco subreddit has figured out you can a) grab your receipt data as json and b) built a dashboard for it and Oh My

new idea. we let lina khan do the whole mayoral job while mamdani is in absentia and instead we station him on permanent president whisperer duty in the WH. this is how bernie can still win

This is what the internet SHOULD be. Always keep that ideal in your heart.

Trump just cut farm workers' wages $1-3/hr, and there IS something we can do about it. youtu.be/AnCJfhLxk_c

Yeah, in a situation where repercussions aren't negative/important, "Were you this awful as a child or is it something you had to learn growing up?" is a similar line I've used. Sadly, frequently there are negative repercussions.

Make the Goddamn meal and put it in your Free Fridge. Write the $100 check to the food bank. Ask your local school what they need for the kids and then go about trying to get that stuff.... Do these things regularly and you are making meaningful contributions to your communities.

For those who don’t know, Lina Khan is John Wick/Baba Yaga to Wall Street and billionaires

Please check all that apply

Have you ever tried finding a Louisiana sugarcane agronomist willing to testify in court AGAINST THE BANKS & SUGARCANE MILL that employ their entire sector? In defense of a Black family? I had to dig up a guy so retired, the banks couldn't even threaten his *children's* careers.

me, a small farmer: Small farmers in the US aren't poor. Most are middle class at LEAST. Here's the data if you don't believe me City Folks(TM): But have you considered all the Details? This info distresses me. Therefore you, Small Farmer, must be mistaken ppl from farm country: haha I know right

US farmers are saying they "just need temporary help, until things get better." Here's the thing. US farm exports- which are mostly soy- CANNOT get better. Other countries expanded their soy industries to fill China's demand. We've walled ourselves out of the global market, folks. This is it.

Wanted to help this escape Reddit containment: Farscape is popular in prisons (and in my house.)

The Pinky Guard #9 youtube.com/shorts/XS53L...

IT'S FINALLY POSTED. If you've ever wondered -what the Ballerina Farm dynasty is up to -if their meat is worth the $11/lb+ pricetag -how the trad hype stacks up against the real live Mormon women of the 1800s I got you covered youtu.be/yLZUWoDq9QA