Damn, this is good. So, so good. Read it and jumpstart your mind for the new year. www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

NEW: Boeing awarded $8.6 billion contract by Pentagon for F-15 jets for Israel, funded entirely by US taxpayers through FMF military aid grants.

Support Graywolf Press with a tax-deductible donation! In a moment of increasing pressure towards uniformity, a donation of any size supports the publishing of new, innovative, and too-often overlooked voices. Become part of the wolf pack today: graywolfpress.salsalabs.org/donate/index...

Excellent take on the denouement of AI psychosis and LLM chatbot hallucinations in this @bostonreview.bsky.social piece: "In this bright future, we will achieve synergy with the machines. We will divide our labor. One party will hallucinate. The other will act on the delusions."

I will never understand the soullessness of people who try to strip a human rights defender and torture survivor of the safety that his family won at impossible cost. I have nothing but the most profound admiration for Alaa Abd el-Fattah

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people,” writes Brian Groh. “Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost.”

Occasioned by reading and looking at photographer Moises Saman’s Glad Tidings of Benevolence. If you remember this war, if you’re painfully aware of all about it you don’t grasp, if you feel that complicity, I recommend.

🔴 “There’s a killing mechanism that has been created… [by] the U.S. and Israel together. They have made conditions in Gaza so deplorable, so incompatible with human life.. These conditions are completely manufactured. And now, you don’t need a single bomb to... — Dr. Mimi Syed (X: @Memers1st)

Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

In his wry, idiosyncratic novels, Rabih Alameddine, who won the National Book Award last month, has attempted to wrestle with the terrifying arbitrariness of fate, Lily Meyer writes:

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Back in June, I tagged along with the legendary Mira Nair for an afternoon canvass in Richmond Hill. Production delays (by yours truly) kept this from coming out during the election, but we wanted to share this one with you for the holidays. I hope you enjoy it - this is one of my favorites.

Ceremony held at hospital destroyed by Israel highlights toll of two-year war on Gaza's medical system.

Christ on a bike, this is brilliant. And disgustingly historically accurate. 10/10

BREAKING: Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See Video (no paywall): bit.ly/4qn6Jn5

"The path the justices are walking leads to Calhoun’s paradise: ...where people of color must carry identification papers...; ... where the military points guns at the taxpayers who fund it; and where the official ideology of the state is vindicated by elections the ruling party cannot lose."

The full article is well worth reading. Here’s the gift link from the author—and the only reason to pay attention to the Atlantic—Adam Serwer 2/2 @adamserwer.bsky.social

Got to tell Peter Orlovsky that I found his blond ponytail, cut off in Benares in 1962 when he broke up with Allen Ginsberg and shaved his head, in a miscellaneous file in Ginsberg's papers at Stanford.

Got to tell Samuel Delany’s daughter that her baby teeth were in her father’s “papers” at the Beinecke

The Epstein file is the only thing Trump has ever taken his name off of

A disgusting infringement of liberty.

Zohran: "I mean, think about when you fly.  We have made it such a difficult experience to go through TSA that there's now a financial incentive to sign up for a separate program that can move you through it quicker. We have monetized the dysfunction."

Conservatives: The constitution is colorblind, discrimination does not justify reverse discrimination Also conservatives: white men deserve reparations for not having 100 percent of the jobs they apply for

Oceans of data on job, education and housing discrimination: Try harder, losers, stop blaming everyone else Anecdotal evidence and innumeracy: There's no point in trying, the deck is stacked against us and it is a great injustice that must be rectified

Read the whole thing, but especially this recognition of how anti-alarmists in the press ignore the firsthand experiences of critics who have lived in the midst of rightwing fanaticism

A story I found about Haiti: In 1999, a group of Haitians were tired of political disorder and dreamed of a better life in the United States. So they built a small, 23-foot boat by hand using pine trees, scrap wood, and used nails. They called the boat "Believe in God."

very weird feeling watching a seemingly coked out president yell at you for 20 minutes straight

The Holsinger Studio Portrait Project is back! A traveling version of our hugely successful 2022-2023 exhibition, Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift, will open in mid-January at a well known C-ville church. Stay tuned! (And find us on Instagram at: holsingerstudio.)

2025 has obviously been a busy year for the Trump businesses, and there's been a lot of good reporting on it in various outlets, some of which didn't get much pick-up. In this year end piece, I pulled some of it together: www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

Baalbak, mon amour!

Affordability and "a critique of the state of Israel" were the two main messages that helped Zohran Mamdani get elected mayor of New York, says his father Mahmood Mamdani.

Invented by Desmond Margetson an avid tennis player and Black engineer

Really well presented testimony from a brave man with one small, devastating story that captures so much of the moment.

Reading.

Hudson Valley peeps. Come in from the cold.

Congratulations!

Know your rights. Protect your neighbors. New York is — and always will be — a city for all immigrants.

"As just about any working-class American family will tell you, the real 'distortion of reality' is the idea that a family of four can do anything but suffer on $32,150 a year." Commentary from @danawormald.bsky.social #NHPolitics

tapping the "please support billionaire free, worker run, reader supported news" holiday edition

THIS

goes without saying, kim is the greatest... from labor, to metal, to freakshows, gunpower, resistance +++

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

Rep. Crockett’s Statement on the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Texas’s 2026 Map

no i don’t think so.

Oh.

Do you support ICE kidnapping our residents here in Minneapolis? All I’ve seen you do is vote for the Laken Riley Act and strip away due process from immigrants. You didn’t stick up for Minnesotans. In fact, your vote is impacting our Somali and immigrant communities heavily.

New Yorkers: read this piece, makes total sense. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

...The effort seeks to build a global movement behind Barghouti’s case, directing supporters to join through a website listed below. Join the Campaign: freemarwan.org Video: FreeMarwanNow via X (@FreeMarwanNow)

and to amplify the point of the original thread, this is not a "f*ck them kids" screed. it's an indication of (1) systemic failures in education, (2) a structure of feeling about the present, e.g. a sense that today's problems are so severe that no one from history can possibly speak to them