Little Free Anti-ICE Libraries: yesterday multiple people were abducted by ICE in my Chicago neighborhood (Avondale). This morning I added 40 ICE alert whistles to three different LFLs, including one box that is about a block from one of the kidnappings. I have ordered 700 whistles.

Cannot stop watching videos of these bears enjoying their abandoned digs. Send help.

“The professor spoke by phone from the inside of a car to avoid being overheard by colleagues.”

All right! I think I've sorted out the feed issues. Here's the link to the new and improved #pleasingterror feed for our October M.R. James ghost story reading club: bsky.app/profile/amnd... And the reading schedule is below. Join us for some antiquarian horrors next month! 😱📖🐋🛖💐💯🪵🌰🪛🪞🚀

Testing a new version of this feed -- hopefully this one actually captures posts other than mine! 😱

🐋!

omg

If anyone can help me firgure out why only some posts are showing up in the #pleasingterror feed (and others are appearing and disappearing), I'd be very grateful. I used Skyfeed to set it up; from one Reddit thread I looked at, it sounds like this might be a known issue?

I knew I should've gone to opening night...

“We are told by leaders that we are the future. But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.” Incredible speech by Violet Affleck who warned about the ongoing dangers of COVID & Long Covid, & advocated for masks and clean air at the UN today!

For anyone who needs to hear this, by virtue of being a “human being” with “empathy” and a concern for “the dignity of others,” well, I regret to inform you that you are and always have been a part of antifa.

I don't know if I'll have time to go to this, but I want to go to this. Especially the music talk and the birding in Central Park!

The autumnal equinox means it's time to begin my annual transformation into Ms. Autumn Person. It's not quite sweater-over-plaid-shirt weather yet, but soon. SOON.

GUESS WHAT WEEK IT IS

October is somehow right around the corner, which means I'm hauling out the M.R. James stories in anticipation of our #bsbookclub read-along. I've had the battered old World's Classics edition since I was a teenager; the Collected came out from Oxford UP in 2011. 😱🌰🪞🫏🚀🐋🛖💐🪛🔩

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

Nobody's walking 500 miles and then walking 500 more anymore and that's sad.

Pretty clear illustration of "you may as well stand up for what you believe in, they're coming for you anyway."

Part of me *almost* wants to see the creative ways these statues will be vandalized or outright pulled down, but a much bigger part of me is like, WTAF. JFC.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

A friend just introduced me to this show and I was instantly hooked. I love shows where everyone is incredibly good at their jobs (hello, Leverage), but it turns out I *also* love shows where everyone is a dysfunctional screwup. I contain multitudes.

Wait, the Met cast Sandra Oh as the Duchess of Krakenthorp in La Fille du Regiment? I was already leaning toward seeing it with this season's cast, now I'm definitely seeing it. (It'll be easier to see her in this production than in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte, that's for sure.)

Yet another demonstration that AI is not a labor-saving device; it merely displaces the cleanup and mitigation (in realms where care, caution, accuracy, etc., actually matter) onto other people

Wow. I hadn't heard about what's happening at Duke. JFC.

Love this.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

it's so funny to see America's health insurance companies be like "look. If there's one thing we love it's denying you care. but we ran the numbers - and we cannot BELIEVE we're saying this - and it's cheaper for us to just pay for the vaccines than deal with you going to the ER."

🧵

From an email from my aunt, who describes a daytrip to DC where she and my uncle saw bored-looking National Guard members standing around: "I've sometimes regretted not traveling to Spain on my year abroad in college, but I was put off by it being run by Francisco Franco. And now here we are."

I hope you keep writing and researching and publishing, even if it’s about distant and abstruse topics. It’s not stupid, it’s beautiful, because it’s a testament to the curiosity and care they’re trying to eradicate.

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

Positive Covid test. Goddammit.

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

You know what else is being affected by the tariffs on parcels worth less than $800? International interlibrary loan. I'm hearing reports of libraries overseas that won't lend to the US anymore. (That's in addition to the libraries here that have shut down their ILL b/c of lost IMLS funding.)

New favorite micro-genre of YouTube videos: people cleaning, repairing, and tuning neglected pianos.

The spammers who keep making my inbox look like this are cordially invited to fuck all the way off into the sun.

I love this so much, and was reminded of my personal favorite little guy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

a question I often find myself asking these days: "are these the moves of a movement that feels that it's winning or one desperately afraid that it's about to lose everything?"

None of the young male mass shooters and now political assassins I've written about in recent years had stayed in higher education and pursued a bachelor's degree. Crazy enough, it's almost like college is a positive socializing force, not a radicalizing one

"Don't Engage, Just Block" is praxis

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. -Adam Zagajewski Resharing a favorite. [trans. Clare Cavanagh, published in TheNewYorker’s Sept 2001 special issue] #everynightapoem

I hope this ishmael finds you whale

My new favorite podcast is the Piano Puzzler from Minnesota Public Radio, in which a composer rewrites familiar tunes in the style of various famous composers, and the show's guests have to guess both. You haven't lived until you've heard, e.g., the Star Wars theme in the style of Chopin.

This makes me sofa king proud. This is what journalism is.

A professor at Texas A&M taught… something related to gender that offended a student, who secretly filmed herself objecting. That video is picked up by TX legislators, who demand her firing, and now the dean and dept head have been fired. www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

nyc go look at the moon

I am watching the new season of the GBBO and the friend who told me that this year’s bunch of bakers is queerer than ever was SO RIGHT.

ai slop is the aesthetic of modern fascism

Attn all ICE agents! Here’s an announcement from our front window: Chicago hates you, and you are not welcome here!