Remember when Americans knew how to make sensible fake structures? #Sheesh

what if they fought back against republicans instead

Tax the Rich is a moderate position. Rule of Law is a moderate position. Abolish ICE is a moderate position. Impeach the President is a moderate position. What is radical is accepting fascism without a fight.

The plan: forever warp the job market through taxpayer-funded subsidies of unsustainable AI businesses just long enough for all other companies to lay off millions of workers and reorient their work processes around proprietary technology and then once this is accomplished, raise inference prices.

Okay. Ai can go bankrupt then. This is not our problem, this sounds like a rich tech billionaire problem.

Another thing this administration is breaking

1706-08 E. 79th St., Chicago. 1926-1927, Maurice Spitzer, architect and owner. According to the building permit, this was built as stores, a hall, and a restaurant. Definitely taking advantage of the new Avalon Theater across the street.

Perfection

We have so many ways to say STFU About Chicago, it’s kinda hard to choose one. #chicago

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us

Last image from tonight (short film in the morning): this brother out here with his Singer sewing machine, gifting people a custom embroidery on their jerseys and hats with the name and the date, was more artistic than anything at Burning Man and ad gorgeous as a Caravaggio. Magic! Goodnight.

we could be funding archival labor—staffing, storage, systems—instead of producing this garbage

Even some of our most reputable bookshops have started carrying nonfiction. Right out in the open where children and the morally enfeebled can see it!

I left the Author's Guild some time ago, and it was because their head seemed to be in places like this. THE LIBRARY IS NOT THE PROBLEM.

Get their asses

Getting a reference question and knowing when and how to not take it at face value to get the library patron the actual information they need. 📚 #PubLibs

Musk functionally ran the US government for 6 months last year and managed to: increase spending, slash services, kill 100,000s, and help nurture both Ebola & Screwworms. Yet somehow no one mentions this when they talk about the company he is going to take public this week.

I just don’t think you can be like “women, who are half the country, should shut up and stop complaining about the indignity and violence inflicted on them because I think that indignity and violence is popular.”

This is what most chest thumping nats don't ubderstand "foreign aid" isn't charity, its a hard nosed calculation that 10 bucks soent today over there saves 500 here tomorrow.

has any man ever been more vindicated? x.com/stuartbuck1/...

Uninterested in leading a pile-on but no, AI does not “have access” to everything ever published. Not archival material, obviously, but not secondary material either. Nor across times nor languages. AI is not human knowledge personified. It’s exactly not that, in fact. It’s not even a search engine.

"Listen. I don't like to preach, but here's some advice. You'll meet a lot of jerks in life. If they hurt you, remember it's because they're stupid. Don't react to their cruelty. There's nothing worse than bitterness and revenge. Keep your dignity and be true to yourself." - Marjane Satrapi

RIP to a great brave original - gone much too soon. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/w...

One of the most morale-crushing parts of my professional life is seeing cultural heritage institutions look at our scholarly work as "content" because some of it goes online now (and hiring content/digital people who are indifferent to the cultural heritage part of the work (aka... the work))

“Content” also insidiously shifts significance and validity to the platform, not the substance — content is contained, what defines content is the existence and form of the container

Every single thing about the world that used to bring joy or value is being ruined systematically from the top-down, but the fallout from that, in all its particulars, is being blamed almost exclusively on the people at the bottom with no ability to change it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the shifting baseline concept as applied to everyday life. People in their 20’s now have no memory of highly functional systems, products (from blenders to sweaters) that were so well made you could hand them down across generations, or even helpful customer service.

If you absorb nothing else take this observation in fully. And here’s a gift link to the entire conversation. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/o...

This was more than 40 years ago, and while a big caveat is that it's the 80s, the fact is the transgender issue was being handled better in 1985 than people are handling it now, which shows you how much of a damn boondoggle it is now.

My personal opinion is that women use AI less because they are way better at being suspicious of flattery, and because our intelligence has *always* faced accusations of being lesser than, and we’re used to doing our work regardless.

This is the way forward

Faculty: libraries and librarians need your advocacy BEFORE our collections are shuttered and our workers are fired. Whether you think your library is in trouble, and it almost definitely is, write to your provost and tell them how essential the library and library staff are to your work. Right now.

This is incredibly tragic. I had the pleasure of speaking at an MIT Libraries event last month and got to see the good work the do and the community they support. For a university of this caliber to shutter this many of its libraries--this is truly a travesty.

I’ve said it before and will say it a few more times. When Trump 2.0 came for accreditation I knew we had crossed into a different era of white reclamation. Precise, focused, stealth. Anyway, you probably don’t want these reforms.

If you’d told me 15 years ago that in 2026 Donald Trump would be the Republican president and that I would be reading papal encyclicals muttering “fuck yeah, this Pope really gets it,” I would have laughed in your face. And yet here we are.

THIS IS IT, THIS IS THE THING TO UNDERSTAND!!!

"...intelligent enough to not need a trained librarian." EXCUSE YOU? www.librarlabs.com/en/home

One of the best things you can do as an adult is realize that you didn’t actually have to stop drawing, coloring, painting, playing with clay, doing whatever else you loved as a kid. Even if you’re bad at it. Maybe especially if you’re bad at it

Something I learned in art teacher grad school is that kids who are taught that art is about the process, not the product, are more likely to stick it out through the frustration and self identity as artists later. Also that frustration is part of the process and to compare to themselves not others.

Absolutely still one of the best moments of my life, Colbert was thoughtful and curious and it’s a loss for all of us to not have him on TV after today

imagine getting back the parts of your attention drawn into wondering “is that legal? can they get away with that?”

Ah, the party of the “working man”! They really understand “the trades.”

1. Number of stories about Trump buying and selling hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks in the first three months of 2026: CBS: 0 CNN: 0 Fox News: 0 NPR: 0 PBS: 0 Politico: 0 Semafor: 0 Business Insider: 0

Billionaires must be targeted with tax policy and antitrust policy not because it helps everyone else (though it does) but because their political power must be limited so they can't wreck the world the way they're currently doing

AI is the lynchpin of the whole political project. It’s the container for the parallel governance they have promised each other. I truly think that they are surprised that people don’t like it…and that they can’t yet wholesale punish everyone for not liking them.

I think the reason I've been a little ambiently mad all day is because January 6th rioters are statistically the most likely group of pedophiles in the world and they clubbed a guy to death and they're going to be rich from the tax money that I give to the country I live in.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

From my own personal experience, for anyone doing AI- assisted work on race, slavery, colonialism, resistance, and violence... DON'T. I tried running some writing through AI, and it would strip out language about race and violence. "Ask" it why, and it will gaslight you.

I keep hearing that wholesale financial restitution for harms by the state are impossible and yet here's Trump proving again that nothing is impossible in this country.