The first installment of ‘Lavender Scare’ just dropped!! What's that, you ask? A new column from Rough Notes, home to bold, unapologetic & experimental coverage of the Golden State Valkyries & the WNBA from a sociological + queer perspective. Because women's basketball changes everything:

This is the longest story I have ever written. It is also the most meaningful. It will go out in The Small Bow's newsletter tomorrow. You can read it here now: www.thesmallbow.com/p/consider-t...

The stuff the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org has been pumping out has been incredible. Subscribe now!

A thoughtful if infuriating read on what it’s like in the alleged progressive bastion of the East Bay. Reminds me why I get so annoyed when folks say we need a strong local conservative party to keep the local Democratic party in check — we have that, they just also consider themselves Democrats.

If you count the first calendar we did as the beginning of ORB, which we do, then today is our one-year anniversary of being An Actual Thing! One full ORBIT around the sun!

Does Lake Merritt smell? The answer isn't so simple.

"These fancams are the work of what I call the the Center for Surveilling Unwitting Players via Guerrilla Investigative Reporting by Lesbians, aka SUPGIRL, for which a member requires no training. The only requirement is the ability to see in gay."

Actually have been waiting for a piece like this about Oakland’s sideshows for quite some time. Got to give it up to @oaklandreviewofbooks.org on this. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...

"Cult nonfiction presumes that a cult is an aberration, a pocket of strangeness on the margins of society that fools are lured into, into which readers are given an opportunity to peek...But is the structure of a startup so incompatible with a cult?" www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/riding-nicol...

One (anonymous) woman's account of navigating the "sexual marketplace" of Silicon Valley ca. 2015, as the rich tech dudes were beginning to get a little fashy.

By "Anonymous"

We asked Alex Werth, author of “On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland,” to make a playlist of songs and sounds that he thinks are characteristic of Oakland in some way. Here’s a thread, pulled from this piece: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/black-sonic-...

“…the most pointed lesson in the book is that art draws its power from the resistance of its medium and the traces of creative labor left behind. It’s why you would use an oscillator that can’t maintain pitch rather than a digital filter that pretends it can’t.” @oaklandreviewofbooks.org is so good

A lot of people have asked what the Oakland Review of Books is. One good answer is that ORB is the opposite of whatever these guys have become. Give a thought to subscribing, won't you? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org#/portal/signup

Read the article about the history of Oakland's sideshows that everyone at r/OaklandCA (that's the reactionary Oakland subreddit) absolutely hated: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sideshow-his...

Cops and media go the other kind of dumb at the sideshow.

Among the myriad benefits of being an ORB subscriber--including at the "pay nothing, get everything" level--is that we send out a "Sunday Reading" on Sundays, with links to things to read (thus the name): www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/email/0c8775...

Subscribe to ORB! It is cool and interesting and local (in the not annoying way) if you become a member and ever run into me IRL you can be like, “hey, I subscribe to ORB and I enjoy it” and I can be like, “me too!”

"The existence of aquatic “cryptids,” creatures unrecognized by mainstream science, requires a cloudy body of water to suspend our disbelief. Without this opacity, legends of these creatures would eventually go extinct..." www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/theres-a-mon...

Our subscription drive is making progress! We added 25 new Founding Members in the last 24 hours, 1/10 of the way to our goal of 250! Only 142 to go!

It was also about the loss of Black power in Oakland, and how "Oakland" has come to represent "a place that was going to become something but didn’t."

"Freaky Tales" deserved better than to have been unwatched and forgotten. It was about Oakland in the 1980s, sort of, but it was also about the U.S. in the 2020s and the simple necessity of fucking up Nazis.

We have so many good ones! Here are ten: 'Who Made Caitlin Clark a Good White Girl?' @tcraggs22.bsky.social flaminghydra.com/who-made-caitlin-clark-a-good-white-girl/ 'Taking What Comes' @parkermolloy.com flaminghydra.com/taking-what-comes/ 1/

six months to the day after my charges were dismissed, the Department of Justice was granted yet another extension to file their appeal of that dismissal. https://timburkelegalfund.org/

"In the end there is no response to the fact of inequality, because to a man of humanity that fact is—in the word we all most associate with Shawn—inconceivable."

On "Squad Assembles" movies in general, which are secretly about full employment, and on "Sinners" in particular, which moves the Squad Assembles movie to Jim Crow Clarksdale and does something radical with the genre in the process.

Hard agree. It also feels like a good time to re-up Aaron Bady's incisive essay on Sinners for the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sinners-one-...

"I don’t think the NBA really cares... If the WNBA vanished, I don’t think Adam Silver would lose any sleep over that. If the NBA vanished, I think Adam Silver would crawl into a ball & cry himself to sleep." @wagesofwins.bsky.social is the expert WNBA economist that ESPN *won't* tell you about:

People said they wanted more culture pieces on Bsky, right? For COYOTE, I interviewed the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org and @meganwachspress.bsky.social for a behind-the-scenes account of how Megan's 7,000-word feature (!) on coal in Oakland came to be—a phenomenal work of longform journalism.

"Oakland is west of Bay Area and Palo Alto,." is an instant classic in my group chats.

I just subscribed to the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org — and you can, too! It’s new(ish). It’s (a) collective. It’s place-based. And Alysa Liu would want you to subscribe, I’m sure of it. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Was not counting on being moved by any "Infinite Jest"-at-30 essays. And but then @pauline2k.bsky.social performed a tour de force of reparative reading. This is so lovely! www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/infinity-plu...

This, from @meganwachspress.bsky.social, is so good. Starts off as an explainer picking apart a dumb NYT story about Oakland and winds up reimagining the very idea of a city in the dying days of the coal economy.

Just got in at the highest tier. They truly are doing things no one else is and it is glorious. LFG!

So, a quick note on Oakland Review of Books, or ORB: a handful of us are working to will it into existence, and--aside from a big boost to get started from our friends at @ebbooksellers.bsky.social--it's a self-funded operation whose goal is to exist and enable writing like this.

You might enjoy my little essay on Greatness in Art in the age of AI, AKA, "Sinners is Great, actually, but greatness doesn't exist, also." www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/sinners-one-...

"'Sinners' is also, itself, a metadiscourse about Ryan Coogler’s journey through Hollywood. It’s a movie about making 'Fruitvale Station,' 'Creed,' and 'Black Panther'—a pretty stunning unbroken string of excellence—and then waking up one day to find himself making 'Wakanda Forever.'"

I wrote about prediction markets, where we’re at and how we got here for Defector

I have a piece today in Defector making the case for "more training" for ICE agents. A *lot* more training. defector.com/i-have-a-gre...

Thought this was a really smart, sobering piece from @tcraggs22.bsky.social. "Nostalgia for some older, bolder time is useless. Journalistic bravery is structurally produced. Cowardice, too."

"If Weiss is exceptional, it's only in her knack for making a spectacle of the sort of things that slicker operators in media say and do all the time without causing too much of a fuss." @tcraggs22.bsky.social on Bari Weiss and all the Bari Weisses: defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

There are Bari Weisses everywhere for those with the eyes to see defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

I foresee a lot of people writing "the transformation/moderation of Marjorie Taylor Greene" takes this year who'll forget that's she's arguably the most ubiquitous anti-semite in American life at the moment

MTG on the Epstein scandal—"elites doing horrible things and getting away with it"—may have an egalitarian air about it, but only if you fail to read it alongside the rest of her conspiracism. She's talking about the Jews. She's always talking about the Jews. flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...

TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the various ways to read Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent political transformation. “Alternatively, you could choose not to shove your head into your ass. She is talking about the Jews. She has always been talking about the Jews.” flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...

We launched Oakland Review of Books in 2025, starting with an events calendar and vibe reports and, as we've gone on, more and more blogs and reviews and even a few full-on bangers. (And The Oakland syllabus!) We've actually done a lot. But 2026 is going to be The Year of ORB!

#Oakland please reshare! ICE spotted near schools. Can you come stand in solidarity to protect our neighbors?

Ouch. www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...

Nice piece of writing. Love the shout out to David Noble’s 1984 classic, Forces of Production: “Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men.” And this observation from @tcraggs22.bsky.social is exquisite: “The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.”

I talked about "Kpop Demon Hunters," the Eighth Army's occupation of Korea & the origins of Kpop, the only person more driven by resentment than Michael Jordan (my mom), rooting for pretty (again), and the greatest natural athlete the world has ever known (Kim Jong-Il)