Wait, what? My son’s friend, traveling in China, is staying at a hotel chain called ‘James Joyce Coffetel’, and instead of a Gideon Bible, they leave a copy of Ulysses by the bedside.

A very old idea whose time certainly seems to have come again: employee housing for teachers. Gift link:

Good work, Portland 🫡

From today's Oregonian: Portland ICE supervisors admit in court that they wrote up warrants afterwards to cover up unwarranted arrests, and pasted boilerplate accusations into arrest reports, regardless of actual facts. Gift link:

My hands-down favorite house in Portland is a turreted money pit that is only taking cash, & that the city's Historic Resource Inventory categorizes as Tudor and “curiosity ethnic.” Gift link:

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts www.nber.org/papers/w34524 via @florianederer.bsky.social

TX Tech has a flow chat for guidance on what can be taught in the university system. Two things: 1. Very little content seems to be permitted. This is partisan control of the curriculum. 2. I would not enjoy teaching under these conditions, but I really would not want to be a Chair or Dean.

Well now I just want more SM57 jokes in the New Yorker

In case you haven't heard, Nathan Rabin was in a car accident over the weekend. Here's a link if you'd like to help him and his wife with their hospital bills and recovery. gofund.me/544ae75ef

this is quite the detail

You know, many years ago a Senate committee floated limiting compensation at nonprofits to federal pay scales. (Tops out at ~ half mil, usually for the VHA or NIH head.) If you wanted to pay more, you couldn't call yourself a nonprofit. After outrage from many lobbyists, the idea got buried.

Ladies and Gentleman, I bring you the laziest magazine title ever:

The new issue of McSweeney’s arrived, and it’s in the form of a ✨✨Trapper Keeper ✨✨

Imagine being stuck behind this guy at the Coinstar machine

Oregon Humanities now receives three AI-generated submissions for every real one. If you know your market well, they're pretty easy to spot, because they quote people who don't exist, get basic facts wrong, etc. But I don't envy the international news editors dealing with the flood of slop pitches.

I keep coming back to this

Which reminds me of one of my favorite New Yorker corrections

New Mexico just became the first U.S. state to offer free universal child care New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told CBS News it would save families an average of $12,000 a year. "In 41 states in America, your child care payment is more than your mortgage payment," she said. #PublicHealth

"I mean, isn't everything punishable by death, if you just wait long enough?" -- someone on Fox, probably

RFK Jr had committed to Bill Cassidy, as a condition to win his vote, that he would keep website language. Cassidy in February: “If confirmed… CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.” Note the language in second photo.

This is an excellent story. We got similar pitches from the same writer at Defector and if they had not been entirely generated by someone plugging prompts into The Fabulism Device they really would've been cool.

WSJ on private insurers gaming state Medicaid contract requirements w/ nonexistent networks: "Centene claimed to have 28 child psychiatrists available [near Belleville]... 11 didn’t have a single appointment that year, the Journal’s analysis of Medicaid claims records showed, & 9 saw 10 or fewer."

Google directions before the Internet. Photo-Auto Map books, published by Rand-McNally in the early 1900s, provided illustrated turn-by-turn directions -- in this case, all the way from Chicago to New York City. You can find a collection on the Internet Archive. archive.org/search?q...

"Defense attorneys are telling us they can’t get their clients to take good or reasonable plea offers because they felt they’re better off spending their money on a political donation." The fall of the DOJ is both exactly what you suspected & yet still shocking. Gift link:

Reselling tickets for profit to be outlawed in UK government crackdown

Great headline in the latest print edition of the Onion:

My wife and I came across these in London like 30 years ago, and they're still the best idea ever for a card deck.

Writers! Applications for the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award are open. This year, we've increased the prize to $15,000 to account for the higher cost of pasta. Apply now: journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/awa...

Congratulations to the Times app on 17 amazing years of a useless search function

What if we didn't ask people to concuss themselves for scholarships? What if we didn't knowingly run up a huge future legal liability? What if an institution for developing minds didn't, you know, damage them? What if, like SF State, UC Santa Cruz, and U Vermont, we just didn't have football?

“Wilson is co-founder of the Transit Riders Union [& entered] after the incumbent became the public face of an effort to block a new tax on high earners to pay for housing construction… She lives with her husband & 2-year-old daughter in a rented 600 sq ft apartment & does not own a car.” Gift link:

An important account of both the neglect of the disabled in institutions & the erasure of their history. The fight David Scott went through is outrageous. You shouldn't have to personally confront the governor to get records on a sibling with no heirs who died over 50 years ago in an institution.

if you can’t see the aurora borealis tonight, here is a sewer tunnel which is a wonder in itself.

Still super stressed about this.

Coming this December:

I asked Georgetown law prof David Super wtf is going on with this latest demand for states to claw back benefits already sent out. He says the law doesn't allow for this, and if the USDA is mad that states already sent out SNAP money, too bad—they were following USDA's own guidance. Full comments:

Doesn’t seem to have been picked up locally, but Portland State's having to hire back 10 faculty they laid off, because the not only did the U basically blow off the union & faculty senate, they also couldn’t really explain *why* those specific faculty got the ax. And that's why we have unions.

Why not put your money in a bank that can’t form a coherent sentence and spells Genius with a J

Perfect sequel to the primary, no notes.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Kind of a brilliant notion for harnessing a liability for geothermal purposes: "The report estimates that about a quarter of UK homes sit above flooded workings where MWGH [Mine Water Geothermal Heat] could be used to provide low-cost heat."

A math prof studying gerrymandering: "I’m doing a lot of work on alternative systems of election that can robustly give you proportional outcomes without having to do careful line drawings... The biggest American city that uses S.T.V. is Portland, Ore., and it was a great success there." Gift link:

Not noted in this article: the 4 Palantir execs & instructor quoted have degrees from, respectively, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and... Yale again. 3 are grad degrees. It's easy to be blasé about the value of a college education when your own will never be questioned.

365 Days is an anthology of flash fictions inspired by news stories from 1934. Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail invited over 200 writers to contribute, but you can see here who had to carry the project over the finish line.

it's me, unnamed critter from bosch's triptych of the temptation of anthony!

Sometimes calling out bullshit works!

Aw, man. Jack DeJohnette was an amazing drummer, a huge influence on me. His 70s ECM albums had this incredible cymbal sound. He was a bit coy about how they got it, but I once heard him explain, "Everyone mics over the cymbals, but you know, there's sound *under* them too." The master at work:

If you're looking for some food banks to donate to, we vetted a ton all over the country back in 2020, in conjunction with our marble league sponsorship, a sentence that I swear made sense in context. Anyway -- there are links to 17 of them in this thread. (And apologies for linking to... y'know.)

Top notch work by a neighbor in fitting up their tree-skeleton with scrubs.

Might be worth noting that the DoD cannot just accept giant gifts from any random schmuck.