And the Daily Bruin is controlled by student govt, not by UCLA. This... might not shut the story up the way admin imagines.

Delicious NEWARK CHIPS

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Fun fact: this guy's "Intellectual Freedom" center was established last year by GOP legislative fiat, overruling a NO vote by OSU's faculty senate and over rhe objections of the faculty union. OSU faculty were also excluded from deciding who got hired. www.aaup-osu.org/post/aaup-os...

Scoop: Top FDA official Vinay Prasad overruled the agency’s reviewers when he refused to accept Moderna’s application for a new influenza vaccine, STAT has learned. www.statnews.com/2026/02/11/m...

That's right, I will make you a fortune by selling novelty AM radios, Y-splitter cables with a faint buzz, weird multifunction karaoke megaphones, and store brand batteries you need to give your phone number for

Aside from the morals, I worry a lot about the safety of these. Warehouses are designed with the assumption that the number of people in them are very low (which is fire marshals crack down on nightclubs in warehouses). A fire in a warehouse where people aren't free to leave is a nightmare scenario.

Macbeth: SHIT

The drugstore pbk market was HUGE. Years ago, after I wrote a Times story on liquor & cigarette ads running in paperbacks (!) in 60s & 70s, I heard from an old Madison Ave exec who did the ad buys. Biggest volume bookstore in the US, he said, was the Rexall Drugs at Grand Central Station. 🎁 link:

Today in Very Portland Crimes: hitting a fed with a bodhrán

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

The Washington Post laid off hundreds of the country's most dogged reporters today, who did indispensable work holding the powerful accountable at home & abroad. We are heartbroken. Please share with anyone who cares about the future of journalism: www.gofundme.com/f/standing-t...

Kids making AI a byword for fake is *delightful*

I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.

Go ahead and scoff, but it's a lock for Best Bribeumentary

A lot of people are pointing out that handwriting isn't for everyone and typing is faster, and this is my plea for someone to reboot this beautiful and neglected classroom device

Keep up the pressure to cut off DHS funds until the *agency* is made accountable. House & Senate contact info for your district: www.usa.gov/elected-offi...

Today OPB radio interviewed the proprieter of Wayne's Chainsaw Museum, which displays "only about half of the 4,000 or 5,000 chainsaws he has amassed."

Interesting (if unsurprising) recent study: habitually angry people tend to have a hard time comprehending irony. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Senator Byrd, opposing the Homeland Security Act in 2002:

Alex from our time working together, while he was in nursing school. Later, he moved to ICU, working as a nurse to support critically ill Veterans. He had such a great attitude. We’d chat between patients about trying to get in a mountain bike ride together. Will never happen now

Some context from a Sept NYT article, when RFK appointed this menace to the panel: “In a 2024 hearing on vaccine safety led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, he [Milhoan] said that getting a Covid vaccine increased the risk of developing the disease.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/h...

Ok, but did you know that they make for great artificial reefs

I wasn't sure what to expect from a group of Democratic state AGs, but I definitely was not expecting a long monologue about Ruby Ridge and the Boston Massacre www.theverge.com/policy/86588...

The traditional Bodleian Oath which every reader is required to read aloud on seeking admission to the Bodleian Libraries. 🫡

It’s Penguin Awareness Day which seems like a great excuse to post the greatest ever Wikipedia edit.

It sucks for an author to have a book come out head-to-head with a similar title — I remember, years ago, 3 or 4 narrative nf books on bees & honey all colliding with each other — but it happens. But from the same goddamn publisher? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/b...

Just remembering when McSweeney’s ran, verbatim and without comment, Trump’s incredibly stupid prayer breakfast comments on MLK, complete with a shout out to an apparently still alive Frederick Douglass.

The headline's about vaccines, but the poll also shows health coverage emerging as a voter issue & Trump getting clobbered on it. Maybe because while you can lie about another person, lie about another city, & lie about another country, people know what their own medical bills look like? Gift link:

I was pleased to see recently that novelist/critic David Madden is still active on social media at age 92. The two collections of essays by novelists on their favorite neglected works of fiction—Rediscoveries (1971) and Rediscoveries II (1988)—are what led me to become obsessed with neglected books.

Portland State will reinstate 10 faculty members who were laid off, in compliance with an arbitrator's ruling. But the university insists the layoffs complied with the contract. https://chroni.cl/4qtCJqg

howling at the fact that someone just took photos of this man's phone from behind him. he was talking shit with his phone font set to large and screen at max brightness

"Laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called perfidy.” It's also the same boat where survivors clinging to wreckage were attacked. Just outrageous. Gift link:

Gift link: www.wsj.com/us-news/vide...

What an odd case. A 68 year-old novelist in France is being sued by her brother for libel for portraying their late mother -- in fiction -- as a Nazi collaborator. This sounds like something that will get thrown out tout de suite?

“I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world." Bowie's childhood home in London is being restored as a museum, complete with his picture of Little Richard on the wall.

Vigil/press conference featuring six city councilors ends with an “abolish ICE” chant and the Portland crows circling overhead.

A fascinating social science analog to slop-driven pitches to editors -- people game Mechanical Turk IDs to get paid for taking market and research surveys, & just basically answer "Yes" to everything. 50 US-based IDs for 7000 rupees, and they're up and running. (preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps... )

Here's something fun that I just figured out: Portland is by far the largest city on the west coast to have an even number of city council members. 🤔

A friend in Minneapolis just sent me this video. Looks like thousands have come together for a vigil after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. This was my neighborhood for several years before coming to Portland.

Looks like an eventual cutoff of federal loans may loom over some Oregon arts degrees, among others:

I can't find US outlets referring to Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, the basic intl law & UN precept that one nation can't grab another's resources. That would be... a timely explainer, right about now. The Guardian seems to be the only place that's bothered to specifically note it.

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Always delighted/horrified to see in the for-sale listings how in 1975 you could buy drum kits upholstered in denim or — wait for it — faux leather.

Transit's main competition is cars. If you raise fares from $2.50 to $3, you're still way more affordable than driving. But if you cut the bus from every 15 to every 20, you're screwed because cars have infinity frequency and 24 hr service span.

"International trainees said the foundation sent them to a Nebraska hog farm where they toiled for 12 hours a day, got no training and were threatened with deportation, according to internal State Department emails." Good work at the Times on the abuse of J-1 visas by profiteers. Gift link:

Hey, remember when the DOJ issued redacted PDFs that could be defeated in seconds, back in... *squints*.... 2003?

Merry Christmas from Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet

Sometime since late October the FTC changed references to itself to the "Trump-Vance FTC." Settlement payment letters also refer to "President Trump's Federal Trade Commission." (Extra fun fact: this FTC suit was filed in 2023, during the Biden administration.)