Iain M. Banks died on this day in 2013. Years ago, I wrote about his career for Kirkus Reviews, and ended up interviewing @amendlocke.bsky.social about him. I figured it was a good time to resurface the interview: www.andrewliptak.com/iain-m-banks...

Guffo, Le Monde

At a time when education is under attack it is useful to understand why people should study literature and fiction. Amongst other things it is so as to be able to distinguish fact from fiction, and to be able to distinguish between true and false.

That's Saturday taken care of.

I suspect billionaires believe that their relative wealth gives them the right to edit their own histories, and other people's futures.

Early social media exchange of views

Choose your online engagement.

This is Leo. He is patiently waiting for this guy to throw the ball. Gonna be here a while. 13/10 (TT: twogoldenleos)

And on a personal note, I really prefer to have smaller numbers of likes (sounds so weird to say online, right?) But thinking about it, the bigger the number is, the bigger is the reach, the easier people can steal, use it without my concent. The bigger the pain is for me to take care of that.

good to see Carl Sagan condemning the bloated cost of Star Wars here, clearly he already had an inkling of what the future movies would look like.

Denim, reality and appearances, cheap manufacture and culture wars.

This explains donald trump's lack of clss. He keeps saying Pardon! instead of saying What?

Five stages of Trump-Epstein • Denial of ever knowing Epstein • Anger at failure to edit the files • attempt Bargain with Rupert M • attack De Press in desperation • Accept offer to spend exile in Trump Towers, Gaza #TrumpEpstein

Two days ago I posted about how many folks said disabled people who can’t cook for themselves should be institutionalized. Today Trump signs an executive order permitting the arrest and institutionalization of homeless people & those with mental disabilities. Eugenics.

“the kindest person in the room is often the smartest.” JB Pritzker is a mensch.

This Herblock cartoon was published 71 years ago, and it’s just as pertinent now.

Only-Epiphanies.con

Cheese culture appropriation

A day later and I'm still thinking about this...

Ok. I take that back. This is better.

" They "

Douglas Adams wrote a funny scifi book. EMusk (age 13 3/4) thinks its a great work of philosophy . . .

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

The guy with the Nazi salute is funding population and fertility studies?

Catch-2025 Milo Minderbinder fills the greasy till

Timeline cleanse! Choctaw Code Talkers finally get recognition for their heroism in World War I www.kosu.org/news/2025-06...

This is your regularly scheduled message to USE SIGNAL (I ditched whatsapp in 2014. yes, when Facebook bought it.) Signal is secure and private - these are NOT THE SAME THING (Whatsapp uses your metadata for spying and marketing) And pay for Signal if you can. Best £10 p/month I spend.

This. today by Dave Coverly

Writing invented ... by accountants

Reagan-era judge *finally* calls out the wildly obvious racism in the DOGE cuts to the NIH

[Cinéma] « Kneecap » : les enfants terribles du rap irlandais refont le film de leur success story ➡️ https://l.humanite.fr/OGT

Here are my top 10 protest dogs! youtu.be/lgOtg-BeV6E

Fight, Flight or Detached Observation. Stewart Lee describes a mugging and how his response is to see what happens next Similar to Samuel Beckett, paid deposit for suit to a dodgy tailor–SB knew he was being scammed but continued anyway, observing as if from distance www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Useful examination of the term "woke" (with ref to Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit").

First the Dutch government and now Denmark; EU ministers are cauterising their dependence on US Big Tech and moving to open software to secure basic infrastructure. Baby steps, but they're in the right direction.

This seems to suggest the difference between 1930sNazis and modern far-right is the actions the 1930sNazis took. If the ideas underpinning both are the same, is there a guarantee that the actions of 1930Nazis will not be repeated?

“Write like your life depends on it.” Denis Johnson

Lovely section of this where are links traced back to a schoolteacher on Blaskets. Puts real people on that line through an oral tradition to the written tradition. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

The long summer break was probably decided on during a time when getting the harvest in was seen as more important than getting the learning in Only learned what a holiday was after I could stay in Dublin 6 for a full term of Lúnasa rather than doing the annual migration to the western hayfields

What are people in literary studies up to nowadays? I have this vague intellectual history in my head wherein way back in the early 20th century it was all close reading aesthetically interesting texts, then in the mid-to-late-20th century they decided they were gonna save the world actually...

It's understandable that they lost an empire. What's less obvious is how they managed to find one in the first place.

This is really important - the GENIUS Act is, foreseeably, going to fill the whole American financial system with exposures to incredibly run-prone liability structures. slate.com/technology/2...

This thread reminds me of something the Cato Institute's executive vice president David Boaz once said to me, as he watched, with great sadness, so many in his libertarian movement get on board with Trump: "It turns out they hate the left more than they love liberty."

In 1901, William A. Dunning published an article in @theatlantic.com called “The Undoing of Reconstruction.” He argued the war against Reconstruction was an ongoing project that hadn’t ended in 1877, or even in 1901. Unwinding it was a multigenerational effort…. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

I salute the 600 Naval Academy grads who released a letter condemning Trump's book bans at the Academy.   At this week's Board meeting, I moved to reverse the ban & made clear I won’t give up the fight. Are we really afraid to have midshipmen read Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”?

You’re allowed to argue that black people and women are genetically inferior. But you’re NOT allowed to argue they are NOT inferior because that’s divisive. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It's surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.