I took Tylenol.

BREAKING A 2006 memo from Alan Dershowitz’s own aide shows him pushing prosecutors to minimize his friend Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, by minimizing the victims. “These girls are self-described prostitutes, they don’t feel harmed, and they’re out for money.” More below 👇🏻

No faith at all.

I have to believe that most people have a desire to love and be loved at their core, and if their best selves could be kindled they would have to see the glaring difference between control and care, between violence and nurture. Wouldn’t they?

I just unlocked a memory from age 9 or so where my father is locking his fingers hard into my shoulder or neck in church because I’m not sitting stock still, probably fiddling with the toe of my nylon panty hose. He was so severe. So humorless. I used to ignore itches, counting until they went away.

“Isn’t the point of beautiful art – again, like a person, like a life – that it is unfixable and unfixing? That it changes as we change? And that it unmoors us, calls into question what we thought we knew, and who we thought we were?” Ross Gay in Inciting Joy ❤️

"Open Carry" gives tactical advantage to criminals and mass shooters. It is idiotic, imposes an unreasonable disturbance of the peace on all of society, and should be totally banned. #GunCultureSucks www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

You’ve got to be able to say “I don’t understand your choices but I still love you and so I’ll fight for your right to make those choices.” That’s why nonreligious people shouldn’t try to kill religion & why people who don’t understand LGBTQ folks should get it’s not their bodies or their lives.

If it’s true that people of good will can disagree (and of course they can) then the “good will” part must involve faith that other people can make their own good decisions about their own good lives. Freedom for yourself cannot be prison for everyone else.

“The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has, in fact, taught me to live in the moment. Nothing but this day matters… In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle. The things I love – the things I should love – become clearer, brighter.” Kate Bowler

Me IRL right now (and probably many of you too?)

“Transgender for everybody!” Well, for everyone that wants it absolutely.

Melissa McCoul was recently fired from Texas A & M for affirming gender diversity in a classroom. Allan Josephson was awarded $1.6m by U of Louisville after being fired for saying how bad he thinks gender affirming care is. Free speech only counts I guess if you are demeaning innocent people.

Dear God. Why are grief and rage so frowned upon, when they are the only reasonable response? I’m surrounded by people bopping along, because they feel safe. Are they? Probably. And so they skate.

It’s the cruelty.

I accidentally paid full price on a Poshmark item when I had a lower private offer, and the seller refunded me the difference. And the world is so bad now that someone being kind just about that is making me cry.

Many years ago, one of my family members disappeared. I thought they were dead for months. My heart was dust. My therapist, God bless her, saved me with this: “You actually don’t know what’s going to happen.” This made room for movement toward the best possible future. It let me breathe and act.

“Hey, humanities departments. Solve this problem without resources. And if you can’t solve this problem without resources, we won’t give you resources.” 

rapture out of order

When I’m reading stuff by students I can tell when it’s A.I. because I zone out like the words are background noise because they are. It’s like eating nothing but plain marshmallows. Yes, it’s food I guess but

rapture out of order.

Terrorist escalator?

One take away from my religious right class today. We get to say “That’s not a big enough view of diversity!“ when someone says something like “Evangelicalism is filled with diversity, because we have evangelicals from Africa, from China, and from Brazil!”

Matthew Avery Sutton shows we never got over the Civil War, & some of us never got over the Civil Rights movement. We are haunted by failures around both. The book was published in 2014 before President Grump, but we are still in the hot backlash of not dealing with our history of racism & violence.

Since America’s beginnings some Christians have been telling other people what they’re allowed to believe, who counts as human, & whose bodies should be controlled (hint: not theirs). Today’s maelstrom is a panic bc the world is changing around them & they can’t keep doing it. Really, they can’t.

There's plenty to cause despair these days, but this one hits me hard--a superintendent ordering all public schools in Oklahoma to establish Turning Point chapters. It hurts my heart.

"Once you try to force or boss a being (either human or nonhuman), the spirit is gone from that relation. You can’t use magic or make magic; you can only swim with its currents, occasionally choosing which stream will take you." ~Tyson Yunkaporta

You can’t escape the world system. You are already part of it, because you exist. You will always have been. Time is an illusion, and all that there is, is All that There Is. It is. Still, but not still. So you are too. And what will you do with this expansive, wild, glorious timeless life being?

We got a set of scholars’ stones donated to our department! They show the sculpting of time and natural forces.

How about an end times handout? In honor of us being left behind, you know. I use this in my classes.

America is so cringe.

It was a typo. Some of us got enraptured. Like, with poetry or film or a lover or a tree or the idea of moral justice. True, only some of us were enraptured. And we kept our clothes on (some of us did).

Maybe we have all been raptured and this is heaven, same as earth? And somebody totally forgot to run the update. It’s got glitches and bugs and malware all over it.

Nobody I know got raptured. Is Trump still here?!?

You have nothing to fear and nothing to prove. Are you ready to be strong? Time to remake the world. ~Joy Ladin

If you haven’t been paying attention to Prager U, you should. This conservative Christian educational company makes kids’ videos used in public schools across the country, in at least 10 states. With the defunding of public broadcasting, schools will be turning to this crap more and more.

This is a solid introduction the Great Replacement theory, and white supremacist panic.

“Think of somebody you love unconditionally, no matter what. If you can’t do this, you need to stop now and go take care of your life.” Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk.

For many US Jews, High Holy Days will be a mix of anxiety and determination religionnews.com/2025/09/22/f...

Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies…The import of this history has never been clearer than [now]…If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?”

Some Cornell students caught and killed a bear and skinned it in their dorm. This is my town.

“The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit…covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels' robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise." Frederick Douglass

On the Kirk assassination.

Mike Johnson said this kind of rhetoric is highly inflammatory and incites people.

In thinking of visiting the Ark in Kentucky in a few weeks to absorb and write about biblical literalism in today’s riven world. I’ll go to the creation museum too. Would anyone like to see that essay?

Oh no. I bet that once welfare is good and stripped, T and co will give gov’t money to the churches—especially in the South—to provide new welfare, repackaged as Christian gov’t aid. And of course he’s declared the churches able to curry votes. The perfect mix.

Which have you used: mimeograph machine; overhead projector; fax machine; answering machine; tape recorder; 8-track player; Commodore-64; typewriter; floppy disks; dot matrix printer; card catalog. I’ve used them all!

I’m trying not to shill too much here but I’ll say this: my book can fill in blanks on how we got where we are. It addresses how white storytellers have silenced non-white American stories, and how that keeps happening today via media and games, and of course guns. 30% off with code NYUAU30

College president forced to step down because he didn’t fire a professor fast enough for talking about gender diversity in a children’s lit class.

“Northeastern states…formally announced the Northeast Public Health Collaborative, a voluntary…coalition of public health agencies and leaders,…together to share expertise, improve coordination, enhance capacity, strengthen regional readiness, and promote and protect evidence-based public health.”