Waiting impatiently for Hackett's Complete Works of Aristotle to resume sales. (They ran out of inventory, and claim there will be more today.) I hope that a Joe Sachs Aristotle omnibus is on the horizon.

Let me get this straight: Trump found tens of billions of dollars to give to Argentina for a bailout during our government shutdown, but he couldn't find funding to keep SNAP program benefits going for 42 million hungry Americans past this Friday?

The reform party nativity scene. No unmarried mothers. No Middle Eastern people. No refugees. No people seeking emergency accommodation. And not a wise fvcking man in sight…

If Emily sells prints and I don't get one for Hanukkah I will be extremely sad.

All the niceties are gone. The players are not even pretending at governance. All is done by fiat and force. Why not occupy the House, gather the Democratic Representatives, declare a quorum, and start passing laws? Of course, this escalates into chaos, but is there more chaos than there was before?

CA: Voting on Prop. 50 starts today. Your vote is likely your best means of holding back tyranny in your lifetime. Mark your ballot (this is a one-issue election, so it will take about sixty seconds to mark, seal, and sign/date. Mail, drop off, or take to a Vote Center to scan, and you're golden!

Congratulations to @neuromelody.bsky.social and all the honorees!

Judd Legum (popular.info/p/ice-boosts...) says that ICE is stockpiling chemical weapons. Are these lethal chemical weapons like sarin and VX, or are they non-lethal like tear gas or pepper spray? If the former, we are fish in a barrel. If the latter, more of the same.

ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase. The President is building an army to attack his own country.

I worked (as a part-time contractor) for IRG, which, among other things wrote reports for IES's "What Works Clearinghouse." My full-time colleagues, the investigators, were brilliant, classy, and professional. The work they did was impeccable and helped U.S. K-12 education tremendously. No more.

People are way more optimistic than me www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

🇺🇸 🔥 That. Was. Impressive. We are watching America reassert itself and its values from the grassroots up. The world saw you and we have huge hope invested in you.

TROUBLESHOOTING: 1. My democracy is throwing errors. There is a tiny hole in the bottom into which you can stick an unbent paper clip. Factory reset, followed by bootstrapping the Constitution. To tell you how the progress is going, each of the fifty stars on the American flag lights up, one by one.

Darned if these politicians think Western classical civilizations are "safe" and unthreatening to entrenched power. Quite the opposite! Our waning hegemony is prefigured by theirs. Hybris->atis->nemesis->tisis.

This is of niche industry interest, but here goes: The digital catalog platform most independent bookstores use to peruse and order new books for their stores (called Edelweiss) has jacked up their prices on publishers to catalog new titles 200-300%. Why does this matter?

Never Trust AI. I was trying to create a Discogs tracklist for a recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It's picky work, and I thought it might be easier to tell Claude how to do it. He was subtly and completely wrong. He left out all the tracks in minor keys! Facepalm.

Administrators of the @uofcalifornia.bsky.social can let the Trump administration pick off campuses one by one. Or they can stand together, resist this abomination, and win the gratitude and support of their state and their >2 million living alumni. CC: @governor.ca.gov

May our repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert G-d's severe decree. Given events of the past year, G-d may be serving us justice; hopefully, we will merit a little more mercy this year. An easy fast, honest reflection, and a good outcome for all of us!

"The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has said that every culture is a 'gamble played with nature' in the sense that it depends on the continued availability of environmental resources, and on challenges that it can continue to negotiate." —Jonathan Lear, "Radical Hope."

Belated news: Peter Gelb announced that, due to the unavailability of any billionaire donors, he has made a deal with the Saudis involving Met performances there. There's only one catch: the dramaturgs will be Sunni clerics who will "snip, snip, snip" the librettos. What will the operas look like?

I grew up with a Mom who'd taken elocution lessons and a Dad from Brooklyn. Still, my accent was announcer-neutral until college: a Texan roommate and an Irish adviser left their marks. Some U.S. kids adopt British accents by listening to or watching the BBC.

One reason sign-up-in-advance organizations want your information is, wondrous to relate, so that they can ask you for money now and down the road. I think that's definitely part of what they mean by "moving [attendees] up the ladder of activism." Ever signed a change.org petition? Same deal.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

"This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show." - Adam Serwer www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

*9/17/2025 noncooperation thread* Not everyone can choose to walk away. But some of us can and do. 8/

Every major talent that works for ABC and Disney should refuse to show up for work until Jimmy Kimmel is reinstated. Marvel movies need to shutdown. Ditto the sitcoms. Collective boycott. Corporations love money more than anything,& this will harm them and force them to do the right thing.

The recent censorship hits against Kimmel, Colbert, and, of course, PBS make me wonder who needs conventional OTA/digital television. Anyone who can find the money in legacy broadcast television should apply, but shouldn't we really be moving on to forms subject to less "regulation?"

I could never have predicted that the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Teen Vogue would become crucial sources of news and analysis, nor that the New York Times, LA Times, and Washington Post would lose the trust of people like me.

The Reincarnation of Horst Wessel.

OK this is interesting. Remember how a while ago I said that the Replacements were the greatest straight, no fat, no frills, American rock and roll band? I mean, I was correct. But I've been playing with my favorite new toy: 1/x

Chayka's NYer piece is ridiculous  1. "Bluesky is for liberals." 2. "Liberals are returning on bended knee to X, because X is real and Bluesky is a mere shadow." This is all breath and wind, just a conceit for an article. I wish people would stop writing that story; no one ever writes it better.

Oh, my God. They really do want to start a new war, giving Trump wartime powers. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/u...

"They need to reignite investor confidence with an appealing growth story for the future." Stories? I can help with that. Once upon a time, there was a little baby Pharma. She had a sister, little baby Pharma. The two of them grew up together. The world was put on 10 pills a day, and all were happy.

Some thoughts on Zohran's supermarkets, @Printculture. printculture.com/zohrans-supe...

Justice Sotomayor is crystal clear in dissent as to what's happening: "We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent."

Great. With "Flash Teams," you can instantly call on an "expert" whose brain you can pick for ten minutes, and you are done. They're not thinking from the "flash employee" perspective of not knowing where their next meal is coming from. Walmart-style HR. mitpress.mit.edu/978026204984...

NASA admin Duffy: "Don't let safety be the enemy of progress." Tell that to Grissom, White, Chaffee, Scobee, Smith, McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Jarvis, and McAuliffe. "Safety" was the watchword after Challenger. Astronauts and personnel are not expendable.

“When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. . . The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.”

Apothegm #2: "If you do not have the ball, you cannot shoot it."

Apothegm #1: "If you can't sleep at night, sleep during the day."

When I was 7 years old, I lost a tooth, and I wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy explaining that the reimbursement rate for teeth had risen from 25 to 50 cents due to inflation. It included a chart. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/p...

A doctorate is focused: "The role of wax in the construction of Renaissance Perugian altarpieces," then contextualized within broader fields like art history and material culture. ChatGPT is a generalist and notoriously fails at specifics. They're opposite kinds of "intelligence," Altman!

For those of you going to Denver’s SAA, please consider joining @roaringgirle.bsky.social and me to talk about the importance of public libraries, Shakespeare, and other early modern literature. There’s so much to consider in our current political climate:

Grocery inflation may be the weight-loss trick I never knew I needed!

"Help Build Classical California's Ultimate 101!" I take it that the "2024 Top 250 Classical Favorites" from last year had to be cut down to 101 pieces because of the CPB recission. www.kusc.org/events/vote-...

🧵NEW: This is an unprecedented intervention. Almost every single living, former head of the IDF, Mossad (Israeli foreign intelligence), Shin Bet (domestic intelligence) & Police Commissioner urges an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. “This is an extremist government. It has taken us all hostage.” 1/

One public TV station's post-CPB future. It sounds as though someone at the station read Project 2025 and started planning. printculture.com/quasi-public...