Keep in mind that they haven’t even started to enshittify the AI yet.

“In one early study, only 5% of lithium-treated patients developed Alzheimer’s, compared to 33% in a similar untreated group.”

“Child of the seventies that I am, when I first started reading Barthelme in my teens I felt the same way about his collections as I did about albums—that they were meant to be received and consumed as a unit, that the title and the cover art mattered, that they must be played over and over again.”

Shark Week is early this year.

“Mrs. K[lein] interpreted that… Daddy might not be able to get out of Mummy’s inside and would be caught there, like the ships in the Mediterranean.” A lovely essay about a “bonkers” psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein of a child in wartime, negotiating “the Hokey Pokey of early object relations.”

Being an American during the 250th Aniversary of the United States feels a lot like if the terrorists in Die Hard demanded that the hostages continue having their Christmas party.

I always think of what the smart and menschy director Arthur Penn told me about the early- and mid-'60s years just before everything changed when I interviewed him for Pictures at a Revolution: "It wasn't just that we were sick of the system. At that point, the system was sick of itself."

I know we like to shout at the New York Times a lot here, and often with good reason, but I'm enough of an institutionalist to be mostly thankful for the work its journalists, editors, and—ok, I'll admit—game designers do. M. Gessen's piece today on Hungary is great.

Update: Same.

A tale of small talk about reading, and about not reading any more, during a visit to the ER.

A President ordering the Justice Department to criminally investigate a woman who won a sexual assault lawsuit against him makes Watergate look like an unpaid parking ticket.

Jane Freilicher (1924-2014) Untitled (Curtains), 1975 oil on linen, 30 × 25 in. 📷Karma Gallery #WindowsOnWednesday 🎨

@dadadrummer.bsky.social tries to find out what happened to Artur Nunes and other musicians during the Angolan civil war, and discovers that the history (though not all the music) seems to have been lost.

One of my favorite writers, @calebcrain.bsky.social, on a very good friend's very good book. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I reviewed the last dad book.

“The prelapsarian aura that invests the memory of the expedition in popular culture can’t withstand much scrutiny.” Enjoyed reading @calebcrain.bsky.social’s incisive take on Lewis and Clark in @newyorker.com this morning, in an apt along the 1776 route of De Anza: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Look, this is not normal. Early Americanists don’t write this kind of review-essay about Lewis and Clark unless they’re under a lot of stress.

I reviewed the last dad book.

“and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word ‘oiseaux’ and scrawled above it ‘birds.’ ”. —Nabokov, _Pnin_

Suez 1956 analogy still looking pretty accurate for the Iran war debacle. After Suez, PM Anthony Eden retreated to Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica (really), then was forced to resign after returning to Britain. What will be the equivalent aftermath for Trump?

The rich are out of town and I can have all the parking spaces I want and there’s no line for the artisanal sourdough.

To Disregard. v.a. [from the noun.] To slight; to neglect; to contemn. www.engadget.com/2179762/goog... johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/disrega...

Worth reading. (And my beloved neighborhood indie bookstore, East City Bookshop, features in this story!) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/b...

It’s good to know they have no principles about anything.

“I sound like I have a stick up my butt,” is my new favorite thing for a writer to say about a quote fabricated by AI and falsely attributed to them.

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

GIFT LINK NYT 5/11/24: www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/u...

The green room bathroom of the Jackson WY Center for the Arts is an interesting place. Not pictured: the second fan.

Why should anyone pay taxes now?

Someone please make a Bluesky label that says whether an item like this is real or parody. I can’t tell the difference any more.

is that good

A German language edition of Common Sense was published in Philadelphia in January 1776 adverts250project.org/2026/01/23/a...

my favorite genre of international dialogue

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.

statehood for DC and Great Dakota

When will death come.

🚨🚨🚨 DOJ sent a grand jury subpoena from the Northern District of Texas to NYU Langone for all patient records of trans youth. DOJ is engaged in forum and judge shopping in Texas in a blatantly unlawful bid to shut down gender affirming care in blue states. nyulangone.org/public-notic...

Here, from a lovely tribute by Luke Roberts, is a J.H. Prynne opinion I wholeheartedly share www.littlemirrormag.com/luke-roberts...

"Reading a poem by Schuyler doesn’t propel you out with eyes upturned to re-see workaday details through freshly polished lenses; it keeps you fixed on the page in front of you, which becomes a window onto a world built of observation, memory, and the inevitability of forgetting."

funny that the delightful ease of bike parking in the american city is entirely due to every block having 16 parking signs

I think about this comic all the time.

From the story "Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk About Death Is Funny" by @calebcrain.bsky.social in Harper's Magazine, May 2026. #SundaySentence #ShortStory

Who knew that what we needed to unite us on this Friday was a woman walking down the sidewalk saying into her phone, loudly enough for us to hear, “Stop dicking around, Brice!” We’re suddenly smiling. Birds are chirping. Dappled light. Fuck Brice.

“The sense of myself that I’d carried in my thirties and forties—of someone who could, through my editing work and my criticism, through the exercise of my judgment and taste, bring about some change for the good in American literature and culture—maybe even its politics—was gone.”

“If Andy Sachs 1.0 had to decide between a glamorous magazine gig and a salt-of-the-earth newspaper one, that distinction itself is now revealed to have been a luxury.”

“The Trump administration has set an April 30 deadline for the Zambian government to accept a new health funding agreement that is tied to giving the United States expanded access to the country’s mineral resources.”

Agree.