No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is evil.

Follower of Rembrandt van Rijn, A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, ca. 1628-30

I hope lawyers, secretaries of state, and state attorneys general are preparing for what’s coming.

Wait, Dr. Kananga is interrogating J.B. Fletcher?! (I have this problem every time I see Yaphet Kotto in anything besides “Live and Let Die.”)

I was gonna let this lie but two things: 1. There is much latent antisemitism in medieval studies; the most 'benign' versions treat it like all Jews are things to think with who substantively vanish from the specialist's map in the 13th-15th C and thus one needs no contemporary ethics of care...

this is an amazing sentence

BREAKING 🚨 🚨 🚨 Trump promises Schumer funding for NY tunnel project if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed after him The startling offer, which was described by two people familiar with the conversation, was swiftly rejected by Schumer. www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/p...

The word don't is censored. Don't, or Don T. If you're looking for just some fun proof they're doing control+f censoring

Because we're talking about the New Fire ceremony tonight, they get to play with this site. It's a fantastic reconstruction of the city of Tenochtitlan. It'll really help the students visualize a place they're just freshly learning of and will maybe never get to see. tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl

i will never stop thinking about the intersection of epstein and the shitty media men list

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday. It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

Please listen to every Californian telling you Gavin Newsom is a terrible choice and you should not anoint him the Democratic nominee for 2028. The only thing Gavin Newsom actually cares about is Gavin Newsom. He will sacrifice anyone and anything you care about for his political ambitions.

“How a major national newspaper will carry on without someone on staff to summarize the plots of midlist literary novels is beyond me.” @roncharles.bsky.social faces the post-Post world:

Frog pope is not happy with you at all

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

AAAAAHHHHH

It's true it seems, with no warning or explanation CIA simply discontinued and removed the World Factbook this week. I imagine they'd say we have wikipedia now wo who needs it, but check the footnotes and see how many wiki entries get their data from the CIA factbook. Lots.

“You make it sound terrible.”

Not to mention that it’s also wildly historically inaccurate.

Washington Post is shuttering its book section, part of the ongoing war against literacy & knowledge. We at Current Affairs want to pick up the slack by expanding book reviews. Writers: pitch us anytime! And if you subscribe/donate we'll use the funding to commission book coverage.

Some people are asking what I want Schumer to do. He should be screaming over medical care and access to facilities. He should be going to detention facilities himself and putting his body on the line, as he did at the border in 2019. He should lean into stories about New Yorkers in detention. [1/4]

Ruth Marcus on today's devastating cuts at the Washington Post: "Today, people in war zones are getting e-mails telling them that their positions have been eliminated. And you know what? I bet they’re gonna file stories, because that’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done."

I am searching for "medieval" in the Epstein files. Nothing of note yet. Some "stay at this medieval place," some "time to go medieval on my uncle" (from two people not JE), amusing numbers of times when "medieval" is a typo for "medical."

Remember when the robber barons wanted to be seen supporting museums and universities because it was part of the performance of elite perspicacity (gross in its own way but I digress)? I guess Bezos is too rich to even care about public legitimation.

Cryptocurrencies are an amazingly efficient tool for sowing distrust in democratic government and regulation, so there's that on top of all the criming too! This is a great piece from 2022 with many quotables.

can’t not hear and see:

This is bonkers. MAHA 'farmers' with ecoli tainted raw milk admit they really don't know how to make the stuff after all. "Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint. Unfortunately, we learned this after the fact." people.com/ballerina-fa...

Whatever you think of the Washington Post at this moment, here's a chance to support the dedicated, hard-working journalists who were just laid off. If you have the means, your donation is most welcome. If you don't, a kind thought and maybe spreading the word to others is support enough 💙

ohhh ‘democracy dies in darkness’ was aspirational

Moving to Buffalo right now. www.loopnet.com/Listing/220-...

More than 60 Survivor, Big Brother, Amazing Race, and other reality TV competition stars have come together to raise money to help immigrants in Minnesota. Here's the story of how that came together, from the campaign's organizer, Owen Knight. #Survivor #RealityTV

The house is on fire.

"Those who were laid off include Caroline O’Donovan, the Post’s beat reporter covering Amazon"

INBOX: Washington Post Ukraine Correspondent Lizzie Johnson announces that she has been laid off in the middle of a below-freezing war zone without power, heat, or running water.

MacKenzie Scott has the chance to do the funniest thing right now.

Most of the Washington Post’s tech reporters were laid off today, including me. I have loved my time at the paper, which is where I wanted to work from age 15. I take some consolation in not being among the survivors who will have to work harder with less for fewer readers. On to better things.

How has Minneapolis remained so non-violent in the face of Trump's horrific provocations? JaNaé Bates Imari explained to @thedigradio.bsky.social how MN's deep progressive orgs set a tone of non-violent discipline for the movement as a whole

"We’re witnessing a murder," writes @ashleyrparker.bsky.social. "Jeff Bezos ... and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special." www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

the guy who financed a propaganda film about the nazi first lady is killing a newspaper that writes unfavorably about her and her husband. this is how the club works.

Given the WaPo disaster, I’m re-posting my starter pack of indie journalists—it probably needs an update so give me a shout to add folks. #wapo #journalism go.bsky.app/A2UpMn5

Hello you should all read SCRAPING BY!! For a million reasons, now including banned-book-reading cachet, and of course so I can make more mudmachine jokes and have people outside of, like, MCHC staff, actually understand

This history professor informed his students of what books were being censored. One of them (it seems to me) is almost certainly the award-winning Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (JHU, 2009), by @sethrockman.bsky.social

a detailed look at the mechanics of the new American censorship regime It runs on threats of accusations, administrative ambiguity, and pervasive, amorphous fear of sudden termination.

For Bezos, as for many rich men in tech, this is clearly also ideological and not just financial. As people smarter than I have noted, once these bozos realized their wealth didn't buy them adoration or deference many of them became actual fascists.

Yeah… why would we need news coverage of the Middle East right now? I think the only question is whether Bezos sees this as purely cost-cutting or whether he’s doing it to help the regime keep a lid on its activities in the region.

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…