reading the news

The historians are speaking plainly & directly. Timothy Snyder, specialist in the history of Central & Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

“I’m here to chew gum and kick ass,” he said, unwrapping another stick of Trident, “and I’ve still got like three packs of gum.”

"We must grapple with the reality that the current models we have for philanthropy are not up to the task of incubating, developing and supporting strategy on the left." on the list of serious election post-mortems, highly worth your time to read www.thenation.com/article/soci...

"oh ho, but just last year you said running people over with with a big steamroller was wrong!” I exclaim delightedly as my enemy fatally runs me over with a big steamroller. it seems I have won this battle of wits

done with the hard part, now onto the hard part!

doctor: i know what you need. there’s a great clown in town that will cheer you up. pagliacci: but doc, doctor: wiggles pagliacci: oh. haha. i thought- doctor: i’ll write the name down. there’s another clown in town too, but you can skip it. pagliacci. not funny. bad bad bad bad bad. stupid

I think journalists, policymakers and good govt types are struggling to understand DOGE because their mental model is that it is a government reform commission, operating like previous ones. Maybe. But it might be better to start thinking about it as a hostile takeover of the govt by oligarchs.

There are 12 other answers but, as you'll see by reading the first two responses, @colsonwhitehead.com pretty much sums it up www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/o...

in 2025 this gesture will be coming back in a big way for me

there are some days where i have more people mad at me online than my ancestors would have had mad at them in their entire lives. there is functionally no difference between this and being cursed by a witch

i've still got no comparisons for this story to anything else in american politics in my lifetime

Put down your phone and walk through a wall. Or write a book. It's the same thing.

it wasn't until I read this (very good) @defector.bsky.social story that I realized her name is spelled Haliey, which is just an exceptionally bizarre and cruel decision for her parents to make

I would love to write a piece on the Adjustor’s goodreads profile.

Only ever thinking of Søren Solkær's photographs of starling murmurations.

WISDOM IS BACK!!! (If you're not familiar, this fantastic queen of a bird has been hatching chicks on Midway for at least 74 years and is practically saving her species)

I was already excited to click on a news story about Rudy Giuliani having a meltdown in court today and YELLING at the judge. But nothing prepared me for the courtroom sketch

devastating truth

Barnard Bulletin, New York, November 22, 1938

Melons could kill you; so could melancholy. In his new book Eating and Being, the historian of science Steven Shapin analyzes the longest-enduring system of medical and gastronomic thought in European history, dietetics. My review is up at LARB: lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-m...

why is this written like this lol www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

politics reporters are so washed man. i can't find any information on Walz's bench, squat, or power clean at all

I am so honored to be speaking at the National Book Festival this month, an annual celebration of books put on by The Library of Congress. If you’re in the DC area I hope you’ll come see me speak with Alexander Sammartino about writing violence and the west. www.loc.gov/events/2024-...

discovering that design within reach unfortunately exceeds design within grasp

NYC libraries face a $58.3 million cut that could force Saturday closures, meanwhile @NYCMayor announced a $225 million Cop City. Budgets are moral documents: libraries amplify human thriving and cops amplify violence. @NYCCouncil #NoCutsToLibraries investinlibraries.org/dayofaction

Average American president has been convicted of .74 felonies

when you design your syllabi, remember that the point of education is to get students to engage with something so weird that they never stop thinking about it for the rest of their lives

Political scientists have already had to reclassify the United States as not a consolidated democracy, since we failed the "peaceful transfer of power" test in 2020. Next up for debate: does the U.S. pass the "monopoly on the legitimate use of force" test for Weberian statehood?

cat snoozing on the desk, dog resting under it. as above, so below…

solstice— and now the long climb back into the light, thank goodness

anybody you meet at 4am is either a benevolent alien or an actual demon

editor, publisher, agent, writer

i think it should be a bigger story that NYC’s public libraries are now being forced to close on Sundays due to budget cuts while the NYPD spends 95% of the Library system’s total budget to get new encrypted radios that prevent people from knowing when the cops kill people

here are some pictures of some strange stones i found on the street and wanted to send to my geologist friend to identify before i realized i was just taking pictures of beets

had a dream last night that i invented a pizza with an entire chicken pot pie as a topping. i am frightened by my own genius

names i call the dog: bingus, shingo, dorgon, spingoid, glumbo, blimpus the dog’s legal “government” name: Dorothy

i love that there’s still no direct messaging on here. real retro 2007 facebook wall to wall kind of vibe

culture critics at the nyt

nobody is a bigger devotee of costco than my mother

always a delight to ask my composition class how much they think a professor is paid for publishing a peer-reviewed article— this quarter we got a low guess of $500 and a high of $300,000!

grandma’s running out of subjects for her paintings

One time I spent five minutes at lunch drawing a reverse centaur and it became one of my most retweeted pieces of art. I resented that so I deleted it but now it can be free again because not enough people follow me on here for it to go big

i feel you, otis

Tomorrow Likely Last Day Leftovers Still Good According to an individual familiar with the matter, tomorrow will likely be the last day the leftover chicken in the fridge remains good to eat. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t eat it on Thursday,” an intelligence analyst told the Times.