Frontier girls tennis Western Mass champions story in good ol’ newsprint.

If I was so personally unlikeable I made Senate Republicans do oversight I would join a monastery

Frontier girls tennis team makes program history with Western Mass class B title. recorder.com/2026/05/20/w...

This piece by @deanblundell.bsky.social about a deal to build an AI data center in Utah is both scary in its evocation of staggering MAGA corruption and also a rollicking good read.

Other people have noticed this phenomenon too but danah boyd put the best slogan to it: social media is now parasocial media. Social media hasn't been social for a long while—how long depending on the platform, depending on the milieu. It's not folks sharing equally, but broadcasting and receiving.

The things people like about you aren’t always the things you want them to like about you.

It’s beyond parody.

“Our half-life is a new form of forever.” A poem on plastics and how they haunt our modern life by Ronald Carson: poets.org/poem/forever...

But can they?

If we really cared about climate change, the Strait of Hormuz shouldn’t matter this much.

None of this is good. It’s government picking voters, not voters picking government.

“Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz,” says @billmckibben.bsky.social. “That makes it a very appealing alternative, especially now that it’s cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil.”

At the most basic level, one party continues to function as an actor in a liberal democracy, whereas Trump and much of his movement, with the eager participation of many Republicans, simply do not. trib.al/kR18S2u

It’s the kind of America that wants to double down on Christopher Columbus statues.

“A Warning Bell for the 413” — I think this article connects some dots that resonate with my thinking. Hampshire College is symbolically important to this area and our spirit.

I think you're seeing the obvious. Punching down. Roberts puts a legal intellectual veneer on sadism.

New England Public Radio and WGBH Boston plan to merge. Can this sort of consolidation work? Or will Western Mass lose out? www.masslive.com/news/2026/05...

We don’t need an empire of orders; we need a democracy of flowers.

Hampshire College is closing, which is a real tremor in the fabric of Western Mass. I didn't go to Hampshire, but I've spent some time on campus, as a graduate student advisor to the student newspaper, and as a visitor. It was the quirky kid of the Five Colleges. www.masslive.com/education/20...

Donald Trump is stealing from us. He’s trading away our global reputation and our green earth for a gilded palace and greed.

I’m with the Pope.

That’s quite a headline.

In Deerfield @ Frontier Regional, students + community members sent an SOS signal to the Legislature + @massgovernor.bsky.social + LG @kimdriscollma.bsky.social . MA communities are sounding the alarm about the fiscal crisis of RURAL + DECLINING ENROLLMENT schools. www.ruralschoolsma.org

“I am trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune” poets.org/poem/world-t...

Bookbinding in Glasgow.

Lighthouse north of Tobermory, Scotland, on the Isle of Mull.

Tobermory, Scotland, on the Isle of Mull.

My daughter has started reading “We Never Have Been Woke” and now she’s talking non-stop about Symbolic Capitalism. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

We woke up with military strikes on Iran. Why? we asked, phone out, still in bed. The possible answers swim in my head like fish. It is all cynicism.

Today’s poem of the day is much older than I thought. “There is no rest for the mind,” begins the poem “Interior: The Suburbs” by Horace Gregory. poets.org/poem/interio...

The media and academia have an obligation to not remain neutral in the face of authoritarianism. These institutions need liberal institutions to exist in any meaningful way. Authoritarianism is an existential threat. Our devotion to "neutrality" will keep us from fighting for our own survival.

Internet outage exposes frayed equipment, relationships in Greenfield — by Jonathan Gerhardson and in collaboration with the Montague Reporter. theshoestring.org/2026/02/26/i...

Saw this painting by JooYoung Choi in an exhibition at the Meade Art Museum at Amherst College today. www.jooyoungchoi.com/cover-galler...

The richest shouldn't control everything. They shouldn't be able to bribe all the Governments. They shouldn't be able to run pedophile islands and never go to jail. Being a Billionaire should be impossible, taxes should be so high you can't do it.

🚨 Tell your Senators to vote NO on the GOP’s so-called “SAVE” Act”, which would: Require continuing voter purges w/ NO PENALTY for erroneous purges. Subject election officials to potential PRISON TIME & citizen suits for mistakenly registering a single voter—even if the voter is a citizen! 1/

Good reporting from MassLive on what the Trump administration's request to states for voter rolls means, and why it matters. www.masslive.com/politics/202...

Today’s poem of the day at the Academy of American Poets: “Burn Out” by Amy Alvarez. poets.org/poem/burn-ou

Canadian PM Mark Carney gave this speech at the UN, where he talked about the rupture in the world order and what middle powers like Canada need to do.

Cool!

“ICE’s lawless behavior in repeated incidents should be deeply concerning to everyone who wants to live in a free country.” - Heather Cox Richardson

On January 6, 2021, supporters of President Trump broke into the Capitol building to try to prevent congress from certifying the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden. The rioters assaulted police officers and threatened members of Congress and VP Mike Pence.

In K-12 public education, we call it bullying.

I love the retro “Jim’s Take” opening to this, and also, it’s spot on. It’s the oil, stupid.

I published my first post on Substack, containing the first section of an essay that I've been brooding over for a little more than a year now. It's called "Retreating into the Corn." open.substack.com/pub/andrewva...

Agreed.

This seems like a zen koan of social media: we are all writing off-the-cuff aphoristic pronouncements and expecting everyone else to keep up.

Hey, it’s a podcast on the Boar’s Head Festival at Trinity UMC Springfield! My family and I are in it and it’s coming up Jan 9-11.

This says a lot about our country right now, and I don’t know what to feel about it.

My family and I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum yesterday. The courtyard is amazing, especially on a dreary day. And there is art everywhere.

My brother went to New College, so I’m interested in this reporting. I saw the NYT piece and it was odd.