I'm going to spend the rest of my life in opposition to the prevailing state of things, aren't I?

Modernity draws a bright line between the possible and impossible, the rational and irrational. Yet spiritual cinema reaches out toward the ineffable, offering audiences a glimpse of a world beyond our circumstances.

About "agitators" -- 1. Homan can't even capitulate without threatening more illegal, military-ish force against people exercising their 1A rights. 2. I doubt it's unintentional that they continue to use a loaded term inextricably linked with segregationists and bigots.

ICYMI: went mystic mode on the cinema of today

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

“I want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tongues—a miraculous art that pushes beyond itself.” thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

Gonna be thinking about this part of @robrubsam.bsky.social's article for a good long time.

Over at @thebaffler.com, some thoughts on spiritual cinema, medieval mystics, Shaker chairs, dance music, and what it might mean for modern art to yearn for the divine. thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

A real nice bit of reviewage from Rob Rubsam in @thebaffler.com, placing "Revelations" within a larger trend of the sublime and spiritual in contemporary cinema!! And can you believe they used a still from our movie for the header!! Read on! thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

Very beautiful essay that made me want to watch all three films discussed. Should be of interest to many medievalists, too, as a film of Julian of Norwich is among them.

An amazing piece. Thank you for this, Robert.

yoooo, new Rubsam just dropped and shit's 🔥🔥🔥

Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths. @robrubsam.bsky.social writes on three films that reach toward something deeper: “The Testament of Ann Lee,” “Revelations of Divine Love,” and “Sirāt.”

a bit of great news: we're getting another Mike Leigh movie

What this man is describing would seem to constitute crimes against humanity under international law. Other governments could and should contest the abuses he’s describing the U.S. government committing against migrants.

Over at @thebaffler.com, some thoughts on spiritual cinema, medieval mystics, Shaker chairs, dance music, and what it might mean for modern art to yearn for the divine. thebaffler.com/latest/wild-...

Wow, looks like Lionel Shriver is back to puncture liberal pieties like "migrants are people" www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

Tatiana Maslany I was not familiar with your game

I’m listening to this while reviewing recent photographs from Gaza that a source provided me for a forthcoming piece and certain resonances between both circumstances have me about at my emotional limit

i think this more than anything is what miller wants. vast detention camps with all of the suffering and death that means.

When you think about it Rip Van Winkle was the original deadbeat dad

When you think about it Rip Van Winkle is the original deadbeat dad

So ICE is forging people’s signatures to say that they agreed to be deported and then holding them hostage if their lawyers appeal their cases www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Naipaul

845 excellence

Textually this is more the first movie about Andrew Cuomo

“I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Here’s a story published yesterday, the day before the current president posted a video depicting the first black U.S. president and First Lady as gorillas. mississippitoday.org/2026/02/05/m...

They're Abrego-Garcia-ing a child -- punishing him because his very existence is inconvenient to them. It's gutter bigotry and petulant sadism all the way down.

Big Oil "purchased solar and EV patents to ensure others couldn’t use them, solicited control of renewable markets and then abandoned them, and funded powerful institutions to promote false solutions, all while using trade groups to downplay the harms of fossil fuels, according to the complaint." 😠

It’s just racism. There’s no immigration problem

In a sane world, the decision by Rufo, Vance, & co. to slander and slap a target on the traumatized, hardworking immigrants who revitalized a rust belt city -- and who *were invited* to that city -- would be a stain on their careers that they never live down. They should be reminded of it. Often.

I'll say more before too long, but for now: Thanks to anyone who has ever read and supported the Post's books coverage.

What bullshit. John, Jacob, and everyone in books let me write about Bruno Schulz, Junichiro Tanizaki, Jenny Erpenbeck, Mauro Javier Cardenas, Fine Grabol, Donald Niedekker, Jo Hamya, and more. They actually gave a shit about weird literature, and I'm immensely luck to have worked with them.

"The highly unusual government move....is designed to head off claims that crimes against humanity have been committed and that as many as 30,000 Iranians have been killed. Iran’s official death toll released by the Martyr’s Foundation is 3,117" www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

"This is how we propel culture forward: by enabling a myriad of individual artistic expressions, all independent of each other, that work to shift and expand the boundaries of what is deemed normal (or even work to eradicate altogether the false god we call normality)." stereogum.com/2480201/the-...

We have cover art. Coming this September from Yale University Press.

My latest In Gaza, an ‘apocalyptic wasteland’ foretold wapo.st/4rrkWAb

The photos from a UN fact finding mission to northern Gaza which were part of a diplomatic cable suppressed by the US Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, have been released by Drop Site News. These are the genocidal conditions in Gaza that Lew specifically tried to hide from the White House and public.

our nation’s first crust punk congressperson being a radical centrist makes a TON of sense actually

Israel bombed tents in Gaza today, killed at least 30 people including children, and the death toll is likely to rise www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Wow, not what I would have expected from the chud thug administration's chief chud thug

Rufo has always been a pseud, but there is no way now for him to interrogate the plain truth—that Trump's policies are so enormously unpopular and his vision for the country so odious that Americans will literally die to stop it—without acknowledging that they have a genuine problem.

Cultural phrenology is a pastime for suckers and morons and cowards afraid of living in the present world with the rest of us

turns out the CDC has some important tasks protecting the public and under the madman RFK Jr it just is not doing them www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

"Mass vaccination is not just a disease prophylactic but among the simplest tools we have to limit the damage of America’s many social pathologies and inequalities." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/o...

More surprise Mexican burial complex news please