I've studied so many concentration camps through history that held vulnerable people in just this kind of crowded squalor. You demonize people, you demand more arrests, this is what you get. It already has its own budget and its own momentum, and is on track to go much further, unless we stop it.

Bring back the iconoclasts

Super Mario crowd out, Faces of Death crowd in

DHS did the same earlier today. It was for exactly as vile and racist a reason as you can imagine; Breitbart’s “black crime” vertical as official government policy. They are terrible, terrible people. And they’re in control.

i don’t think helen dewitt is well and i hope someone in her life is helping—but also writers shouldn’t have to grovel and lick boots for prizes

Gradually building out a more perfect bluesky

CBS News has a bombshell interview with a U.S. soldier who survived the deadly attack in Kuwait on the first day of the way -- he says Pete Hegseth is lying about the attack and that the base "was unprepared to provide any defense for itself." www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-wa...

Obviously no church is above the law but they are mostly above the Trump administration

One of his five best, hands down

Marcus is a dimwitted hack, but it's surreal to read this after spending the last few weeks working through the mountain of cases in which ICE and Border Patrol agents beat people, shot people, and lied through their teeth in reports and affidavits. www.foxnews.com/opinion/davi...

Hey, somebody needs to direct the last 30% of these movies and it's sure not going to be Steven

what a glorious time capsule of this broken moment we are in

ICYMI for, uh, any reason in particular:

Eyewitness video from the scene of today's ICE shooting in California appears to (you guessed it) contradict officials' claims that the man "weaponized" his vehicle. The car is reversing and the agents appear to be well clear of it.

In the Spring issue of @readliberties.bsky.social: a few words on Bruno Schulz, the Brothers Quay, and the reanimation of dead matter that we call puppetry: libertiesjournal.com/articles/the...

everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability

We don't normally publish on a Tuesday, but this is a special one-off: A big interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates where we cover the aftermath of the 2024 election, the boycott movement, Black and Palestinian experiences in the US and more www.thekeymagazine.com/p/ta-nehisi-...

Extremely weird review. Opens by stating that this tedious-sounding book is in fact tedious and then never bothers to explain what about it is actually boring, or why. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/b...

Sneakily one of the great albums of the 2010s coliseum.bandcamp.com/album/house-...

Multiple things may be true: 1) Trump's threats are monstrous and should be denounced. 2) He appears desperate and is using these threats to try to coerce Tehran to reach a deal. 3) The danger of further US escalation—with the risks to Iranians and probability of counter-escalation—is real

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

same Overton Window-shattering tactic he’s always used: Even if worst doesn’t happen tonight - rhetorically he’s opened up possibility of the unimaginable, making lesser (but still horrible) actions seem moderate by comparison… all increasing likelihood that one day the worst really will happen

Here are the stories of some of the human beings who died horrific deaths from preventable disease because Trump and Musk and their flunkies decided to murder them by gleefully destroying USAID and the entire global aid system:

Remember when DHS agents had no choice but to shoot two Venezuelan men because the men had attacked them with a snow shovel and a broomstick? New video shows they were lying about that one, too. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/u...

Remember all this nonsense about the supposed inferiority of “third world” immigration? They really believed that and applied their theory to international relations and it failed. Racism makes you stupid.

Dude! Spoilers!!

The birthright citizenship case shows how Trump-era Republicans have embraced the convictions of the proslavery Senator John C Calhoun, who believed America was a “white man’s government” and the integration of nonwhites onto the polity would destroy the country www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Working on some things

The Drama (2026)

I hope this is driving home to folks that anti-DEI/anti-woke are functioning mostly as a way to make racism more palatable by framing it as a kind of defensive reaction to an imagined unfairness.

probably when we found out goblins were posting among us the whole time, we just never noticed

We live on a planet surrounded by literal trillions of alien intelligences, but of course these assholes would only look for the kind that seems to flatter their own

Will be reading something pretty new at KGB Bar tonight. Event starts around 7, I’ll go on sometime after that. Should be fun, if for some reason you are interested in Laotian tourist traps and several digs at the good people of Australia.

Trump will always revert to his original form (terrible boss) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/u...

Only two correct choices here. Middlemarch is the great 19th century novel, and Moby Dick is the great 20th century novel docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The notion that any person born here should be denied U.S. citizenship because their parents happened to be immigrants is an anti-American perversion of legal principles that actually pre-date the 14th Amendment. The only support for that proposition is Dred Scott, which is of course no longer law.

“Two hundred Dalit workers, members of the [oppressed] caste in India’s rigid social hierarchy, came rom Rajasthan to New Jersey to work on the temple... Dalit workers are also purportedly not allowed to worship in these temples because of their caste ranking” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Under the occupation the Nazis attempted to goad Polish communities into committing their own pogroms. Jan Gross wrote a very famous book about it. Anyway, no connection to anything here www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

NBCC member Robert Rubsam wrote a long essay that includes, in part, a review of Joseph Leo Koerner's "Art in a State of Siege" for Liberties Journal:

Would Garth have used AI - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

And now another reason not to touch the stuff: the strong possibility that you will end up plagiarizing, whether you know it or not. But it was the "that is going to go away" attitude that rankled the most. That's the tech credo: anything that takes time or I don't understand must be obsolete.

these are exactly the stakes! embracing trump’s view would be embracing the cramped vision of freedom and belonging that we fought a civil war to banish to the ash heap of history

"Their vision of citizenship — which would plunge countless children into statelessness as a permanently subordinate class — would bring Dred Scott back from the dead." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/o...

So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

He wants to make sure Kavanaugh isn't the biggest idiot in the room