He desired desire. He was a desirer of desiring, who above all desired to let eels chomp on his flesh & for your children to die en masse of preventable diseases.

The partisan divide has grown, too. The wealthiest 100 tended to give more to Republicans than to Democrats before last year. But giving to the GOP spiked in 2024, with *84%* of donations going to back Republicans or conservative PACs.

ICE, which has seen its budget triple, said it did not have the resources to maintain videos of detainees

Once a HS social studies teacher was inexplicably forced to do a day of sex ed and didn’t know what to do, so he told us about a “timekeeper,” who is someone at a bar who you don’t think is attractive enough to hook up with and when you’ve drunk enough for them to be attractive, you should go home.

Happy 30th anniversary year for Lieder.net. It contains countless (well, over 200,000) texts for art song/lieder and related forms, searchable by composer and author (and more). Text in original languages and translations.

Today’s case is different than the deployments in California, Oregon and Illinois, because Trump controls the DC National Guard However, the judge noted that “Congress has given the District rights to govern itself. Those rights are infringed upon” once Trump unlawfully deployed National Guard

🚨🚨🚨 "Because if you just look at item four it says that the US will mediate between NATO and Russia to create a European security arrangement. The US in this document is talking as if it's not part of NATO, that when when US, a founding member, talks about NATO, it means the Europeans."

I don't think it matters that the racist Texas gerrymander might be dead. With enough blue state redistricting, Democrats can see how much political pain Republicans are willing to endure before they agree to fair(er) electoral maps. badfaithtimes.com/now-is-the-t...

Police are investigating former British MEPs who were tasked by Nathan Gill on behalf of his handler Several EU forces are investigating others who may have been instructed directly by Oleg Voloshyn, and an international investigation team has been started www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

DW Griffith directed BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), a virulently racist film (and neither his first nor his last one of those) that saw racist violence follow wherever it was screened. So, naturally, there are film bros and gals who think we should "ignore the racism" and keep it in the canon. Thread

I wish I had access to all this information when I had to watch Birth of a Nation for an Introduction to Film class back in the 90s.

Whoops, The Onion has accidentally torn apart the Detroit Lions fanbase.

🧵 We are, in fact, doing the thing again for @onesimplewish.bsky.social. In 2024, the kind people of this community put the money cannon on blast to help grant $75K in wishes for children in foster care. Toys, tech, a suit for job interviews. Here we go again! 👇 www.onesimplewish.org/giving/megwa...

This is like Donald Fagen’s IGY: a melancholy forecasting of a beautiful future that we never got.

New: Alt5 Sigma, one of Trump's key business partners, told the SEC that it suspended its CEO in mid-October. An internal email, though, says he was placed on “temporary leave” more than a month earlier. me, for @forbes.com 1/

A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree www.bbc.com/news/articles/…

So basically, the U.S. no longer collecting race and ethnicity data is a major blow to medical advancement and directly harms Black American kidney failure patients. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-m...

a nice reminder of one of the more absurd elements of trump v. u.s., which is roberts’ apparent belief that the constitution was written to remove limits on executive power prospect.org/2025/11/21/r...

. . . “I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints, and forgery by typewriter”

Years ago I remember being shocked when Antonin Scalia threw a bullshit argument I knew for a fact he had to have gotten from a Rush Limbaugh rant into a written decision. Today federal judges are using their opinions for shitposting. Next we'll see a dissent that's just a string of groyper memes.

On our final vet trip, I wasn’t prepared to make arrangements because I’d never lost a pet as an adult. They’re listing them off, and one was to have Janet cremated and scattered at a coral reef and all I could think in the moment was “…our cat never expressed a desire for the sea.”

If there is ever a datapoint for how no one ever learns anything ever it is in how after Trump's strategic fuck ups with the US-Russia meetings in Riyadh and Anchorage you still see people wasting 1000s of Substack wordcount on another American strategic brainfart

After already having sat through two rounds of Trump's attempts to solve the Ukraine-Russia war I find it quite remarkable that so many analysts, journalists and scholars still get sucked into taking the car crash diplomacy seriously of a chaotically inept US government.

Yesterday’s announcement that a half-dozen MAGA goons were added to the LA28 board does make that Palantir Deep Dive Center much more likely 🫠

Intuit Dome will keep its name in 2028, the latest Olympics venue to retain naming rights in what’s honestly a smart way for LA28 to raise some cash

we have PrEP because of these monkey studies. animal welfare in medical research is extremely strictly limited and regulated to ensure ethical use. there is no replacement for these animal models in biomedical research.

this is the first build of the Version 3 design of the Superheavy booster, which means every time they try to improve this Cybertruck for space it just gets more explodey bsky.app/profile/esgh...

"undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism" dude you're a little late to the game. Remember when Pam Bondi handed out fake copies of the Epstein Files and then said they didn't exist?

Leave it to David Fucking Brooks to bothsides the Epstein Files. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/o...

Axios is the embodiment of Trump era courtier journalism

The officiant at my wedding was Don Knotts' cousin.

The rich are probably gamy and stringy and like any such meats would benefit from slow, low cooking. Thus, the new slogan: "Sous vide the rich"

"A majority of Americans have a negative view of billionaires spending more money on elections, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in September. Fifty-eight percent said such spending is bad, including 34 percent who said it is 'very bad.'" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Insane detail about the 1977 New York mayoral race that Bella Abzug was gonna be the subject of a big Rolling Stone feature/endorsement that was viewed as possibly the home-stretch push she needed and then Elvis died that week

Word of the day is ‘quockerwodger’ (19th century): a puppet politician whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else.

Oh dear. What have I done now?

If you like cute cats with stupidly brilliant names, photographed amongst very pretty Oxford architecture, this article from @oxfordclarion.bsky.social is for you: oxfordclarion.uk/college-cats...

EU foreign policy chief @kajakallas.bsky.social sending a very visual message on Ukraine at EU-Indo Pacific ministerial meeting.

I couldn’t WAIT to get nirsevimab for my baby. He barely noticed when RSV circulated in his class. It was amazing. Starkly different from when my older child had RSV as an infant and nearly needed to go to the hospital.

This is a fabulous read: "Bovino’s Border Patrol raiders have one playbook — terror — and it’s less effective each time they deploy it. So far, it’s aging in nuclear half-lives. The shock value is wearing off..."

America 2025.

The peace plan is full of Trump's misunderstandings and predilections-- silly emphasis on trade which is irrelevant to the war, kickback opportunities, US as separate from NATO, commitments on behalf of NATO/Europe he can't make, ignorance abt Ukrainian politics (e.g. ban Nazism? long banned!), etc

Bank of America helped revitalize Charlotte, NC, with immigrant labor. Now it and other major employers are silent in the face of ICE raids. They could learn something from the communities they depend on. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

At some point we’ll need to deal with the fact that the word “jailbait” exists and most people know what it means.

Oh mah gawwwd, this is as wonderful as the Nepalese Hindu celebration of doggos!!

I had to find out how cute this was. Turns out: incredibly cute and I needed to know this. I put some time into these alt-tags

Outerbridge Crossing, a bridge in Staten Island, was named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, first chairman of the Port Authority

I was also on the fossil auctions beat this year for @nytimes.com, covering the (more-than-usually) controversial auction of a Ceratosaurus at Sothebys and the increasing financialization of dinosaur fossils

Recently finished up my last freelance work of the year before moving on to a mad sprint of book writing, so —rather earlier than usual — it's time for my year in review! Here, in no particular order, are the features I'm proudest of.

On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA).