For me, just a little bit of involvement in my local town politics—in New England that can mean being an elected Town Meeting member—has been an important antidote to the despair I feel reading NextDoor posts or certain Facebook local forums. Yes you know that these are the worst people… but 🧵:

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in defense of sea lions, who bark a lot: although some just bark for a while for no apparent reason, when they bark at each other it seems like it’s over important matters like who gets to sleep where. Then they go back to sleep. I’m quite sure they’d never do “sealioning” if they used the internet.

This is one of the most quietly revolutionary things any city can do to improve kids' lives & outcomes. If you genuinely care about kids having access to education or safe after school spaces & activities, then fund your libraries, staff your libraries, & make every public school ID a library card.

These dumb ass bylaws that are meant to ensure there is not “an unbroken facade” for too far down the street. They will define the look of buildings of our age. And, come to the suburbs—where these are not only defended but literal table stakes in trying to get upzoning approved.

“With what's going on in the world right now, it's a reminder of Dubai [that] it is where it is,” Rilea Group President Diego Ojeda said onstage at the Miami Airport Convention Center. “It's next door to that. It's terrible for them. I don't wish this on anyone. It's good for Miami.”

There is really nothing quite like reading the real estate trade news regularly for shifting how I understand the world. www.bisnow.com/south-florid...

Doreen St Felix in a beautiful essay about Africa Bambaataa —what he meant culturally —his abuse of others —his existence, after his death, as a “haunting” The Death of Afrika Bambaataa and the Afterlife of Hip-Hop www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...

I have a schtick about this for my patients who are living alone and don’t usually cook from scratch: you make sandwiches or tacos day 2 on what you don’t eat day 1, then boil down the rest for soup—put some veggies and noodles in that. Even w/o using a SNAP benefit it’s a great value

Disclosure new track with a bass synth sound at 1:55 which is how I want EVs to sound when they back up youtu.be/paEe6qTS20c

One important thing about Iris Long is that she started with Michael Callen and Joe Sonnabend—an activist/doctor combo who had started community research that could exist outside of academia. Callen was an author of the Denver Principles—a statement of the power of people with AIDS themselves.

ACT UP Oral History Project interview with Iris Long. Transcript link below the two video links: www.actuporalhistory.org/numerical-in...

wrote about the most important architectural legacy of the Trump administration: the conversion of logistics warehouses into detention centers www.thenation.com/article/soci...

the amount of time from JD Vance converting, to him mansplaining the pope about just war theory: = to the time from the start of med school to being a junior medicine resident, or if you count the campaign seasons as equivalent to extra time for a med school thesis, an intern

We didn't deserve this day.

Vieques, PR. More airports should have airport cats.

I really really do not like the 'voting against their own interest' talking point. People use this often because they want to explain how downwardly mobile people support rightwing fascists. But this just elides the FACT that people have VARIOUS and CONFLICTING interests.

I grew up in Sacramento feeling like it was a place to leave (saw Lady Bird in a theater in Boston and bawled my eyes out—best Sacramento movie ever). Now I see @mnolangray.bsky.social bragging about it; when I’ve gone back, I see great things about it. Food; diversity; trees; rivers. It works. 🧵

Here’s an update from @prisonculture.bsky.social on her blog: open.substack.com/pub/prisoncu... and more 🧵 below:

Zohran is getting flak about reducing his support for libraries and parks, as well he should. These are two of the last bastions of truly common space, places everyone from the poor and the well-to-do appreciate and use. Pragmatically you can see why a mayor would trim or stall these dollars 🧵

Deer Island and Long Island as seen from Logan Airport. Sites of arguably the nation’s first concentration camps during King Philip’s War; a jail; a TB hospital; a homeless shelter. The jail and the shelter both ended up being moved to Mass and Cass—as an island within the city.

news you can use

I've been listening to an audiobook about airships (zeppelins, dirigibles, or blimps, depending on locale), and how they NEVER really worked, but governments had invested so much in them that they were determined to MAKE them work, wasting fortunes & years & lives This post is not about airships

I have an enduring and to some degree inexplicable affection for this optimistic, pissed-off, and detailed podcast about decarbonization. David teaching me the nerdy details of this stuff helps make my hopes and my anger more specific and more real—and thus more manageable. Hence I subscribe.

Yeah, hate to be right so very soon on this one, but see my thread below on why I felt confident that this is what he would do. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/n...

“Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.” — Audre Lorde, ZAMI

strange but true: you don't have to fight the 2028 primary on here yet if you don't want to

CPCS, the #Massachusetts public defender agency, has called on the attorney general's office to appoint an independent investigator to investigate the 2025 death of Shacoby Kenny, who died after being beaten by corrections officers at the South Bay jail in #Boston.

Best meet-cute in American literature

Yes exactly because of Bad Bunny’s performance apparently it’s time for another round of non Puerto Rican left-liberal white people to announce their strongly held ahistorical opinions about Puerto Rico’s governance

One key lesson of this time is that for anyone to accomplish something politically, there is no substitute for showing up somewhere or somehow, and doing something. “Something” can be a lot of different kinds of things!

JAMA Network Open: Why Are Opioid Deaths Declining? Roundup of current evidence: Chinese regulation of precursors is leading to a decline in potency; total number of users is declining

Share one of your favorite lines from a sci-fi movie

Share one of your favorite lines from a sci-fi movie

“Never mind jobs you had, tell me five classes you took at university.” Africa to 1800, Africa 1800-present (2 semester class) Anthropology of Dance Architecture of the Suburbs Third World Cinemas and the West Workers’ Autobiographies of 19th Century Europe

Sending extra love and warmth to homeless street outreach workers + mutual aid folks busting their butts to make sure folks stay safe ahead of the snow. Nobody should live or die outside in the richest country in the world. We need housing, not handcuffs.

welcome to Ferrix

Remember all of the SAMHSA grants on mental health and substance abuse that RFK Jr. canceled yesterday? Funding is restored.

If I were 6’2” I’d probably be a tech exec huffing my own farts. Good to be down here and humble.

to reiterate *doctors do not take the Hippocratic Oath *the Hippocratic Oath contains enduring ideas as well as some weird-ass nothing-to-do-with-modern-medicine ideas *”do no harm” in popular usage is a simplistic and naive idea which obscures both the risk and benefit of medical intervention

I can’t explain why this is such a Sacramento story but it is, in every respect. From its particular kind of sad sweetness to its particular kind of quiet trauma and despair. This is an absolutely beautiful episode podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

1. This is awful for trans kids and for everyone who cares about them. Others here speak to that eloquently, including Rep. McBride’s statement today. 2. This is also independently bad for doctors, who don’t seem to be noticing the way this administration is demonizing our profession specifically.

something i really admire about boston is how fundamentally hated starbucks seems to be here. at the train station the crowd at dunkin is nigh on impassable but even so only a few shifty eyed cowards are at the starbucks. you guys really did it man you defeated the monster

Trump’s foreign policy isn’t “noninterventionism,” it is a kind of neo neo conservatism devoted to imposing authoritarian ethnonationalism abroad instead of democracy (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

I demand a font czar: the nation should have elegantly designed fonts for all to use—let’s not debase ourselves by fighting over which retired Windows default font we like better. Even if you’re going to be this basic with default fonts, the new one, Aptos, is better than either.

Movies you’ve watched more than six times with a gif.

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

A thoughtful comparison by a former Marine to the moral universe of the Roman Empire, the early Christians within it, and the eternal temptation of violent spectacle. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

I think Zohran is great. I also predict that he will reinstate sweeps by some other name, soon. I’d be happy to lose that bet. But sweeps are never for getting people housed. Sweeps are to ensure people don’t lay claim to a single piece of land long enough to establish informal tenancy rights. 🧵