admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records

A lot of people your age, some you thought were friends, who put all their chips on their youth lasting forever will now start the long process of curdling into the bitter nasty false-nostalgia-poisoned reactionary assholes they always were somewhere deep inside. Ignore them & take up a hobby.

If the immigration enforcement apparatus of the US were its own national military, it would be the 13th most heavily funded in the world. This puts it higher than the national militaries of Poland, Italy, Australia, Turkey, Canada, and Spain — and just below Israel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXDs... Listening to Crespin & Chauvet's performance of this duet w/Prêtre and thinking, yes, of course, perfect, idiomatically French, with buoyant tempi, immaculate diction (although with an Énée who seems quite a tenore di grazia, more a Nemorino than an Énée)--

MORE: Immergut issued a stark warning that the efforts by Trump to make a bad-faith justification to call up the guard risked plunging the country into a form of unconstitutional military rule. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A bunch of German arms for Israel's genocide are about to dock in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Kind of disturbing that domestic policy in this country is now run by a twitchy latter-day Bernhard Goetz seething with highly sexualized "White Negro" anxieties about the potency of subaltern males, but instead of a .38-caliber revolver he has the full force of the American state at his disposal.

This first edition of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo, his first book (1947), written soon after his return from Auschwitz, arrived at work yesterday from an Italian bookseller and was sent to me to deal with. Quite rare! After editors at Einaudi, mainly Pavese and Ginzburg, rejected it--

The photos in this article are horrifying.

Struck by how awkwardly some Dems talk about healthcare in relation to the shutdown, as if it were some unfamiliar, faintly indecorous topic they're miffed at having to discuss. Being a senator was supposed to be about headlining at the Aspen Security Forum and attending AIPAC fundraisers, not this!

"Reviewer presumed he’d only appetized the author’s oeuvre, but comes to find he has already devoured it ..." REVIEW: Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff — @nameofauthor.bsky.social minorliteratures.com/2025/09/17/y...

Hegseth is at heart an Amway preacher, no? Grim.

Though it is tempting, it would be a mistake to describe this haunted, shining memoir about the Cambodian genocide, intergenerational trauma, and the author's own fatal illness as "miraculous," or to say that it is written with "uncanny grace,"--

Eddie G. has a lot of under 85 minutes films under his belt. You like to get scared: enjoy THE BLACK CAT.

Brushing up on my “customer service” skills in preparation for today’s desk shift by watching this clip. m.youtube.com/watch?v=rxBm...

Featuring a beautiful chorus and gales of demented laughter, this song from Japanese folk-rock weirdo Morio Agata's celebrated first album (1970) about black rain triggered by atomic bombs is a favorite. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cec8...

97% of my thoughts about myself are bad; you don’t see me trying to outlaw thinking.

Seems quite bad for the rest of us that in a post-neoliberal extortion economy run by oligarchs, fascist movements like this one can't offer their core supporters anything--not stability, the possibility of a good life--other than expanding theaters of revenge against their perceived enemies.

a key reason they see an opening for such a blatant speech crackdown is that they already did one to Palestinian and anti-genocide activists and it got enthusiastic bipartisan approval

A deeply conflicted memoir, celebratory and yet subtly derogatory of its subjects, whose primary stimulus seems to be a narcissistic injury De Quincey suffered from Wordsworth through the latter's failure to fully appreciate and recompense the selfless devotion of his acolyte.

"Guess nobody wants to pet you today!" announced a woman on the street to whom I bid a polite good morning but whose dog I skirted with a wary glance, a remark I prefer to attribute to an innocent unawareness on her part that all dogs, including her own, harbor a secret wish to attack and kill me--

Never quite ~got~ Bumbry, perhaps b/c recordings don't serve her as well as they do, say, Shirley Verrett, another mezzo turned soprano, but in this Nabucco duet from a gala performance (not usually a setting for musical or vocal distinction), she just scorches. www.youtube.com/watch?v=im_O...

The Selfie of a Lady

I think it has less to do with fear than with the deranged (but for the short term probably correct) calculus that they can count on Dem revulsion alone to recoup losses in 2026 and continue politics as usual, w/funding & patronage structures that might be threatened by stronger action now intact.

This collection of writings and reviews by Goffredo Fofi, who died a few months ago at 88, is a rich chronicle of Italian leftist cultural, cinematic, and political life from the boom years of the late fifties through the Berlusconi era of crass acquisitiveness and meretricious display.

kutsher's lobby, thompson, new york, 1977

Got these for a song at a used bookstore on Baxter St. in Athens, Ga. recently.

surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights

"It isn't happening and also they deserve that it's happening." www.972mag.com/israelis-atr...

Recalling how when I lived in Louisiana a septuagenarian family connection a few towns away would occasionally send me a Xanax wrapped in bubble wrap and tucked in a greeting card through the U.S. mail on the principle that everybody needs a Xanax sometimes, as a treat.

Released in August 1981, a mere year after the bombing of the Bologna train station, this rather sinister song by Renato Zero, whose androgynous glam rock transgressiveness was somehow perfectly in tune with an essentially conservative sexual politics, cites Dante's inferno (canto 5, verse 136)--

Into my life of force-feeding Xeloda tablets to people & monitoring their bowel movements whilst doing scraps of remote work via unstable WiFi, occasional news--fascist coups, Empire cannibalizing itself--from the outside world, distant yet somehow (strangely) my own, occasionally filters.

Mariam Dagga saw so much death in Gaza in the last months of her life, before Israel killed her too. So many of these photos are of dead children, or dying children, or dead children near their dead parents. So much death. The ruthless savagery of the Israelis will haunt the West for generations.

A spectral séjour through the sepia-tinted spaces of an itinerant childhood passed in a state of vassalage to faintly disreputable parents, neglectful and domineering by turns, who scrouge out a living,--

A rigorous analysis of revolutionary state formation and the mostly dire fate of leftist political insurgencies in post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean by the late, lamented Manning Marable, who was mostly a socialist of the C.L.R. James variety,--

Ingeborg Bachmann, Elsa Morante, Hans Werner Henze, Sandro Penna, and Muriel Spark (but NOT Alberto Moravia) together at the same party in the same apartment in Rome, ca. 1970 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgg0...

Earnest McKinsey & CIA alums who speak this kind of technocratic gobbledygook are like those esperantists one used to meet who thought they were vanguard speakers of a soon-to-be Weltsprache but ended up beavering away at a language that is incomprehensible and irrelevant to almost everybody.

Israel killed Anas more than a year after targeting and killing his family, including his 90-year-old father, because of his journalism. Comes after Israel killed Hossam Shabat (so young, born in 2001), Roshdi Sarraj, Ismail Al-Ghoul, Wael Dahdouh’s family, among 200+ others.

Like Dangarembga's superb (classic!) Nervous Conditions, this novel about a brainy scholarship girl caught between the conflicting claims of skin color and class is a crystalline depiction of the Fanonian divided self that colonial societies produce, particularly in their most gifted members.