A couple of weeks ago they said breadsticks were getting married, are you going to do anything about that

This kind of thing at Substack (including their Nazi problem and trans hate problem) are why my newsletter is at Ghost.org and always has been. Andrew Tate is a spectacularly vile human being accused of numerous violent crimes against women and hugely corrosive for young male minds.

Very useful piece by @benleff.bsky.social: theconversation.com/judges-block...

my friend may be the first trans person officially reported for using the women's restroom in kansas as a trans woman lawrencekstimes.com/2026/07/13/t...

ICC detainees are housed in a Dutch prison that looks much, much better than the facilities that DHS and ICE officials have put people into without due process: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...

Forgot this one. I’m curious why NYT thinks this kind of vile racism isn’t disqualifying for an op-ed writer. I imagine that if an author said something similarly vitriolic about, say, Lutherans, the NYT would face massive blowback for publishing them.

Sadly, Americans can't donate to British candidates.

I highly recommend Harold Goddard's essays on Shakespeare. His long essay on Hamlet basically boils down to, "What he really wanted to do was direct." archive.org/details/mean...

Disney could retroactively redeem its entire line of soulless, critically loathed live-action remakes if it did a live-action Frozen where Elsa comes out as queer. Don't even preview that, just let theater-goers encounter it.

stunning Paris was how this whole mess got started

Martha Wells Katherine Addison (if "The Orb of Cairado" counts) N.K. Jemisin Robert Caro James Boyd White

Ursula K. LeGuin Octavia Butler Simone de Beauvoir Bernard Williams A.R. Ammons

Trans urbanism! www.planetizen.com/news/2026/07...

It's important not to throw around terms like "paranoid delusions," but this person (who's influential on the right) is either experiencing them or trying to get other people to experience them. The concept of "hopped up on surgeries" is really a delusion for the ages.

This woman has been the subject of three NYT pieces in 2025-26

People are lighting fireworks in daylight, in the rain. The American spirit has never been more alive.

I agree with all the takes about an attack on the humanities being an attack on critical thinking, &c. It’s also about joy, though. ‘Why bother studying that’ is always also a sneer at — why do you think you should get to do something you enjoy? Grow up and be miserable all the time!

BREAKING: Federal judge blocks DOJ from requesting or receiving patient information about those who have received gender-affirming medical care as minors at Packard Children's Hospital (Stanford). The is the second order blocking these grand jury subpoenas: www.lawdork.com/p/doj-trans-...

If you keep telling Americans that socialism means "not having your power go out during a heat wave," you shouldn't be surprised when more Americans identify as socialist

"The closer you ascended towards heaven, the greater your chances of an unscheduled appointment with the Lord." -- A British man on an art-history documentary, talking for some reason about early elevators

This is what it will take to get me to watch sports

Today, SCOTUS ruled that states can ban trans girls from girls' sports. To get there, it watered down the way it analyzes Constitutional protections against sex discrimination. My analysis with comments from @maryrziegler.bsky.social and @avaayers.bsky.social: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

That's right.

When Sam O’Hara first spotted National Guard members on patrol in D.C., he quickly decided how he would protest: Darth Vader’s theme music. But one Guard member didn’t seem amused. He called D.C. police who detained O’Hara. The ACLU just sued and won.

Two ICE agents tracked down a woman *inside a polling place* yesterday. Why? They demanded that she take down an Instagram post in which she named Jonathan Ross as the man who shot & killed Renee Good (after the Star Tribune identified Ross). www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06...

Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, dissenting in the TPS case: "The evidence [the Haitian plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print."

Not enough people know that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have named his book "𝐓𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐨 𝐢𝐧 𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐄𝐠𝐠" if Zelda Fitzgerald (with the help of their editor Max Perkins) hadn't persuaded him "The Great Gatsby" was better. A lot of F's ideas were Zelda's.

"Zetetic" is just an awesome word

Christianity is elitism now

this might be the best headline i’ve ever read

"The books are always here. They will be waiting for you when you are ready."

Incredibly moving, full of insight and wisdom… Please give this a read… “I, for one, refuse to live in the dark any longer. You can hate me or kill me, but you can’t steal the joy that comes from knowing who I am.”

I loved The Matrix Resurrections and I don't care who knows it.

This is particularly revealing: Dobbs was supposed to be about whether or not pregnant people have a right to terminate their abortions. For Alito, apparently, it was about whether STATES have the right to prevent abortions. That's not how the law works, obviously.

It would be so great to see Alito get even a little bit worked up about all the discrimination that occurs in spite of states' laws against it.

Six years after this story was written, "Def Leppard Lagoon" is still there on Google Maps, in the middle of Illinois, fabulously unexplained. fox2now.com/news/trendin...

NEW: We've spent 10 months tracking the outcomes in tens of thousands of lawsuits brought by ICE detainees amid an unprecedented detention push. It's not a cose call: judges have ruled more than 10,000 times against ICE, a 9-1 ratio. See the database: www.politico.com/news/2026/05...

"In fact, although it is philosophically deeply annoying, human institutions survive because most of us can live comfortably with wholly contradictory beliefs." --Judith Shklar, "Legalism."

Ancient burial mounds emerging from the morning mist, last week near the Mississippi River in Minnesota.

"I can’t travel internationally anymore. I can’t use my passport," Caitlyn Jenner told Tomi Lahren in a recent interview.

fuck em up, professor ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

I'm proud to be in @ballsandstrikes.org this morning: ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

"We are a sad people, without hats." www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was 'Amtrak wifi.'

On TV, when criminal organizations take over the government, they're more subtle about it than this

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue