United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages to target people for deportation.

These days we have to be prepared for anything. The limits of our incredulity are being tested. So sure, maybe ICE Agents will interrupt Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show and drag away and arrest half the participants. That seems entirely aligned with the Zeitgeist.

A notebook dump on the decade of poems collected in Robert Creeley's LOVE. Plus heroes, the hero, Wallace Stevens, and the dialectical urges of the cento. www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/9/...

For anyone here who may have attended Rene Girard's lectures on Mimetic Theory at the University at Buffalo in the late 1970's or read his book Violence and the Sacred, this piece should be of great interest to you.

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazi's to justify Germany's slip from democracy to dictatorship. Those theories have been a roadmap for the billionaire ever since.

AI data centers are sending power bills soaring throughout America. Bloomberg analyzed consumption rates across the US and found that wholesale electricity rates had risen as much as 267%over the past five years in areas adjacent to AI data centers.

Two new events added to this weekly Buffalo literary calendar. thebuffalohive.com/buffalo-area...

Katie Kadue reviews AMATEURS!: HOW WE BUILT INTERNET CULTURE AND WHY IT MATTERS, by Johanna Walsh (Verso Books) in Bookforum.

Nick Sturm: "The Best American Poetry is a genre management project that drives a wedge between poetry and interdisciplinary intellectual culture. It powerfully insists on defining American poetry as a literary practice self-managed by the professional networks it privileges..."

It's the end of The Best American Poetry. I wrote about the forty-year anthology project, poetry’s place in Big Five publishing, and editor David Lehman's culture wars vision of American verse. defector.com/good-riddanc...

Eight events this week in the Buffalo literary community. Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (week of Sept. 29 to Oct. 5) thebuffalohive.com/buffalo-area...

‘A distinctive set of proto-Trumpian sentiments began to seep into the American public sphere no sooner than the rubble of the Berlin Wall had been tidied away.’ @will-davies.bsky.social on how the political scene in the 1990s sowed the seeds for Trumpism: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Quinnipiac in recent poll asked: Do you think that the way people talk about politics these days is contributing to violence in the United States, or don't you think so? 82% of voters agreed with this including majority of Dems, Independents, and GOP. I said basically this and got fired.

WashPo: learn how to file for part of the Amazon settlement! Up to $51! Also WashPo: it’s behind this paywall, subscribe for $11.99/mo Bezos, honestly, how much money does one person need? Please go to therapy.

“Shadow Ticket” is the first new work by Thomas Pynchon in a dozen years—and, at 88, he’s “still panoptic, exciting, abstruse, distractible, and, for good or ill, unrestrained,” Kathryn Schulz writes.

“I just can’t bleed out onto the page as some people do.” Zadie Smith writes about her preference for impersonal essays, and the tried-and-true method she uses to write them.

"One of the worst habits of the mainstream media is seeing politics and government as a game. Or maybe a horserace, but definitely something with clear winners and losers" @sulliview.bsky.social With the media under threat, this is a failure of mission. margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/legacy-med...

Eight events this week in the Buffalo literary community. thebuffalohive.com/buffalo-area...

TikTok will be co-owned by China and Trump allies, Paramount was sold to a pro-Trump billionaire who's also set to buy Warner Bros, X is owned by an apartheid-bred fascist, WaPo and Meta are owned by Trump-cowering billionaires, and Murdoch owns the Fox empire. Here's why media has a liberal bias.

Barnes & Noble may buy another indie book chain: California’s Books Inc.

A modest proposal: rather that scraping copyrighted material from porn websites, the Meta AI engineers could simply take their large vision data models to a brothel.

Given the likely training data, this should not surprise anyone. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five "Aryan" actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich's Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism..."

This is the whole ball game, gang.

The Buffalo Humanities Festival, Susan Cope at Larkin Square, and Andrew Galarneau at Art’s Cafe in Springville are among this week’s highlights. thebuffalohive.com/buffalo-area...

Sze is a poet with a lot of acclaim — he's won the National Book Award, was a Guggenheim fellow and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He aims to promote interest in translated poetry in his new role.

“In a liberal order, the burden of justification ought to fall on those who would silence, not those who would speak.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah

The pure products of America/ go crazy-- (William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, 1923)

Readings at Fitz Books, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Arts Center, and Centro Culturale Italiano di Buffalo headline this week’s Buffalo area literary calendar. thebuffalohive.com/buffalo-area...

If anyone (@thebaffler.com @nplusonemag.com @publicbooks.bsky.social) might be interested in an article offering an ideological post-mortem of almost four decades of The Best American Poetry anthology as a conservative publishing project, I'm yr guy.

I did an event at Solid State last month and it was so wonderful and now they’re losing out on sales because the fucking National Guard is patrolling outside the store. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

How sad to fall in love so much / that you don't know the date of / the train you’re on. Ed Sanders

September brings the return of the Literary Café Series to the Center for Inquiry.

“I'm more than I say in time but time's less exact than I am.” ~~Alice Notley

Speaking of the brilliance of William T. Vollman, consider this 15,000 word piece on his travels in Ukraine in Granta published in July of this year: "I shook his hand and he embraced me. Whenever he was not decolonizing, he was on the front line with his military unit: ‘I do small drones.’ "

Sorry to learn this health update about William T. Vollman this week.

What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.

I miss the old brand #CDC

Beer and AI may seem like an unlikely pairing. Yet breweries are increasingly asking the technology for input

Cindy Sherman, from 30 Essex St. in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Buffalo's West Side in 1975 to the cover of The New Yorker's as "Being Eustace" [Tilly] in its "The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue" a half century later.

Happening tonight in Buffalo! Book Release Party for My Fingernails Are Fresnel Lenses, an Artists’ Book by Chris Fritton with Illustrations by Mary Goldthwaite.

Nick Sturm ‬: "The Poetry Foundation invited me to write an essay remembering Alice Notley (1945-2025). I'm grateful for the space to remember her in this way." Link in comments.

The Poetry Foundation invited me to write an essay remembering Alice Notley (1945-2025). I'm grateful for the space to remember her in this way. www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/171...

Language Machines is in The Observer!

Today’s Featured Poem: “We Came Here to Get Away from You” by @donikakelly.bsky.social from The Natural Order of Things published by @graywolfpress.bsky.social Read here: spare.poems.com/poem/we-came...

Women's Studies Quarterly is seeking new general co-editors! Maybe this is you? www.feministpress.org/news/call-fo...

Buffalo-based poet Rachelle Toarmino's second full-length collection of poems HELL YEAH drops in October from Third Man Books. Link to purchase in comments.

The president this morning, tilting at windmills. To follow through with the literary allusion, the White House press corps are playing the role of Sancho Panza to DJT's Don Quixote.