pete hegseth, who you will recall has been accused of domestic abuse and sexual assault, has announced a new policy by which you cannot file anonymous complaints of mistreatment. sex criminal solidarity.

Someone made a Voynich-themed keycap set! @lisafdavis.bsky.social , have you seen this? www.mwkeys.com/products/ext...

Morning walk

I have some very strong feelings about the misleading and absent signage between Boston Logan’s garage and the American side of Terminal B baggage claim. They involve four-letter words.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

dudes rock

I'm on vacation, and during trivia this morning, the host asked a question that he has never gotten a correct answer for: "In medieval England, what was used for currency for rental agreements?" His unbroken streak ended today, all because I follow @greenleejw.bsky.social That's right... Eels.

Yeah, @greenleejw.bsky.social and I can cosign this.

The writers this season aren’t even trying anymore

I hope FIRE is busy emailing people fired for their social media posts offering to represent them for free, or busy shutting down their offices and going home. It's one or the other.

They are literally canceling culture

When I was placed on the Professor Watchlist in 2021, people sent death threats about my children. I had security officers monitor my 8yo at school. Where is all the outrage for those of us who have been targeted for years? Where is the outrage for our families? My own colleagues are silent.

Lucked out and found a teacher for adjusting shoe lasts and, once I’ve got these set, making my own shoes

Turning Point USA made a literal watch list of professors, primarily women, queer folks and people of color, and made us targets of political violence. I’ve received hate mail and harassment and death threats off and on for nearly a decade in part due to that man’s organization so 🤷🏽‍♀️

I think it’s kind of bad for society that America is so intergenerationally segregated. Something I liked about living in Jerusalem was that there were just kids everywhere and it was normal. You saw kids all the time whether you had kids or not.

Looking up something in the Boston census of 1900, and these are just other families on the same pages. 2 children surviving out of 14 1 child surviving out of 5 0 children surviving out of 10 3 children surviving out of 4

While it doesn't read like his own words, a post from my president appears to have just declared war on my hometown. With a gratuitous AI image of his forces bombing Chicago with napalm. This is really freaking weird. Horrifying. Scary. But also just...bonkers? Bizarre.

The weekly Wednesday protest of ICE in Burlington, MA is now up to 5 Ladies Liberty, last I counted.

Tomorrow.

my father-in-law is a “I know a guy” Guy. sadly all the old Guys are aging out of the Guy Economy. Guys are fundamentally incompatible with Hustle Culture because it’s not about “winning” a deal, it’s about collecting favors and goodwill in a mutually-beneficial cycle. protect your local Guy Economy

That point in late winter where Nature's got the bag of weather for the year upside down and is just shaking out whatever's left at the bottom, could be ANYTHING, only it's Time and a whole century.

On Wednesdays we wear pink…and protest ICE.

One of the most tragic ironies of what the US has done to PEPFAR & USAID is that there is an incredible new drug that could deal a crushing blow to HIV globally. I wrote about lenacapavir for @foreignpolicy.com & the millions of lives it might not save. foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/25/l...

I've put up the fundraising post for GMH for this year. We've switched to a new host on a 3 year contract, with a total cost less than we'd pay for one year at Dreamhost. I very much appreciate everybody's support over over the past few years to keep this project going.

So it's kind of like what they think of as socialism, but like, maybe, a national kind?

The cruelty is the point: ICE releases woman it had locked up for 10 days by shoving her out the door of its Burlington hole in the pouring rain, with no phone, 30 miles from home; she walked over to the Burlington Mall and begged for help at the Cheesecake Factory. www.masslive.com/news/2025/08...

For some reason I'm thinking of the two huge dudes who showed up to my local parish a couple years back. We'd just opened an overnight shelter there and there had been protests elsewhere, people standing outside yelling shit so migrants couldn't sleep, etc. So here come these giant guys.

Today is my mother's birthday. Tomorrow—barely—will be 16 years since she passed. And yesterday I learned a friend in Florida had a wanted pregnancy without a heartbeat, was forced to wait to miscarry, had severe complications, and wound up hospitalized and traumatized. My mother would be furious.

New Shaker just dropped

The Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 definitely opened up a portal to a horrific timeline that can probably only be closed by the Cubs winning the World Series again.

I mean, just in case: if you're Chicagoland and need moving boxes and packing material, do lmk!

"they're the same picture"

Time to get this applied to the ICE office in Burlington, MA, which is egregiously violating all of the above.

What strange times, when the commander of RAF Greenham Common is coming out as a liberal supporter of the right to protest

I have literally never used ChatGPT to do anything. Gonna start a chastity club.

Should I add anything else to the brandied peaches? Three jars’ worth, all likely to end up in cobbler.

There's not exactly a drought! All this handwringing is because there's a lack of interest, not a lack of content. The question really is "How do we make men feel like they can preserve their historical position over women-as-a-class without going full right wing?" and that's a losing premise.

OMG PEOPLE! I have the BL hack of all BL hacks. Why didn't this occur to me before? It turns out the Wayback Machine has snapshots of MS metadata from the old Digitised Manuscripts site. I tried it for the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, in honor of his day, and lo! web.archive.org/web/20140305...

So uh I guess one takeaway from all this is that Ian Dunn stepped on a dang landmine of how disenfranchised, silenced/ignored, and imperiled leftist women feel under Trump 2.0. And how as a reaction we have become furiously unwilling to bend.

I think the problem is that the piece itself comes off differently than that post does. Also, many women have a visceral reaction to being told to expect violence if men's sexual needs aren't addressed, or that ongoing violence is the result of failing to take those needs seriously.

The manosphere is not about teaching men how to get laid. It almost certainly makes things worse on that front. It’s about teaching hierarchy.

You want…romance novels, Ian. They already exist.

If this were about a sheer biological need for physical pleasure, then we'd have a different discussion: one about Texas's ban of sex toys and so forth. But it's fundamentally about access to women. For ego? Social capital? Emotional validation? All of the above, I suspect. It commodifies us.

I obviously don’t love this, but also my coed housing at Brown had bathrooms alternating gender by floor…so we all just ignored the signs. Since I stayed in the same dorm multiple years but in different floors I spent either ‘09 or ‘11 showering in “men’s” facilities. No idea which, though.

I’m thinking today about all the women doing DEI work in universities, and how all of our canceled grants and shuttered initiatives means that not only are we losing the time we’ve already put in, we’re now even more behind our male peers who stayed focused on their research.

My overwhelming memory from Hebrew school is being young and seeing images of ancestors starving in the camps. “Never again” was our religion. Here is the paper of record today. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/w...

Lawrence O'Donnell is doing a great job during his opener tonight talking about what Epstein's survivors are going through right now... as @wagatwe.com notes, they are being lost in the recent coverage.

im not trying to be sententious and its frankly delightful to see trump wriggle in the nets of a scandal for once in some lasting way but the disjunct is intense

Yeah I think one thing that hasn't really been articulated is that it is a separate, distinct harm to sexual violence victims to see stories like this consumed as prurient entertainment.

7/23/2025, Bear Witness, Burlington, MA ICE protest