My fan-theory: Isaac Chotiner never goes into an interview intending to make his subject look foolish. He sees fascinating contradictions in people of apparent intelligence, and says, "ah, what an opportunity for my, my audience, and my subject to better understand human complexity!"

Irrational demand for the day: a cover by Mongolian tribal-rock group The HU of German 70s disco group Dschinghis Khan's eponymous hit. They can translate the lyrics and change the more egregiously ahistorical bits, as long as it's recognizably the same song.

@theradr.bsky.social's On Repentance and Repair is still $3 at sundry e-book sellers. I finally started reading it last night and it is really very good! If you're Jewish, it's a great stimulus for reflection as we approach the Days of Awe. If you're not, it's still well worth reading.

Donald Trump is way less popular than he wants you to believe. And you are significantly more powerful than he wants you to think.

Some wordplay for the day: "helpful" isn't the opposite of "helpless", but perhaps it should be. If you're feeling doom and foreboding, one place to start getting out of that hole is doing something nice for someone else.

Speak truth to power. Don't obey in advance. If someone is going to hurt you, make them work to do it. We win when we're troublesome, and we lose if we just give up.

This is a great thread: it's good that someone keeps tabs on the internal schisms of the right wing, because I really can't look too closely at that shit.

"Charlie Kirk represented the very worst American political discourse had to offer, and I wish he were still alive so I could tell that to him, to his face, over and over again. I wish he lived long enough to see everything that he worked to achieve crumble all around him."

Mathematicians know that the infinite is such a dangerous concept. You engage with it at your own peril!

"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights." —Charlie Kirk

me, to the judge: “Well if THAT’s what they meant, they should have used punctuation.”

Hmm, wasn't there supposed to be a big, important predisential announcement three quarters of an hour ago? Presumably nothing significant is delaying it, like, say, the intended speaker being gravely ill. No, he's probably just his usual level of demented, alas.

I went down a KAJ-shaped hole this morning and discovered that, 10 years before they taught us to love the sauna, those crazy Ostrobothnians were... singing J-pop about being aggressively regaled with fika? Come for the colorful hair, stay for the kanelbullar.

The wonderful thing about @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social is how delightfully absurd (or poignant, or cute) individual lines from Frog and Toad stories can be in isolation.

Last month, I sat down with @thenation.com to talk about the legacy of Fiorella La Guardia, how we're building a new kind of politics to meet this moment, and our mission to deliver a dignified life for the working people of this city.

See you can't just say "America has fallen." You have to ease people into it, kindly. So when people ask how things are going you start out like "well, Trump went up on the roof today but I'm sure it will be okay. ".

I just wish weird psychosexual obsessions functioned the way they used to. 19th century weirdos aiming to end masturbation made us both a breakfast cereal and a tasty cracker. That NEVER happens today. Nobody tries to criminalize IUDs and accidentally invents a new kind of Milano.

Huh. I only today learned that Don McLean is straight, with no historical connection to gay liberation. I thought "Vincent", "'Til Tomorrow", and "Crossroads" all had queer subtext, but I guess that's not what he was aiming for? (Also, "The Pride Parade" predates the current usage of the phrase)

This shit is insane. The most prominent anti-trans quislings in the party are straightforwardly secular (Gavin Newsom believes in one thing and it's himself), and one of the most prominent trans rights defenders (Andy Beshear) does so in expressly religious terms!

I am so fucking confused. Is Bari Weiss's crap website _deliberately_ making fun of their own hitpiece? The semiotics of this ad feel like they belong on The Daily Show or SNL. The fake typing! The ill-fitting blazer! The line "And no, it's not stalking. It's called journalism."!

We need to send US&UK transphobes to Belgium for a week. "Keep men out of the women's bathrooms!" "Women have their own bathrooms?" Seriously, the last three bathroom visits I've made have been to urinals in a common area. Anyone of any gender wanting to peek at my tackle totally could.

Had a wonderful time at Bridges #MathArt! It's great every year, but it was especially exciting to be exhibiting.

A Lithuanian equivalent to “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” is nemokamas sūris tik pelėkautuose. It means “the only free cheese is in a mousetrap” * read on for more international cheese phrases (this thread may not turn out grate, but hopefully it will be gouda ‘nuff)…

CALLING ALL CROCHET GEEKS AND GRANNIES Do you want to crochet something that ends up in a mathematical art exhibit in Paris* next summer? Join the project at www.grannylifecrochet.com * We will find out in September if the project makes it into the Paris exhibit

A lesson for American public transit enthusiasts: here in Münster, I was on a bus with a person in a wheelchair. In most American public transit systems, their embarking and disembarking would be a 2-3-minute process involving the bus driver activating a motor which rolled out a ramp

Riding with ICE today. No, the good kind of ICE.

These hit pieces on Zohran are getting out of hand

I saw this a few days ago near my workplace and it lifted my heart. To those who are hurting: stay resilient, and stay beautiful.

The original article was godawful bullshit, but this is a beautiful response.

My wacky paranormal fiction friends, an idea: a Catholic vampire recruits a priest to perform the miracle of the Eucharist regularly to get blood without preying on the living. Surely someone has already done a story on this conceit?

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

Today's absurd pronouncement: the best music to clean the kitchen to is Aqua's 1997 proto-hyperpop album Aquarium.

I am both happy to see Ollie North reduced to shilling windows and siding, and dismayed that windows-and-siding installers see an endorsement by Ollie North to have any value whatsoever.

Don't say you weren't warned.

As a child, I listened to a recording of the Fraser-Simonson settings of some A.A. Milne poems (the tunes to "Market Square" and "Buckingham Palace" are the ones I most remember). Going down memory lane this morning, I learned with delight that Grant Doyle recently recorded all of the Milne songs.

Mariana Conte may have been disappointed by Eurovision audiences (that deserved more than 8 points worth of public love!), but she won the competition that really matters: getting a clip onto Last Week Tonight, joining delightful acts such as WIndows95man, Subwoolfer, and fellow censoree Citi Zēni.

“They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” • REBECCA SOLNIT

Wanna see something incredibly ... bad? Here's Alito quoting a source to suggest that you can't do habeas class actions: 1/

More Eurovision thoughts, these based on watching the semifinals.

PORTUGAL? (IYKYK)

Late to the party on this—the article's nearly two years old—but I just read and enjoyed Victor Gijsbers's excellent dive into gender roles in Gareth Rees' _Christminster_. It's notable that the two famously early works of IF with female PCs emphasize the social marginalization of those PCs.

Our book has now appeared, a bit ahead of schedule. Its in Open Access, meaning the chapters are all free to download either as epub or pdf from this link. I’ll put a thread together on what the individual chapters are about. www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Happy Derby Day, everyone! Have an irrepressibly peppy Melodifestivalen performance about horse riding.

Oy, the arithmetic of the absurd claim that fentanyl seizures saved the lives of 75% of the population. They divided the quantity of pure fentanyl by a minimum fatal dose to get that. That assumes every dose is exactly a minimum fatal dose, and is actually fatal. That's not how people take drugs!

*wild eyed youtuber voice* the NIH is lying ... many illnesses are caused by tiny organisms invisible to the naked human eye... and they're ALIVE!

This sort of cultural penetration is why the Nordics (especially Sweden) tend to outperform at Eurovision. If the Home Guard band is playing your music at the Changing of the Guard, you've arrived. (when we were in Stockholm, they played Dancing Queen, so pop music is in the standard repertoire)