"Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf."

This feels like a thing I should already know the answer to, and yet

A dumb question: How personalized are google results? If I google something, and you perform the exact same google search at the same time, do we get the same results?

Real.

it's times like this I'm glad that Great Britain isn't real

One of the main political stories of the last 50 years, but especially the last 20, has been the displacement of planning by prediction.

Because of reading Gertrude Stein, and because I don't believe in liberalism as a theory of political progress—stuff improves over time—I very much disagree that contemporary political repression is a regression, a "return" to how things used to be. It's something else.

Man, that would be crazy if Trump died of hantavirus

sigh.

For MTC, Evan Goldstein pens this absolutely stunning and studied piece of religion in The Pitt. "Being secular is unbearable, but one cannot be otherwise; religion, in the most positive formation the show can give it, is at best something we remember fondly."

No pain like the babysitter cancelling on your anniversary

guys, do you think the rest of the world will be mad at us for causing this energy crisis

“…[at] the zine fest, I am perhaps looking for something that I think I may have recently lost track of, a couple decades into a peripatetic but also arguably successful career in publishing: the drive, freedom, and confidence to just make something. No promise of audience or sales… no regrets.”

It's weird that we've allowed there to be a category like "laid off" that is distinguished from "fired" in some kind of boss-exculpatory sense

I paid off one of my four student debts today, which I took out in the previous millennium. Because I went to a state school, in the previous millennium, I didn't have a LOT of debt, but being in grad school for a decade and then having a low repayment rate meant it took a while.

Last night the El Cerrito City Council voted to end our Flock contract! Huge thanks to the hundreds of El Cerritans who organized to make this happen. They met with councilmembers multiple times, shared research, sent emails, circulated petitions and dozens spoke at our meeting that ended at 1 am.

Cala is OBSESSED with the song "cat bus" from the Totoro soundtrack, which means it's currently around 30% of the music I listen to in a day; I've been thinking a lot about what its Gershwin references mean in relation to animal-hybrid mass transit and the US presence in memories of postwar Japan

guy whose elevated rhetoric fueled his entire political career says what

had never seen Homicide: Life on the Street before, and after watching part of one episode, I'm afraid my impression was "Wow, TV used to be so bad that this seemed Good"

If I spend ~10 minutes a day doing this exercise, it does me such a consistent amount of good. Most days I don't do it, because I'm a lazy pos. Today I did it. I triumphed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BOT...

When Juliana Spahr reads! @msatris.bsky.social on listening to Oakland's Pulitzer Prize–winning poet: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/juliana-spah...

“The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote.” hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

Centrists spend their time policing the left for what it MIGHT do, were it in power, even as the right actually DOES those things in power, not because they believe the left is actually potentially MORE dangerous, but because the centrist understands their assignment

Framing a decrease in births as “a sovereign injury to the state itself” is quite a mask off moment

Totoro, writing in his diary: today, some weird kid gave me an umbrella. nothing else really happened. napped.

Totoro rules, because nothing really happens in it, but we briefly open our eyes to the reality of death and the enchantment of the world, while the titular creature didn't even notice he was IN a movie

C decided to put a bead in her nose, which her mother managed to remove, in case anyone wants to hear a story about Peril and Heroism

Anyone else fucking sick of Brian May planting daffodils in his village www.ctvnews.ca/entertainmen...

Let us peer into the soul of the nation, via a staged non-discussion about a contentious tax measure for library funding in El Cerrito. And then let us heal: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/we-dont-deba...

not having your work cited by the @nytimes.com will definitely prepare them for a journalism career tho

Imagine publishing Seneca Scott, in this, the year of our lord.

Rudy Giuliani asked to leave Cuomo fundraiser because he keeps looking up “Tilly Norwood nude” on the iPad hooked up to the projector

Is there a consensus best book to read about 20th century Brazilian music?

"A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of toxic people and fake friends.”

Leonora Zoninsein devises a scent for Oakland, derived from the atmospheric memory of The Town: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/a-perfume-fo...

Why is Saikat Chakrabarti going on reddit just to get owned:

Gen Z has rediscovered Twin Peaks & is realizing how dystopian the America of today is compared to the 90s "Watching Twin Peaks... has solidified my belief that I would have likely been happier in an age that preceded me."

"When did you have your first irresponsible thought about the latest assassination attempt against Donald Trump?" www.theringer.com/2026/04/30/n...

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

редактор: Comrade, you got that drawing of Lenin smashing the city? художник: Sure did comrade, real fuckin naked just like you asked. редактор: what

Me, to myself, listening to the totoro soundtrack for the 90th time this week, "man, this is incredible retro throwback to the 80s music"

sexy muscular lenin with the phallic torch and a hammer smashing the city is not real, sexy muscular lenin with the phallic torch and a hammer smashing the city can't hurt you

trying out a temporary site redesign for may day www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Generational tweet that might even spawn a school of architecture.

Almost like the VRA was doing what it was supposed to do! And if anyone wonders why Black representation increased so quickly in the ‘90s, it was because the Supreme Court handed down Thornburg v. Gingles in ‘86, establishing a framework for VRA Section 2 violations. 1/2

Infowars says NO to working on May Day, thanks comrade Alex Jones

anyway: hello!

Being laid off with hundreds of WaPo colleagues sure does make a person think I've thought, for instance, it sure is lucky no one in charge over there puts ideology over free speech

I wish Xavier Becerra would send me a hundred more texts