certainly this is the first time an imperious madman has tried to fight the Roman Church

no one is doing it like jd vance, a loser across three continents in a single weekend

Ordered this so fast 🙂

One of the ways news media often fail us is by giving us the microscopic rather than the telescopic view. Everything I mention in this essay is well-documented, but the dots are mostly not connected to make visible this death by a thousand cuts our country is undergoing.

Helen DeWitt, boundary queen.

Loving reminder from a medievalist to use a non-Google search engine to look up the Avignon papacy ☺️

Poem by Andrea Cohen.

A meme for the books 😂

“This is fine” meme with a dog in a house fire, edited to say “This draft is done”

Me and my writer friends achieving our goals in 2026

Since 2020, it’s become an annual tradition to check in on disaster preparedness around March 11-12

move slow and repair things

What!! The absolute nerve! 🤨

Sometimes you start reading a book so gorgeous you just have to stop. Brains weren’t meant to process this much ache and beauty all at once. Must go lie down.

Is this a new floater or just another toddler fingerprint on my glasses:
A Me Story

Caregiving dissolves illusions

every one of these guys is like: I'm a genius. you should do whatever i say about business, finance, research.... because i am so smart i have it all figure--

oh, jeffrey epstein? man that guy totally pulled the wool over my eyes. Is that what he was up to? wow.

If you don’t already have a recurring donation set up for a local food bank or mutual aid network, now’s the time!

When you’re a New Yorker and see the Mamdani era take flight but you also grew up in conservative circles in Minnesota and are seeing the best of that state courageously shifting narratives and then find out you were right to hate the Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie aesthetic in the early aughts

Man, it just dawned on me that I won't be able to say this to my kid because my feet grew like crazy during pregnancy. 🥲

I miss the way you could research things on Twitter, especially for writerly things. It's where I found out about workshops and cool lit websites and so many other things. There were just so many people talking all of the time, and that was good, actually. The jokes were also great.

🤣 exactly!!

Same.

I hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.

Noooooooo! So it’s truly back to the drawing board 😭

One positive flip side to this problem is that when you finally find a name you like, it’s strikingly clear. “Oh, wow, okay, I don’t completely abhor this.”

@summerbrennan.bsky.social on “Cat Person” and discourses of yore (and ongoing projects to deny women as artists)

Going Through Old Notebooks Part 12: The Defining Moment of What Was Literary Twitter? Or "Discourse Person" On empathy, fiction, plagiarism, the woman as artist, the short story that launched a thousand takes—and the lost world we writers once shared online.

“In fiction, female authors are constantly asked to explain how their personal experiences have somehow qualified them to tell the stories they are telling, and live under the constant suspicion that their fiction isn’t really fiction at all…”

open.substack.com/pub/summerbr...

Completely, totally fascinating

It’s so funny, it hurts