Bit by bit, small US groups chip away at historic levels of social isolation Americans are disconnected from each other at historic levels, buffeted by what a former surgeon general calls an “epidemic of loneliness.”

This is highly significant political news.

Still open to submissions until 1/11/126

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WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW THIS: So you can get in where you fit in.

Can you give $$? Give time? Can you cook? Keep good records? Have a flatbed truck? Can your strong back haul bags of groceries? Are you a good table host? A great greeter?

Find your right place. Your neighbors need you NOW.

🧵MEAL SITE = Local. Provides communal hot meals or brown bag takeaway lunches. Think: soup kitchens, elder group meals, afterschool programs. Need volunteer cooks, servers, cleaners, distribution staff, and people w/ trucks to pick up food, which is primarily sourced from food banks. Also need $.

If you want to give to a food pantry: Donations of $$ help them buy the meat or butter needed to make a meal of food bank supplied dry goods.

If you want to do a food drive/give donations of food, ask what *specific* foods your pantry needs to make their grocery bags complete meals for families.

🧵FOOD PANTRY Local. Distributes bags of groceries to individuals and families. Food mostly comes from food banks, supplemented by food and $$ donations. Mix of staff and volunteers. Need volunteers for stocking, distribution, people with trucks to go to the Food Bank.

The national network of Food Banks is called Feeding America.
Find your local Food Bank here:
www.feedingamerica.org/find-your-lo...

🧵FOOD BANK = Warehouse that collects literal tons of govt surplus, farm gleanings & chain grocery donations. Distributes food to pantries, meal sites, & childcare programs, not individuals. Staffed by tractor-trailer and pallet jack drivers. Give $$: $1 donated to a food bank buys $7 worth of food.

Do you want to help with the current and expanding food emergency? Is that a food bank? a food pantry? a meal site?

Here are some words that can help you find the place you want to connect 🧵

Notably: every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you're, I dunno, demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and it's makeshift gestapo.

This is why it’s important to use old-fashioned plain words, like “racial segregation” instead of DEI.

Disruption across Italy as tens of thousands protest against Gaza war Schools and stations closed and ports blocked in one of Europe’s biggest demonstrations opposing Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Krystal, thank you for this frequent prompt. Could you include a link to “how to do this” next time? Not your job, but for effectiveness. I trusted your voice, so when you gave the prompt + the how-to, I actually changed my behavior. Now always use ALT-text!

Offered with much appreciation

Former food bank administrator here. Food banks are giant warehouses that receive & distribute government surplus and bulk purchased food to your local emergency food pantry & meal sites. This survey determines how food banks are funded. This means no govt cheese or PB, no community meals.

160-mile march for democracy arrives in Washington from Philadelphia Over the span of 14 days, nearly 200 people marched from Philadelphia to Washington, D

Over the span of 14 days, nearly 200 people marched from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in defense of democracy.

abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory...

More to the point: Fuck them so I can be safe. Sacrifice them so I can be safe.

OH resident here. I think the subtext is “sacrifice women/Appalachians/etc so that coastal metros can keep their freedom, comfort, and sense of superiority” e.g. maintain the liberal status quo

It is always clarifying to say “Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” Most Americans don’t understand this political prison is not in the U.S.

Thank you for beginning this conversation long ago, with your cemetery tours and research to write your novel Spider In A Tree. Northampton once lived in denial that it had residents held in slavery. You are a part of the illumination and rememory of their precious lives in that place.

So do I have this right? The current regime’s plan: Restore white supremacy by (1) Removing working class Latinos to prison camps & traumatized silence thru Dirty War means, while (2) Creating massive middle class Black unemployment to force them into the “Black jobs” for which they are “qualified”

Author Katie Kitamura at Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator conference

Katie Kitamura @ Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator writing conference is generous,sonorous and inspiring.

Got mine last weekend. So hard to find in Ohio.

I’ve spent decades building community groups and shifting distribution of $$$ towards building a more just future. I have 12-15 people I call to check on. I have 0.5 people who check on me. It feels like “weak sauce” if you’re held in community, but not if you’re the one doing the holding.

It’s important to amplify every example of our refusal to submit to brutality and oppression

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I don’t know which newsletter you mean, but I sure could use some uplift

If anybody “already gave at the office “ it’s her.

Oh,good grief. Thanks for translating. Some days even journalists have no words for this bullshit.

The phrasing in this post it’s so confusing that I have read it three times and still can’t understand what it says. Please consider rephrasing and reposting.