All of Us Yahoos | Aaron Matz A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice.

Aaron Matz on what, exactly, satire is

This is what pique fitness looks like

The Russian Futurists' "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste"

The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock — and answers to a family’s pain Decades after a brazen art theft drove Merry White’s father to despair, federal agents closed in on one last missing work. For White, the search is personal.

A deeply troubled painter. His friend (my grandfather). A legacy of modern art. A sudden theft; it's psychic reverberations. The great art critic Sebastian Smee wrote about my family's story for the Washington Post:

www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

Thank you, Ben!

Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife The author knew recognition of her works would take time—and planned accordingly.

I reviewed Francesca Wade's "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife" for the New Republic: newrepublic.com/article/2027...

we came to it bc she loved Vanessa Bayer in Freakier Friday (she is, indeed, great in it)

Every Totino’s Ever - SNL YouTube video by Saturday Night Live

Agnes enjoys these www.youtube.com/watch?v=izhv...

Congratulations, Brian!

Three poems by Jordan Davis Interrogator neededmust fail to understandthe simplest thingsin a vault of goo —Platitudes generatedby electricityfalling into a sourceit troubles us to considereven once,whispering to solvent afte…

THREE POEMS by Jordan Davis @jordandavis.bsky.social

Poetry for BURNING HOUSE PRESS @thearsonista.bsky.social

LANDSCAPE // LABYRINTH

burninghousepress.com/2025/09/20/t...

John Stuart Ill

Highly detailed photorealist painting of an escalator, looking down; with another escalator visible off to the right

"Escalator," a 1970 work by Photorealist painter Richard Estes

I feel attacked

A group of high-profile writers is launching a new magazine called Equator “to challenge the reigning assumption that global events should be narrated by and for the West,” according to a description shared with Semafor. Its founding team includes Pankaj Mishra, Mohsin Hamid, Nesrine Malik, Samanth Subramanian, and Suzy Hansen, with editing by Guardian long reads creator Jonathan Shainin. “In a post-American era, the task of a new magazine is to engage the rich variety of this historical moment on its own terms, without compulsively asking ‘What does it mean for the US?’” the nonprofit outlet, which is primarily based in London, will ask.

Our new magazine, Equator, is officially out in the world — and here @equatormag.bsky.social
Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event in London: equator.org

Last year for The Chronicle I wrote about the long history of the first of these, which has been with us since the 1940s

Charlie Kirk’s Death Is a Catastrophe for Higher Ed Things were already bad. They’re about to get worse.

My latest for @chronicle.com: Charlie Kirk's assassination on a college campus is a catastrophe for higher education and will likely only intensify the Trump administration's war on American colleges and universities.

@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social Did you guys spot this, in the latest New Yorker crossword?

The One Percent’s Fear of Death Is Wreaking Havoc on the World Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death posited that we act out in antisocial ways—and even embrace authoritarians—because we cannot face our own unavoidable demise.

My latest for @newrepublic.com: I went back to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 book “The Denial of Death” to see if it had insights in an age of AI, nightmare tech bros, and the return of Trump in the wake of Covid-19. Turns out it does, though not in the way Becker quite foresaw:

Readers have long been frustrated by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". Thanks to AI, it is now possible to explore BOTH of the paths described by the speaker

Opinion | What a New Landmark AI Settlement Will Mean for Authors Creators should demand credit, not just compensation.

My essay on the tense relationship between authors and AI, as embodied in a major lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now in the Chronicle of Higher Education: www.chronicle.com/article/what...

(I should stop too)

That's nobody's business but the TERFs

I'm more of a constative male

Worst thing to happen to book crit was getting mercilessly synced to pub dates. writer gets 97% of the coverage they're ever getting by the end of week 2, & if the book is widely reviewed (positive or not) in prestige places some of your would-be audience burns out on takes & skips the book itself.

Drank so much coffee that I can feel the Nothing nothinging

Read our blog to get an overview of the Anthropic settlement. There’s an FAQ for authors, too. We hope you find it helpful.

authorsguild.org/news/what-au...

I remember writing a paper for my college Intro to Film course analyzing a sequence from The Magnificent Ambersons. Maybe I'll do the same with these new AI scenes

Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, led by Edward Saatchi, is using the film as a test case for how Hollywood can overhaul production. The results won't be commercialized — the tech giant hasn't obtained r...

The Enshittified Ambersons www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

Ruby Hamilton · Things go kerflooey: David Lynch’s Gee-Wizardry For years, his biography on press releases was just four words long: ‘Eagle scout, Missoula, Montana.’ David Lynch...

‘David Lynch had a peculiarly subtractive aesthetic. Just as the more you see, the less comprehensible it becomes, the less you can see (the lower the lighting, the poorer the quality) the more there is to look for.’

Ruby Hamilton on the filmmaker: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Did u guys see the Tesla robot video? I think it's dying