Wow 😮

Trump doesn't like it when people go after his friends and allies

Prince’s Erotic Democracy - Public Books In the 1980s, in the shadow of AIDS, Prince (along with Madonna) brought post-disco polymorphous perversity to the mainstream. As Richard Kim beautifully put it in The Nation last week, “If you were ....

Prince died 10 years ago yesterday-- I published this obituary essay, in which I consider his music as "a project of ecstatic de-repression," in @publicbooks.bsky.social a few days later. Still miss him (& Bowie)!

In His Own Words: J.D. Vance On Why He Converted to Catholicism "How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic." (The Lamp, April 1, 2020)

thecatholicobserver.substack.com/p/in-his-own...

J.D. Vance in 2020: "My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims”
🤔

Ok I gather there’s some controversy but I listened & don’t really get it?

“A flying “V” never fails to draw attention, but the geese on display aren’t forming letters for our benefit. In this book, beginning readers will learn about the many habits of geese.”

@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social

Gwendoline Riley tells it like it is in re: the violence of a bad editor

Well, I guess that worked last time with Trump

And “Putin’s mouse” (self-described, remarkably: “According to a leaked transcript of the phone call, Orbán also compared himself to a mouse rescuing a trapped lion after it spared the rodent”)

Praying that Orbán is going DOWN

Seemed like a great opportunity

I’m so embarrassed I just spend $500 to participate in a suspiciously unfocused conversation with “Patrick Radden Keefe” about P.G. Wodehouse

Boots Riley @iucinema.bsky.social
@bootsriley.bsky.social

Ah too bad!

“The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic”…. Not long before his death, Aaron Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything””

Trump threatens Iran with ‘Hell’ over Strait of Hormuz in profane post Trump escalated threats against Iran’s power plants, bridges and other infrastructure in an expletive-laden post on Truth Social on Easter morning.

It is difficult to focus on work when our president is threatening to unleash a horrific collective punishment on a modern nation of over 90 million people in the midst of a war one of the premises of which is that the majority of that population do not support the regime under which they live.

@danielhack.bsky.social's essay prompted me to finally read Carr's (very wonderful) novel! Glad he concludes with the amazing bit about finding traces of the medieval painter's beard in the paint: “he was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint"

new writing + a scandal in plain sight Arthur c brooks, looksmaxxers, evangelical cinema + a request

From open.substack.com/pub/afetewor...

💯

Who Goes AI? An interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game.

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes AI?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific journalists.

www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai

A month into Iran, the GOP’s political reality sinks in Republicans in battleground states are largely sticking by the president's war — but they’re finding it harder to brush off the consequences.

www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

Yeah I can see how that would be discouraging as a Republican, lol

brb writing a new book chapter

I had not realized that Michel de Montaigne got so horny

For Arendt, “thinking properly depends on our setting up windshields, walls perhaps of canvas not of brick, behind which we can draw a breath and focus our eyes more acutely on what lies out there in the glare”

How did “sexistential” go unused in pop history until now. Saved for Robyn

“…the college assumes we want efficiency at all cost through automated rather than hand-pulled coffee.” I maintain that human services, including library services, are often inefficient when they are good, because the care & connection of humans is not quick work. Oberlin Luddites, I stand with you!

Check out Alex Murray’s blog post about his article “Gatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s,” which explores the often reactionary and sexist genre of the reader’s report during the complicated cultural politics of the 1890s.

Had an amazing meal (pizza and beer; we brought our own salad) at Scratch Brewing in Ava, Illinois (semi-finalists for a James Beard Award for best bar this year). Foraged beer! -- made from e.g. wild carrot, nettle, pawpaw, & fig leaves foraged from the property or the woods around it