I appreciate your allyship of my discipline, currently under brutal assault

The company from “9 to 5” if they were nerds

It’s all the humility. To aspire to him is to be too humble to name yourself after him, and to claim that you have reached his greatness is too heavy for even the vainest tongue to lift.

“sucks” is different from “sucks off” is different from “sucks off of”, but trying to clarify that, say, you didn’t mean a homophobic slur, you were just suggesting breastfeeding, highlights that you can avoid digging into one hole to fill another if you opt to talk like a professional.

It was the favorite insult of one of my Latin teachers, so I felt compelled, even though “unspeakable spiders” doesn’t quite fit the tone in English

O tempora, o mores! O araneas infandas!

…
so let’s turn up the heat til we fry

I have been thinking about this a lot. Some racist ideology leads to bad policy and gets “rebuked” - but this means the racists hide their unpopular views for a while. Time passes and eventually the shtick arises again, because it never really left. Society (which we pretend has a mind) “forgets”.

It’s a big world, and everyone has their own experience, and I’m interested if you would articulate broadly what some of these intangibles are. Maybe having to do with work/career stuff? Because in most of the spheres I know of, “relaxed” is not an adjective that comes to mind.

My father was reading a book named “What is the name of this book?” and the die of my destiny was cast.

and a dagger or three. Eleven and a half months can go by fast

Thanks for sharing this!

surely there’s context I don’t know yet, but every post that doesn’t end with delivery into my belly was not written by me.

I absolutely had a whole reply about how the storm happened in 1880 and it was just a long hysteresis before the overload came until I realized it was from Australia.
Of course, it makes sense to have lots of stuff named after the queens - they’re around to enjoy it.

The idea of a reunion feels like having to prove myself to people I knew. The reality is typically a bunch of people who want to be wined and dined and share war stories, of then and since.
If that doesn’t sound good, don’t do it. If you know it’ll be more like the first thing, don’t do it.

NOT TODAY SATAN CLIPPY

Clippy doesn’t deserve our obedience.

“the executive recognizes an emergency and can act”, but the executive does not define the existence of an emergency; there should be checks and consequences that can contravene an executive’s actions if the state of emergency isn’t consensually agreed on. The South Korean case has some analogicity

Well written and clear. Great piece.

It highlights, but wisely doesn’t go into the weeds of, the “in an emergency” contingency of the authority. A side observation is that there’s some willful misinterpretation, in my opinion, of “who decides there’s an emergency”, which I believe should be 1/

Two elves can be true

Yglesias has been pointing out that low turnout elections used to favor Republicans and now they favor Democrats. Obviously everything is details here - it’s not that the act will disenfranchise/discourage some voters, it’s precisely how much happens to exactly who - but without biased enforcement-?

Steve Winwood putting up strong sports competition with Huey Lewis’s album that year (Fore!)

This is pretty funny, notably because Miller is so dedicated to denying the basic humanity of basically anyone, so all the jibes that he isn’t human are pointed. But it’s also true that the core of the joke is that they’re both bald.

I am absolutely on board with concerns about smartphones eating up time in low-value, addictive pursuits. But the headline is a complaint about the Kids These Days, and without some actual research quantifying and comparing attention span, I have naught but side-eye. Bingewatching is still a thing.

Hm. I don’t know if Dahl’s completely consistent, but there’s a fair amount of nasty that makes simple kindness transcendent. The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory establish that the world is brutish and mean, so just not being that is a big deal.

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Appropriate level is so important for meaningful pedagogy. It is reasonable to assume, at some point, prereqs like “bad things are bad”, but that was the curriculum at some point.
The imagined “state of warre” of prehistoric people is clearly based on observation of a class-sized group of children

The reason people were upset at big law firms and big universities capitulating was not because they thought they were extra virtuous, but because we hoped they were the breakwater; if the well-funded institutions don’t think it’s worth the money, all us smaller fish don’t have the juice.

Trying to add on to this and pursuing the analogy, for weaponization to succeed in a judicial sense may require care and competence, but participating in the judicial process is (by design) costly. Weaponization can succeed through attrition just by throwing lots of (federal) money at litigation.

Separately, Bruce’s wealth is akin to a superpower; asking why he doesn’t use it a different way is rather like asking wouldn’t it be cool if Spidey could fly. Just as science fiction is really commenting about the present, superheroes are commenting on the choices the reader could make.