I can’t remember: did Texas even hold a vote to amend their constitution to add their five Republican seats?

First trailer for Coyote vs. ACME, starring John Cena, Lana Condor, and Will Forte.

The Looney Tunes movie is in theaters on August 28.

Wikipedia: "His music, embodying flight and space exploration themes, aligns with cosmist beliefs in humanity's cosmic destiny."
Me:

Incredible shots of the exchange between Rep. AOC and RFK, Jr. at today’s congressional hearing.

(image credit: WSJ reporter @lizessleywhyte.bsky.social)

Report: Meta will train AI agents by tracking employees' mouse, keyboard use Move highlights the difficulty of finding high-quality interactive training data.

I'd rather work in an abattoir. The kicker in the piece is the final sentence:

"The company is also reportedly planning to start laying off up to 10 percent of its global workforce starting in May."

I shall wager you one shiny penny that they'll use these metrics to determine who gets the axe.

To see or not to see? Every single Shakespeare play – ranked! Antony and Cleopatra? Exhausting. Lear? Magnificent but flawed. Hamlet? Limitless. For Shakespeare’s birthday, the Guardian’s former theatre critic ranks all the plays

This article was designed to troll English teachers with no chill (me), to pull us from our hovels so we can be identified & put on some loser database. WHY ELSE is The Tempest at no.25, why is Love's Labours Lost above Henry V, The Winter's Tale and Coriolanus, etc etc. A scam!

My mother, who just turned 84 and is in good health, remembers Whites-Only swimming pools in Austin when she was growing up.

An excellent point

RFK Jr rejects germ theory and is an AIDS denialist (he famously, given his homophobia, thinks the cause is not HIV but “the gay lifestyle”)

So how exactly does he think those dirty immigrants (including the immigrant Jews like me) are bringing infectious diseases?

The number of Republicans crashing out about getting nakedly gerrymandered is, unironically, a sign that we need to do more of it. You guys are correct! This shit sucks! Welcome to the party, pals! We can all stop doing it any time you like!

THE LEAVES (Triolet)

IIRC, flu deaths outnumbered combat casualties among US soldiers in WWI, a bunch of them in stateside training camps bf they were ever deployed

Pick up the nearest book, turn to p. 42, and post the second sentence:

"Your board should now look like the one below."

Gustave Doré’s depiction of Don Quixote amid his fantasies of chivalric romance: frontispiece to a 1863 edition of the 17th-century masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes, who died #onthisday in 1616. publicdomainreview.tumblr.com/post/8145950...

Ironic to see this appear on Earth Day.

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"
2/2

This bit from Emerson's "Nature" fits well for Earth Day:

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.
1/2

A short thread:

I never saw Prince perform live, but I did have an experience that showed me, in a small way, how he could command attention in unexpected ways, and in unexpected places.
1/6

This is shameful

Alright, I’m home now so here’s the Norm update. Yesterday at 4pm, I got a text from a family I’ve been helping who had a loved one abducted a couple of days after Renée Good’s murder. This was the family that Norm Nation kept from being evicted (and you delivered). ICE had released their loved one.

Reading.

The cover art for Penguin's edition of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It is designed to look like 17 spines of that same edition, displayed in the way you'd find them in a bookcase.

This one.

"Few approve of how Donald Trump is handling the cost of living" – Overall: 33-67 – Immigration: 40-59 – Iran: 32-67 – Economy: 30-70 – Cost of living: 23(!)-76 "The nationwide poll was conducted April 16-20, 2026 using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 2,596 adults. The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 3.4 percentage points."

There's no other way to say it: This AP-NORC poll is atrocious for Trump.

– Overall: 33-67
– Immigration: 40-59
– Iran: 32-67
– Economy: 30-70
– Cost of living: 23(!)-76

37% of Republicans disapprove of his handling of the economy, 47% disapprove on cost of living.

apnorc.org/projects/few...

It Was on Your Table Every Morning Growing Up. It’s Dying Before Our Eyes. No One Wants to Face It. The powerhouse of American citrus is suffering a brutal decline. Everyone has a theory about why.

Just an incredibly sad and melancholy story on the death of the Florida Orange industry
slate.com/business/202...

They already knew what I had yet even to realize: that Prince at his best transcended assumptions and expectations about who his audience was.

That night was one of the stranger cultural experiences I've ever had, and I'm grateful for Prince for making it possible.
6/6

The entire time, the audience was rapt as the film played. As was I.

I'd not expected anything like the number of people who were there, much less their clear and genuine response to this film, a response that seemed to be a deeper one than that of "just" being entertained.
5/6

Every seat was filled, as were the aisles between the rows of seats (I was in one of the aisles, toward the back), plus the space between the back rows of seats and the wall. If I had to guess, there were probably twice as many people in there as the auditorium was designed to hold.
4/6

(I'd heard the hits and liked them, and I wanted to see Morris Day and the Time, but I wasn't (yet) calling myself a fan.)

I was stunned by what I saw when I got there: The crowd (it was a full-sized auditorium, with seats for several hundred people) was literally standing-room only.
3/6

I didn't see Purple Rain when it was released in the U.S., but when it arrived in Durango, Mexico, where I was living in 1985 (I was teaching ESL classes there), I thought I'd go to the theater to see it, just out of curiosity.
2/6

A short thread:

I never saw Prince perform live, but I did have an experience that showed me, in a small way, how he could command attention in unexpected ways, and in unexpected places.
1/6

So let me share a quick story about Prince’s death and one of the genuinely nicest things I ever saw in the Alabama Legislature.

This is former Rep. Alan Boothe, R-Troy. Standard conservative who chaired the House Rules Committee. When news of Prince’s death came out, he went to the well. (1)