“Between Dr. Frankenstein’s antipathy toward academia and Harlander’s obsession with transferring his consciousness from his body in pursuit of immortality, it is difficult to imagine that del Toro did not have certain tech billionaires in mind.”
AOC: This is about actual crimes happening in front of us. This is about shredding the Constitution and plunging us into war. This is about taking crypto money and money laundering… So if you’re asking me if I’d support impeachment, I do
💯
The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.
Breaking:
Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein
He will also relinquish his University Professorship — Harvard's highest faculty distinction.
It’s particularly dark to see capoeira in there, a martial art created by enslaved people to hide the fact that they were training
Exterior shot of 99CENTS Only store. Headline placed below reads “These L.A. Artists Flipped an Empty 99 Cents Only Store Into a Bizarrely Beautiful Mid-City Art Gallery”
In the shell of an abandoned 99CENTS Only Store, L.A. artists stack hypnotic sculptures and portraits as a call to nostalgia.
The full story: lataco.com/99-cents-sto...
By Odessa Hairapetian
New Essay! ✍️
✨ Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks ✨
Please read & share! 👩💻 🙌
"This is the future" = "You can't argue with this"
In contrast, Bezos’s ex-wife gave away $7.2b in 2025, the most given by anyone in a single year since Fortune began tracking this in 2012 - and more than Bezos has given in his whole lifetime.
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
We're at 55% of our $25,000 goal to help me launch @lataco.bsky.social investigative news desk. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed or shared our fundraiser! We're already putting the money we've raised to use 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
Donate here - givebutter.com/la-taco-inve...
So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don't think it's prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.
Tony Gilroy, creator of Andor, wasn’t allowed to use the word “fascism” during press junkets in 2025.
Interesting interview in The Hollywood Reporter.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...
👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics.
"It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!
It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this
❤️❤️❤️
ICE has pulled out of Terminal Island, its base for the last eight months for escalated immigration raids across Los Angeles and Southern California.
“ICE didn’t leave," Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio, told the L.A. Times. "The people kicked them out.”
www.latimes.com/california/s...
I don't think it is only our job to teach students how to read long novels; it may also be our jobs to teach them how to live without an online surveillance state. To learn without intrusive apps. To swap notes. To write in a book's margins. To exist in their communities in slow, clunky, human ways.
Ari Drennen @AriDrennen Follow The high trust neighborhoods that MAGA yearns for exist all over America, and they're all like D+40 nxthompson A @nxthompson •22h An extraordinary paragraph. buff.ly/uH5ykhX The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesivebecause of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about "Western civilization," while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
This is so spot on
@joshksky.bsky.social
My friend named a mealworm in my honor at the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes.
Please enjoy watching Buddy the resident American toad enjoying Michelle the mealworm as a special Valentine's Day treat.
Yes, everyone here is a genius.
youtu.be/BQ3dyzpAsMA?...
When he gave the Grammy to that young boy who made everyone think of Liam…even if that wasn’t actually Liam, it was just the perfect way of cutting through all the bullshit.
Every kid impacted by this administration’s cruelty is another Liam.
🔥Bad Bunny halftime plus Contra ICE towels 🔥
On a similar note, as Mamdani continues to notch W after W you’re going to start seeing opinion pieces about how this could never work in any city other than New York, etc., etc. Do not engage! It’s just entrenched power bullshit and that’s all! Don’t let them make that a conversation!
Fabian Muniesa - 'Finance, technology, and fascism today' @ UC Berkeley 26/02/2026 besi.berkeley.edu/event/financ...
I liked reading this and will be thinking about it: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-52/rev...
Especially in dark times, reading for pleasure is important— spiritually, collectively — Check out the books a few writers and editors (including me) are looking forward to!! @latimes www.latimes.com/entertainmen...
