@artwinslow
Owner of literary tote bags, also former magazine editor (The Nation), prior jurist/panelist at Pulitzer Prizes, NEA, NBCC, MacDowell. Have written for many venues, general interests skew to literary journalism and cultural reporting of almost any stripe.
I hope you've been following the excellent letters from MN that @lithub.com.web.brid.gy has been running--by writers like Kao Kalia Yang, Kawai Strong Washburn, Charles Baxter and so many others. Mine ran today, about buying gas masks for, well, the first time in my life. lithub.com/letter-from-...
Your boots on the ground are much appreciated, Laurie, as is the affirmative attitude you stake out. Literally, the country is watching and your collective action reverberates nationally. Kudos.
A terrific critic and a nice guy as well (as you might surmise), thrown under the bus with a lot of other professionals at The Washington Post. You can find him here. We served together on a Pulitzer Prize jury a dozen years ago, he saved me (us all) from my pedestrian tastes.
From this moment forward (and before, but clearly now):
-If you work for ICE.
-If you vote for money for ICE.
You are complicit. This is the gestapo. You're on the wrong side. You can't pretend not to know.
So much for my on-again, off-again impulse to re-subscribe to The Washington Post, which I've done more than once in the past couple of years. On balance, it would be only a matter of weeks before the next censorious act by its management caused me to re-cancel.
The indictment was handed down 2 days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US atty for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker wrote “I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
What an atmospheric, ponderous poem by @janezwart.bsky.social.
A smart dissection of an Orwell essay that pins our political moment with precision, with human nature the underlying component of both his time and ours.
It's a rhetorical question that reveals a truth about today's media ecosystem (an echo system) -- things commonly get endlessly repeated without secondary attempts at verification. So, caveat lector.
Yet another example of how a corporate media conglomerate cannot privilege democratic needs over profit imperatives. It's almost as if this hyper-capitalist media system is incompatible with democracy, especially when the latter is threatened by authoritarian power.
Terrific essay. If you haven't read Nguyen's The Sympathizer, pick it up, and he mentions Bob Shacochis's excellent The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, well worth your time as well. Let the uneasy assertions of the essay sink in. He doesn't mention Twain, who was explicitly anti-jingoist.
I've enjoyed much of Outside's reporting over the years. This is not much different from what has happened to many print enterprises, but it's a process sad to witness.
The Trump administration is continuing its unconstitutional attack on attorneys it disagrees with—this time detaining an American attorney representing a pro-Palestinian student protester arrested at the University of Michigan last year.
O'Donnell articulates a sad but intuitively sensible perspective re Musk's claims: because they lack a shred of evidence, assume they are false unless proved true.
Why DOGE is unconstitutional
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
Apparently the evangelicals have it all wrong. Stirring words here (eg, "We are becoming the voice on the 'Access Hollywood' tape...")
Thought this sticker was odd when I picked it up at the polls, but it pretty much matches the times now. Multiple ways to read it.
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This CNN piece is the best I’ve seen, and includes info on actions before the inauguration. www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/p...
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"How do you build popular support for democratic institutions when the very mechanisms of public communications are increasingly controlled by anti-democratic forces?" A sobering reflection on where we find ourselves.
Krugman says the editors at the Times editorial page were increasingly trying to water down his columns and arguments www.cjr.org/analysis/pau...
Shareholder society as anachronism?
The writer Peter Matthiessen was among those convinced of Peltier's innocence. I published a piece of his contending that, part of his then-forthcoming book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, long ago but had since accepted that no redress for Peltier would ever come.
"Fear has its uses" is a nice turn there by Amis. At literary darts, you'd have to consider him a first-rate tosser.
Curiouser and curiouser...
No, The Savage Detectives and that's it, although 2666 seems to shake a finger at me every time I spy it on one of my shelves. (A lower one, since I don't like to be guilted.) Will check out By Night in Chile, though, as time allows (and it's a strict master, that one).
The Regret That Haunted Me for 50 Years www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/o...
Don't dismiss this halfway through, thinking you've absorbed Dorfman's message, it corkscrews in a fascinating way. Beliefs are us, that's my takeaway.