I’m the first to tell you that books are tools and it’s fine to dispose of them in many cases. This isn’t retiring a damaged book. It’s pillaging of intangible cultural heritage.
Let’s be clear: what these bastards are doing to these books isn’t digitizing. Digitizing is about preservation and access to the original material. They’re gutting and destroying to make Soylent Green. Don’t let them get away with pretending to do this for humanitarian reasons.
‘Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.’
Eli Valley@elivalley.bsky.social · last wk.Dystopia www.news.com.au/technology/o...
A complete nightmare. Some court ruled that AI companies could freely scan any book they wanted *if they also destroyed the book.* We are now seeing book shredding at industrial scale. Please spread the word and help demand that lawmakers and (other) courts put a stop to this.
Eli Valley@elivalley.bsky.social · last wk.Dystopia www.news.com.au/technology/o...
If you’re considering whether terms like ethnic cleansing or pogrom might be applicable to impending government action, there could be a problem.
Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · last wk.TPS for Haitians officially expires tomorrow. ICE is planning big operations, with Springfield, Ohio among the targets www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-hai...
I took a hard look at the financial donors to ICE’s biggest supporters in Congress. These are people who want to significantly expand ICE’s power and have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to do so. Here are the top 25 consumer brands bankrolling the biggest ICE supporters in Congress:
ICE is quietly arresting more people than ever. After months of releasing no detention data at all, the new numbers show a record 1,474 arrests a day in early July, the highest daily pace of the entire Trump administration. 🧵 austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-quietl...
ICE Quietly Arresting More People Than Ever According to Latest Data
NEW DATA ALERT 🚨 After months of data silence, ICE's new numbers show 65,765 people in immigration detention, deportations near 1,250 a day, and arrests now at 1,473 a day.
austinkocher.substack.com
![From The Guardian:
[Muriel] Spark’s collapse, described by her doctor as “anxiety neurosis”, took the form of a persecution complex about TS Eliot, whom she believed to be sending her hostile messages in the programme notes of his play The Confidential Clerk, and in his blurbs for Faber. Eliot’s words, jumping about on the page, reshaped themselves into anagrams: “lived”, for example, became “devil”. Eliot had also, Spark believed, broken into her flat to raid her larder; he was posing as the window cleaner to her friends the Braybrookes, in order to pry into their papers. Afraid of being followed, she wore dark glasses when she left the house, and spoke sotto voce. Her doctor prescribed the anti-psychotic Largactil, and in October 1954 Spark went to a Carmelite retreat at Allington Castle in Kent, where she turned her experience into her first novel. Her recovery took place as the novel evolved.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:f5acafrvojw3zfdpxvsfu7fe/bafkreibix2vnlppvpuuu2tpj6wtyir6x6gshcqdi52fheuxufkrmtcav5q)
In any other lifetime, “American president pays millions of dollars to a woman he sexually assaulted and then threatens to tax Canada because smoke can cross the border” would be such a big headline they’d bring back kids selling newspapers on the corner
ICE facility for who now
Nancy Levine Stearns@nancylevinestearns.bsky.social · 3w ago🧵About the private prison company that will run new ICE facility for kids: Louisiana ICE Facility Mistreated Immigrants, Fed Investigators Say "LaSalle Corrections, the private contractor that runs the Louisiana facility, did not respond to a request for comment." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/03/u...
‘A frightening piece to perform’: can Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece still shock? | @us.theguardian.com
‘A frightening piece to perform’: can Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece still shock?
Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los Angeles
theguardian.com
@haymarketbooks.org is great, and I've got a dispatch in This Is How We Win, coming out in September!! Pre-order now!!
Publishers Weekly@publisherswkly.bsky.social · 4w agoThe radical left-wing publisher is finding success by crashing titles that address timely topics, including playbooks on combatting the Trump administration’s detention of immigrants and organizing working-class collective action.
What a thrill, gang!! "Overwinter" was written during Operation Metro Surge, when I was trying very hard to stay afloat. I reread it again just now and realized I've been using it every day since then, too. So grateful that it resonated with @ampoetryreview.bsky.social ❤️❤️
The American Poetry Review@ampoetryreview.bsky.social · last mo.Congratulations to Claire Wahmanholm, winner of the 2026 Kunitz Prize for her poem "Overwinter."
Item for Plathians: Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has been recording a series of poems about her everyday life. In this one, she mentions that she recently sliced off some thumb skin, such that her phone no longer recognizes her thumbprint. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b7m...
The Final Independent Poem - Week No 144 of my weekly poems about my week for The Independent online
YouTube video by Frieda Hughes
youtube.com
The books are shelved as he left them, using Eco’s “good neighbor” policy, and this is said to have helped him make unexpected connections. It also seems to me to hint at connections he made or hoped to make in work he may have left finished, a map to ideas he was still having. A profound honor.
Wanted in Rome@wantedinrome.bsky.social · 4w agoBologna opens a new library containing more than 32,000 books from Umberto Eco's private study - arranged exactly as he left them - a decade after his death.
"My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother,” said Ronaldo Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s son. “He was on his way to work, picking up his workers. My father did not deserve this.”
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's son on ICE shooting: 'My father did not deserve this'
The son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Houston Tuesday morning, issued a statement on social media Tuesday night.
houstonchronicle.com
Gabe Ortíz@tusk81.bsky.social · 4w ago“In January, agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, a VA nurse. DHS said Good tried to run over agents and that the holstered, restrained Pretti still posed a threat. Video showed neither — Pretti was already subdued when Border Patrol agents shot him ten times.”
Finally I OMGosh have the issue of Oxford Poetry edited by Hall and Hill, and with Hill's poems, written when he was a baby, in it! And I'm sharing the wealth, y'all, as you will find every Hill poem from the issue here! I have been searching for this thing for YEARS!
"I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly." —Teju Cole
On this 250th morning since this nation's Founding, I woke up thinking about a famous poem by our Jamaican-American ancestor, Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay, "America." (Used to have my students memorize this at the turn of the millennium.) www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44691/...
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured…
poetryfoundation.org
Yes - the metaphor I’ve used since 2016 is that of a strong rightward current. Anyone who didn‘t have an anchor firmly planted at the outset has almost certainly drifted with the tide.
Hari Kunzru@harikunzru.bsky.social · last mo.“Moderate” is not a statement about your beliefs, but about your position in relation to others. In a world of runaway authoritarianism that means being dragged rightward like a tin can on a string behind a car
“Another eccentric little artist.” A rare contemporary account of meeting Blake at a party: en.wikisource.org/wiki/William...
William Blake (Symons)/From Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary - Wikisource, the free online library
en.wikisource.org
[Schopenhauer, furiously sweating in an AC-less room]: ONLY THROUGH SUFFERING CAN WE ACHIEVE DENIAL OF THE WILL
Brooke Harrington@ebharrington.bsky.social · 2mo agoHaving lived for extended periods in Germany, Italy, France, Denmark & the UK, I have to say the Germans--& it sounds like perhaps the Austrians, too--are THE WORST about this weird ideological hostility to AC. Italians increasingly have AC in their own homes; the French & Danes seem indifferent.
As literary time capsules go, you can't do better than The London Magazine's 1962 "Survey of Poets." Plath, Hughes, Larkin, Walcott, Gunn, Graves, Seferis, and others answering the same short questionnaire... thelondonmagazine.org/archive-a-19...
Archive | A 1962 Survey of Poets - The London Magazine
The February 1962 edition of The London Magazine was dedicated to poetry. Thoughts from Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath and more.
thelondonmagazine.org
'Would poetry be more effective – that is, interest more people more deeply – if it were more directly concerned with the issues of our time?' @joriegraham.bsky.social, Don Paterson, @aestallings.bsky.social and more have their say in our 2026 Survey of Poets. thelondonmagazine.org/article/essa...
Essay | A 2026 Survey of Poets - The London Magazine
The London Magazine speaks to Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more about the state of poetry and poets today.
thelondonmagazine.org
I bookmarked those videos and I watch them repeatedly because the confusion, distress, and frustration on their faces, as they realize their AI cultism is not shared by the very generation of students they intend to prey on as permanent customers is just beautiful to behold
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 3mo agoDo you know I actually think that these people are so inoculated from any public sentiment that they are legitimately shook by a handful of boos at commencements this week?
The result of AI boosters getting booed at commencement will NOT be them getting a wake-up call about AI skepticism. They will just stop speaking at commencements. But that’s a small win!
Thousands are marching in Selma calling for a full restoration of the voting rights act.