John Williams
@johnwilliams.bsky.social
I write about books and edit others’ writing about books, previously for NY Times and Washington Post. Apollonian/Order Muppet. Highly sociable misanthrope. (Photo: Larry McMurtry's Booked Up, 2018.)
I laughed significantly harder at this than I expected to.
Los Angeles: sports capital of the world@theamitie.bsky.social · 18h agoThere’s a guy on TikTok who posts just him taking a pizza out of the oven every day with tongs and all of the comments are about how their day is ruined from having watched this
Two pieces I read this weekend that I highly recommend, about two very differently idiosyncratic people. First, Molly Young's delightful profile of Johnny Knoxville. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Johnny Knoxville, America’s God of Mischief
What moves the star of “Jackass” to risk his life for our entertainment? A very serious investigation.
newyorker.com
Based on a couple of sports stories this week, I just want to make clear that I would be more than happy to receive somewhere between $20M and $50M a year to a) do my job adequately well, or b) ram my scooter (I’ll buy one) into a fire truck and sustain a non-life-threatening foot injury. DMs open.
WGN posted a meme of Kyle Shanahan as Mitch McConnell when reporting on his car accident.
Me transitioning from seeing Pavement tonight to seeing Phish on Monday.
This one always bothers me. I guess it’s somewhere between on the list and not on the list.
Starting my 40,000th ironic chant of U-S-A...
Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · last wk.Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters The plastic, non-lethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers will be at the ready at certain schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...
This really does seem like the most anyone can promise these days.
In my untiring quest to be right on top of the zeitgeist, I watched “A Complete Unknown” last night. A thoroughgoing “meh” from me.
Wile E. Coyote, despaired, takes a bucket of paint and a brush and paints a beautiful two-bedroom house on a mountainside. He paints a beautiful coyote wife in the window, and two adorable coyote kids running around in the yard. He tries to enter this new coyote life, but it is inaccessible to him
NEW at @porchparty.bsky.social: Did you come from abroad and complete an American PhD? If so, take our survey on what you're doing now—and what Trump's new rule to cap student visas at four years (w/ uncertain extension) means for individuals and in your field www.porchpartynews.com/p/trump-rule...
Were you an international student who got an American PhD? Take our survey!
A new Trump rule forces foreign doctoral candidates to apply mid-degree for an uncertain visa extension. What will that mean for academia and society—and people’s lives?
porchpartynews.com
I saw The Invite today and very much enjoyed it. Though it takes pretty radical liberties with Homer’s original. If that kind of thing bothers you.
Having one of those occasional looks back at emails from 15 years ago. Anyone else find that this opens a large can of existential worms?
"Our predicament today is more complex than Ivan Karamazov’s: it is not only the natural world that is beyond our powers of comprehension, but also the structures of our own making." This Meghan O’Gieblyn piece from 2019 is worth revisiting. www.thebeliever.net/artificial-i...
Good Shepherds - Believer Magazine
Science was supposed to have banished God, but he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. He is the ghost lurking in our data sets, the cockroach hiding beneath the particle accelerator. He brief...
thebeliever.net
ICYMI: my heartfelt praise for the book all #rhetoric geeks, and anyone else for that matter, should own.
The Book That Changed My Life (or, at least, one of them)
Rhetoric, re-reading
open.substack.com
This is terrific and worth your time. (One of the many things I admire about it is that it makes the persuasive arguments without pretending that we’ll be able to discern the AI from the human-generated.)
J. Robert Lennon@jrobertlennon.com · 3w agoI didn't want to write about AI or have an AI policy for EPOCH because I thought it went without saying...that was naive of me, I think. Click through to read my blog post on the subject, if you like.
Looked for posts about Wordle after completing today’s puzzle and was not disappointed.
I've been waiting for someone knowledgeable to write a big piece about how testosterone is (even more than historically, somehow) one of our very big problems. (See: scrawny computer nerds turning into political edgelords with the necks and shoulders of Barry Bonds.)
Matthew Gault@mjgault.bsky.social · 3w agoHegseth announced they're gonna start screening for T and administering testosterone treatment for warriors found wanting
This two-part essay by Marco Roth is fantastic. romanticon.substack.com/p/the-burial... and substack.com/home/post/p-... And it chimes with so many of my own similar-age experiences, feelings and thoughts in recent years.
The Burial of the Dead
Part 1: Finding a Plot
romanticon.substack.com
In my lifetime, I've seen segments of society lose trust in evolutionary biology, climate science, and vaccines. None of this was due to anything scientists did. All of it was because non-scientists perceived some advantage (political, cultural, financial) in attacking science's credibility.
