hearing there are vast tranches of uncounted votes in the county where detroit is located ... veritable Fountains of Wayne for the lucky candidate ...

Bad times make hard cheese. Hard cheese makes good times. Good times make soft cheese ...

"The idea of society may sound appealing, but it's old men who will take the hit, planting trees under whose shade they might never sit."

USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 3d ago

Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.

Working on Henry Blake Fuller, whose 1919 *Bertram Cope's Year* is sometimes called the first openly gay American novel. But, uhhhhh, his 1890 *Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani*, about two inseparable bachelors who collect the painter "il Sodoma," is not exactly hiding it very hard??

Having recently been writing about *A Hazard of New Fortunes*, the only (?) canonical American novel with a German Forty-Eighter as a prominent character, I'm really thinking about how we should be upholding the Forty-Eighters as national heroes far more than we do.

Alexander Clarkson@aphclarkson.bsky.social · 5d ago

Alexander is right, so presumably MAGA's next step will be the mass deportation of members of the Irish- and German-American diaspora

Someone seems to have trained an AI to riff on the oldest surviving notated music, the Hurrian Hymns (1400 BCE). Didn't listen to it but gotta admit I'm a little charmed by this utterly dumb idea.

Ok, everyone try not to be weird about this please, but I, a known Moby-Dick partisan, find myself slated to teach Middlemarch this fall. Victorianists, help an Americanist out: your most indispensable Middlemarch criticism recs?

An already hectic day upped an additional difficult level by a CTA bus simply Preferring Not To stop for a field trip of like twenty preschoolers that depended on it to get home on time 🤷‍♂️

Douthat at 60 Min is a misunderstanding of his talents. This is not someone you want to see do investigative journalism, you want him to earnestly believe a demon might live inside a computer and to quiz an AI engineer about Carl Schmitt to find out if it’s true

“Horse” & “car” are from the same word. I swear: Since *ḱ / *k regularly become *h in a Germanic language like English, “horse” is the expected outcome of Proto-Indo-European *ḱr̥sós. But we also borrow that word back from Gaulish (via Latin; two languages where *k > *h doesn’t happen) as “car.”

Michael Bay's *Paradise Lost* I'm only kind of joking ... say what you will about his Transformers movies, they're the only thing that feels remotely like what Milton's devils and angels should look like, in terms of sheer sense of power.

Jesse Hawken@jessehawken.bsky.social · last wk.

Studio execs are going to want to adapt more poems for the big screen now

This didn't really hit me until I went to visit my (now-)wife's hometown in West Virginia for the first time. Her high school friends were all very nice and excited to show off what they knew: "you celebrate 'tchanooka?' and you really light all those candles?"

Erin Biba@erinbiba.bsky.social · last wk.

I am always trying to explain to folks that most Americans have never met a Jew and people do not believe me and I just need you to understand that the perception that we are a powerful group in this country is intentionally created by antisemites and you’re unknowingly buying in.

Look, it's like this: a filmmaker can reach Sherlock Holmes level mastery of a topic, but, as a busy person who isn't a full-time scholar, they're never gonna reach Mycroft Holmes levels. And part of Sherlock's genius is that he understands this difference and knows when to call Mycroft.

Scott Edgar@scottedgar.bsky.social · last wk.

Not QTing because I don't want to start any beef, but: This isn't true, and by the standards that Wilson takes for granted, Nolan is in fact a dilettante. And the ugliness is in refusing to acknowledge the decades of concentrated study it takes to achieve genuine academic expertise in a text.

(quoting bc I can't reply) They cite a specific law on the signs they put up at the checkpoints. Next time I see one I'll take a picture.

Stephanie Kollmann@slkollmann.bsky.social · last wk.

I'm not fully convinced by this explanation, though. While the rules allow people to (usually) pass through (ungated) parks 24/7, I suspect there must be some underlying decisions about passage through the commons that forced them to allow this 🤷

📣 ANNOUNCEMENT 📣 I finally have a draft of this book chapter ready to show brave volunteer readers. It's about literature in Chicago from 1833-1887 (official founding to Haymarket trial). Americanists, Chicago heads, other interested parties: DM if you're interested in giving feedback on this.

📣 ANNOUNCEMENT 📣 I finally have a draft of this book chapter ready to show brave volunteer readers. It's about literature in Chicago from 1833-1887 (official founding to Haymarket trial). Americanists, Chicago heads, other interested parties: DM if you're interested in giving feedback on this.

another for the Hot Corn Summer files: bsky.app/profile/keit...

K. A. “Kîck Åß” Pillë@keithpille.bsky.social · 2w ago

all hail the Queen of Nebraska

Me and which 31 friends gonna road trip here to play Human Chess

Lake Michigan! Live!@lake-michigan.live · 2w ago

Current* conditions near Petoskey, MI:

ask a good question, get a good answer!

Hagen Blix@hagenblix.bsky.social · 2w ago

Why is AI a "machine for shifting income and power from labor to capital"? It's all about the distinction between productivity increases and deskilling. When productivity rises, it increases output per unit labor. Deskilling, in contrast, 1/

Under Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot, SEIU and CTU were tied at the hip. Together, they helped elect Brandon Johnson. Now, after years of feeling burned by the mayor, SEIU is breaking with CTU and lining up against Johnson.

total Friedrich William I of Prussia behavior

Parker Molloy@parkermolloy.com · 2w ago

Over on Twitter, the usual group of people are in total meltdown mode over this, but she was his stunt double during the scene with the Laestrygonian giants. The giants were all played by people over 7 feet tall. The doubles they used for Odysseus' crew were mostly under 5 feet tall.

elon stroking his chin in thought, thinking about how the three hour movie he sat still for and paid attention to wasn't as faithful as it could be to the long poem he read all of

Obviously we must square this circle by returning to a Ciceronian concept of friendship: friends bond over their shared commitment to duty and support each other in its pursuit. Also this relationship is so intense that you can only have one friend at a time.

A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social · 2w ago

SPICY. But not wrong, imo. Found family and friendship are great, but there's something to be said for the complete absence of duty or Big Goods in a lot of modern media.

Caused a friend great dismay the other day when I asked them why they had a Claude tattoo. Turns out it's a Vonnegut-fan tattoo.

Phil Rosenthal@philrosenthal.bsky.social · 2w ago

Left, logo for Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude Right, Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole in his 1973 novel, “Breakfast of Champions” Not only do they look alike, the same stuff comes out of it in either case.

I forgot maybe my favorite moment in Twin Peaks was in this episode. One of the most beautiful moments in the entirety of David Lynch's career

My Son Was Standing There

YouTube video by kdiamond

youtu.be

jordan@jordanjamboree.pittbert.gay · 2w ago

Spent the day watching vintage racing through a park on a beautiful day, watched Argentina choke right at the finish, and now I get to watch the season 2 premiere of twin peaks on a big screen thanks to my local theatre

"Bc you were a child" doesn't explain why children have a right to be in public, rather than behind nursery walls. For that we should say: we hope to be old and reliant on the next generation; we hope our works live on for them to maintain. So we need them to grow up connected to our shared world.

Joseph Fink, we're going to win@planetoffinks.bsky.social · 2w ago

As a reminder, whether you want kids or not is irrelevant to the requirement to be understanding and welcoming about children in public. You are required to be understanding about children in public because you yourself were once a child

ODYSSEUS, BRISTLING WITH RAGE: thou dare attempt to pork my wife? while i’m on my big trip?

Looks like it might be safe to go for a run today, while masking, at exactly 7pm, when it will be pouring rain. 👍👍

The pleasurecraft out on the water take this one to the next level

Lake Michigan! Live!@lake-michigan.live · 3w ago

Current* conditions near Ludington, MI: