I reviewed the very fun, very lively Portraits of Tracy EP pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...
Portraits of Tracy: Q: From Where Do Our Primal Instincts Originate? A: MTV! EP
Read Stephen Kearse’s review of the album.
pitchfork.com
Stephen Kearse
@kearse.bsky.social
Journalist, critic, and author of novels Post, Liquid Snakes, and In the Heat of the Light. Noreasontopretend.com
absolutely wrecked myself making a photo album of my late dog this morning smdh
some of these etymologies really surprised me www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/wor...
Words from the 'Odyssey'
merriam-webster.com
would love to see music press embrace more profiles like this. hammerandhope.org/article/isai...
Is This What R&B Sounds Like When You Don’t Respect Women?
The emerging artist Isaia Huron sings to an anti-intellectual misogyny growing common among men.
hammerandhope.org
are people out here really asking AI to summarize text messages???
I like what we're going for with "big algo" as a shorthand, but I think we can do better
i'm not particularly invested in Roddy Ricch, but i'm itching to know what label foolery has hemmed him up so bad
I will always appreciate the SFF community's investment in the short story as a form and a tradition.
bummed no one has asked christopher nolan what he thinks about the starrah version of birds in the trap sing mcknight being scrubbed from the internet
nice to read about a person taking on a big system and not being crushed by it www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
One Man’s Quest to Fix Every Deadly Guardrail
In 2016, Steve Eimers’s daughter died when she hit a defective guardrail. Then he learned that the country was full of them.
newyorker.com
bummed I can't read it, but a review being so widely read it crashes the website is the dream, actually
headline doesn't at all convey that this is a reported piece on a language shift it's actually getting at the deep irony that this shift is happening as search as both a practice and a tool is being gutted by google et al. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/m...
Saying ‘Google It’ Makes You Sound Old. ‘Search It Up’ Instead.
As online research evolves, so has the language we use to describe it.
nytimes.com
people underestimate the work it takes to make a discord a true spot
Since A Second Sight came out I've received about 2-3 of these scam emails a week. They are not only profoundly annoying but obviously prey on author's passions and attachment to their work. In some cases they impersonate real people at legit organizations.
That Personalized Email About Loving and Marketing Your Book Is a Scam - Electric Literature
Taking advantage of aspiring authors is a rich tradition, and now published authors are being scammed too
electricliterature.com
had a dream I was walking through a wisconsin walmart without my glasses and offended all the people saying good morning to me because I couldn't see them
Exciting new work alert: I spoke with the inimitable @colsonwhitehead.com about his latest, COOL MACHINE, in my first piece for @defector.com! defector.com/colson-white...
Colson Whitehead Talks About Embracing Change, Pulling Off A Heist, And Finding A Good Coffee Table | Defector
“The city was question and answer in one,” Colson Whitehead writes early on in Cool Machine, the final novel of his Harlem Trilogy. “Cause and effect and everything else, too.” You can forgive the lif...
defector.com
reading an NYer article from 1996 in which bougie is spelled "boojy." anglicized french words seem especially prone to having lots of variants
missed the anniversary of this, but yeah, it still goes www.theguardian.com/music/2016/m...
Beyoncé's Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best
From slavery to the present, black female bodies have been bought and sold. What makes this commodification different in Lemonade is intent – its purpose is to seduce
theguardian.com
I've got a new short story in @vqr.bsky.social. it's about a postman's funeral www.vqronline.org/spring-2026/...
Keeping Watch
vqronline.org
I wonder who is going to be the first politician (or influencer) to triumphantly bite into a head of lettuce and declare nothing's wrong
I've got a new short story in @vqr.bsky.social. it's about a postman's funeral www.vqronline.org/spring-2026/...
Keeping Watch
vqronline.org
hard to overstate how much power has been granted to the presidency recently www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Victims of Trump purge call supreme court ruling a ‘dagger’ at heart of civil service
Rebecca Slaughter, fired by Trump from the FTC in 2025, worries agencies will fear defying the US president
theguardian.com
the real story behind this viral photo is even more heartbreaking than the one the public created.
The Woman in the Photo Wanted to Be Alone. Instead, She Went Viral.
America saw what it wanted to see on the face of its newest icon. And everyone saw it wrong.
notus.org
cyclosporiasis discourse is making me recall all the public health reading I did while working on liquid snakes. outbreak investigation is very painstaking work softskull.com/books/liquid...
Liquid Snakes
What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasureIn Atla…
softskull.com
was drafting a post about the a.k. paul feature on the new kelela and realized "the paul brothers" no longer means what it meant in 2015
best way i know of avoiding explosive diarrhea is to heed the knowledge from this long-ago article from comrade @kearse.bsky.social slate.com/human-intere...
Why Are Salad Greens Always Labeled “Triple-Washed”?
The author of this piece won the second Slate Plus Pitch Slam. If you’d like to participate in future pitch slams, consider becoming a member....
slate.com