Xander Lenc
@xlenc.bsky.social
Carceral geographer, California apologist, valued customer. Read @oaklandreviewofbooks.org
it's heeeeeere, you may now read my essay about how i achieved the millennial dream of home ownership and immediately lost my mind on nextdoor. thanks to the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org crew for their ongoing support of me being Like This
How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor
“I had a panic attack. Then I wrote an apology letter.”
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
Man, I just love it when I'm right.
29 U.S.C. § 157@organizingpower.bsky.social · 23h agoThis is gonna be a blowout, folks
In every single example of freeway removal I have heard of, people were FURIOUS when it was happening but within ten years there is a universal consensus that it was a good idea.
Good evening. "Cory Booker" was a twenty-year sociological experiment conducted by the McKinsey & Company Political Services Department. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.
I was comparing the 2016 and 2024 Republican Party platforms and it's stunning how different they are. I still think some pundits overstate how much Trump changed the GOP, but comparing the platforms it's hard to believe its the same party at all.
I collect old transit tokens, and the Honolulu tokens are some of my favorites.
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 3d agoHonolulu once had a thriving, heavily utilized streetcar network, but like many major cities across North America, it was dismantled in favor of buses and cars. Now we wonder how to deal with congestion as everyone sits in traffic.
Come party with us at Eli's, August 20th! Celebrate our LAUNCHIVERSARY! We'll have lots of stuff!!!! luma.com/6viuhae6
ORB Launchiversary: Always Be Launching · Luma
Oakland Review of Books continues to exist in space and time, and like Oakland, is always becoming. Celebrate with us on a randomly chosen day we've deemed our…
luma.com
So have ANY of the journalists or politicians who spread the disproven lie that Hamas soldiers beheaded hundreds of Israeli babies on October 6th apologized? I can't think of a single one.
The past fifteen years have convinced me that Adorno was right about astrology.
Ezra Klein: "Look, the path to presidency is simple for democrats. They need a candidate who can do a really good JFK impression, and a platform that promises a freight elevator in every home." Derek Thompson: "That's right, Ezra. And at the end of the day, that's what Abundance is all about."
Remove the phrase "the left" from your vocabulary and watch in awe as your political analysis instantaneously improves as you are forced to reckon with material forces in politics rather than projections, phantoms, and abstractions.
I finally looked up why it's called a No. 2 pencil, and apparently it's a graphite hardness grade. Which isn't all that interesting under itself, except that I also learned that the modern graphite hardness grading system was created by Henry David Thoreau!
cleaning up my zotero and finding some choice forgotten materials
‘Scandalous, irrational and irresponsible’: French beekeepers’ fury at lifting of pesticides ban
‘Scandalous, irrational and irresponsible’: French beekeepers’ fury at lifting of pesticides ban
Allowing use of two neonicotinoids to combat crop-ruining disease will kill bees and reduce harvests, union says Beekeepers and environmentalists in France have reacted furiously after parliament approved a bill reauthorising two banned pesticides scientists say can poison bees. “There are no words to describe the frustration,” said Carolyn Bouguet, a beekeeper in Essonne, greater Paris. “Bee populations have already been badly compromised by climate change, new parasites and loss of habitat. And now this.” Continue reading...
theguardian.com
I think time has mostly proven me wrong about this, which could mean a lot of things, but one possibility is that Mamdani has far more political capital than I realized.
Xander Lenc@xlenc.bsky.social · 9mo agoNYC is going to have the world's biggest media-manufactured crime panic in history the second Mamdani is elected. They aren't even going to wait until he is inaugurated. Whether or not you like the guy, you need to start preparing now for the fire hose of disinformation that is about to activate.
My roof has been getting replaced over the past two weeks. I realized that from my cat's perspective, we are under siege by an army of hammer-weilding men who try and break into the house every day. She is in war mode.
I love staying up late and reading Wikipedia and getting so irrationally mad about the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 that I can't sleep.
A&M may be generating most of the anti-academic freedom headlines, but this is a pretty bleak sign of how things are going at my old employer, too: www.statesman.com/news/educati...
UT border surveillance scholar was a shoo-in for tenure. UT denied him.
American Studies scholar Iván Chaar López fears UT’s unexplained tenure denial violated his academic freedom amid scrutiny of controversial fields.
statesman.com
We’re hosting a free webinar on investigating extreme heat in prison, jail and ICE detention. Join us at 1 pm EDT tomorrow, July 21, to hear from climate, medical and criminal justice experts. Register here:
Extreme Heat in Prisons Webinar
Hear from both climate and criminal justice experts about how heat is impacting people in prisons and ICE detention, and how you can cover it.
themarshallproject.org
One of my favorite first lines in any book is in Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf: "So." ... which is exactly how a speaker might begin a story. Scholars do NOT all agree that Beowulf was part of an oral tradition, and with a single word Heaney is making it clear that he believes it was.
I dropped off some honey with my sweet elderly British neighbor three doors down. Two days later I get a LETTER that she MAILED thanking me and apologizing for not having me in for tea (she was on the phone). I love my neighbors!!!
"Is it Cake?" videos are a psy-op designed to train our nation's youth to be paranoid and believe conspiracy theories.
"I know it’s too hot in my prison when prisoners start checking into suicide-watch cells in our medical area. People employ various excuses, but most know they do it because the infirmaries have air conditioning."
Summer Heat in Prison: Just How Hot Are Our Nation’s Prisons?
Prison writers from across the U.S. describe how hot their prisons get in the summer. One prison reached 117 degrees.
prisonjournalismproject.org
Headlines in the US right now: incontinence and USDA policy, castration anxiety and military policy, narcissism in monetary policy, oral fixation in FDA policy. Sorry guys but Freud was right about politics.
There is no justification for dissertation format requirements like this!
This is going to sound crazy but Evil Dead 2 is very clearly inspired by Citizen Kane and Orson Welles would have loved it if he had lived to see it.
Every year on Bastille Day I reflect on the fact that the Bastille only held seven prisoners when it was dismantled as a universally-despised symbol of political repression. Today, ICE alone holds well over seventy thousand people, including children, on any given day.
