A brief ambivalent note: I think of this newsletter as part reading blog, part elliptical diary. Amidst a not-quite bloodless coup, attending to one’s diary can feel frivolous at best, at worst a self-aggrandizing attempt to render inaction as “bearing witness.” One worries about coming across as all talk and no action, especially when seeing people who seemingly have greater access to levers of power like Congressional Democrats post through it instead of, say, doing literally anything.
This is not a #resistance project, it is a personal and curatorial one. Maybe I will look back on the time I spent on this amidst collapse as denial, persisting in little routines when I should have been stationing barricades. But it’s not exactly an either/or thing (people certainly have kept diaries while at the barricades) and despite everything I want to believe it is worthwhile to continue paying close attention to language. It is, after all, a primary concern of the fascists who I expect might rename it the US Department of Portation given their childish fervor to erase all things trans from state speech.
But that may prove to be the defining feature of life under the second Trump administration: For now, to survive and move strategically, we will have to live with the whiplash of having to take the cruelty of men who are not very bright very seriously.
“Welcome to Trump 2.0: Stupid and Evil at the Same Time”, Melissa Gira Grant for The New Republic
Runner-up sentence:
Just because these people are ineffective, conspicuously incompetent goons doesn’t mean they aren’t goons—and doesn’t mean they can be dismissed.
Sorry, I could barely get through Kissick’s orgy of grievances.
A letter to the editor of Harper’s by David Velasco
As seen on Bluesky.
This scene and the punk stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.
“The White Noise Supremacists”, Lester Bangs for The Village Voice
Anna Delvey is a mecha
“Meet the Mech Suits”, Cat and Girl by Dorothy Gambrell
Submitted by Sam.
If you don’t follow the artworld, you could be forgiven for thinking there is an evident lack of seriousness in the way they choose and approach their subjects.
“Into the Artworld”, Theodore L. Prescott for Image
The fact that two different journalists tried to conjure animalistic arousal from the same threadbare material of Penelope Cruz performing an identical routine, wearily eating a steak in front of them like a sad lioness in a zoo, is a really incredible testimony to how this whole thing worked.
“What Was the Horny Profile?”, Anna Merlan for Flaming Hydra
These findings are remarkable, but North American turtles do not have the same cloacal superpowers.
“No, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts: Getting to the bottom of a popular misconception”, Grégory Bulté for The Conversation
Submitted by Danielle.
Few comedies set episodes in ICE detention centers, but few comedies have the élan of “Mo.”
Review of the TV show Mo by Margaret Lyons for The New York Times
“Almost nobody [in the study] had the ability to voluntarily move their ears, so our results are not related to a person’s ability to do this,” said Schröer, although he noted other research has shown people can learn to move their ears.
“‘A neural fossil’: human ears try to move when listening, scientists say”, Nicola Davis for The Guardian
Submitted by Justin.
Your classically damp commercial experiences have a sort of terroir to them, a signature that marks a confluence of circumstances and time- and place-specific appetites; I have carried with me for decades the peculiar smell, less that of cigarette smoke than cigarette smoke in hair, that I remember from a baseball card show at a Ramada Inn that I attended as a kid.
“The Future Is Too Easy”, David Roth for Defector
Some other bangers:
There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it.
(What a lede!!)