Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Dale Chapman

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 2d

More Viking lore (targeted specifically for Bostonians) from the great Rowdy Geirsson.

A Short History of the Varangian Guard for Bostonians

Art by Matt Smith - - -Now, evuhryone knows that the Vikings were some sehriously hahdco’ah fuckin’ fightahs. ’Cept most’ah ’em actually didn’t go...

buff.ly

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 4h

I'm already hearing that USC and UT Austin are likely to fold on this. I have trouble understanding how this is going to work, how operating on the terms the administration has laid out is even possible.

I'm glad for MIT's commitment on this, and it sounds like Dartmouth will hold out as well.

Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 6h

Courtesy of colleagues at Penn

A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 engraving in the Pennsylvania Gazette, published in Philadelphia, in an effort to foster cooperation among the various colonies against the tyrant king of Britain, with the American colonies replaced by the nine universities selected for special collaboration opportunities

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 4h

OMG

I mean people should really know better by now. You do not want to get into a posting war with this dude.

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Reposted by Dale Chapman

Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 5h

the actual story here, which the media never talks about, is that police in this country have become a discrete right-wing political operation. the story isn't about cops leaving (they're lying about that), it's about the police trying to exert influence over elections.

Mark Misoshnik 🏴 @misoshnik.bsky.social · 1d

Lmao is this supposed to be a bad thing?

A tweet from Bari Weiss that says “"It's shaken me to my core," a lieutenant said of Mamdani's unexpected victory in June. "The absolute dread I feel is palpable.
"
Today in @TheFP our @Olivia_Reingold talks to the cops who say they will walk if Zohran Mamdani is elected in November:”

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Reposted by Dale Chapman

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 6h

federal agents stealing children and sending them south. where have i heard about that before?

Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 8h

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 6h

Someone in my mentions is upset because these people haven’t suffered the worst at ICE’s hands and therefore they shouldn’t be praised for being out on the streets?

Yeah, no. To push back on these people we need everyone — especially those with relative privilege — to get up and get involved.

Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 8h

Portland, you magnificent weirdos

Tim Dickinson @timdickinson.bsky.social · 8h

Live from the Emergency Naked Bike Ride 🚲 where the crowd hase just erupted in cheers with the arrival of the Unipipier

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 5h

People just straight up auditioning for Louvre of Bluesky now

I got something similar yesterday. Someone so incensed at the long and notorious history of the Catholic Church that they couldn't find anything to like about a Catholic procession marching on an ICE facility to advocate for justice

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

That cartoon chart is just pure ideology right there

That Musk buys into it is a measure of how much he's sampled his own discursive "product" since buying Twitter: high on his own supply

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

For starters, they could write a headline that doesn't read like they wrote it while polishing his shoes

I think you could write a headline for the exact same story that goes, "Trump Circumvents Separation of Powers: Trump seizes power of purse from quiescent Congress"

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 6h

Well, they used to, but it's been awhile

a man is playing a flute in a black and white photo while a group of men are playing drums .

Alt: Reenactment of a fife and drum group carrying the US flag during the revolutionary war, complete with powdered wigs and leggings and old fashioned military uniforms and whatnot

media.tenor.com

Reposted by Dale Chapman

vijay iyer @vijayiyer.bsky.social · 7h

NYC: GET YOUR TICKETS NOW

VIJAY IYER QUARTET
w/ ADAM O’FARRILL, YUNIOR TERRY, & TYSHAWN SOREY

THE VILLAGE VANGUARD
NOVEMBER 4 - 9

🎫👇🏾
vv.squadup.com/artists/vija...

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 9h

Gotta ask: at what point does the Eighth Amendment kick in? Or does it just get bracketed for immigrants?

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 9h

Meanwhile, Nazi Kilroy over here might as well be sitting behind the resolute desk, while Grandpa eats his pudding and fires off angry, word-salad tweets

Kilroy was Here graffiti, showing oval-headed, long-nosed line drawing figure peering over a wall, his fingers clutching the wall on either side

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 9h

I would just remind people that in season two of the West Wing, Toby losing his shit over the chief of staff unlawfully assuming Presidential powers for half an hour at a time was a big enough deal that they devoted an entire episode to it, one of the most powerful of the season

The New Republic @newrepublic.com · 1d

His slip of the tongue reveals who’s really in charge. trib.al/AoXcgAq

“Illinois governor says we’re provoking actions that are unlawful,” Miller said on CNN. “If I put federal law enforcement and National Guard into a nice sleepy Southern town, is anyone gonna riot?”

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

That line about the police stats made me so angry that I almost threw something at my phone, except that it wasn’t far enough away

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dan sinker @dansinker.com · 12h

New levels of hell: just got an email from our local AYSO cancelling today’s youth soccer games because ICE is at the Home Depot across from the soccer fields at James Park in Evanston.

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

As a college instructor, that generally aligns with my experience. I do worry about whether any of this Manosphere stuff is going to come down the pike in a couple of years, in one of our incoming classes, but so far I don’t see much evidence of it

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Guy Grossman @guygrossman.bsky.social · 11h

Are you affiliated with UPenn (faculty, staff, student, alumni, or parent/guardian of a student)?

If so, please consider signing the petition calling on President Jameson to categorically reject the Compact for "Excellence in Higher Education."

actionnetwork.org/petitions/ju...

Just Say No to Trump's Compact for Academic Extortion

Yesterday, the University of Pennsylvania was one of nine targets of the Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." Through it, Trump asks once again for universitie...

actionnetwork.org

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

I was at a conference a couple of years ago in Minneapolis, and was surprised to see very few people walking downtown, at least compared to a city like Toronto or NY

I did think there was less density of stores and restaurants than those other two places, and that that might have accounted for it

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 11h

He went to Yale law school, right? Isn’t that something they teach you there? Whether vague aspersions about political integrity rise to the level of a chargeable offense?

Ari Cohn @aricohn.com · 12h

I have some bad news for JD Vance if he thinks violating the oath of office is "pretty criminal."

abcnews.go.com/Politics/pri...

Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 12h

My first Flanagan project, and such a good one. I always appreciate his mix of horror and emotional catharsis

Reposted by Dale Chapman

Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine.bsky.social · 13h

We have armed secret police kidnapping people off the street based on the color of their skin.

When we win: we will haul them before a Senate committee. The masks will come off. There will be consequences.

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 13h

Yeah, if Glenn Greenwald, or Matt Taibbi, or anyone of a number of men grifters from the U of Austin set became ahead of CBS News— in the near total absence of editorial experience in journalism— yes, there absolutely would be the same hue and cry

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Dale Chapman @decmusicology.bsky.social · 13h

This is good. We need a couple of Jeremy Paxmans over here, to make sure more interviews go like this

a man in a suit and tie says goodbye

Alt: Jeremy Paxman, sporting a gray suit and blue tie, raises his eyebrows and says, “and it’s goodbye from me, goodbye”

media.tenor.com

Reposted by Dale Chapman

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 1d

This heartfelt and meaningful statement by Portland resident and author Cristina Breshears on another social media platform bears reposting here. I don't think the intent is to idealize Portland but to remind all of us what is important and why. (Posted here with permission.)

For nine nights now, the steady thrum of Black Hawk helicopters has circled over Portland. The sound is constant, invasive; a low mechanical beating above our homes. It’s expensive. It’s intimidating. And it’s unnecessary.

Our protests have been largely peaceful. There is no insurrection here. Yet this federalized military presence makes us feel like we are living in a war zone (the very kind of chaos this administration claims to be protecting us from).

The irony is painful: it is only this occupation that makes Portland feel unsafe.

Each hour of helicopter flight costs taxpayers between $2,000 and $4,000, depending on crew, fuel, and maintenance. Multiply that by multiple aircraft over multiple nights, and you’re looking at hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars burned into the sky.

Meanwhile, the Woodstock Food Pantry at All Saints Episcopal Church — which feeds working families, elders, and people with disabilities — has seen its federal funding slashed by 75%. How can we justify pouring public money into intimidation while cutting aid to those who simply need to eat?

This is waste, fraud, and abuse in plain sight:
* Waste of public resources on military theatrics.
* Fraud in the name of “public safety.”
* Abuse of the communities that federal agencies claim to protect.

Portland is a Sanctuary City. A sanctuary city is not a fortress. It’s a promise — a living vow that a community will protect the dignity and safety of everyone who calls it home. It means that local governments and ordinary people alike will refuse to criminalize survival. That schools, clinics, churches, and shelters will remain safe spaces no matter who you are or where you were born. But the term reaches far beyond policy. It’s an ethic of belonging; a refusal to criminalize need, difference, or desperation.

Sanctuary isn’t weakness. It’s courage. It takes moral strength to meet suffering with care instead of punishment, to believe that our neighbors’ safety is bound up in our own, to insist that safety is not achieved through force but through community, inclusion, and trust. It is living Matthew 25:40 out loud and in deed. It is an act of moral imagination and moral defiance. To hold sanctuary is to say: you belong here.

When we hold space for the most vulnerable — refugees, the unhoused, the undocumented, the disabled, the working poor, the displaced — we become something larger than a collection of individuals. We become a moral body. We do more than offer charity. We offer witness. We declare that the measure of a nation is found not in its towers or tanks, but in its tenderness.

Sanctuary cities are not lawless; they are soulful. They represent the conscience of the nation, a place where the laws of empathy still apply. To make sanctuary is to affirm that the United States is not merely a geographic territory, but a moral experiment: a republic that must constantly choose between fear and compassion, between domination and democracy.

A nation’s soul is measured not by the might of its military, but by the mercy of its people. When helicopters circle our skies in the name of order, while food pantries struggle to feed the hungry, we are forced to ask: What are we defending, and from whom? The soul of a nation survives only when we make sanctuary for one another. Not through walls or weapons, but through compassion and collective will. If we allow intimidation to replace compassion, we will have traded our conscience for control.

Please know that despite the hum of war machines overhead, the conscience of our city — whimsical, creative, stubbornly kind — can still be heard.

Portland is not the problem. Portland is the reminder. A reminder that a city can still choose to be sanctuary. That a people can still choose to be human.

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