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Kincso Biro @kincsobiro.bsky.social · 3d

“The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Mychal Threets @mychal3ts.bsky.social · 4d

Reading Rainbow… is back! 🥹

This LeVar Burton/Reading Rainbow raised human is feeling all of the library joy. We hope your kids believe they belong in books, just like you ✨

Take a look, it’s in a book 📚🌈🦋🌌
youtu.be/gHAIjSkmnYI?...

No Cats In The Library 🐱📚 | Reading Rainbow 📖 🌈 | Full Episode | @Kidzuko

YouTube video by Kidzuko

youtu.be

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Molly Jong-Fast @mollyjongfast.bsky.social · 3d

They ruined Google search for nothing

John Gramlich @johngramlich.bsky.social · 3d

So far at least, Americans are lukewarm about AI summaries in search results. Relatively few who have seen them think they're extremely or very useful (20%) or have a lot of trust in the information they get from them (6%). New data from @pewresearch.org: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Bar chart showing that 20% of Americans who have seen AI summaries in search results believe these summaries are extremely or very useful. Far more (52%) see them as somewhat useful, while 28% see them as not too or not at all useful. The chart is based on an August 2025 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

Bar chart showing that 6% of Americans who have seen AI summaries in search results have a lot of trust in the information they get from these summaries. Another 48% have some trust in this information, while 34% have not too much trust and 12% have no trust at all. The chart is based on an August 2025 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults.

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George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 @gtconway.bsky.social · 3d

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Dan Rather @thedanrather.bsky.social · 4d

There’s a very good reason polls show Republicans are being blamed for the shutdown.

The Shutdown That Really Means Pay Up

First poll shows Americans blame Republicans

steady.substack.com

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 10d

Adrienne Rich

I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, w no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 14d

Yes. Loved seeing her poem on The Slowdown today.

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 15d

❤️

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The Elegy Project @elegyproject.bsky.social · 15d

Chelsea Dingman, "Microchimerism"
@chelsdingman.bsky.social

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Erin Belieu @erinwriter.bsky.social · 27d

Taught John Balaban’s great poem “A Finger” to my students this morning. I can’t think of a poem that captures the immediate, terrible aftermath of living through the events of September 11th more movingly. Here it is: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152030...

A Finger

After most of the bodies were hauled away and while the FBI and the Fire Department and NYPD were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared, the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gow...

www.poetryfoundation.org

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 27d

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute…These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart

Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

www.theguardian.com

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · Aug 15

We go on.
We do not turn back.
The world becomes so small we can fit it into a handshake,
into a glance cast across the room,
a finger raised to the lips.
Everyone’s fingers are crossed behind their backs.

‘Then the Fog’, a poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Jorie Graham · Poem: ‘Then the Fog’

www.lrb.co.uk

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D. A. Powell @dapowell.bsky.social · Sep 1

Everyone who's alive should be reading Essex Hemphill

"Who dares to tell us
we are poor and powerless? We keep treasure
any king would count as dear."

BLACK BEANS

Times are lean, Pretty Baby, the beans are burnt to the bottom of the battered pot.

Let's make fierce love on the overstuffed hand-me-down sofa.

We can burn it up, too.

Our hungers will evaporate like-money.

I smell your lust, not the pot burnt black with tonight's meager meal.

So we can't buy flowers for our table.

Our kisses are petals, our tongues caress the bloom.

Who dares to tell us we are poor and powerless? We keep treasure any king would count as dear. Come on, Pretty Baby.

Our souls can't be crushed like cats crossing streets too soon.

Let the beans burn all night long.

Our chipped water glasses are filled with wine from our loving. And the burnt black beans-caviar.

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David Atkinson @davidatkinsonpoet.bsky.social · Aug 31

Last day of summer and reflecting on the grim weather, this came to mind. The worst that could happen me today is that I got a little bit wet. This is weather on a different scale. 'Katrina' by Patricia Smith, from Blood Dazzler

#poetry
#poemoftheday

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Terry L. Kennedy @terrylkennedy.bsky.social · Sep 1

The grasses are light brown
and ocean comes in
long shimmering lines
under the fleet from last night
which dozes now in the early morning

from "September" by Joanne Kyger
buff.ly/2BU7N9S

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · Aug 31

Bhanu Kapil

I don't want to beautify our collective trauma.
Your sexual brilliance resided, I sometimes thought, In your ability to say,
No matter the external circumstances:
"I am here."
From this place, you gave only this many Desiccated fucks
About the future.
Day by day, you discovered what happiness is.
As your guest, I trained myself To beautify
Our collective trauma.
When night fell at last, I turned with a sigh Towards the darkness.
I am about to squeeze out an egg, you Murmured
As you kissed me
Goodnight.
Hold a funeral for the imagination, I thought.

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · Aug 29

Ellen Bryant Voigt

To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward -
is this merely practice?
Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We'll float, you said. Afterward
we'll float between two worlds-
five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I'd remember that—
until everyone we love is safe is what you said.
"Practice", from Messenger: New and Selected

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Acre Books @acrebooks.bsky.social · Aug 19

For TERMINAL SURREAL's video trailer, we're creating a chorus of voices reflecting #MarthaSilano's influence. To participate, record yourself reading Silano's “Death Poem” w/a voice memo/recorder app on your phone & email us at [email protected] for where to text the file. Due: Fri., Aug 22.

Poet Martha Silano sits outdoors with a water bottle in hand. Clear glasses, purple coat, blue jeans. Hedges and trees in the background.

Martha Silano's "Death Poem." Available online at Post Road Magazine.

Cover image for Martha Silano's posthumous poetry collection TERMINAL SURREAL. Bright pink moth rests on purple orchid.

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · Aug 19

—D. Nurkse

Not Yet America
At the end we are marching and yelling, waving signs we inked in ourselves, just as we did when we were kids.
The street never changes. Drinkers watch from a bar, suds glinting on their upper lips. A bald man is being shaved in a barbershop. The chair swivels toward us: how round those eyes are, in a face smothered under lather. A baker in a white paper bag hat stares from a doorway, poised to clap flour from his hands. Behind an iron grille, a nun sighs and crosses herself.
Apparently we will always have to march, singing to keep awake, calling
"peace" and "justice" as if those sibilants could answer: in the numbing cold, even in the night sky, in the empty quadrant of Scorpio.
There you'll find us, and the street too, since it stretches forever. A bodega with steel gates. A Jiffy Lube. A chain-link fence on which a child has spray-painted the first stroke of the first letter of a name.

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Vicki Ziegler @bookgaga.bsky.social · Aug 19

"It was starlike, the small, reflective slug
crouched in its own echolucent shine."

#TodaysPoem #poetry
ER S/P GSW by Paul Hlava Ceballos (@paulhlava.bsky.social‬) (2023 Academy of American Poets) tinyurl.com/yancmncz

ER S/P GSW

A colleague tells me of her ER patient,

tinyurl.com

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Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · Aug 19

Hi poetry reviewers, writers, readers: here’s a document I made of paying reviews markets. Holler at me if you see something that needs to be updated/deleted/added! 🙏 I would appreciate it. Would love this to be a community resource for freelance writers to be paid for their criticism.

Poetry Review Submissions: Paying Markets

docs.google.com

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · Aug 19

"It's like a PhD in every field!"

"Can it reliably do college-level work, such as accurately identifying and summarizing pertinent information?"

"No."

"So what is really does is sound like an expert to people who aren't experts in that field?"

"Yeah! That's what everyone wants, right?"

Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · Aug 19

Notable that AI tools could not even generate accurate meeting summaries beyond “a couple hundred words.” That’s useless for minutes.

And for lit review they *completely* shit the bed.

But these aren’t people’s favorite tasks & AI is way quicker, so many will keep using them, truth be damned.

I Tested How Well AI Tools Work for Journalism

Some tools were sufficient for summarizing meetings. For research, the results were a disaster.

www.cjr.org

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Haymarket Books @haymarketbooks.org · Aug 19

Sally Rooney: I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it

I would happily publish this statement in a UK newspaper – but that would now be illegal

www.irishtimes.com

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · Aug 16

Larissa Szporluk

Benefits of Drowning
The light has been so awful.
Not whipped as a child, I'm scared of human power.
They say there is an end but I go round and round with unscrupulous desires in regions of my throat.
Nests smell from neglect.
Autumn will smell too if the summer wasn't good.
Hard rain brings exaltation.
All the little mouths come out, blowing rings of brightness.
I can enter them, not stagger, not a skeleton, not plagued, not by ghosts.

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RobertFredeKenter @rfredekenter.bsky.social · Aug 12

For @sealeychallenge.bsky.social Day #11 The Brush (2024) by Eliana Hernandez-Pachon, Columbian poet. A striking narrative long poem, documenting a rural atrocity through different POV: witnesses, investigators, victims & nature itself. @archipelagobooks.bsky.social @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social

Cover of The Brush by Eliana Hernandez-Pachon trans from Spanish by Robin Myers.
Orange cover with a coal black abstract art work with orange flames/petals and white thin chains (as roots) by Cecilia Vicuna.
A beautiful edition of this work by always remarkable Archipelago Books

The Witnesses resume:

If we add the fact that the night entered the houses with
them, the night came and went as it pleased, extending its
dark sky as skin is stretched, as God covered the body of
the animals with hides, if we may borrow that image, which
is to say, enveloping it all, if you add the fact of the night in
all its vastness and envelopment, you might come up with
an idea.

The Brush continues:

When the bodies collapse in the town square,
picked out at random,
the houses are left behind with their yards,
their kitchens, their sheets pressed smooth,
receiving, still,
the sun's warm touch.
Things are left with their layers
creased into each other,
asking why,
this,
now,
things don't think before speaking,
they charge ahead
like old trains
derailing.

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