Christopher Douglas
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crddouglas.bsky.social
Christopher Douglas
@crddouglas.bsky.social
1.5K followers 590 following 300 posts
American literature, Bible scholarship, Christian Right, apocalypse now and then. Univ of Victoria. My latest: "What If God is a ‘Pagan Amalgam’: Marilynne Robinson and Historical Bible Scholarship"
https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/37/2/67/7208648
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crddouglas.bsky.social
Christopher Douglas @crddouglas.bsky.social · Mar 28
In a new article, I argue that Blood Meridian's judge is a human-embodied but intellectually diminished divine being who labors as an evolutionary scientist to piece together the methods of creation in which he previously partook but has now forgotten. Open Access #SSHRCC

doi.org/10.5325/corm...
A Synthesis of the Christian, Gnostic, and Evolutionary Readings of Blood Meridian
ABSTRACT. Scholars pursuing a gnostic reading of Blood Meridian have never explained why and with what consequences an archon might assume human form. Indeed, the train of interpretation, from Hans Jo...
doi.org
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
volts.wtf
Today on Volts: I've had more requests to cover this than almost any other topic in the pod's history, so now, at long last, balcony solar! We dig into how "plug-in solar" took off in Europe & how it's making its way to the US, starting in Utah. Backyard DIY types rejoice!
What's the deal with balcony solar?
Cora Stryker joins me to explain how "plug-in" solar took Europe by storm and is finally, via Utah (?), making its way to America.
www.volts.wtf
November 26, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
adamserwer.bsky.social
You pull yourself up by your boostraps. Me? I DESERVE free money from the government, and so do my rich friends bsky.app/profile/cwar...
cwarzel.bsky.social Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 1d
when its definitely not a hostage situation
November 25, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
karlbode.com
"This has all been especially painful for X users who are, as a baseline, extremely racist. And they are now suffering through the psychic torment of learning that users, predominately from the Global South, are behind some of the bigger right-wing accounts on the site."
Republicans astroturfed themselves
Read to the end for a good Thanksgiving reminder
www.garbageday.email
November 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
acbm.bsky.social
inaugurating a new series, out next summer in hard copy + open-access PDF:

on the so-called hymn of the pearl, with Syriac & Greek texts + English translations, Syriac & Greek glossaries, and commentary (incl. a lot of Manichaean texts) 🐍
www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
The Pearlsong — Harvard University Press
The Pearlsong is an ancient poem that recounts the story of a Parthian prince sent by his parents on a mission to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a giant serpent. Along the way, the pri...
www.hup.harvard.edu
December 20, 2024 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
kevinmkruse.bsky.social
If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand”

Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.
November 23, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
davmicrot.bsky.social
Underappreciated lesson from 2016: most fake news was run for profit (not ideology) & right-wing fake news thrived because it sold better than left-wing fake news. X takes that to next level with a social media platform designed for right-wing users, intentionally incentivizing right-wing fake news.
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 3d
Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait.

My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.
A Twitter account called Ivanka News tweets an AI image of a young woman wearing Muslim garb. The woman is holding a sign that says "I came here illegally. Should I be deported?" Ivanka News writes: What is your response to this person ?? In the "About this account" tab, it appears the account is based in Nigeria An account called MAGA scope writes: Who, in your view is the great enemy of the United States? Communism, Islam, Democratic Party, or Satan? The account is based in Nigeria. An account called MAGA Nadine writes: You go to work and find this. What would you do? The attached pic is an AI image that shows a microwave. The microwave has a sign that says "For religious reasons, this microwave is now making halal food only." The account is based in Morocco. An account called America First posts an AI image of Tulsi Gabbard. They wrote: How would you rate your trust in Tulsi Gabbard on a scale of 1-10?
November 23, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
rubenbolling.bsky.social
3️⃣7️⃣ MORE HOURS
to back the Kickstarter for Volumes 1 and 2 of The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug Library - Collecting all comics from the comic strip's start in 1990 through 1998! Here's just one of hundreds
CLICK HERE👇
bit.ly/TomtheDancingBugKickstarter
November 19, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
karenattiah.bsky.social
I will never forget having to edit Jamal’s final, posthumous piece for the Washington Post, after he was murdered.

He was calling for free expression in the Arab world. You can read it here :

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/glo...
Opinion | Jamal Khashoggi: What the Arab world needs most is free expression
The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events.
www.washingtonpost.com
November 18, 2025 at 6:48 PM
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70sbachchan.bsky.social
“Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable. Entire asset classes are degrading in real time, which translates to loss of value, business interruption, & market devaluation on a systemic level"- Günther Thallinger
@kmac & I dig insurance: www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/ins...
November 16, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
zackbeauchamp.bsky.social
Heritage, for its part, was so upset about this reporting that it threatened to sue Vox to try and stop publication. But we are confident in our source and our reporting.

Here's a gift link to the piece that Heritage tried to kill www.vox.com/on-the-right...
The toxic culture behind the right’s civil war
A Heritage insider alleging “openly misogynistic and racist” conduct shines a light on the right’s inner workings.
www.vox.com
November 17, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
bachynski.bsky.social
“When her professor emailed her feedback on an AI-written paper, she refused to open it. She still hasn’t. “It’s wasting his time because he’s editing a fucking machine,” Gwen said. “Whatever he has to say is meaningless to me anyway, because it’s not my writing.”
markabraham.bsky.social Mark Abraham @markabraham.bsky.social · 10d
New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...
By the end of the spring semester, Gwen reached a breaking point with AI. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be a Yale student,” she said. She thought that she was throwing away her education and the scholarship paying to support it. She decided to quit using ChatGPT altogether. She didn’t ask AI to help her sentences flow or to strike the right tone. She didn’t even use it to brainstorm. “I think that’s a skill you need to have on your own. That’s the core of being original, anyway.” Gwen recalled completing her final assignments without AI, sitting in the middle of a crowded library so that she felt watched. “I struggled. And they weren’t very good.” It was only then, she said, that she started to understand just how much learning she had missed out on. ∎
November 16, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
brenttoderian.bsky.social
Climate knowledge has been taken hostage to prevent climate action.

“It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies.”
Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage | George Monbiot
The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot
www.theguardian.com
November 14, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
irishrainforest.bsky.social
More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists granted access to the Cop30 climate negotiations in Belém (Brazil), 12% up from last year’s talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.

What should be the most serious, urgent talks on the planet continue to be a farce.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber all Cop30 delegations except Brazil, report says
One in every 25 participants at 2025 UN climate summit is a fossil fuel lobbyist, according to Kick Big Polluters Out
www.theguardian.com
November 14, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
tonyburke.bsky.social
The Carpenter's Son, Nicolas Cage's take on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, debuts tomorrow in the US. Not sure when it will make it to Canada. The Associated Press interviewed me for background in this preview article: www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/entertainmen...
Nicolas Cage's 'The Carpenter's Son' turns an apocryphal text about Jesus' youth into a horror film
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In the second century, as the canonical Gospels were being copied and circulated throughout the Roman Empire, another text about the life of Jesus was simultaneously
www.thecanadianpressnews.ca
November 13, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
hectorsocas.bsky.social
"The fallacies behind the cult of Loeb"
New entry in my blog. Other articles have covered the scientific aspects; this one reflects on the social phenomenon. I argue it’s driven by a series of fallacies
tinieblasyestrellas.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-...
The fallacies behind the cult of Loeb
How media hype and misunderstanding fuel pseudoscientific fascination  Introduction The word “cult” is used here in the sense given by...
tinieblasyestrellas.blogspot.com
November 13, 2025 at 11:09 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
donmoyn.bsky.social
Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. "
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...
Early Career Rescue Fellowship
www.uni-konstanz.de
November 11, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
adamserwer.bsky.social
The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons and Dragons to Be Racist
The fantastical roots of “scientific racism”
www.theatlantic.com
November 11, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
georgemonbiot.bsky.social
We should vote only for those who promise to make billionaires history.
We need a great levelling, through tax and redistribution.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t | George Monbiot
Money talks – and his essay denouncing ‘near-term emissions goals’ at Cop30 mostly argues the case for letting the ultra-rich off the hook
www.theguardian.com
November 8, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
planet4589.bsky.social
For those who keep asking me about 3I/ATLAS, here's a great writeup by my friend
@astrowright.bsky.social
sites.psu.edu/astrowright/...
Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS “Anomalies” Explained
Avi Loeb continues to claim that 3I/ATLAS has many anomalous behaviors that lead to the conclusion that it “might” be an alien spacecraft.  He carefully hedges the probability that it is a spacecraft ...
sites.psu.edu
November 11, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
theradr.bsky.social
AUTHORS!!

Remember that case where a bunch of authors sued AI for stealing their work? And WON?

Well, the settlement money has been announced. Each WORK that got thefted will be compensated $3k (split 50/50 bw publisher + author). So authors will be compensated $1500 per WORK stolen.

More here:
Homepage | Bartz v Anthropic Settlement Site
www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
November 10, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
racheledini.bsky.social
The whole piece is excellent but these paragraphs here are absolute bangers. And boy but it’s refreshing to see the New Yorker critique centrist views (here’s the archived version if you haven’t got a subscription: archive.ph/UNdFj).
Women, it should be noted, have dominated the teaching profession since the nineteenth century not because it's a misandrist job-protection racket but because early public-education advocates found that they could expand the school system more quickly by hiring women teachers, whom they could pay less than men. One might ask if difficult, essential work might be well paid, at this moment in history, regardless of a person's sex. But then much of the centrist manosphere's rhetoric is predicated on refusing to see half of what's in front of you. Newsom's executive order concerning men and boys acknowledges the strong correlation between social-media usage and mental-health disorders such as depression and anxiety, but it doesn't note that these effects manifest in girls at significantly higher rates. In "Notes on Being a Man," Galloway writes, "The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing, and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men." He could have said "young people," unless college bursars and landlords run a discount program for the ladies which I haven't heard about. Emanuel, in his Washington Post op-ed, endorses a double standard with even greater frankness. The cost of housing, he writes, "is, of course, a problem for all Americans—men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency." In other words, men and women pay the same bill, but we are obligated to understand that the social and spiritual price it extracts from men is higher. (If women want an emergency to call their own, it can be that they are not having enough babies.) What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The "female-coded" person, to borrow Krugman's terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can't acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person's duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital "P."This person's opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly. "You need Dad," Galloway, who has two sons, said on a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mom is the default parent ("They look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom"), while the necessary dad is the authority figure to whom Mom can appeal as the occasion demands. "There are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in," Galloway explained. "I don't know if it's the depth of my voice, my physical size." Boys, he went on, "begin tuning out their mom over time." One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might long for a deep voice to explain it. Reeves frets that fatherless homes will beget more lost boys, more twentysomething men living in their childhood bedrooms, and more fractured families. If we do not update our "obsolete model of the breadwinner father," he warns, "we will continue to see more and more men being left out of family life." As for what authority has decreed that these absent fathers should be "left out" of their own families, Reeves never says—the culprit's identity is shrouded in passive voice. Nor does Reeves explain how women's attainment of economic independence would cause their husbands to be "stripped" of anything, much less the many non-economic aspects of being a spouse or parent. The notion that fathers wander away from their families owing to some gnawing sense of existential dislocation—some humiliating certainty of their own uselessness or usurpation—s especially pungent when one takes into account the enormous gender gap in housework and child-rearing in heterosexual marriages. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, mothers who work full time do almost twice as much household labor as fathers. Research by the Nobel-winning economist Claudia Goldin has suggested that married men's disinclination toward housework and other "draggy business of family life" may be holding back birth rates, which should pique the interest of Republican pronatalists such as J. D. Vance. The deeper one sinks into our nation's alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents' house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it…
November 10, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
jennycohn.bsky.social
2/ Link: momentmag.com/the-new-chri...
The New Christian Right, Antisemitism & U.S. Democracy
For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—and its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power and scaring Jews.
momentmag.com
November 9, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
jennycohn.bsky.social
“For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—& its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power & scaring Jews.” 11/4/25 (*Incredible* article discussing Tucker, Nick Fuentes, Heritage, Doug Wilson & his protégés, Yoram Hazony, & NatCon.) 1/
November 9, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
volts.wtf
Sigh. I apologize on our behalf.
Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile | Gaby Hinsliff
Who is driving the populist insurgency? It’s not grumpy pensioners or vulnerable teenagers – it’s my generation, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
www.theguardian.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Christopher Douglas
atrubek.bsky.social
I havent read such a banger of an essay in a very long time. This is so well-written!
Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…
lithub.com
November 8, 2025 at 5:37 PM