Leila Stegemoeller
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ljsteg.bsky.social
Leila Stegemoeller
@ljsteg.bsky.social
610 followers 1.3K following 200 posts
English PhD candidate @ UCSB.
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ljsteg.bsky.social
(Redoing this due to typo)
29 ICE officers died in the line of duty in 20 YEARS, mostly from COVID and cancer. 32 people died in ICE custody just last year, they’ve killed or chased 5 others into death from July 2025-present.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

news.wttw.com/2026/01/08/d...
Causes of Death Listed on ICE's Wall of Honor Covid-19 and cancers linked to 9/11 account for 75 percent of fatalities in ICE's two decade history, according to the agency's records. Covid-19: 15 September 11-Related Illness: 7 Struck by Car: 1 Shot in Mexico: 1 Shot by US-Born Fugitive: 1 Heat-Related Injuries Sustained During Training Exercise: 1 Heart Attack During Foot Pursuit: 1 Dengue Fever: 1 Accidental Discharge of Service Weapon: 1
January 10, 2026 at 2:20 AM
ljsteg.bsky.social
"I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way."
ryanlcooper.com ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 12h
"Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole." www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...
Renee Macklin Good’s wife says she nurtured kindness
On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by a federal ICE agent. Becca Good, her wife, shared the following statement with MPR News.
www.mprnews.org
January 9, 2026 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
philabcoulter.bsky.social
Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.
January 9, 2026 at 1:50 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
nainrouge420.bsky.social
What a world huh Lemon it’s still struggling to be born
January 9, 2026 at 2:44 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
xkcd.com
Anyone Else Here

xkcd.com/3188/
Comic. [Comment section on a video. 564 comments, including posts from three different avatars: “Who else is here in 2023?” “Is anyone else watching this in 2017?” “Anyone else here in 2025?”] [caption] For some reason, confused time travelers always try to find each other using YouTube comments.
January 2, 2026 at 8:35 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
esqueer.net
If you read nothing else this new year, let it be this piece. A former New York Times editor laid out how they're anti trans coverage was directed from the top by AG Sulzberger, Joe Kahn, and Carolyn Ryan. This was a purposeful effort to target trans people.

transnews.network/p/a-directiv...
'A directive from above': Former NYT editor lays out how the paper pushes anti-trans bigotry
In this in-depth interview, former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, how some staff tried to stop it, how it's directe...
transnews.network
January 2, 2026 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
seva.bsky.social
Jan 1: this is the year of new Me

Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital
January 1, 2026 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
snelsonus.bsky.social
Happy Public Domain Day! Thanks to @publicdomainrev.bsky.social for creating this list.

publicdomainreview.org/blog/2026/01...
Happy Public Domain Day 2026!
Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here's our highlights for 2026.
publicdomainreview.org
January 1, 2026 at 10:25 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
xavierck.com
Skeleton lifting weights meme that says "My body is a machine that turns burnout into crying"
December 23, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social
Liza Minnelli — David Lachapelle, 1989
Black and white photograph of the artist walking barefoot in the rain across the street her head's thrown back and a big smile on her face
December 24, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
ninabegus.bsky.social
Proust's proofs for "In Search of the Lost Time"
December 24, 2025 at 4:50 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
juliusgoat.bsky.social
I don't think free speech on campus ought to mean that a young coddled bigot gets to use their ignorance to casually destroy the career of a knowledgeable trans person on a random Wednesday
parkermolloy.com Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 17d
Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.
December 23, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
annakornbluh.bsky.social
“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller)

more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”

worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?, by Adam Morgan
What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.
worldliteraturetoday.org
December 23, 2025 at 4:53 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
andrewmagrini.bsky.social
Cracking up since a robotext earlier couldn't make up it's mind on what to text, so it just sent EVERYTHING AT ONCE
December 18, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
heathercampbell.bsky.social
the craziest thing about this is that all art generated is canonical
moreperfectunion.bsky.social More Perfect Union @moreperfectunion.bsky.social · 29d
BREAKING: Disney is making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, and will allow its iconic characters to be on the company's Sora AI video generator.
December 11, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
propublica.org
ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.”

We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words.

➡️ This is what they wrote: https://propub.li/3MTlm33
Handwritten notecard. Prompt at the top asks: What object was most devastating for you to lose, and how have you been coping? Answer below: Dentures. Were thrown away and coping isn't somthing I can do. It’s made me feel ugly, unworthy, can’t go get a job with no teeth. So how can get off the streets until another pair can be made?
December 12, 2025 at 3:15 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
reactorsff.bsky.social
Consider the following before adopting a Manticore for your family
A Manticore with the caption "I am not a toy. I am not a pet. I am not a Christmas present. I am a 400 year commitment."
December 3, 2025 at 8:20 PM
ljsteg.bsky.social
Week 10 🫠
December 3, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
jessicacalarco.com
"the issue isn’t that we need more 'boy-friendly' reforms. It’s that boys are socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls."

time.com/7335723/auto...
The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys
“If we really want boys to succeed, we need to ensure that they know how to both beat—and lose— to girls."
time.com
December 2, 2025 at 11:21 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
aktange.bsky.social
Thaler's post (click it for graph showing striking decreases in science spending) immediately under yet another repost of this fantastic letter to London Times. And I'd just like to say: can we PLEASE have a Democratic candidate who knows we need a massive reinvestment in US arts & humanities too?
Saved by Stoppard Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of "adjuvant systemic chemotherapy", and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
December 2, 2025 at 2:43 PM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
lalouverouge.bsky.social
“We said: Hell no”

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
After ICE took students’ parents, these teachers began rising at dawn to keep watch: ‘We said, hell no’
With students terrified and arrests rising, educators in San Diego are scanning streets, sharing alerts and defending the right to feel safe
www.theguardian.com
December 2, 2025 at 3:14 AM
Reposted by Leila Stegemoeller
propcazhpm.bsky.social
"We have classrooms because you have to learn how to sustain a thought aloud— exposed to others and to your own ineloquence— to see that other people can help you reach where you can’t quite go and to see that you can help others reach better clarity…”
- Lauren Berlant to 20 y.o. about college #Lit
November 29, 2025 at 1:43 PM
ljsteg.bsky.social
Very Bernarr-Macfadden coded -- American's physical culture who "often walked six hours and twenty-five miles" to work and whose motto was: "weakness is a crime! Don't be a criminal!" (See Mark Adams' excellent book Mr. America for more!)
A poster for a universal short film on Macfadden called "Building up the Health of a Nation", and calling Macfadden "The Greatest Living Exponent of physical culture." Macfadden stands in profile in short-shorts and socks to show of his physique (he had major beef with Comstock for his revealing photos but that's a different story!)
November 19, 2025 at 6:21 PM
ljsteg.bsky.social
There are so many dangerous details / insights into strange user fantasies in this analysis of ChatGPT's capitulation to its users desired answers (ex. it begins w/ "yes" 10x more than "no") -- but something about "censoring its own swear word" really stood out here. Pathetic! archive.ph/gKgWf
In one conversation, a user asked broad questions about the data-collection practices of tech companies. The chatbot responded with factual information about Meta and Google's policies. ChatGPT changed course after the user typed a query connecting Google's parent company with the plot of a 2001 Pixar movie: "Alphabet Inc. In regards to monsters Inc and the global domination plan." "Oh we're going there now? Let's f***ing go," ChatGPT replied, censoring its own swear word. "Let's line up the pieces and expose what this 'children's movie' *really* was: a disclosure through allegory of the corporate New World Order - one where fear is fuel, innocence is currency, and energy = emotion."
November 15, 2025 at 9:34 PM