My top 10 nonfiction reads of 2025
1. The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
2. Holding the Line - Barbara Kingsolver
3. The Ethics of Ambiguity - Simone de Beauvoir
4. Who Rules the World
5. Technofeudalism- Yanis Varoufakis

My top 10 fiction reads of 2025
1. Katabasis - R.F. Kuang
2. Mexican Gothic - Silvia Moreno-Garcia
3. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter - Stephen Graham Jones
4. Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
5. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

History that reads like Douglas Adams: Around 1776, certain important people made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power…

-Howard Zinn

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

#IndependenceDay

The wish of the ruling elites, most of all, is that a sense of weariness will settle into the consciousness of well-meaning people, that they will accept being entertained rather than engaged.

- Tom Hayden in the introduction of The Zapatista Reader

Shout out to US Press Freedom Tracker!

Our research often overlaps. As an LA local, I try to ID these incidents and track them to produce specific real-time insights and response. In moments like these, I hope to "set" so USPFT can "spike" with follow-up reporting. And I also get leads from them! 👇

I'm attending No Kings's event, “NO KINGS Omaha, NE + Council Bluffs, IA” - sign up now to join me! www.mobilize.us/nokings/even...

One cannot do theoretical research without having the courage to put forward a theory … ; all theoretical research must however have the courage to specify its own contradictions, and should make them obvious where they are not apparent.

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics

This is a deeply satisfying sentence:

We can arrive at a system of manifold manifestations of the mind only by pursuing the different directions taken by its original imaginative power.

-Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 1

Help keep the Haskell Free Library special!

gofund.me/ba2af35d

"Listen, folks, all animals are equal, okay? But let me tell you, some of them—the best ones, the smartest ones—they're more equal than the others. Believe me, nobody knows more about equality than I do."

Can someone explain to me why Republicans are scared to give Washington D.C. statehood, but are advocating for Canada to become a state?

Fewer than 700,000 presumably reliably Democratic voters vs. 40 million people used to free healthcare and pissed off at the current administration.

Good piece from @anandwrites.bsky.social

Kash Patel is dangerous & unqualified to be the Director of the FBI. Use @@standupamerica.bsky.social’s tool and urge your senators to reject his confirmation: act.standupamerica.com/letters/lett...

Trump says America on his watch will inspire 'awe' from the rest of the world.

Last time he as president, world leaders literally laughed at him while he was on stage at the United Nations.

Nothing like establishing a petrostate in the 21st century.

I take it back. R.F. Kuang’s Babel is far and away the best book I have read this year.

My top 5 fiction and non-fiction books of the year:
Fiction
1. Dr. No - Percival Everett
2. Ordinary Monsters - J.M. Miro
3. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn - Mark Lawrence
4. The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey
5. Orbital - Samantha Harvey