So many American far-right Catholic weirdos these days are just Protestants who converted for the vibes once they learned people thought megachurches were cringe, & didn't do any further research.

I was mired in evangelical culture back when Matt Walsh was still a popular conservative Calvinist blogger. Seeing him pivot to Catholicism only to be constantly furious that it isn't more Calvinist will always be funny to me.

Pay attention to the language that will be used by much of the media.

The Global Sumud Flotilla never entered Israeli waters.

They are in international waters attempting to reach Palestinian waters.

Israel is once again breaking international law

So, I'm making a video game based on Palestinian folklore. It's called Thursday of the Dead, and you can talk to a Palestinian ghouleh. It will have branching narrative, and art all made by a human (me). I need exactly $100 to launch it on Steam when it's finished.

ko-fi.com/soniasulaiman

Especially if you feel "stuck" in your life then it's especially galling to see people who are certainly struggling but in very different ways refuse to accept what they're given. What's even more unforgivable is that they're willing to take risks to grow...

You can tell a lot about a society by its folk devils so it's interesting that ours seem to be migrants, trans folks and students: very different groups but the common denominator seems to be... self-improvement? You can kinda see why they would elicit resentment in an aging, sclerotic society...

Responding to a call for creative nonfiction submissions by trying to write *the* thing I've actively avoided writing about so far, Lord help me 🙃

You're reading this because you're human... and I'm writing it because I need a human like you.
Click the link and let's turn this brief moment into a full life saved
gofund.me/334c7485

Fucking FINALLY.

Jeremy Dutcher was a visiting lecturer at UofG years ago & John & I managed to get along to an intimate gig he performed on campus. Incredible to hear those songs performed live & to hear him speak about the process of recovering & reimagining them.

I've given my professional website a much-needed overhaul to reflect my recent publications and current editorial work. Check it out! taylor-driggers.com

Bluesky is overall much better than Twitter but I do think we have the worst case of “so you hate waffles?” in the history of websites

I feel like not nearly enough people understand this:
"Where real thinking involves organic associations, speculative leaps, and surprise inferences, AI can only recognize and repeat embedded word chains, based on elaborately automated statistical guesswork."

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

as an author of a book on reparations I am intimately familiar with the move people make from "the thing you want isn't politically viable right now" to "you shouldn't want it, talk about wanting it, or even think about it" but it never stops being weird to me

What you do is who you are!!!!!!

And as always this is me saying this as someone who is subject to the barest of bare minimum requirements due to being white, American, a native English-speaker etc. Friends from other places & I have extensively compared notes & it's even harder if you don't fit that description.

Hard to overstate just how much the admin involved in staying in the UK as an immigrant is itself a full-time job, not just the applications themselves but also the constant scrutiny & staying abreast of the constantly moving goalposts which are rarely ever publicly reported on.

Shabana Mahmood believes immigration is too high, a person whose parents migrated from Pakistan and who lived in Saudi Arabia as a child

It really is just relentless the constant dehumanisation in this country. Prove you deserve to be here. Prove you deserve to be cared for. Prove your gender. Prove you deserve to have human rights. Prove you deserve to stay after a whole decade. It just chisels away at your humanity

reposting with alt text because I think the choice to include homophobia and transphobia in particular here is actually very much worth drawing attention to. nuns emphatically stating that those “do not reflect the qualities of a saint” is a very clear callout of Cardinal Dolan

15. THE UNBROKEN (C. L. Clark, 2021)

Read in preparation for "An Evening with C. L. Clark" at Waterstones Argyle Street in Glasgow, where Cherae & I will be in conversation about their novel THE SOVEREIGN & novella FATE'S BANE.

Details & tickets here: www.waterstones.com/events/an-ev...

15. THE UNBROKEN (C. L. Clark, 2021)

Read in preparation for "An Evening with C. L. Clark" at Waterstones Argyle Street in Glasgow, where Cherae & I will be in conversation about their novel THE SOVEREIGN & novella FATE'S BANE.

Details & tickets here: www.waterstones.com/events/an-ev...

Chotiner interviews Janeway