And, in the interest of full disclosure, SKCOTUS has ordered the exclusive use of Comic Sans. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance are proposing to prohibit the use of Times New Roman by any person “with ancestry from an officially-designated shithole country.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/u...

The New Yorker may be famed for their fact-checking, but they seem to have dropped the ball in their proof-reading, at least of typeset copy ready for printing. “OF-/FLINE” is surely one of the stranger line-break hyphenations.

Just posted this up at @marktwainhouse.bsky.social and you can read and respond here. It's an excerpt from "What Have The Police Been Doing?" published in San Francisco, in 1866, and it's a Twain piece I've wanted to share in this forum for years. It felt like the right moment.

We’ve discovered a literal miracle with almost unlimited potential and it’s being scrapped for *no reason whatsoever*. This isn’t even nihilism, it’s outright worship of death and human suffering.

gizmodo.com/fcc-to-appoi...

Since the mid-1980s, public media have resisted GOP attempts to impose government monitors enforcing “objectivity and balance” in all programs. Who’d ever have imagined that the first to submit to peacetime censorship would be Murrow and Cronkite’s network, CBS?

The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list.

The thing about the Brazil tariffs is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list.

The thing about arresting Obama is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list.

The thing is … Donald Trump is on the Epstein list.

The MAGA court will not do anything to halt or reverse any of the regime’s plans to dismantle large parts of the federal government.

In view of what the regime intends to do to the Department of Veterans Affairs, it’s particularly shameful that NOT ONE of these justices ever did military service.

The maps DC’s WMATA has put out for new Metrobus routes in effect today are criminally deficient. When you change both routes and schedules, and some buses use different routes when westbound (or NB) from what they use EB (or SB), patrons need detailed maps w/ stops clearly marked and timetables.

There's a certain type of pundit that is utterly useless in recognizing and responding to white authoritarianism. If we want good coverage and understanding of today's politics, turn to letting the most marginalized speak and explain the historical precedent. The dudes from the Ivy League are lost.

Even the killer’s purported manifesto refers to Israel and Israelis, but does not mention Jews, Judaism, or anything Jewish. It even uses the term ‘genocide’ to refer not only to Israeli actions in Gaza, but to Guatemalan government actions against Mayan people.

Politicians’ and journalists’ rush to characterize the contemptible murders of two Israeli embassy staffers as antisemitic is inexcusable. Everything so far points to this having been an act of anti-Israeli political terrorism, but no there is no evidence yet of antisemitism.

Forgive me for asking, but what’s with all the voluminous, tent-like trousers on so many of the men at the Met Gala?

We’re getting deeper and deeper into Das Leben der Anderen.

“The families and lawyers of dozens of other Venezuelan & Salvadoran men who had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say their relatives and clients have similarly disappeared over the past week” www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Jackie Robinson's story is a totemic history about race and America.

Future retelling of that story should include the fact that in 2025 the Department of Defense erased him from their website. It is a new part of this history.

The Musk/Trump/Vance troika can’t deny that restoration of de facto Jim Crow is a major objective. But none of their lieutenants in the executive, Congress, or the judiciary, and few of their followers, denounce it. That just exposes how deeply the USA’s “original sin” still permeates our culture.