📷 Hello There.
📷 Hello There.
Adrian Carrasquillo in The Bulwark:
Surreptitious extremism is still extremism, and ICE remains an undertrained, overly aggressive organization. Which is why, in this shooting just hours after Homan’s remarks, we see all too clearly what happens when armed agents swarm blue-collar working parents fearing for their lives.
Okay FINE, here’s the new Ghost in the Shell TV show’s opener followed by GITS:SAC and 2nd GIG:
I don’t want to speculate too much here based on a movie trailer, but if Denis Villeneuve found a way to play up Chani and Paul as quasi-adversaries I’d consider it an improvement to Dune Messiah (which was already one of my faves in Herbert’s).
🎓 Reading work by Brooklyn Walker and Paul A. Djupe this morning: “I am a Christian nationalist”:
Most identity work has focused on identities with long histories – race, ethnicity, religion (in broad strokes, like ‘Christian’). When we study these identities, we are asking about groups that have existed as groups, often for hundreds of years. But with Christian nationalism, we get a unique opportunity to watch a new identity develop. The ideas of Christian nationalism have been around for a long time in American history. In this study, we document that a new label is now being applied to the worldview, and that people are changing how they think about themselves as a result.
I haven’t seen a movie in theaters yet this year, but Coyote vs. ACME might get me there.
Approx 15-20 years back I recall reading a biography about Golda Meir that made frequent reference to her ‘kitchen cabinet’ where key government officials would gather over cigarettes and cups of coffee to make hard national decisions. Given the reporting I’ve read on Kevin G’s decision to stay at MSU, and the behind the scenes influence of figures in the Athletics department and University Advancement, I wonder if a similar cabinet here could be called the ‘varsity squad.’
📷 Building on a post from yesterday, I’m not the only person in my household enjoying the summer bloom.
📷 The midsummer bloom is in full swing
Why should athletics be the only department at an institution subjected to transfer portal shenanigans?
📷 The midsummer bloom is in full swing
DC as a microcosm of our national moment:
The white nationalist org Patriot Front marched in DC on July 4, 2026 before the evening’s ostensibly bipartisan festivities. A more historically informed observers pointed out that the KKK held a similar march in 1926. Elsewhere, a massive copy of the Constitution’s preamble was carried through the streets.
Our new birth of freedom remains an ongoing difficult labor and delivery.
A convenience of getting married on a holiday is–all other considerations or current events aside–you’ve always got something to celebrate. 14 years and counting of moments worth celebrating.
🇺🇸 From Public Domain Review for today:
Read the first edition pamphlet of Frederick Douglass' famous 1852 “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” speech. After he finished speaking there was “a universal burst of applause” and 700 copies of the pamphlet were subscribed to on the spot: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/frederick-douglass-fourth-july-speech #July4th
One of my favorite observations about tradition comes from G. K. Chesterton, who famously wrote that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.”
Tradition gives our ancestors a vote.
Hello there.
Living under an extreme heat advisory, just in time for July. These periods of heat always have me wondering how people who wear lots of synthetic fibers (like athleisure wear or super stretchy stuff) maintain their sanity.
Public Domain Review’s (@publicdomainrev@mastodon.social) Sunday Read this week features depictions of Cholera and infrastructure failure. Maybe in the face of defunding public health and deregulation we should dust off some of these prints.
All I want is to be left behind in the AI revolution. The choices I’ve made about how I create and how I conduct my work were made specifically so that I would be left behind, part of a faithful remnant of people who see, value, and promote the singular experience of humanness.
But AI has not left me behind as promised.
The belief that I could decide not to use it and then I wouldn’t have to deal with it was naïve. It’s not a product on a shelf I can bypass because I’m not interested in it. It’s showing up everywhere in everything. (And it almost always makes those things worse.)
Rescue teams from at least 10 countries were racing to help Venezuela in its search-and-recovery efforts after devastating twin earthquakes on Wednesday, but they faced stark hurdles even reaching the disaster zone.
The bsky account that made early accurate predictions about what was going to happen to the reflecting pool RE paint peeling and algae blooms is back with an updated set of predictions. It’s like old-school 538, but for material science and microbiology.
Ryan Broderick on Knicks internet hype:
All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people.
Shout out to the indie web for keeping it human around here.
