Something recent in threads on Bluesky, an (in my judgment) ill-considered, typo-ridden moment of dudgeon from somebody I like, U.S. politics historian Rick Perlstein, worth paying attention to for (and despite) what’s wrong with it: This isn’t a post for chastising Perlstein, let me say, though certainly it’s about disagreeing  …

A friend sent a gift of music a few days ago — included me in the group who receive a digital mixtape from them this time of year. In the set is this ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ cover from Melanie Safka’s 1975 album Sunset and Other Beginnings. I’d never heard it.  …

This is going to be a post principally about getting on with what in the last of my ‘brief items’ posts, Oct. 19, I said I would try for, which is to start more deliberately attending to Pankaj Mishra, his work and dialogical intersections and so on. But it’s not  …

There [in his autobiography, Jefferson] recalls that on February the seventh, 1779, when he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, [he] supported an amendment to a slavery bill that would address, early on, the contradiction at the heart of the new-born republic. He supported an amendment that  …

Matt Sitman: I was thinking, too, Chris, of the great — I forget whether it’s the very final lines or in the last two or three paragraphs — of A River Runs Through It — where the title comes from, right? ‘Eventually all things merge into one, and a river  …

I often go to Google News for an idea of what’s current in headlines. I don’t like it, but for this bare, quite specific purpose, it’s the convenient and (so far) all-too-difficult-to-replace tool. Google News disgusts especially for systematically representing news- and newslike-media from every corner as though all were,  …

An organization I’m involved in from several years ago now, never as a central participant but nevertheless in a continually deepening way, the National Writers Union, put out quite a strongly worded statement last week calling for coverage of new open warfare in Israel-Palestine that isn’t tilted in favor of  …

I’ve had a little bit to say about social media, very occasionally, in what I write on this site, and once in a while have the thought that it’s a topic I ought to be discussing only more. It’s certainly a topic that takes up space in my head. It  …