People often react to descriptions of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower by saying they’re afraid of it. So I want to say I found it grounding and sane-making. The narrator’s relentless hope for a better life and world and how she works to make it happen is even inspiring.
"We’re heading to an era where we’re going to start to tell the truth and it can’t hide anymore."
The way the siblings have come together, and acknowledged their roles, their love, and their pain, is rare. So very, very rare.
The MTA plans to deploy unarmed guards onto buses. Those guards will be directed to look out for riders who skip the fare and escort them off the bus at stops staffed by NYPD officers, who could issue a summons ranging from $50 to $100 and, in some cases, make an arrest.
Donating to
@RashidaTlaib
’s campaign fund today to thank her as I’m sure she faces incredible pressure but also because she had to conduct her protest of Netanyahu on her birthday.
“So much of humor is stock, and I want to steer away from that. Buttering the tie and slipping on the banana peel … I get it, you’re watching someone be ridiculous, but you don’t know the tie-butterer.” —Mary Robison
‘“What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine,” says Thrasher.’
The novel begins July 20, 2024. As her world falls apart she asks herself, how can I hold on to what matters and how can I find people to help me do that. She takes her answers and makes her way, again and again, offers lessons. Some intentional, some not. I was glad to read it.
People awkwardly clapped when Usha Vance mentioned her parents were immigrants from India and that this country allowed them to meet and fall in love…
Someone tell her the party thinks that’s the problem.
We are visiting my sister in Maine and this morning my husband has fixed a toilet seat, snaked a drain and caught a mouse with some help from my sister's cats. He is always handy but today he's hit new levels. This was all before noon.
Many years ago I was obsessed with this Anne Sexton story, The Letting Down of Hair, a reinvented Rapunzel. It called to me again tonight and I found it in the Atlantic’s archives:
I taught this novel about six years ago and my students especially loved one of the characters, a woman living in an open marriage with children by her different lovers. They could not stop talking about her.
Natalia Ginzburg is back! In May 2025 we publish her epistolary novel THE CITY AND THE HOUSE (tr by Dick Davis), with a new intro by Natasha Brown. Cover by
@emmapoppie
Sometimes, in a small rural town in Maine, it’s great to have a group of kids run by you wearing Pride flags as capes, waving Trans flags, laughing and talking about their Ren Fair plans and how much they love their yellow circle skirt. And then to realize it’s Pride.
Sitting on a hill with some neighbors and gossiping while listening to frogs, drinking a little gin and watching the fireflies flicker all up and down the grass. The littlest bit of rain, just a few drops, then nothing.
Heading to Montreal today with a small half-empty suitcase I hope to fill with books and spices. There is the car also but I hope to exercise a little restraint. My husband Dustin has never been and it was time to fix that.
A powerful memoir to keep for when you need to talk to an older writer friend but can’t for whatever reason. It’s about how to prepare for when hope much less success feels far away. The galley kept me good company during a hard spring.
I’d gotten out of the habit of using leftover coffee as coffee iced cubes for iced coffee but I’m so happy I remembered a few days ago. In time for this morning.
I still can't seem to change my user name out of this lurker goblin mode handle but perhaps this is just my goblin era. I still can't get back into my old account.
I learned to read at high speeds accidentally, reading fantasy and science fiction and gay pot boilers at B Dalton’s while my mom ran errands at the Maine Mall. We had a library in my town but I wanted the new books faster than they got them and I always ran through my allowance.
Always amazed by the things Edmund White knows and how casually and yet precisely he brings them out. His read of Malaparte’s French diary is like sitting with him next to a basket as he pulls out horrors and treasures and holds them out to you.
PREPOSITION responds to the
@Stanford
Red Wedding:
"I write to express my tremendous disappointment in the decision summarily to terminate the employment of twenty-three Creative Writing lecturers..."
🚨BREAKING: SOUTH KOREA TOP COURT UPHOLDS RULING THAT SAME-SEX COUPLES ARE ELIGIBLE FOR EQUAL SPOUSAL BENEFITS OF NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE AS STRAIGHT COUPLES
Thinking back to last October and how many of the articles noted without context that nearly half of the residents of Gaza were children. Like it was some isolated fact. Who of you will say the rest of it, I kept thinking, and of what I read, NPR came closest. Named the question.
These absolute clowns cheering in a fundraising text to me that Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris. Liz Cheney of the Iraq Working Group at the State Department during the Bush Administration? Who wanted war with Iran too? I never want to hear from her. I don’t care how she votes.
Restating for precision: Nate Silver - leading pollster pushing for Biden to drop out - now works for a company funded by Peter Theil…who is also funding GOP VP candidate JD Vance:
Please take a moment to read and share my interview with a surgeon who spent two weeks at the European hospital in Gaza. What he saw: many children shot in head and chest by Israeli snipers, death by malnutrition, epidemics, endless suffering
Grabbed this on 94 headed to Hudson, WI. We’re on the tail end of a long family trip, flying back to Vermont tomorrow. Exceptional clouds on this trip.
This conversation was a pleasure.
@BaizeShephard
is a writer I have loved since I found his essays on Gawker back in 2012.
@DeeshaPhilyaw
blew me away with The Secret Lives of Church Ladies in 2020. I’m grateful to them for including me in this series.
I did vote in the NYT Best Books of the 21st century so far feature but no, I didn’t vote for myself, and I didn’t want my roster public for several reasons including that I could answer the question every day and my answers would change. Maybe not all of them but many.
Boyfriendpilled. It’s like rain on dry land. Coffee truck, cute queer Asian men, comedian commentators. Nerds. Soft clapping. I don’t even like reality TV and I’m in.
"We call on Northwestern to reject this new McCarthyism and to reinstate without condition our colleague, Dr. Steven Thrasher."
As academics, journalists + health professionals we write to express solidarity w/
@thrasherxy
and reject his appalling persecution by
@NorthwesternU
.
Are there graduate programs for students writing YA Fantasy, or do they have a different path in this life? I am trying to advise a few students about this, and all I can think of is Clarion and possibly UC Riverside.
It can be maddening as a writer to hear your book is brilliant but the editor says, “I don’t see how I can publish it.” But given his record, it may be that
@groveatlantic
editor
@peterblackstock
will see how. An insightful interview with him at
@Post_45
:
Every new Trump favorite has that wild eyed look in their eyes for a few days like they’ll be different from all the others he used up and threw away. And you can see it go out of their eyes, photo by photo.
I couldn’t be there tonight but cheered from Vermont. I love this glimpse
@reluctantlyjoe
texted me of him and
@AntonHur
celebrating Anton’s launch of Toward Eternity at
@yuandmebooks
.
such a pleasure to work with Mary Gaitskill on this strange essay, and to see how she expresses uncanny and unknowable things with such clear prose
(available to read for free right now)
A 10-month
@NBCNews
investigation reveals how the corpses of the poor were systematically cut up and leased out — to major medtech companies, universities, the Army and beyond — as part of a flourishing business.
When confronted by our reporters, the program was suspended, the
@ambernoelle
I was very moved by Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, and found the use of time travel in it intricate and clever. I will add that I almost never feel that way about time travel.
Muhannad (
@igazaf
) has only received one donation since his campaign launched nearly a month ago. Please be one of his first supported by donating whatever amount you can ‼️♥️
If only E. M. Forster could have written an essay about the love advice he gave J. R. Ackerley— how “you must give up this idea of ownership, and even the idea of being owned.” He died with three different young men named after him, the sons of three of his married lovers.
Every open marriage personal essay seems to treat the concept as the final weigh station before divorce. There seem to be open marriages that work, but none of them involve writers.
While talking about old jobs and waiting tables in therapy I learned my therapist is a former chef, and it occurred to me this could be, in other hands, the basis for some kind of sitcom.