Do these people know nothing of oscars history? Gerwig will get her first best director award 20 years from now for her second or third worst movie, a biopic of Hillary Clinton
Over on bluesky, a refuge for all the daughters of the witches you didn't burn, someone told my boyfriend he should be boiled alive for suggesting that people should try to moderate their use of air conditioners
Imagine if Emile Zola had been like "Je n'accuse pas, words are so powerful, what even is morality or truth? Anyway best of luck to Dreyfus, my heart breaks for him and also for the French military"
in another life, i once got to help bell hooks resolve a problem with the IRS, and when i called to tell her that she owed nothing (IRS mistake of course), she said "good news comes on the wind"
It's actually quite simple: good writing is good, and bad writing is bad. Good writing about good writing is good, as is good writing about bad writing. But! Bad writing about good writing is bad. And—this is important—bad writing about bad writing is also bad
My wonderful mom passed away on Saturday. She was a lifelong reader and a generous Vermonter, so we are asking for donations in her honor to the Brandon Free Public Library, a small-town library she took us to every week, and sometimes every day, when we were little.
The University of California has invested in a Blackstone real estate scheme that essentially requires the rents of properties in their portfolio to go up 12 percent every year
Really excited for this space to sit vacant for a year until finally a place called STUDY BUDDIES that sells $30 lunchables opens for 7 weeks, at which point they knock the whole building down and put up a 14-story glass building that halts construction when it's 90% done
The Astor Place Starbucks closed for good last night. The SB signage is gone from this 4k-foot space, which they'd been in since March '95. Management told
@Joy_of_photos
that "the landlords jacked up the rent so astronomically high that even corporate Starbucks couldn't pay it."
“‘Crumps,’ as he refers to himself, brings the same critical eye to studying the downtown scene in his Substack columns that he does to his day job: copyediting World Bank reports.”
Months in the making, this beautiful essay about Sinéad by the former Twitter philosopher known as Fuck Theory was supposed to be a celebration--I'd secretly hoped she'd read it and send us a note or put out her next album. I wish it hadn't become a eulogy
We brought the Didion-NYRB corpus out from the paywall, if you'd like to spend an evening with her withering assessments of 9/11 patriots, Bob Woodward, the Unabomber, the Clintons, Woody Allen, &c.
In November 2002, Didion gave the inaugural lecture in the New York Public Library’s Robert B. Silvers lecture series, where she talked about the sentimentalization of September 11.
for $90 a year you can subscribe to the NYRB, which is like subscribing to dozens of substacks at once, but they're edited and also not written by peacocking fatheads who stormed out of their cushy staff jobs in a huff
@kathbarbadoro
Pretty amazing how the Brown alumni kept interviewing other Brown alumni and then wrote an article that was like "weird I know a lot of people from Brown so I put them in my article"
Do these people know nothing of oscars history? Gerwig will get her first best director award 20 years from now for her second or third worst movie, a biopic of Hillary Clinton
I got to interview
@dlseuss
, and she was a great correspondent: “My poems are grounded in that crumbling osmotic space between wilderness and failure. The very scent of it activates my imagination.”
I didn’t think the Brooklyn Museum could possibly have a worse exhibit than 2016’s Blue: Here's Some Art from Our Collection That Features the Color Blue, but here we are
very funny when a music writer has no taste because it's like, other than a willingness to say things like "a wash of synths," what exactly are you bringing to the table
@GraceSpelman
college choir singing a song called "come here for your fruit pulp" in a very solemn manner in a very solemn space—i had to get up and leave because i was in the front row and everyone singing could see me in tears
@Nicole_Cliffe
Told an expensive gym in San Francisco that I was moving to the Bay Area for a job at Google so I could get a free day pass to shower and relax while I waited for my friends to get off work
@nkulw
In the ac thread, there were no fewer than four people punctuating their posts with backslash-sarcasm-meta comments
/men be mansplaining news at 11
I'll be earnest: as a pell grant recipient in a low-paying industry who spent many, many years in new york skipping meals or having dinner off the dollar menu at mcdonald's, this loan forgiveness is incredible
"Since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one."
This is pure David Brooks-caliber sociology nonsense. He doesn't engage with a single real person or set of facts in the thread. Just a total fantasy that amounts to a just-so story about the decadent left
"Miyazaki suggests that humanity’s alienation from nature is older and deeper than capitalism, even intrinsic to what it means to be human. For him, problems of labor and the environment are always contiguous."
@LucyJakub
is brilliant on Miyazaki
every single one of those you don't have to read freud tweets is like "old men are trying to tell you to read freud but you don't need to listen to them, in fact you should supplant them and make your word law"
What if instead of a spreadsheet, you wrote a longer piece, an essay, let's say, in which the "facts" of authors' biographies were placed alongside their work and into historical context. You could evaluate the work and the person, some kind of "re-view" of their art and life
Once upon a time, you had to pay a small amount of money to "purchase" a collection of writing, printed on paper. A portion of this money, in aggregate, could be divided up among the writers, thus remunerating them for their labor
Of course in hindsight people can sketch together some kind of narrative about the US being in the throes of wrenching crisis that somehow came to a head in 2016, but come on, there’s no equivalent to the Depression here. That stuff is mostly post hoc rationalization
Let's see, what are some Brooklyn Museum exhibits from the last few years, there was "costumes from The Crown and The Queen's Gambit," "Kaws," "the color blue," and let's not forget the permanent installation "YO/OY" sculpture
@BrandyLJensen
Reminds me of the time some guy used my number to spend hundreds of dollars on Go-Karts, a speedboat rental, and various incidentals at Wisconsin Dells
I was dissuaded from my proposed introduction, which was, in full, “Joyce Carol Oates needs no introduction,” but this week I got to interview
@JoyceCarolOates
who, need I remind you, needs no introduction.
I used to read The AV Club every week, it was a champion of art films, a great venue for alternative cultural criticism, and it's where I learned the words "didactic" and "solipsistic." It's a disgrace what G/O did to them