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I am still stinge watching my way through the second season of Strange New Worlds, but the third season of the show premieres sometime this summer, so I’d better finish it up before then. Anyway, I love this show and crew and the trailer looks appropriately kooky and wacky so let’s goooo!
They’re gonna do a season three of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I enjoyed both seasons, but the second one was definitely better.
There’s a new Frank Lloyd Wright house that was just built in Ohio. The home was constructed according to plans completed by Wright just before his death.
The extended trailer for Mario Kart World, the new Kart title launching on Nintendo Switch 2 in a couple months. Love a new Kart.
50 Ways to Rest. “Wander slowly around the block. Look at the trees. Look at the clouds. Look at the moon. Stand barefoot on grass.”
NYC is getting a new subway map, based on the 1972 Unimark/Vignelli map. I know this puts me in the minority of design aficionados, but I have never cared for the Vignelli map — too much style over substance IMO.
The championship match of the 2025 Tournament of Books pits Percival Everett’s James against Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! What a matchup! I won’t spoil the result…you’ll have to click through.
Folks, I can’t even today. I gotta tap out. I hope to be back with you tomorrow.
M. Gessen: Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. “The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.”
Nature poll of 1600 US scientists: 75% are considering leaving the country, “many said they were looking for jobs in Europe and Canada” or “anywhere that supports science”.
Clickens! Judge paintings of chickens based on characteristics like persistence, altruism, petulance, clairvoyance, and friendliness.
Lots of great comments from students, parents, and faculty in “The End of College Life?” thread about how they’re thinking about the changes to higher education in the US under the Trump regime.
Timothy Snyder: “The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous.”
An E-Bike Transformed My Family’s Life. “I felt connected to our neighborhood in a way I hadn’t ever experienced.”
Margaret Sullivan on “the need for straight talk right now. Enough with soft-pedaling from the media. Clarity! Courage! The truth!”
This ProPublica story about ICE deportation flights, with intel from flight attendants who work them, is horrific. “Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact.” The Trump admin is treating these people like animals.
On April 5th, a group of prominent national organizations (including 50501, Indivisible, Hands Off, MoveOn, and Women’s March) and many local organizations are all coming together for a day of nationwide action and protest.
This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights — enabled by Congress every step of the way.
They want to strip America for parts — shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid — all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich.
If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.
This is gonna be huge. There are events all over the country on April 5, and if there isn’t one near you, you can plan your own. There are signs you can print out to bring (or design/bring your own).
For more information, you can check out the Hands Off! website, the See You In the Streets site, or this informative collection of info from several sites/orgs.
A two-part online training event on the Fundamentals of Organizing. It kicked off tonight at 5:30pm ET and part 2 is on April 8.
The record for the longest individual speech in the Senate belongs to segregationist Strom Thurmond. He spoke for 24 hours & 18 minutes in a racist and futile attempt to prevent the Civil Rights Act of 1957 from passing.
Mercator Extreme is a fun tool that you can use to choose any point on Earth as the pole and then view the resulting ultra-distorted Mercator map.
With a headline like this, how can you resist? On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding). “After he finished his speech, he received applause and cheers from one and a half tables and dead silence from the rest.”
“A fragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur.”
No One Is Safe From America’s Abusive Immigration Authorities Anymore. “Immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse, and deport these tourists & workers instead of working with them.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson says that Facebook is removing her posts. Her two most recent posts, both critical of the Trump regime, are not on the platform anymore.
From Aubrey Hirsch, It Could Be Much, Much Worse, an illustrated guide to what health care and insurance was like in the US before the ACA.
You can also find this guide on Instagram.
Of Course Trump Will Tank the Economy. It’s What Republicans Do. “They screw up the economy. Later down the line, Democrats get elected and have to fix everything.”
In this 10-minute video, John Lithgow reads each of the lessons from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Bookshop).
Number two: defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of our institutions unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.
Snyder himself made a series of 20 videos a few years ago in which he reads each lesson and then provides more context on what it means. Here’s the first episode on anticipatory obedience (he starts reading after a short intro, at about the 2:40 mark):
Lesson number one is: do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
So, this is the first lesson because it’s about the basic choice we make when we confront difficulty. It’s about the choice of all choices: are we going to go with the new flow or are we going to stand — if only a little bit, only hesitantly — as long as we can against the current?
Again, the whole series of 20 videos can be accessed from this playlist.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: AI is mid tech for mid tasks. “The use cases for artificial intelligence across every domain of work and life have started to get silly really fast.”
Senator Cory Booker is holding the floor of the Senate and says he “will speak for as long as I’m physically able to lift the voices of Americans who are being harmed and not being heard in this moment of crisis”.
The United States Disappeared Tracker is “tracking persons politically arrested, detained, or disappeared by the Trump regime since March 9, 2025”.
The view from Europe, courtesy of Zeit Online: Thanks America, That’ll Be All. “Now that lunacy has installed itself in Washington for the next four years, the time has finally come for Europe to once again try its hand at hosting the spirit of the age.”
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and, especially, again in 2024, the adjacent possible of American society has shifted dramatically. For the Washington Post, Philip Bump asked a number of people who study systems of government and the erosion of democracy the following question: “Given the country’s trajectory and what’s unfolded in other countries, what can we expect the United States to look like in five or 10 years’ time?”
Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die (Bookshop) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Bookshop):
I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long.
But also (emphasis mine):
I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Bookshop):
Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.
Thomas Zimmer, author of Democracy Americana:
A little over two months after Trump returned to power, it seems undeniable that even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated democratic resilience in both the political system as well as civil society. In mere weeks, Trumpists have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy. That means we must recalibrate our expectations. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proved wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. Let’s finally discard whatever notion of “it cannot happen here” that is still floating around.
God, the “it cannot happen here” argument was so stupid even back in 2016 when people were debating whether Trump was a fascist. If nothing else, it was clarifying to be able to stick anyone who was chastising others for worrying too much into the “I’m highly skeptical of anything you write now” box.
Anyway, the whole piece is worth a read.
White House Correspondents’ Dinner Scraps Host In Favor Of Terrified Silence. “While we respect the legacy of a presidential roast, if you so much as cough, you will be forcibly removed.” Please enjoy each autocratic shift equally.
A thread from Berkeley political science professor Omar Wasow about how protests are effective actually. Cites research about the Women’s March, BLM protests, the Muslim ban protests, etc.
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They’re pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can’t or won’t do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a “calamity” and says “the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends”.
Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don’t have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I’ll post it for you.)
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse. This will not work — ok, actually it will totally work to achieve the long-time conservative goal of gutting the US social safety net.
Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman are buying The Rumpus. “They are committed to staying true to the magazine’s core mission of publishing both emerging and established risk-taking writers and artists…” Gay was a founding editor of the magazine.
“The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.”
From the Center for Third World Organizing, an Organizing 101 bootcamp, “a multi-day day intro to organizing training designed for organizers, activists and community leaders”.
Multi-Player plays a grid of multiple copies of a single YouTube video, each with a slight additional delay. The site requires a bunch of bandwidth, but the effect is trippy when it works.
This excerpt from Conan O’Brien’s acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is quite good.
Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.”
(thx, andy)
Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Ways to Spot a Fake Masterpiece. I’ve always loved this sort of thing, even before I owned a probably-fake Basquiat.
In a stage production that premiered last year in London, Steve Coogan played four roles (Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Major TJ Kong) in an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The play was adapted for the stage by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley. A filmed version of the play is currently playing in theaters…here are some trailers and clips from that:
The play’s run has ended and I don’t know if it will be restaged elsewhere, but like I said above, a filmed version is showing in theaters and you can look for tickets near you.
P.S. In the original version, Peter Sellers was supposed to play the same four characters as Coogan does in the play but was reluctant to play Major Kong. In the end, Sellers sprained his ankle and couldn’t play Kong in the cramped airplane set, but he still played Mandrake, Muffley, and Strangelove. (via @fritinancy.bsky.social)
March 2025 Anti-Trans National Risk Assessment Map. “The risk level for transgender youth and adults has significantly deteriorated in the latest update. Most notably, the United States has now been designated “Do Not Travel” for foreign citizens.”
Apple has added the Lumon Terminal Pro computer to their devices lineup, right alongside the iMac and Macbook Air.
There are so many reasons these days to covet a Swiss passport but let me give you one more: the design kicks ass. First issued in 2022, the document was designed by creative agency RETINAA.
Drawing on cartographic tradition yet modern in its use of 3D modeled landscapes, the design depicts an imaginary journey along watercourses, from the Alpine peaks down to the valleys, through the 26 cantons and to the world beyond. This journey starts on the first page of the document, which features the Pizzo Rotondo, a summit in the Saint-Gotthard Massif at the crossroads of linguistic regions. Under ultraviolet light, contour lines reveal the landscapes’ topography, enhanced with architectural landmarks that showcase the country’s rich cultural heritage and history.
There are all kinds of beautiful security features that show up only under UV light:
What I love most about the Swiss passport is the idea that things can be official & beautiful, secure & beautiful, utilitarian & beautiful, meaningful & beautiful. From an interview with one of the designers:
With the design, we wanted to redefine what a Swiss document looks like in the 21st century. The design of passports often looks outdated, even though the technologies used to produce these documents are extremely innovative.
Instead, we wanted to create a contemporary design around a visual narrative. It allowed us to incorporate security features that are not only difficult to counterfeit, but also play a role in the narrative. Ultimately, the passport should be a document that holders can trust, identify with and be proud of over the next 15 years!
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