Tom Lin

Painting by Xue Jiye. A naked man sits on the floor with his back against a wall and with both hands peels his face from his skull. He appears to be screaming.

reading the news

The Logic of Destruction And how to resist it

The historians are speaking plainly & directly.

Timothy Snyder, specialist in the history of Central & Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.

open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

“I’m here to chew gum and kick ass,” he said, unwrapping another stick of Trident, “and I’ve still got like three packs of gum.”

Left Organizing Is in Crisis. Philanthropy Is a Major Reason Why. Progressive philanthropy lacks good strategy, so too many of our organizations are hollow—and that left us unable to prevent a second Trump term.

"We must grapple with the reality that the current models we have for philanthropy are not up to the task of incubating, developing and supporting strategy on the left."

on the list of serious election post-mortems, highly worth your time to read

www.thenation.com/article/soci...

"oh ho, but just last year you said running people over with with a big steamroller was wrong!” I exclaim delightedly as my enemy fatally runs me over with a big steamroller. it seems I have won this battle of wits

A dialogue window labeled AMONG THE LIVING CREATURES. Two full progress bars in green extend across the window. The top bar, “Manuscript Target,” shows 118,764 of 110,000 words written. The bottom bar, “Session Target,” shows 4,180 of 2,500 words written.

done with the hard part, now onto the hard part!

doctor: i know what you need. there’s a great clown in town that will cheer you up.

pagliacci: but doc,

doctor: wiggles

pagliacci: oh. haha. i thought-

doctor: i’ll write the name down. there’s another clown in town too, but you can skip it. pagliacci. not funny. bad bad bad bad bad. stupid

I think journalists, policymakers and good govt types are struggling to understand DOGE because their mental model is that it is a government reform commission, operating like previous ones. Maybe. But it might be better to start thinking about it as a hostile takeover of the govt by oligarchs.

Roland Busch, the chief executive of Siemens, the industrial company based in Munich: 2025 will be the year of industrial A.I. It will be a powerful tool to address skilled labor shortages and boost productivity, creating substantial growth opportunities.

Siva Sivaram, the chief executive of QuantumScape, a developer of solid state lithium-metal batteries based in San Jose, Calif.: In 2025, the race for global battery supremacy will intensify amid growing demand across sectors like transportation and A.I. The battle for lithium-ion batteries is lost to China, but the future depends on next-generation technologies that outperform them. I hope the United States leads in this new era of energy storage.

Colson Whitehead, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author: I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the Earth. Villains triumph and the innocents suffer. I imagine these trends will continue.

There are 12 other answers but, as you'll see by reading the first two responses, @colsonwhitehead.com pretty much sums it up

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/o...

Close up of hand from Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci, in a gesture of benediction

in 2025 this gesture will be coming back in a big way for me

there are some days where i have more people mad at me online than my ancestors would have had mad at them in their entire lives. there is functionally no difference between this and being cursed by a witch

i've still got no comparisons for this story to anything else in american politics in my lifetime

Put down your phone and walk through a wall. Or write a book. It's the same thing.

The Hawk Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis Of Bag Culture | Defector I can’t ease you into this one, so: Haliey Welch, colloquially known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched a bespoke cryptocurrency token called HAWK last Wednesday, the same day she told Fortune it was “...

it wasn't until I read this (very good) @defector.bsky.social story that I realized her name is spelled Haliey, which is just an exceptionally bizarre and cruel decision for her parents to make

I would love to write a piece on the Adjustor’s goodreads profile.

Only ever thinking of Søren Solkær's photographs of starling murmurations.

WISDOM IS BACK!!!
(If you're not familiar, this fantastic queen of a bird has been hatching chicks on Midway for at least 74 years and is practically saving her species)

I was already excited to click on a news story about Rudy Giuliani having a meltdown in court today and YELLING at the judge. But nothing prepared me for the courtroom sketch

devastating truth

Barnard Bulletin, New York, November 22, 1938

On Melons and Melancholy | Los Angeles Review of Books Ben Wurgaft demonstrates how Steven Shapin’s “Eating and Being” illuminates the intellectual and cultural dynamics of “dietetics”—the relationship between diet, health, and identity—like no prior work...

Melons could kill you; so could melancholy. In his new book Eating and Being, the historian of science Steven Shapin analyzes the longest-enduring system of medical and gastronomic thought in European history, dietetics. My review is up at LARB: lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-m...

Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: “I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.” When he was 42, Cormac McCarthy fell in love with a 16-year-old girl he met by a motel pool. Augusta Britt would go on to become one of the most significant—and secret—inspirations in literary history...

why is this written like this lol www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

politics reporters are so washed man. i can't find any information on Walz's bench, squat, or power clean at all

Coooooool!!!

I am so honored to be speaking at the National Book Festival this month, an annual celebration of books put on by The Library of Congress. If you’re in the DC area I hope you’ll come see me speak with Alexander Sammartino about writing violence and the west.

www.loc.gov/events/2024-...

discovering that design within reach unfortunately exceeds design within grasp

Day of Action for Libraries: #NoCutsToLibraries — Invest in Libraries Your library and your community need your help! Our public libraries are facing a potential $58.3 million cut.

NYC libraries face a $58.3 million cut that could force Saturday closures, meanwhile @NYCMayor announced a $225 million Cop City. Budgets are moral documents: libraries amplify human thriving and cops amplify violence. @NYCCouncil #NoCutsToLibraries investinlibraries.org/dayofaction

Average American president has been convicted of .74 felonies

when you design your syllabi, remember that the point of education is to get students to engage with something so weird that they never stop thinking about it for the rest of their lives