Julian Lucas

The Board of Peace has wasted no time starting its first war.

The decline of right wing cultural production is just due to the fact that they don’t like culture, they like the signifiers of culture, ie “classic sculpture means white people are better.” They don’t like art at all except for this purpose. They don’t even like the nerd stuff they whine about

PBS Cuts Ties With Former Harvard Professor Elisa New Following Epstein Email Release | News | The Harvard Crimson PBS has stopped airing former Harvard English professor Elisa F. New’s show, “Poetry in America,” after emails released by the House Oversight Committee last month revealed close ties between New, her...

Alas, he did manage to infiltrate poetry www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

PHILADELPHIA —The National Park Service has started dismantling exhibits about slavery at the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park. www.pennlive.com/news/2026/01...

You used to be able to "inspect element" in this country. You used to be able to download video

Into the abyss The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.

I wrote about how concentration camp regimes evolve and why it's not too late to stop this, even though we are deep in it now.

*frantically googling*

moral arc bent wrong how to fix

wikihow diy moral arc fix

moral arc technician near me

Opinion | In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War

I went to Minneapolis last week. What I saw was horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. Gift link to my latest column: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/o...

Renee Good's Murder and Other Acts of Terror An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley on how to think about ICE—and the broader history of police violence.

"Strangest of all is the liberal pipe dream that local police will stand up against ICE and CBP, when police have collaborated with ICE and been deployed to protect agents from protesters, even in so-called sanctuary cities."

An interview with Robin D.G. Kelley
www.bostonreview.net/articles/ren...

once again saying: our ancestors accomplished more, with less, against worse.

QR codes for ICE is hilarious, like they’re a restaurant menu that shoots people in the face.

Trump appalls with attack on Civil Rights Act: 'White people very badly treated' Critics pounced on President Donald Trump Monday after he complained to the New York Times that the Civil Rights Act – the landmark 1964 legislation that outlawed racial discrimination – was “unfair i...

We're going full Restoration now. Trump attacks Civil Rights Act as unfair white people. www.rawstory.com/trump-267487...

ICE and other federal agents claim they mask b/c they're at risk at being doxed and killed. Here's what they're really dying of: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Minneapolis City Council member Jason Chavez: "Many of our immigrants neighbors are picked up simply by moving their cars. Help your neighbors take out the trash, because there are many reports of neighbors being kidnapped when they're taking their trash out."

We’ve fallen so far from Kellogg’s chaste vision

Renee Macklin Good's wife, Becca Good, released a statement and it moved me to sobbing tears:

archive.is/ur35j

This is why it annoys me when people try to make it seem as if this is how things have always been. There was a time when greater literacy and reading as a part of everyday life for people of every class was a national mission. Then it changed drastically and now we’re here.

Something Abominable Is Happening on Elon Musk’s X. Everyone in Congress Should Be Ashamed. An app the U.S. and U.K. governments use has devolved into a source of A.I. porn. Lawmakers are keeping dangerously mum.

happy(?) new year everyone, for my first piece of 2026 I wrote about Grok's *still*-ongoing CSAM blitz and the troubling, embarrassing silence of lawmakers in the U.S. and U.K. who've spent the past year censoring the internet for the sake of "child safety" yet are saying and doing nothing about X:

30 years ago they were like we have to ban song lyrics for the children but it’s full steam ahead for the here’s how to do drugs until you die machine

Now more than ever.

this is your mission. our pedophile president needs you to jump out of a helicopter to kidnap a head of state and his wife so some oil ceos can make a lot of money. we’ll be watching from a resort in florida that still serves wedge salad and checking how many retweets we get. good luck soldier

A lot of people forget how in 2004 the Bush regime kidnapped the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and dumped him in Africa.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Zohran has been mayor for twelve minutes and it's still cold in NYC. What the fuck. Mr mayor can you please turn on the sun.

Julian Lucas Writing by Julian Lucas (https://www.julianlucas.com)

Thanks to all who read me! You can keep up with my work through my newsletter and website

buttondown.com/julian.lucas/
www.julianlucas.com

There’s more, but I’ll close with this short profile of the painter Kerry James Marshall, who was delightfully combative about Afrocentrism (“this crazy idea”) and the merits of abstraction (“random shapes”) www.julianlucas.com/posts/kjm/

The Met’s Luminous New Rockefeller Wing Still Casts Some Shadows A seventy-million-dollar renovation beautifully presents the museum’s non-Western art—even if doubts remain about whether all of it belongs in New York.

And I wrote a number of art reviews, including this critique of the Met’s renovated Rockefeller Wing in the context of calls for repatriation www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.

I profiled Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web—and traced its “enshittification” through his career-long struggle to keep it free and open www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...