Peter L'Official

Blue states should prohibit the use of masks by federal authorities.

Opinion | The useful political lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s college application America’s understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic.

"To be white in America is not to have to think about it," R.W. Terry wrote in 1981. Everyone else needs to be attentive to their race — not only as they understand it but also as White people do.
Gift link: wapo.st/40HTp2j

Franz is one of the most insightful chroniclers of music labor from the ground level. Always worth engaging with his insights, especially when they challenge your assumptions.

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

File impeachment articles that are just direct quotes from the Declaration of Independence

what booker is doing right now is an example of what i mean when i say things like “we need more ambition right now.” there is room in american politics right now for people with ambition to take big stands and reap the rewards. he’s doing it!

Sen. Booker’s speech was a substantive and moral account of this moment. He did not read the phone book. He did not babble.
For 24 hours @booker.senate.gov laid out a detailed, damning, and critical narrative of truth, history, politics, morality, humanity.

What will you do?

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.” “It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

Trump's 3/27 executive order targets the Smithsonian for advancing "the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct."

Trump argues that the exhibit's statement, below, is unscientific. He's wrong. As a biology professor and population geneticist, I agree with every word of it.

One of the defining feelings in American life, for decades now, is elites doing plainly criminal shit and nothing at all happening as a result. It is deranging in a way that virtually nothing else is. Media fixates on perceived street lawlessness but shit like this matters much more in my opinion.

The idea that people with humanities educations are ignoramuses pursuing meaningless debased fragments of what human knowledge used to be sounds more and more like projection from incompetent computer babies

Can we nominate a Facebook screenshot for a Pulitzer? I love this.

I texted @trufelman.bsky.social and we had a super-tiny chat about novelty, yet we managed to squeeze in Italian generals sporting jaunty little Tirol hats and nuns ditching their habits... europeanreviewofbooks.com/texting-with...,

If your excuse as an elected official, here in 2025, for not doing something that is in the interest of Dems who elected you is that Republicans might weaponize it, you are not living in 2025. They are going to weaponize anything you do, either way. They have demonstrated this over and over.

Boycott Tesla Electric car buyers don’t like right-wing politics. This means Elon Musk’s position at Tesla is very vulnerable and susceptible to economic pressure.

A collapsing Tesla stock genuinely erodes Elon’s economic power. If the stock is hurt enough, Tesla’s board will have no choice but to remove Musk as CEO in order to save the company. www.currentaffairs.org/news/boycott...

Everyone--EVERYONE--in higher education has to understand that this is Trump's plan for you, too: federal control over scholarship, curricula, discipline, admissions--everything. They want you to submit. Your only other option is to stand up, together.

30 years ago, we did. They were called "local newspapers."

Then the Telecom Act of 1996 allowed essentially unlimited corporate consolidation of media outlets and they killed off local news in the space of a single generation.

Columbia University, Profile in Cowardice And more news to start the week.

Columbia University has caved to outside forces attempting to silence pro-Palestinian speech at every turn, and look at where it's gotten them: raided by ICE and defunded by the federal government. hellgatenyc.com/columbia-uni...

UbuWeb, an avant-garde #web #archive that has existed independently for 30 years, is adding new content again.
No ads, no links to social media. Only #art (text, image video) for you to #discover.
ubuweb.com

NAACP lists companies that dump DEI in its tactical spending guide for Black Americans The NAACP wants Black Americans to steer their buying power toward corporations that haven’t pulled back from diversity programs under conservative pressure.

The NAACP is re-mixing 1930s-era "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns to confront the neo-segregationists targeting DEI.

apnews.com/article/blac...

I can’t say I’ve thought about inflation that much since the US Attorney in the district you and I both live in had to resign because the President wanted to make a corrupt deal with the Mayor, backed by the threat of a dangling DOJ prosecution, to terrorize immigrants and people of color here.

The AP should stop covering Trump events. Instead send those White House reporters out into the field to report on the harms and repercussions of his policies.

The U.S. public never needed coverage of pseudo-events anyway.

Nobody Elected Elon and LEAVE MY DATA ALONE! signs

HANDS OFF OUR PRIVATE DATA & TAX MONEY sign

Coalition of Labor Union Women hoodie

Members of Congress speaking outside of Treasury

Signs. Of. Life.

Protest outside Treasury Dept. tonight.

this is exactly what i’m getting at when i see these people have no understanding of civil society. they do not seem to conceptualize other people as having agency whatsoever.

aaaand now it all makes sense

The inability of the national media to understand this basic point ABOUT AMERICAN CIVICS is simply wild

I need Americans to hate this administration the way Kendrick hates Drake so they can actually stand a chance of surviving

Murphy: "This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let's call it what it is."

“As Trump Attacks Diversity, a Racist Undercurrent Surfaces” President Trump has promised a "colorblind and merit-based" society, while also equating diversity with incompetence .

Dante described a special place in hell for NYT headline writers, where they experience burning pain but there are no devils, no agents of torment, just weird ‘undercurrents’ like bad smells. Who is torturing them? No one in particular