Caroline Shea

An ICE agent shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen and San Antonio resident, in March 2025. Then ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety covered it up. He was 23 years old. I am calling for a full investigation into this shooting, including why there was an 8-month cover up.

In October 2024, the Georgia secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after receiving numerous reports from residents across several counties saying they’d received partially prefilled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC. trib.al/n6hAZOC

UN says Israel is stoking ‘ethnic cleansing' fears in Gaza, West Bank Intensified attacks, methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods appear aimed at permanent displacement, UN says.

Intensified attacks, methodical destruction of entire neighbourhoods appear aimed at permanent displacement, UN says.

really good writeup of the RELX/bookcon stuff, as situated in a broader media landscape where everything we love puts money in the hands of cartoon villains 🫠

my other fave is “you would have said this about the Industrial Revolution” yeah dude, I hope I would have vociferously objected to the mass death and immiseration from irresponsible forced use of barely-understood new technology by craven monopolists incapable of valuing human life in that era, too

realizing 130k words and five years in that i maybe need some sort of chart or list or apparatus to keep track of who knows what when in the novel rather than the current method: incomprehensible notes scattered across several word docs, my notes app, and 10+ notebooks

a “time out” button that temporarily mutes and lets you leave a note for yourself w/ the reason

Maybe try loose leaf? The little ritual of preparing it can feel similar to making coffee and you have more control over how strong you want to steep it that way. I love both Harney and Sons and Murchies for loose leaf. & a basic black breakfast tea can be great to have as a quick morning option

Thank you for writing it!

ICE officials knew use of force was rising well before Minneapolis shootings Internal agency emails show a surge in reports of ICE officers using more force going back nearly a year, but DHS leadership did not see it as a concern to be addressed.

According to internal emails obtained as part of a FOIA request, top ICE officials knew as early as March 2025 that officers were using dramatically more force against civilians and the targets of enforcement operations — months before federal officers shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A photo of a bunch of short story collections

Do you want to read some beautifully weird and frequently heart breaking scifi / fantasy / horror / litfic short story collections???

Of course you do!

Any of these will do the job for you :).

Don’t sleep on them!

Report: Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids' letters and drawings detailing conditions inside

ProPublica published children's letters and drawings documenting their sadness and suffering at Dilley. And Dilley staff are now retaliating by confiscating kids' letters and drawings.

www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...

just in case anyone needs reminding or a guide:

reactormag.com/anyone-can-v...

TO: newyork@relx.com ATTN: RELX CEO Erik Engstrom, Nick Luff (CFO), and Paul Ashton Walker (Chair) Re: Immediate Termination of contracts between RELX subsidiaries and ICE February 9th, 2026 Dear Erik Engstrom, Nick Luff, and Paul Ashton Walker, We are some of the authors that make events like BookCon—run by your subsidiary, ReedPop—possible. Another of your subsidiaries, LexisNexis, has a $22.1 million dollar contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), supplying them with the data they need to surveil and terrorize our neighbors, friends, and families.[1] We condemn any collaboration with ICE and call for the immediate termination of all contracts between RELX and ICE. ICE has a twenty-two year history of discrimination and abuse against immigrant communities. Under the current administration, their efforts have escalated in both violence and visibility—enabled by their partners in big data, including LexisNexis.[2] RELX is a multinational corporation worth $40 billion, of which events like BookCon are only a small fraction. Our power is limited. But BookCon advertises itself as a place where "fantasy meets reality,"[3] and the reality is that RELX is profiting from mass terror against communities of color, including the murder of eight people this year alone. The fantasy is that a bunch of readers and authors could ignore it; we know a villain when we see one. We, as authors, intend to honor our immediate commitments to BookCon and to our readers. If RELX chooses to renew their current contract with ICE–which expires on February 28, 2026[4]–we will be forced to reevaluate our association with all future ReedPop events.

if you're an author attending BookCon this year (or, to be honest, any other ReedPop events, which include NYCC), and would like to add your name to the letter: forms.gle/V7m2YbcGguAY...

Two-month-old baby 'choking on his own vomit' while detained in Dilley 'His life is in danger,' U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said about newborn Juan Nicolás. The child fell ill after spending almost a month — or half his life — in a San Antonio-area family detention facility...

‘His life is in danger,’ U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said about newborn Juan Nicolás. The child fell ill after spending almost a month — or half his life — in a San Antonio-area family detention facility.

Donate to We Lost Everything to a Fire. Help My Family Rebuild., organized by Chloe Clark On January 24th, our childhood home burned down. Our parents lost 50… Chloe Clark needs your support for We Lost Everything to a Fire. Help My Family Rebuild.

We have managed to replace my brother's wheelchair (bureaucracy hoops successfully jumped) and have set my family up in safe and calm temporary housing. Thank you again to everyone who has donated or shared the link!

An excelllent post on the impact of place, viewed through the lens of fantasy literature:

Insight: Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped. Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.

Insight: Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped. reut.rs/4qzZRCE

Magic, in Clarke’s world, is synonymous or inseparable from the living force of the natural world. It doesn’t seek to refuse reality or deny history. Instead magic functions as a radical rejection of stasis and separateness, a dissolving of borders not just on the level of nations but on the level of individual consciousness. When Drawlight is swallowed up by the enchanted wood, Clarke writes: “The trees, the stones and the earth had taken him inside themselves, but in their shape it was possible still to discern something of the man he had once been.” This is the darker side of Clarke’s vision of interlinkedness, an eco-consciousness that is all-consuming, vengeful even, rather than benevolent. But even this ambiguous force carries with it a kind of hope: Drawlight’s devouring represents a world where humans function as part of nature rather than stand outside of it. He is able to live “inside” the world while still retaining “something of the man he had once been.” In her depiction of magic, Clarke reintegrates the human into the natural.

It seems worth noting, then, that White’s stalwart page in The Once and Future King, is named Thomas for Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, the medieval text which inspired White’s novel. It’s believed Malory wrote his epic while in prison. Like Arthur, he may have found himself grappling then with the lessons of his life and its inheritances. The closing passage of Le Morte is often quoted, rife as it is with its compelling allusions to the once and future king. Yet what’s not as often referenced is Malory’s own denial of that eventual resurrection. He writes: “…and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll not say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde say: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff.” Here in this world he changed his life. Arthur’s promised resurrection pales in the face of his existence. The king may not come again, but his dream will never die, not while there are those who keep the candle burning. As White turned to Malory in the wake of World War II, as Mirrlees imagined a mirror of London in the aftermath of World War I, I've turned to their work, and to the work of Le Guin and Clarke as the United States continues its descent into rightwing authoritarianism. Each novel reckons in a different way with what a “love of country” unbounded by borders and grounded in a recognition of nonhuman agency could look like.

I wrote about nation, nationalism and the agency of nature in fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, Susanna Clarke, Hope Mirrlees, and T.H. White: patreon.com/posts/150679...

That’s a great question! I wasn’t able to really touch on it here & would want to do more reading before I did but I definitely see the two things intersecting & also probably in conversation with her interest in Taoism/the idea of balance.

also definitely partly a danger of switching back and forth between working on fiction (where I happily disregard the rules if it looks/sounds good) and nonfiction (where if I start stacking too many clauses I will forget my own argument)

I’ve also been going a little mad w/ power w/ my compound sentences lately so when I try to pare this back it often also leaves a variety of confusingly vestigial colons

it truly is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment you publish or share a piece of writing you will notice, at a minimum, 3-5 stray commas

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part.

very very excited (& nervous! stage jitters!) to share news of a project that my person & I have been working on for so long now

we're starting a tiny artist residency here in Baltimore; say hello to The Doll House!

www.thedollhouse.studio

For more on how conditions at Dilley are affecting children, read my latest for @nbcnews.com

On Nov. 16, a mental health counselor recorded in Kamilla’s medical records that her mother reported the girl had lost her appetite after being “served food that contained worms.” A week later, the couple said, children were told to gather in the gym for what they believed would be a Thanksgiving celebration. Excitement spread as families saw tables set with turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, they said. The children waited expectantly. But when a parent asked when the celebration would begin, Oksana said, staff told them the holiday meal was for employees, not detainees. The children, she said, watched despondently as the feast was packed away.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast.

The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me.

But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

Thank you!!

That’s so kind of you to say, thanks for sharing it!

also thank you to the multiple people who told me i needed to read Lud-in-the-Mist: you were correct!