Caroline Shea

By the Pricking of My Thumbs: A Reading List for October | Caroline Shea Get more from Caroline Shea on Patreon

And if that isn't enough, have some more: www.patreon.com/posts/by-pri...

For all your October reading needs, a collection of hauntings:

Worth adding, “AI may know - but they cannot compare their experience to ours, and we cannot know whether or not to believe them”.

(Relevant passage attached from Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus)

Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials.

Stephen Miller is murdering Venezuelans and Colombians in cold blood bc he believes it helps his propaganda campaign to paint Latinos as dangerous.

www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

MAGA Lite: What “Bari Weiss Conservatism” Is, and Why It’s Dangerous The new CBS executive isn’t exactly MAGA. But her polite Trumpism will still help destroy America as we know it.

Weiss very intentionally does not describe herself as a conservative or Republican and wraps her politics in terms like "free press." That makes more useful at advancing Trumpism than explicitly right-wing figures. newrepublic.com/article/2014...

CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors.

ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't

CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart.

ISILDUR: true

Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time Record solar expansion and steady wind growth driving world’s shift away from fossil fuels in 2025, report finds

For the first time in history renewable energy sources are now generating more power than coal worldwide.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

“Four months ago, in Skrmetti, the Court used purported medical uncertainty to give Tennessee more flexibility to discriminate. Today, Alito used purported medical uncertainty to give Colorado less flexibility to protect.”

Outcry as Trump plots the plunder of US forests: "You can almost hear the chainsaws" Public comments suggest repealing the Clinton-era "roadless rule" is wildly unpopular.

In 1999, Bill Clinton announced that “the last, best unprotected wild lands anywhere in our nation” would be shielded by a new rule that banned roads and drilling.

Today, these lands could soon see chainsaws and logging trucks amid a push by Trump to raze these ecosystems for timber.

ONE WEEK! DC! Come to the launch party in Adams Morgan! @rvoronacote.bsky.social and me at Lost City Books and a few fun surprises, and a very spooky party www.eventbrite.com/e/happy-peop...

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

Bunny Ears - Nightmare Magazine Hannah’s first impression of Colden Hills Music Camp is that, for a place with “hills” and “music” right in the name, it’s too flat and way, way too quiet, and the one thing she initially thinks must ...

You know what’s a great read?

@kristinaten.bsky.social’s Bunny Ears over in @nightmare-magazine.com!

Creepy summer camp vibes, body horror, and one of the best endings I’ve read in a while.

Don’t sleep on it :)

www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/bunn...

We wanted to understand Democratic Socialists of America. So we talked to two old guys who voted for Trump. (Yes, this is literally the article.)

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

Over the background of John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shallot, white text reads: The Long Ago: A Medieval and Renaissance Reading List

We seem to return to certain periods of time as readers and writers again and again. Each time the story shifts. Richard III appears throughout history and literature in many guises, taking sometimes the role of a weak-willed villain, sometimes the maligned victim; Anne Boleyn, too, takes her turn as a scheming seductress and tragic heroine, depending on who’s narrating events. Both historians and HBO TV dramas delight in the violences and excesses of the Borgias. And the fall of Rome, of course, will probably never stop being retold, in any medium it can be.

The Long Ago: A Medieval and Renaissance Reading List

+ some thoughts on medievalism and why we return to certain eras in fiction and scholarship again and again. Read here: www.patreon.com/posts/long-a...

What Liberals Get Wrong About Trump's Executive Order on Antifa Liberals dismiss antifa as just an idea. That opens up the activists, researchers, and organizers to a real risk of persecution.

“Anti-fascism was one of the most unifying and electrifying banners to organize under during Trump’s first administration.” - important reflection from comrade Matthew Whitley on not dismissing the ways antifa IS real (but not what Trump says) @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2025/09/27/t...

ICYMI:

Over the background of John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shallot, white text reads: The Long Ago: A Medieval and Renaissance Reading List

We seem to return to certain periods of time as readers and writers again and again. Each time the story shifts. Richard III appears throughout history and literature in many guises, taking sometimes the role of a weak-willed villain, sometimes the maligned victim; Anne Boleyn, too, takes her turn as a scheming seductress and tragic heroine, depending on who’s narrating events. Both historians and HBO TV dramas delight in the violences and excesses of the Borgias. And the fall of Rome, of course, will probably never stop being retold, in any medium it can be.

The Long Ago: A Medieval and Renaissance Reading List

+ some thoughts on medievalism and why we return to certain eras in fiction and scholarship again and again. Read here: www.patreon.com/posts/long-a...

For a more accessible version, see https://cymbals-corn-mx5t.squarespace.com/janezwart1.

I'll stand by "I am tired of tidings," for the most part. But getting a message that @thedodgemag.bsky.social nominated "East of Eden" for the Best of the Net anthology, those were tidings that put some wind back in my sails. Thank you to the editors, especially @sambranopoet.bsky.social.

Trans Patients File Groundbreaking Legal Complaint Against UPMC For Capitulation To Trump UPMC bowed to Trump and abandoned its trans patients, advocates say. It may have violated state law.

1. In a groundbreaking legal filing, transgender patients, represented by Women's Law Project, have filed a legal complaint against UPMC for capitulating to Trump and dropping trans care.

Federal funding threats do not override state law.

Subscribe to support our journalism.

two tiny poems up on HAD today! ❤️☠️

More and more evidence shows – most of the Gaza war deaths are civilians Israel No Longer Bothers to Dispute the Gaza Health Ministry Figures, Which Show That the Number of Civilians Killed Since October 7 Is the Highest in Any War in the 21st Century

The figures presented in an investigation by journalist Yuval Avraham, published by +972 & The Guardian, lead to the conclusion that "only about 17% of the dead were armed or identified as Hamas members."

🆓🔗 archive.is/1tN72

“Here,” he said, pressing the ammonite into her hand. It was beautiful. She didn’t want it. She still felt the sting of his open palm on Teo’s cheek. She wanted to throw the stone in Creon’s face, to refuse this gift and its small, baffling kindness, but she found her fingers closing around the fossil instead, clutching it so tightly the rough edge dug into her palm. His pain, she reminded herself, not yours. But she didn’t really believe that. It had never made sense to her, the way people drew borders around their bodies and marked that space a sovereign kingdom. The air in your lungs was the same wind whipping through the grass; the pale chalky grit you could scrape from the old clay pits the same pulp that made your bones. How stupid, she thought, how human, to believe harm to others did not harm you, too. She unclenched her hand and realized the rough edge of the rock had nearly broken skin. She watched the crescent indent on her palm bloom blue, then black, then yellow-green. A few minutes later, as they made their way down to harbor, the bruise had faded, the blood drained away. Her skin was unmarked as if the small hurt had never been.

a Tuesday novel scrap before I force myself to get more work done: "How stupid, she thought, how human, to believe harm to others did not harm you, too."

NYT: gone. WaPo: gone. LA Times: gone. CBS: gone. CNN: gone. MSNBC: going.

Plus almost all local newspapers & local TV news stations.

Plus almost all of social media.

The information environment is utterly dominated by the right & everything else is downstream of that.

“It became immediately apparent there was an ordered universe about this with rules and protocols and genres. And I sort of globbed onto it. So one thing led to another […], [and] I started selling books.”

I talked to Dan Dwyer of the wonderful Johnnycake Books
about the store's history, his 35 years in rare bookselling, and what he wished more people knew about the world of rare books. Conversation linked here: www.patreon.com/posts/interv...

“It became immediately apparent there was an ordered universe about this with rules and protocols and genres. And I sort of globbed onto it. So one thing led to another […], [and] I started selling books.”

I talked to Dan Dwyer of the wonderful Johnnycake Books
about the store's history, his 35 years in rare bookselling, and what he wished more people knew about the world of rare books. Conversation linked here: www.patreon.com/posts/interv...

bonus: "The candle must not die, because then there is no story."

"I think Donald Trump can get away with it because he understands something very basic about the development of American military power over the last few decades, which is that the United States doesn't really have to win wars. We just go in and kill a lot of people."

ICYMI this morning!

a screenshot showing a page count of 92 and a word count of 34192

gonna be fun getting this essay down to 3,000 words when this is the notes doc 🙃