Michael Erard

Wait, did you just bang that out?

Inevitably it’s a parenting mistake to show this cutie video to your kids. It’s not for them! Just like Calvin and Hobbes is not a kids’ comic.

And thinking about it I’m not sure it’s a real kid anyway.

Isn't it cool that so many of our students are using war machines to do their homework

wish i were there

Letters Without Limits At Letters Without Limits, we partner with hospice, palliative, and rehab centers to help patients preserve their life stories, values, and cherished memories through personalized legacy letters.

"At Letters Without Limits, we partner with hospice, palliative, and rehab centers to help patients preserve their life stories, values, and cherished memories through personalized legacy letters."

letterswithoutlimits.org

"I’ll deal with this when the time comes, I thought. What happened was I forgot about it completely."

Notes on Being Born on Soil - DesignObserver At times you hear stories about patriots in exile who want their children to be born in the motherland and supplement by putting dirt from said place under a woman who is giving birth.

"My wife’s family, at their annual reunion on the family farm...gathered about a pound of soil and shipped it to us in Maine. It came sealed in a freezer bag, labeled “Farm Soil” (so you don’t, I suppose, confuse it with the other soils you might keep around)."

For any writers or avid readers who missed this yesterday 👇🏾

I loved hearing @lukekemp.bsky.social bring up rackets on @ppfideas.bsky.social.

As I’ve said, there is no single story, which is the single story, but damn does racket theory get close

Vance is such an idiot that he’s going to leave the church and claim he invented schism

movie poster for Logan's Run, a 1970s sci-fi flick famous for its central conceit: it's a society that manages population disequilibrium by putting to death everyone over the age of 30 (in the novel, it was 21).

Scratch A weekly newsletter of interviews, essays, and real conversations about how writers are surviving. Launching March 2026.

Today in good news: Scratch is back!

@manjula.bsky.social's project to map out how writers make a living was a vital resource from 2012-2018. Today it relaunches, now a joint project with Manjula, @rahawahaile.bsky.social, @maggiemertens.bsky.social & @latriagraham.bsky.social.

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Cedars - DesignObserver The author's desk at PaisanoIt's the last day of my writing fellowship, I have to be packed up and moved out of the ranch house today, and I'm in the woods, shoving my clippers under cedar trees and c...

the last day of the writing fellowship: "Now the book’s half-finished, and the time that lent itself to that work seems so far away. I don’t want to recall the edges of the place, the arrivals or the departures. I want to recall that feeling of security at the center of the center."

timeline cleanse? www.legalaffairs.org/feature/note...

Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’ Speed and scale of US military’s AI war planning raises fears human decision-making may be sidelined

every US war includes an assault on language—so now we get claims that Anthropic’s Claude “shortens the kill chain”

Next up: why and how to breathe

An Incarnational Theology of Nonviolence by Barbara Birch https://yourwifey51.medium.com/a-quaker-theology-of-nonviolence-a064ebb03f28 Truth, Embodiment, Power, Testimony, Community, Suffering

I made a meme! Please share it and make me happy today. 😘

A titan of vaccine development sees his field’s achievements slip away Stanley Plotkin, the 93-year-old "godfather of vaccines," is watching his field’s achievements slip away.

“In a pair of recent interviews with STAT, Plotkin expressed dismay at seeing the achievements of his career & his field slip away. He knows what lies ahead…
“All I can say is that I’m beginning to regret having lived so long —because we’re going downhill,” Plotkin said” @jackiantonovich.bsky.social

I'm always glad to see funders experiment with random draws. More should be doing it.

Join us today @cudanlab.bsky.social

for a lecture & discussion with

@oliviermorin.bsky.social
on "The evolution of writing & well-designed languages"

16:00-18:00 Tallinn time UTC+2 🇪🇪🇪🇺🌍
(5 hours from this post).

Details & zoom: cudan.tlu.ee/events/2026-...

Yes yes yes

good plan

No illusions: I'm toward the nobody end of the Somebody-Nobody spectrum. But my body of work has a nice shape, not everything is online, and most of it isn't stale because it's not tightly hooked to a moment.

thanks, that's very kind!

would it make sense for me to collect a bunch of my language pieces and publish as an e-book?

Or, under what conditions would it make sense?

Live your life in a way that no one can keep a tally of all the accusations you make that turn out to be confessions

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?" June Jordan, 1984

The recipient of a second-hand Nobel Peace Prize just started another war.

Despicable

Nielsen to announce that it will stop measuring viewership, in order to “align its core business with trends in the market,” in 3…2…