labubu radley

cities should be copying wholesale what baltimore is doing. but many won't do it because it's a broad-based approach that doesn't make them feel good. they would rather have people dead in the streets if it means they get to enjoy seeing people locked up.

the right is not interested in reducing crime. they've been presented with the empirical evidence over and over on effective ways to reduce crime and they don't want to do it. they actively fight against these measures. they want a crackdown that makes them feel good.

Book #78 of 2025: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar. With the addition of Libya, my "Countries Read" list is up to 109. :)

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/in-c...

Donald Trump threatens to clear encampments in D.C. With D.C.’s MPD now under federal control and the National Guard coming to D.C., the fate of people in encampments remains up in the air.

"“I ain’t ever bought no prostitutes. I ain’t never raped nobody. I ain’t never paid anybody off. None of that stuff,” said G, a resident from one of the photographed tents.

“He’s much more of a criminal than I am”"

streetsensemedia.org/article/home...

Book #77 of 2025: Death in Her Hands by Otessa Moshfegh. OK.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/deat...

Book #76 of 2025: Dust and Other Stories by Yi Tae'jun. Fascinating collection by a Korean writer known as "The One Who Went North," as in, to Soviet-occupied North Korea, where he disappeared.

NK = my 108th country read.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/dust...

Book #75 of 2025: Divorcer by Garielle Lutz. Everyone was right about Garielle Lutz. What a writer.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/divo...

one effect from the tariffs I haven't seen people talk about yet: one slurp juice is now no longer enough for multiple apes. JP Morgan just put out a report saying we're rapidly closing in on one slurp juice per ape. Things getting dark fast

How the National Parks Service is struggling with drastic funding and staffing cuts Summer is the height of the visitor season for the National Park Service. Last year, nearly 332 million people visited NPS sites, a record that is likely to be broken this year. That surge in visitors...

This is a great summary of the many challenges currently facing the National Park Service. #NationalParks www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

The strategy:

1. Appeal to economic anxiety created by AI hype.

2. Target prospective students in geographic regions far removed from established tech centers.

3. Rent brand equity of public universities associated with regional pride, while simultaneously sowing doubt in the their legitimacy.

Conservatives who claimed Obama was using FEMA to build concentration camps really quiet now that it’s real

one of the stranger phenomena in American life is that hate is supposed to flow in one direction (rural people get to hate urban people, Republicans get to hate Democrats) and if the hate goes the other way people pretend as if this is very upsetting.

I knew there had to be more to this story

doesn't make the headline for some reason but the Trump administration confirmed on the record that they are running an explicitly whites only refugee program, if you're wondering how things are going in the year 2025

Book #74 of 2025: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. A classic of the conservation movement.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-sa...

Well fuck

One thing they don't tell you is that grief accumulates in a bottle in your soul a drop at a time until one day you wake up so sad you don't think you can get out of bed. Then you've got to listen to a bunch of sad music and cry till it's empty enough to carry on anyway.

Book #73 of 2025: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. I really liked the first story here, "Angelita," but not really any of the others.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-...

Chart showing risk of being murdered in the subway if you rode 500 times last year (0.4 in 100,000) versus other risks such as that of dying in a traffic accident in the US last year (12.1 in 100,000)

The subway risk chart you've been waiting for (Sawyer County, Wisconsin, is where Sean Duffy is from). Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Book #72 of 2025: Lanark by Alasdair Gray. An epic novel, half realism, half fantasy--like, literally, half and half--by the author of Poor Things. A really rich book that lives up to its heft. One of my favs this year.

fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/lana...

External observers have long been struck by the rampant depoliticization that has made the most celebrated American writers susceptible to the lures of unprincipled power and vacuous celebrity: for instance, David Foster Wallace spending over twenty thousand words to investigate, indecisively, whether John McCain was a moral hero and a “real leader or merely a very talented political salesman,” when a quick glance at the voting record of the warmongering Republican senator would have sufficed. In recent years, writers abroad who are, or romantically see themselves as, necessarily alienated critics of society have been baffled to see American counterparts gratefully receiving laurels from Barack Obama, “our own Black shining prince,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates, borrowing from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm X, put it. In their eyes, some unprecedented confusion of literature with neoliberal chic occurred when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read aloud, at the PEN America World Voices Festival, her Atlantic article that she had wanted to title “Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?” as the former secretary of state looked on fondly.

Damn, this essay is FIRE

archive.is/JLWvu

I want you to know for whatever bug whenever I open bluesky now it goes straight to this reply

Book #71 of 2025: In the Company of Men by Veronique Tadjo. An Ivorian writer capturing the POV of West Africans during the Ebola crisis.
fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/in-c...

The image on the cover of the Joy Division album "Unknown Pleasures" is from a plot that radio astronomer Harold Craft made for his PhD dissertation, using data collected at Arecibo while studying the pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬

You can’t be justifying your own pessimism about other Americans like this when we’ve got polling data that says every time a spotlight gets shined on deportation or detention, the polling for Trump on that issue takes a huge hit.

(Chart from @gelliottmorris.com)

The most rotten thing about JD Vance is that he has three half-Indian children including a son name "Vivek," yet he still prattles on about how you must descend from the Europeans who'd settled America prior to 1861 in order for your citizenship to be valid.

Which is just to say that the book, though it has its moments, didn't exactly compel you to want to figure out what it was saying

Book #70 of 2025: Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. If you like necrophilia, this book's for you. fiftybooksproject.blogspot.com/2025/07/chil...

I got some of it but I also didn't try real hard