Aisha Down (@aishadown) — Bluesky Profile

1 month ago

Laying off @joemenn.bsky.social is the newsroom management equivalent of stapling your dick to the wall. Truly insane move, and one of many.

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1 month ago

Today's Poem reminds me of my grandmother Ethel Mabry who was the one who got up early and started the woodstove and then cooked breakfast. Things I took for granted then but don't now.

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1 month ago

An insane, perfect encapsulation of it all:

The same day Trump’s agents kill a Veterans Affairs ICU nurse in broad daylight, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon join Trump to watch a private screening of a film about his wife directed by an alleged sexual abuser who was seen shirtless in the Epstein Files

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1 month ago

Meet ‘Amelia’: the AI-generated British schoolgirl who is a far-right social media star The avatar, created to deter young people from extremism, has been subverted and is breaking out of niche online silos In certain corners of the internet, on niche news feeds and algorithms, an AI-generated British schoolgirl has emerged as something of a phenomenon. Her name is Amelia, a purple-haired “goth girl” who proudly carries a mini union flag and appears to have a penchant for racism. Continue reading...

Meet ‘Amelia’: the AI-generated British schoolgirl who is a far-right social media star

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1 month ago

TORN
Witness the wet dead snake, its long hexagonal pattern weaved around its body like a code for creation, curled up cold on the newly tarred road.
Let us begin with the snake: the fact of death, the poverty of place, of skin and surface. See how the snake is cut in two—its body divided from its brain.
Imagine now, how it moves still, both sides, the tail dancing, the head dancing.
Believe it is the mother and the father.
Believe it is the mouth and the words.
Believe it is the sin and the sinner-the tempting, the taking, the apple, the fall, every one of us guilty, the story of us all.
But then return to the snake, pitiful dead thing, forcefully denying the split of its being, longing for life back as a whole, wanting you to see it for what it is: something that loves itself so much it moves across the boundaries of death to touch itself once more, to praise both divided sides equally, as if it was easy.

Ada Limón

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2 months ago

Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us

A water-meadow is not a flood-meadow.

A working meadow's not a fallow field.

Heartbreak like a bloodhound better off abandoned because untamable.

There's a slant of light I used to call Self-Portrait as a Lion, Bringing Down a Stag.

I can’t imagine my life without the poetry of Carl Phillips 💙

@cphillipspoet.bsky.social

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2 months ago

NEW: It appears billionaire Bill Ackman has donated $10k to a GoFundMe for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good.

Ackman has reposted the fundraiser but hasn’t posted about his own donation.

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2 months ago

Be ahead of all partings, as if they were
behind you, like the winter that’s just past.
For among the winters is one so endlessly winter
that your heart, if you overwinter, can survive it.

Be dead in Eurydice, always—, climb with more song,
climb with more praise, back up into pure relation.
Here in the kingdom of decay, among what’s wasting,
be a tingling glass that shatters itself with sound.

Exist while you know the state of nonexistence,
the endless ground of your own deep pulse, so that
you can fulfill it completely this one time.

With the used-up, as well as the muffled and useless
stock of full nature, the unreckoned sum,
count yourself in, rejoicing, and then demolish the count.

the endless ground of your own deep pulse,

Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. David Young

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2 months ago

HOME ALONE IN MID-NOVEMBER,
WAITING FOR A POEM

The morning comes on like
a bout with loneliness,
dark clouds sweep in low
across the valley, rain
sets in hard from the west.
I want to stay in bed,
refuse it all, like the junk mail
I always end up opening.
For hours, I pace among these rooms
parting the air with my hands,
searching the horizon
for traces of light that catch
and turn somehow to poem.
All I see from the window
are the dark shapes of geese
winging past, like children
who are leaving home for good.
The day slips by, another empty
envelope marked occupant.

I want to stay in bed,

Robert Kinsley

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2 months ago

The 'kin' of ‘napkin’ means "little."

‘Nap’ comes from ‘nape,' which means “tablecloth.”

So a napkin is a little tablecloth.

10/10, no notes.

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2 months ago

This, unfortunately, has been very obviously coming. I suspect this is only the leading edge of a whole bounty hunter complex.

aramzs.xyz/noteworthy/t...

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2 months ago

“These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their
stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.”

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3 months ago

‘We could have asked ChatGPT’: students fight back over course taught by AI Staffordshire students say signs material was AI-generated included suspicious file names and rogue voiceover accent

“If we handed in stuff that was AI-generated, we would be kicked out of the uni, but we’re being taught by an AI" -- on how maybe AI shouldn't transform higher education.

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

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4 months ago

Sure, can you write me on Signal if that's OK? aishadown.57

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4 months ago

Ross Douthat here makes a fantastic argument for ... just subscribing to The Guardian instead.

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4 months ago

If I was working at the Times (would never happen lol) I would be talking to my women colleagues and perhaps outside counsel about whether this constitutes a Title VII violation.

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