Frenchfold

Slipcase by Watanabe Katei (1913), showing a weasel, ferns, and fiddleheads (so, well, more ferns). From the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands.

That weasel has some tail!

Watanabe Katei (1913)
Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

Andersonville: The Deadly Confederate Prison Camp Civil War History, the story of Andersonville, or Camp Sumter as it was known officially.

The conditions is ICE/CBP centers are going in an Andersonville direction.

www.battlefields.org/learn/articl...

I keep seesawing between wanting to believe the midterms will be fair and worrying something bad will happen because the political weather in the US is not normal.

The regime is remaking the country, but it’s not a democratic system they’re setting up.

This is not about immigration. It never was. They’re already hovering up or killing anyone they don’t like. They lie to and ignore the courts. They just tried to charge members of Congress.

The good people of Minneapolis get it, but much of the US hasn’t grasped how dangerous this moment is.

Originalism at work! Or should I say UET, which has conveniently muscled it aside.

Good Lord, it didn't even occur to me that like 60% of the population of New Hampshire is probably Canadian by this definition

Hey wait -

a smiling girl and a kitten on her shoulder

Goodnight.

A girl and her kitten, 1955 - by Walter Chandoha
www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/08/walt...

Good thread. As much as I’m quite pessimistic about the fairness of the midterms, I do want @angus.bsky.social to be right. And he knows a hell of a lot more than I.

The risk of malfeasance in the November election is real, and serious. But the Trump administration doesn't have a magic wand.

It has tools of repression. And we have tools of resistance.

The big picture to keep in mind is that modern destabilization and foreign interference usually isn’t about invasion. It’s about: undermining trust, amplifying division, convincing people their own system is illegitimate.

Once enough people believe that, outside pressure becomes easier to justify.

Or a “Mexican” restaurant in Vancouver BC in the 70s or 80s: a quick journey south to Seattle WA improved the offering immensely.

To reject the US as a fundamentally American country with a deep shared history and commonality with the rest of the Americas, including that Spanish has long been our de facto national second language, is on a deep level anti-American. It's hating actual American culture and history and tradition.

8. Evil city / pure countryside is an example of what Jeremy Lent calls a “root metaphor”: an idea so deeply implanted in our minds that we don’t even recognise it as an idea.

An excellent thread on the long history of the hay to be made, and spun into gold, by politicians peddling anti-city rhetoric.

Kate Brideau, The Typographic Medium

If I could write a book on type it would be a book just like this. I am so happy it exists.

We said we would bring back the postwar years, but we didn’t say which country’s postwar years.

“The camps are already here.” @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

Exclusive: Detention Center Captives Are Throwing Lotion Bottles Wrapped With Notes to Organizers Outside Otay Mesa Facility ~ L.A. TACO “For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh," an Otay Mesa captive communicated through handwritten note. "We are all in one big room with no doors...

Concentration camps:

“For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick."

Good thread! It’s sad that it can be both true that you can make people’s lives significantly better and save taxpayer dollars and that this program can be canceled because of, well, ideology.

you've lost 60% of your voters & coverted 0% of reform ones - yes, that is an actual statistic, 0%

but sure, keep at it, i'm sure this latest wheeze will bring em all over

Every social worker and librarian and paramedic and caregiver and community leaders and city people are still doing what they can. Bless them all, without reservation.

It’s just sad to see where the situation has become because of short-sighted decisions years ago.

In this case it is rocket science because, like an Apollo mission all the pieces have to be kept synchronized. But the senior levels of government didn’t help enough. And no one could keep the rudder pointing in the same direction through various elections.

And what a tragedy!

Injection sites aren’t a magic bullet. They’re the start of a whole process: to get people better. They need to be backed up with treatment, housing, and support at sufficient levels to dry up enough of the demand to allow enforcement to be able to crimp supply.

A more extreme version of this is Vancouver’s DTES. From criminal justice reform to funding to rehabilitation beds, getting and keeping all three levels of government in sync proved impossible. Long term, effective strategy was not possible.

But this is also a classic situation where a solution falls between so many stools that everyone, from the Feds giving up on social housing to developers basically running many councils, can just pretend that they are powerless.

This is one of those classic “cities are the creatures of the province” problems. And in provincial politics demonizing cities is always a winner: any good proposal can be shot down by zero sum rhetoric.

Serious trivia I heard today. There is no stone in the London bedrock. Everything made of stone in London is from stone quarried elsewhere.

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...