solidad decosta (she/her)

Artist uses Harry Potter books to make portraits of murdered trans women A Vermont-based artist is making a statement after using Harry Potter books to make powerful portraits of murdered trans women.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what to do with my Harry Potter books, because just dumping them in a little free library felt wrong. So I mailed them to this artist who was turning them into portraits of murdered trans women

www.thepinknews.com/2025/11/11/a...

Tell HHS: Hands Off Our Care Take action with ACLU People Power!

The Trump administration is trying to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth nationwide.

Send a message to the Trump administration and tell them: Hands off our health care.

The people who support mass deportation policies never cared about whether people have "criminal records," and I caution people who want to stop mass deportations that they should not focus on the "criminal records" either.

‘He’s not the same’: Father of Liam Conejo Ramos says 5-year-old continues to suffer Some people thought they say the 5-year-old during the Super Bowl halftime show. But Liam is still in hiding with his family, after he and his father were detained and then released from a Texas deten...

The ‘abolish ICE’ door is cracked open and every one of us needs to push and keep pushing.

“Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, said the family was in hiding. He cited a bomb threat at his son’s former elementary school and ICE agents patrolling the Columbia Heights home they no longer live in.”

Struggle is not the goal.

It’s the method.

To get free.

Too many people imagine struggle is the goal, so any acts of worldbuilding that prefigure freedom are dismissed as incidental, as distractions.

There is no "fixing" detention centers. We are knowingly killing people as a policy choice.

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

One of the most striking snd powerful parts of the halftime show

In terms of paper waste, maybe, but ebooks aren'tthe solution. Speaking as a librarian, ebooks are the bane of my fucking existence. I can buy 10 MMPB for the cost of 1 restricted access temporary license ebook. See:
bsky.app/profile/book...

One month after Renee Good’s death, wife sends thank-you note to Minneapolis for enduring ICE’s presence “Minneapolis has shown me that even in the middle of grief and fear, people still show up for each other.”

“Minneapolis has shown me that even in the middle of grief and fear, people still show up for each other,” writes Becca Good in a thank-you note to the people of Minneapolis.

Indigenous-Led Collectives Are Keeping Minnesotan Communities Safe From ICE Members of the American Indian Movement and the Many Shields Warrior Society are patrolling the streets of Minneapolis.

Members of the American Indian Movement and the Many Shields Warrior Society are patrolling the streets of Minneapolis.

Three geniuses gaining and using their platforms without compromising their humanity or their artistic visions, and showing us just why art matters. They are changing the conversation, each one of them.

LAPD Charges at Hundreds of High School Students in Peaceful Walkout Protest at MDC ~ L.A. TACO LAPD arrested at least two teenagers protesting ICE raids in Los Angeles yesterday. They were also seen corresponding with ICE agents on Alameda Street during the demonstrations.

I feel like Los Angeles is a place where people expect ICE to happen because the kidnappings have been happening to my home city for decades, so there’s less media attention to it now. and I want folks to see that in LA, Latine students are organizing major protests & the police are attacking them

if everyone could take on the “what if we just did the thing instead of waiting for it to happen” energy that much of minneapolis has right now, the world could be pretty good

Just because good news is worth celebrating:

There is now a Prep medication that is an *every six month* injection.

HIV has, effectively, a vaccination.

Finally done. White hairpipe beads on 30 inch/76.2 cm antiqued metal chain. Available for sale.

$75 USD plus shipping

Shipping and conversion rates from the US to Canada is very high, so please make sure to check if you are in Canada and interested.

You are not entitled to the training and labor of your comrades solely because you want it and aren't satisfied with your own work.

I think it's perfectly understandable that many people feel a deep sense of resentment and disenfranchisement for the time capitalism has stolen from them, but the answer is not to embrace capital's machine that pretends to show you an inner life you aren't having.

AI is not alive. It cannot translate human experiences. It cannot feel for you, and even if it could, it would only be that much clearer that its output is not something YOU made. It has no relation to you.

I do not want future writers to have to come up like I did, starving and stealing and hooking and scribbling out a few sentences before collapsing into bed. I want a world that respects them and provides a firm bedrock of social safety while they build their skills and live their lives.

I dream of having enough stability in our culture that anyone who wants to can pursue the arts, but the meaning comes from that pursuit, from translating human experiences through skills acquired over time. Art is labor, but it isn't just some commodity that can be pulped and reconstituted.

Every instance of "AI democratizes the arts, you're classist and ableist and a gatekeeper for trying to stop it" is a slap in the face to the literally centuries of poor, disabled people making art on the margins and a crass lie in service of a machine that strips down and regurgitates dreams

The Death and Rebirth of the Queer Bookstore Hi! Before we get started… Right now, you can get a Humble Bundle including everything Annalee Newitz and I have published with Tor for just $18 (plus...

Queer bookstores died in 2010. We had a funeral and everything!

Except... a ton of people decided to roll up their sleeves and start *new* queer bookshops, all over the place. In cities. In tiny towns.

My latest newsletter is about the rebirth of the LGBTQ bookshop:

buttondown.com/charliejane/...

Library workers, library patrons, students of all ages, moms and dads and grownups of all kinds, have been organizing against book bans in this district for years, some of the most inspiring people I’ve met.

The distance between the U.S. government killing people on boats and the U.S. government killing people on city streets is pretty damn short.

Boo JD Vance. If you see him with his children, boo him louder.

New Documents Reveal Florida Paid over $573 Million to DeSantis-Connected Immigrant Detention Contractors in 2025 - UNICORN RIOT New documents provided to Unicorn Riot have revealed that the state of Florida gave at least $558 million to private contractors last year to work on two immigrant detention centers — including the no...

Documents acquired by Unicorn Riot late last year reveal that well over half a billion taxpayer dollars have thus been funneled out of Florida's state budget to private prison companies that donated to Governor Ron DeSantis and other republican campaigns.
unicornriot.ninja/2026/new-doc...

Mutual aid is I give you this so that you might succeed as you want. Whether your metric for success is only your survival. Because that’s what I want for you. Because I care.

BREAKING: An Arizona state court permanently blocked several abortion restrictions, including a law forcing patients to make two trips to a provider and a ban on telemedicine abortion.

This is a big win for reproductive freedom in the state.