Julia Carrie Wong

I used to be friends with someone who reflexively critiqued everything they ate and it lowkey made me so stressed out and edgy and these videos are basically the opposite I’m just happy they’re happy

the entire premise of these videos is beautiful and wholesome and the execution is great but also I really just enjoy the fact that they enjoy every single thing they eat and can’t stop talking about how good it all tastes

America, América by Greg Grandin: 9780593831250 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A New York Times bestseller • A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction •...

(Reading this. Highly recommend.)

The myth of America as a white nation is a tawdry fiction, and an obscenity, and while those who promote that myth will never be sneered at as “activists”, there is no shame in being an activist for the messy, shameful, painful but honest version of our history.

Reading American history will break your heart a thousand times but it will also fill you with such admiration and awe for all the people who were excluded from the protection of America’s founding principles and fought to promote, protect and expand them anyways

Journalistic truth and literary (or moral, or religious) truth are different aims, achieved through different means. Muddying that up on a subject matter that is already beset by propagandists attempting to undermine empirical realities with their own version of truth seems beyond misguided.

This is a deeply confused justification that is basically incoherent. “I care about truth, not persuasion, but if I persuaded one person to do what I think is correct then my packaging of fiction as truth was justified” is not a good argument.

Yeah, they’re definitely very different pieces with different problems. I’m just struck by the commonality of the rhetorical device and wondering if it speaks to a certain lack of investment in the messy reality of journalism, with all its limitations.

Infamous transphobic Atlantic cover story: “Your Child Says She's Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She's 13. By Jesse Singal”

The cover line of the infamous trans cover story used basically the same (deceptive) rhetorical technique. Second person, speculative narrative about an extreme hypothetical example (surgery at 13).

This is fundamentally a project to reestablish the “natural” truths that men deserve to rape and rule, that white people are intellectually and culturally superior to Black and brown people, and that existing inequities bw groups are inherent rather than contrived. It is dirty, dirty work.

I think it’s important to look at this kind of project within the broader frame of coordinated attacks from the state and the right on gender, post-colonial and area studies, as well as the push to revive/launder biologically essentialist views of sex, race and intelligence

I guess I missed whatever good work he might have done. I think this kind of reactionary anti-intellectualism masquerading as good faith critique is dirty work, but I imagine it’s well compensated.

“I spent 2025 compiling lists of academic projects that I consider ‘activist’ and ‘progressive’ bc I must save the humanities from those who would destroy it through monetary grants. I am very smart and acting in good faith.”

Tyler Austin Harper “l've spent the last year working on a story about the Mellon Foundation, the mega-wealthy private nonprofit that has a monopoly on humanities funding in America. The article, about how Mellon has held the humanities hostage to its progressive political ideology, is out today.”

Scoop: DOGE allegedly used ChatGPT to identify approx 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants the Al tool deemed as related to DEl, which were then terminated in April of last year, according to a new court filing released today. Among the terminated grants were a film analyzing how baseball helped heal frictions between the U.S. and Japan caused by World War I; a documentary titled "The Untold Story of Jewish Women Slave Labor in the Holocaust;" a film focused on the Colfax massacre of 1873, where dozens of Black men were murdered by a mob of Confederate soldiers and KKK members; and a film about the first female pilots to fly for the U.S. military during World War II.

🤡🤡🤡

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sometimes i'll be in a really bad or sad mood and then i'll see a dog on the subway and by the time i get where i'm going i'm fine

nothing makes me happier than seeing a dog on the subway

humani nihil a me alienum puto, except that

To save New York City dogs, get them out of the subways The death in Downtown Manhattan was a dark turn in a trend that began when transit ridership plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article quotes a man who has been “annoyed by a dog more than 13 times” which is… fascinating and also beyond my capacity to relate

the amount of time it is taking for these relatively podunk snow banks to melt is really throwing into relief for me how fucked up it is that we are managing to melt the glaciers

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why | Joan Wallach Scott Texas A&M University is the latest school to end women’s and gender studies programs and teaching race. We know why

“What’s really at stake is the enforcement of ‘sex-based distinctions’ that have long been understood hierarchically (men on top) to deny women (and sexual minorities) equality of treatment and access to resources and power.”

getting mad that gender studies programs are getting some grants is, to me, a tell

typical robber baron behavior

Usually it’s quite impressive when someone spends a year on a story but this may be the first time my response is just “oof why tho”

You’re laughing. The Mellon foundation is providing grants to gender and area studies programs and you’re laughing.

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

a thing i am never not mad about is that spelling bee accepts "hobbit" and "lilliputian" but not "latino"

I'm so squarely in the demographic that should be susceptible to her hawking of fancy mattresses, botox, and excessive luggage or whatever, and yet...

I feel like the NBC/Olympics/advertising industrial complex has grossly overestimated my capacity to be charmed by Tara Lipinski

This is a pogrom