Severian

One and a half million people are killed by animals every year. Almost one million by other animals, and more than half a million from direct conflict among ourselves.

Almost all of these deaths from other animals are caused by just two types: mosquitoes and snakes.

Nothing surprises me. In fact, I can see further escalation / deterioration of this situation which wouldn’t surprise me and I don’t want to mention the scenarios I’m thinking of for fear of summoning them into being.

This can get worse.

Tyrannical.

A woman stands on a dirt mound, her back to the camera, looking toward a horizon filled with dense, dark smoke. A label in the top left reads "Tehran." Photo by Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times.

The view of Tehran’s skyline overnight on Sunday was apocalyptic: Billowing smoke and towering oil fires turned the horizon orange as Israeli strikes ignited fuel depots outside the Iranian capital. By morning, dark, oily smoke hung over the city. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/w...

Don’t overplay this Dems: you need to win *red* states. Woke don’t play there.

A path leads towards a shrine with tall trees to each side and in the distance. On the path many deer are standing or sitting.

'Way to the Kasuga Shrine' - Yoshida Hiroshi, 1938.
#JapaneseArt

I honestly don’t understand how we don’t all wake up screaming at the insanity every morning.

He’s lankier, that’s fair

If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful [that they] have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma.

—Becca Rothfeld on the phenomenon of Looksmaxxing, in The New Yorker

Talarico needs to be like Ossoff and put on some muscle mass. This is a silly, trivial thing I am embarrassed to say—but I honestly think it’d help him.

Not sure what that says about the validity of democratic governance.

Education results have gotten worse during a period of time when we’ve decided to try less hard to teach kids

Vance said that Iranians are eating the dogs, eating the cats, of the people who live here.

Hahaha - yes, it possible that I already have some presentiment of such a future…

The Republican Party is against America

A four-panel collage of endangered wildlife: a tiger walking through tall grass, a gorilla resting in a lush forest, a rhinoceros grazing in a field of yellow flowers, and a giant panda looking upward among green foliage.

Some positive news you might have missed this #WorldWildlifeDay. 🙌

🐯 Wild tiger numbers are bouncing back.
🐼 Giant pandas no longer listed as ‘endangered’.
🦏 Kenya now has over 1,000 black rhinos.
🦍 Mountain gorillas: status improved from critically endangered to endangered.

there's a thing I like to call "load-bearing assumptions", that you don't notice until they're suddenly gone (e.g the air you breath has oxygen in it).

the post-ww2 order is a load-bearing assumption for basically the entirety of american life. trump took a sledgehammer to it in the last 90 days.

That tracks bsky.app/profile/rike...

a woman wearing a necklace with a cross on it smiles for the camera ALT: a woman wearing a necklace with a cross on it smiles for the camera

His original title was actually “Limited Combat Operations What Is It Good For?”

It was when I was growing up, but maybe curricula have changed more than I know

Greg Oakley - Peregrine Falcon.
Acrylic on canvas.

Also, to the original comment you shared, for Hamlet has other dramatic strengths, but simply for sheer use of language it’s LLL.

There are about ~20 that I could choose as a favorite... I’ll offer this though, it seems like high schools often select 2 plays to introduce Shakespeare: R&J and Julius Caesar. They should swap JC for Macbeth. Macbeth’s the better play and has more power to capture the young reader’s imagination.

Shhhh, let him finish…

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Where are all the jobs turning tiny screws that guy from the sex trafficker’s island promised us?

Wild guess based on Americans’ attention spans:

By the end of next week people will be ready to move on from this episode of “the show” and start to wonder what we are still doing there, and that will show up in polls the following week. So numbers worse by March 20.

Curious about Paramount Skydance CDS

Two photos. One shows Kristi Noem in a construction worker's outfit. The other shows her in a police officer outfit.

Two photos. One shows Kristi Noem in a nurse's outfit. The other shows her in an electrical worker's outfit.

Two photos. One shows Kristi Noem in a military outfit while riding aboat. The other shows her in a firefighter's outfit using a firehose.

Two photos. One shows Kristi Noem in a Westernwear outfit. The other shows her in a police officer's outfit.

good news. kristi noem has already found eight new jobs

Focused like a laser on affordability.

I continue to be gobsmacked at 1) how common this formulation is 2) how antisemitic and generally bigoted it is 3) and how for all the talk of anti-semitism this is never cited as an example even though it’s quite literally the original incarnation.