Boston Tom Levenson

So immaculately well played, my digitally mediated friend. (And no less a friend for that.)

Amen and amen.

Thanks. I plan to look into DaVinci. But I have access to Adobe CC through my institution and we ask our students to use it, so it behooves me to try and keep up.

Evil MFs.

I am tiptoeing with diffidence (terror) & ~enthusiasm into the vertical video world.

My problem: I've directed a bunch of long form documentaries, working w. v. talented editors. So I know what I want to see as I put together a video.

Doing so as a beginner at Premiere? Hours of frustrated agony.

Obama calls on Virginians to vote for redistricting in special election “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, but right now they are under threat,” Obama said.

🚨BREAKING: A day before early voting begins in Virginia’s redistricting referendum, Barack Obama called on Virginians to vote in favor of a state constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to redraw its congressional map to counter GOP gerrymanders. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Yes, and more of this please.

The internet is full of garbage. Support something real www.awritersnotebook.org/subscribe

Kristi Noem has done a stunning amount of damage and it’s good she’s gone.

But this doesn’t change the fact that we need a complete overhaul of DHS, impartial investigations into the killings of two American citizens, and information on children that were taken from Minnesota.

Astonishingly enough, it seems to this wholly inexpert commentator that we might actually be seeing a downgrade at this position.

Markwayne Mullin is not seen as the dumbest member of the US Senate only because Tuberville exists.

Single Daily Tablet Shows Powerful Results for People With Drug-Resistant HIV A large international clinical trial has unveiled a promising new option for people living with highly treatment-resistant HIV.

A development such as this has been a goal for HIV researchers for decades. It is important because people who are faced with difficult treatment regimens are less likely to be compliant.
Single Daily Tablet Shows Powerful Results for People With Drug-Resistant HIV share.google/RjULDFVtCYI9...

It is so damning of US news media that so many outlets refuse to just straight up say that Senator Tim Sheehy assaulted an activist.

He did not "help" Capitol police. They did not need his help. He wanted to assault the guy and did. He should resign.

This.

Here's a bad take on the Iran war...

Trump finally realized us dirty hippies were right all along about climate change so he's engineered the closing of the Straits of Hormuz to raise the price and hence lower the use of fossil fuels.

Told you it was a bad take.

;-)

Latest place the tariffs hit my wallet? I needed to replace the chain on my e-bike. Much increased. Didn't need a new tire, but found that the same model I used to replace a punctured one a year or so ago has gone from $54 then to $70 now.

Yes, Felon Trump...I am tired of winning.

Heck, I was inundated w. Crockett and only slightly less so w. Talarico asks up until yesterday.

Why should things change?

Every single one of those officer need to be retired right now.

Yeah. I have a similar reaction to the One Big Thing genre.

Wouldn't that be lovely!

...The Constitution properly understood, Harlan wrote, reveals that ‘the possession and enjoyment of all rights are subject to such reasonable conditions as may be deemed by the governing authority of the country essential to the safety, health, peace, good order and morals of the community’. Why must the individual be subject to some constraint? Because ‘on any other basis, organized society could not exist with safety to its members. Society based on the rule that each one is a law unto himself would soon be confronted with disorder and anarchy.’ But if so, what then does it mean to be free? Once more, Harlan explained not just the law of the land but the idea behind the law in terms suited to the meanest understanding: ‘Even liberty itself, the greatest of all rights, is not unrestricted license to act according to one’s own will. It is only freedom from restraint under conditions essential to the equal enjoyment of the same right by others’ – one’s own right to act as one pleases ends when doing so conflicts with others’ ability to do the same. ‘Real liberty’, Harlan concluded, is ‘liberty regulated by law.’

Justice Harlan sorted this out 120 years ago.

See this passage from my upcoming A Pox on Fools:

Sorry about the flurry of posts--this was my pinned post, and a kind reader let me know that the original link was borked. So fixing it meant that y'all got spammed.

Apologies.

A Pox on Fools by Thomas Levenson: 9798217155002 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books An urgent and profound history of vaccine skepticism, seeking to understand how our three most common fears about vaccines hardened into a lethal ideology—from a leading science writer Since the...

Self promotion alert!

My book A Pox on Fools, comes out on 5/26 (UK) & 6/9 (US).

It's a history of vax opposition, tracing RFK Jr.'s anti-vax grift back to once-somewhat plausible fears. Its goal: to help readers debunk his BS for any persuadables they know.

Preorders are a book's best friend!

Hoeing turnips in the far north and west is a well known fate for inconvenient fact-sharers.

One more thing. If you're interested in this or any book, the best thing you can do to help it find an audience is to preorder it. It's shocking how much they can propel a work into literary (and civic) conversation.

The other best thing is to ask your libraries to get it.

Purchase options below:

The front cover of A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines." The cover shows a black circle with the title and the author's name (mine!) in white. The bottom right of the circle is indented, pushed by the needle of a pre-WW2 syringe, held in someone's left hand. In the space between the hand and the spine of the book, there's a blurb by geneticist, author, and broadcaster Adam Rutherford: "Brimming with righteous anger, this book should infuriate you for all the right reasons, and arm you to take on the grifters and their war against science."

With all the horrors around us, talking up a book seems...weird.

But I have a book coming and it is, I believe, an important one—one hope help persuade the vaccine hesitant (those who've heard the noise but aren't yet consumed by anti-vax BS).

Anyway, here's the latest iteration of the US cover:

ExactLy.

Our nation is again at war, not because we had to but because the president recklessly chose to.

Now we must recognize who pays the price: not the president and his wealthy allies, but service members and ordinary Americans.

“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating v...

The Republicans seem to be prepping an argument that any domestic terror attacks in the aftermath of their Iran attacks will be the fault of Democrats for shutting down DHS funding, so I'd like to remind everyone of this appointment:

In bad news (for my end of the business). Nonfiction is doing ok, but a lot of the gains are in the religion and Bibles category, while narrative non-fiction is not as strong.