MSVH

Who’s Deciding Where the Bombs Drop in Iran? Maybe Not Even Humans. Behind last week’s scrum between the Trump administration and Anthropic lies a deeper question of how warfare is conducted—and whether accountability event exists anymore.

My latest piece for @NewRepublic.com is on AI and war. It was painful to write. It might be painful to read. 

newrepublic.com/article/2071...

Shoutout to Karen Carpenter (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983) 🫡

Fifteen writers vie for Caribbean’s biggest literary prize • Bocas Lit Fest Books by fifteen authors with roots in eight territories have been shortlisted for the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One

Fifteen writers vie for Caribbean’s biggest literary prize • Bocas Lit Fest

www.bocaslitfest.com/2026/02/28/f...

@dukepress.bsky.social

Reverend Wright wuz right.

The thing you have to understand about the 80s is that the Harlem Globetrotters could show up in anything at any time and nobody would bat an eye.

new poem, "Altogether Elsewhere," in new issue of The Sewanee Review thesewaneereview.com/articles/alt...
(1/2)

Let It Be So 28/8/2024 Having— thus far—produced no offspring (that I know of), finally bathing my mother—a task she'd for years half-jokingly coerce us into vowing we'd perform when the time came—seems to have been next st...

Sigh: www.matthewhunte.com/irishspring/

I've never been a worshipper of Morrison but then I don't really have that sort of relationship to writers (it's hard to do so when your early literary "heroes" are Naipaul, Mailer, and Ralph Ellison.)

On the hand, I just inadvertently paid for another year of hosting my Ghost site so now I'm forced to regularly publish.

YouTube video by Cannonball with Wesley Morris If We Worship Toni Morrison, What Do We Lose?

Wesley Morris, Parul Sehgal, and Sasha Weiss "On Morrison" : www.youtube.com/watch?v=0koq...

AI can't shovel snow and boil an egg.

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

Looney Tunes is one of the five best works of art. I think all the time of Bugs saying “Would I have the temerity to do this if my erstwhile chum were encased therein?” to imaginary cops as he repeatedly stabs the chest he’s tricked the gangster into hiding in with a sword

I should also let you know that the stories in Aunt Hagar's Children correspond (prequel, sequel, shared characters, etc.) with their counterpart stories in Lost In The City ie. the first story in each is connected, as are the second, third, etc.

I was on Twitter for the writers and the book recommendations, the essays, the poetry, the community. I am here now for the same. I’m a nerd. Please reply with a favorite recent essay or poem or story or book recommendation, and thank you.

Trying to come up with something snarky about V.S. Naipaul but I'm rusty.

Notice for Brad Bigelow's appearance at Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Ave N in Seattle on Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 7PM.

Join me on Wednesday, Feb. 25th at 7PM at Seattle's superb Phinney Books. We'll talk about Virginia Faulkner, Recovered Books, reissuing Pilgrimage, and how taking breaks from studying math in UW's Suzzallo Library led to my passion for championing neglected books and writers.

The Curse of Monkey Island (1997)

Opinion | What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?

Great and informative interview of @andreapitzer.bsky.social by @jamellebouie.net.

The term "concentration camp" has become calcified into a single referent, but as Andrea makes clear, it is more useful to think of it as a process, and its history begins well before Nazi Germany.

Teeming masses who just want to read good books coverage in the local paper, is that so much to fuckin’ ask??

Absolutely bonkers crowd at Politics and Prose for the Washington Post Book World wake.

YouTube video by Politics and Prose A Tribute to Book World

. @politicsprose.bsky.social tribute to Washington Post Book World (live) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXwg...

I wrote about one part of my reaction to recent events: the importance and nuance of what it means to subscribe to something.

Because I do not hope
to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope
to turn

Comrade Jesse!

YouTube video by Scott Cannon Radio Jesse Jackson - Nation Time! National Black Political Convention, Gary, IN, 1972

youtu.be/rkdZ9zPEczk?...

Imagine what it would take in 1988 to be the white mayor of a white small town, nestled in the countryside of a white state, and endorse Jesse Jackson for President. Imagine 1988, Reagan and AIDS and crack and war and scandalous corruption on behalf of a ruling class run amok. Imagine the Democratic Party leaders of 1988, their hegemonic New Deal coalition frayed, everyone timid from successive thrashings at the polls, desperate for a return to normalcy, determined to nominate someone "moderate," friendly with the coalition's business interests, capable of restoring the confidence of the well-off white guys running things. Imagine Jesse Jackson's 1988 Rainbow Coalition, an urban-rural multi-racial working class movement premised on universal rights to freedom, dignity, and democracy, arraying itself behind an outsider with little clout in Washington, DC.

Imagine being a Vermont letter carrier or school teacher or farm worker and sitting down to hear your mayor give the five minute speech I posted in the comments, outlining the devastating inequality ravaging the nation, emphasizing the need to unite everyday people of all sorts to take on the wealthy class, and describing Jackson's as "the most courageous and exciting political campaign in the modern history of our nation." There he is: Bernie Sanders, the one, single, solitary, lone white elected official in the entire United States to endorse Jackson, standing up for what matters: people's livelihoods and jobs and healthcare and education, their right to live free from domination by a tiny ruling elite, and the imperative to defeat the politics of racist suspicion and resentment by bringing diverse people together around their common interests.

His consistency is as remarkable as his courage. It's the same speech he's still giving! The statistics have gotten worse, but the content is absolutely identical, sometimes down to the word. I know his repetitiveness can be maddening, can make him seem stiff and stubborn, but you have to respect and admire the guy's will to remain unwaveringly independent, decade after corrupt, malignant decade, relentlessly making a stand for the oppressed and ignored. The first time I saw that footage, in 2016, a spirit took over my body, and without thinking, I made my first ever donation to an electoral campaign, in the amount of $27. Today, to mark the occasion of Jackson's 32-years-coming reciprocal endorsement, I made the latest in a series (oy!) of $27 donations l've made since, in memory of that feeling -- an involuntary compulsion, an imperative that came from somewhere other than my rational brain, a tug I was helpless to resist, to do what my feeling heart and my moral conscience demanded.

Imagine if Jackson had won. Imagine if the Democratic Party had adopted his vision for the future of the country. Imagine if Dukakis hadn't been nominated and lost 40 states. Imagine if Clinton hadn't come along and done his "Sister Souljah" repudiation of Jackson and steered the party toward extremely hard neoliberalism, slashing welfare, deregulating Wall Street and telecomm, ramping up mass incarceration, and opening North America's borders -- but only to capital, not labor -- and thereby setting off massive wave of factory closures in the US and forced dislocations in Mexico. Imagine if we'd instead had a job guarantee, universal healthcare, military disarmament, and an end to the war on drugs. We can still make Jackson's vision happen. Bernie Sanders has given us that opportunity. And for that, as Jackson said in today's endorsement speech, "Thank God for Bernie Sanders."

A short tribute I wrote to Rev. Jackson, via Sen. Sanders, on the occasion of his endorsement of the latter’s 2020 campaign

Jesse Jackson. First presidential candidate I, like many in my generation, voted for.

Keep hope alive.

YouTube video by C-SPAN's American History TV Jesse Jackson 1988 Convention Speech

🫡 youtu.be/xodzh-CneAQ?...