Dani K.

Does your public radio station carry Tiny Desk Radio? I'm guest hosting this weekend's episode with Anamaria Sayre! This one features Tiny Desk Contest winners from years past... speaking of, entries are now open for the 2026 contest!

tinydeskcontest.npr.org

1994 "The New Kind"

A collage of Damien Jurado demos from 1994. The tapes are warped to heck, but there's so much warmth in these recordings.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

🤩

YouTube video by NPR Music Sixpence None the Richer: Tiny Desk Concert

I brought Sixpence None the Richer to the Tiny Desk for some holiday cheer (and melancholy) @npr.org

youtu.be/sSY_w9odHPk?...

Haha, and meanwhile I chose my books cataloging app specifically because I didn’t want social features. I just want to be able to remember what I own with a quick search.

I’ve never even considered an app, wow. I have a big drawer at work and a large bin at home and just went through the bin and there were so many teas I forgot I had. (Thankfully I mostly have teas that benefit from aging.)

The 25 Best Songs Of 2025 From the breakout Brooklyn band Geese to the Puerto Rican star and soon-to-be Super Bowl halftime performer Bad Bunny and dozens in between, NPR Music shares its picks for the best songs of 2025.

I wrote about Hayley Williams' modern Southern Gothic masterpiece.

www.npr.org/nx-s1-5616663

Full poem below. Image is my typing the poem out on a typewriter. The border is a line that birds cannot see. The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half. The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires. The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe. The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend. The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein. The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going. The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so many. The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a stop sign, always red. The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished. The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam. The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a thousand imaginations. The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do not rhyme. The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest. The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the evening. The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far. The border is two men in love with the same woman. The border is an equation in search of an equals sign. The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made. The border is “NoNo” The Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh. The border is a locked door that has been promoted. The border is a moat but without a castle on either side. The border has become Checkpoint Chale. The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken. The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier. The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist. The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing changes. The border is a skunk with a white line down its bac…

The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.

The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.

The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.

-Alberto Ríos
from “The Border: A Double Sonnet” (2015)
#everynightapoem

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Kay Ryan The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn't. Pretty much solid elephant. So there's no room to talk about it.

The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

-Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room”
#everynightapoem

20 or so peppercorns and dried shrimp/scallops is wild. Probably tasty. But also… if I’m making egg drop soup it’s because I don’t feel like putting in much effort for anything else.

LOL

Dear friends,
As have become a habit, I mark each #autumnequinox by sharing a small poem by Xin Qiji. I also start my translation cycle of Chinese and Japanese poems and prose that mark the twenty-four lunisolar micro-seasons. Translation notes blogged here:
#everynightapoem

Luiza Brina is an artist on a small, São Paulo-based label who captured my heart so deeply that I wrote a letter to Brazil's ministry of culture so she could get a grant to travel to the U.S., so that we could share her music. This one took a lot of work to produce, and it has my whole heart.

The lack of mainstream coverage of regular huge protests reminds me of a talk from a Twitter employees who explained that they had to drop BLM off the Trending Tags section because otherwise it would have been there permanently. The modern media environment has no appetite for sustained movements.

If you see this, quote repost with a vampire who isn't Dracula.

First day of classes on campus = always a shock to transition back to soooo many students omg

Omg earlier I saw this post out of the corner of my eye and my brain read it as Zao playing Tiny Desk, and I was like…. HOW in the world did I not know about Zao playing Tiny Desk?!?

I like how Studio Ghibli films are like, "Cool, a new monster friend!" and "A witch and her cat!" when you're a kid, and then "Do you ever think about your parents dying?" and "What if you're so burned out you can't do the thing you love anymore?" when you're an adult

5. Most importantly, I recognize that none of us signed up for an online Duke experience. I don't expect to be able to teach in the same way nor do I expect you to learn in the same way. Not academically, not socially, not intellectually. A bit of history: from the very first time I designed and taught this course, I understood it to be about community - the ways it is fostered, even in the direst of circumstances. Many of the first "Chinatowns" were labelled as such as a result of institutional racism, fear and a desire to ghettoize those who seemed unfamiliar and therefore dangerous. In their more recent incarnations, they are often touristic spaces - yet many of them are once again in peril from the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, from a resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Asian racism, as well as from existing issues such as gentrification and global political tensions now exacerbated. A bit dark - but what better time to study the history of communities worldwide that have lived through prior plagues and targeted destruction and social upheaval? However, Chinatown communities also grew out of a genuine longing for home - for normalcy, for nourishment, for protection. Chinatowns have always been about survival and innovation and reinvention, about creative ways to make a living, make a life, and to build family out of strangers and unlikely allies. In the larger scheme of things, a single course -"Chinatowns," or your entire online Duke fall semester, for that matter - will not make or break your life. None of us knows how things will turn out. Whether our loved ones or ourselves will get sick, whether we can remain financially solvent, whether our passports and visas and identities will be deemed 'illegal, whether we will be shunned from new lands and our homeland, or, what the social and psychic costs will be of the sudden disbanding of our collective lives together. But my sincere hope is that this fall, in treating each other and ourselves with g…

5 years ago, I had sent this message to students enrolled in my Chinatowns class at the height of online pandemic education. Then, I wanted to send some words of reassurance, and to offer our (virtual) classroom as genuine community.

Uncanny to feel as if we are in direr straits on campuses today.

Yesterday at an event I had an elderly white lady ask me the classic “but where are you really from” question. Which I don’t often get here since lots of folks tend to think I’m Indigenous, but may have been prompted by the fact that I was wearing one of my Áo Ngũ Thân inspired shirts.

Sigh.

Adopt A Station - Rescue Public Media Help preserve independent journalism and community programming across America by adopting a public media station. Congress has voted to rescind public media's funding.

Don't know who made this, but thank you. adoptastation.org

Hard not to be paranoid when you remember all the times your paranoia was justified.

I needed to have an emotion in private.

I think about this every day

Coworkers doing a photo scavenger hunt came into my office looking for something “strange” for their photo. Their biggest issue was choosing.

Then they asked if I had anything with a rainbow on it and I started laughing at them before overwhelming them with options.

First, this is a terrible instructional format for my learning style.

Second, the majority of these videos do not seem to be applicable to my situation and are therefore a waste of my time and I cannot easily skim or search like I’d be able to do with text-based documentation.

Rant: just because a lot of users like video content does not mean that everyone should pivot to making all of their content in video format. It can have SO many accessibility issues.
Trying learn something for work and the only options available to me are videos (42min + 55min).

On the anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first of a series of increasingly stringent exclusion laws that not only banned the Chinese but also became a blueprint for racially-charged US immigration policy that persists to this day - sharing a poem from Angel Island.

“In a time of destruction, create something.

A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.”

-Maxine Hong Kingston
(from the book she wrote from scratch after her home burnt down and she lost all her drafts in the Oakland forest fires of 1991)

Stop Forcing A.I. Into Every Fucking Thing!

Stop Forcing A.I. Into Every Fucking Thing!