Saralovesyou

I didn’t enjoy church, but the Catholic Church we attended was not somewhere that ever talked about “end times” of any of that nonsense. It’s so weird.

One thing I’ve wondered as someone who really had no functional understanding of evangelicals until very recent years is how few people in journalism truly understand the difference between evangelicals and any other Christian denomination. I think they don’t, which is not good.

This is an incredibly concerning piece of reporting, and I am not sure what to do with the worry it fills me with.

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Our little standwithminnesota.com team staved off multiple evictions today. I’m so proud of us. And the stories are so heartbreaking, and there’s still so much need.

If you can help, I’ll get it directly where it needs to go.

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We keep us safe 💛

I wish the schools taught handwriting and cursive. They do very little of either now and it catches up once you have to take notes. (This is just my experience, and if I could get my kid to do this at home I would in a heartbeat).

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Also, his car was shitty and had rusted wheels. Had he not parked at an angle that would block my car door, he wouldn’t have had an issue.

I wanted to stay and make him move his precious car or call the St. Paul police on me for existing, but I had to come to school to pick my kid up.

I just got lectured by a guy because my door touched his car, which he parked so poorly that you couldn’t open the door most of the way.

Because he was monitoring me, I had to get in on my passenger side and contort myself into the driver’s seat.

It’s so terrible. Massively decreased reporting staff across the board and infinitely more time to fill.

In print, I’d have to flip to Katherine Kerston’s terrible takes on purpose to get mad. I could also just not open the opinion section. She’d get so many angry clicks now.

Algorithms, blurred lines between news and opinion (the dreaded supposedly objective ‘analysis’), and disinvestment in reporting staff is the problem.

It is easy to pump out hot takes. Less easy to write educated hot takes, but reporting takes labor and expertise and is hard.

The Brown dropout is a reference to Einstein’s founder. Very little is more expensive than putting money into college and not finishing.

I assume he didn’t have those concerns. Which always sends my antennae up.

The substance of the most serious underlying problem here is spoken to in this piece. Einstein etc poison the well for education access online, and if not seen and treated as fraud will affect the credibility of academic degrees for *normal students* not well off enough to be a Brown dropout.

the most amazing thing today was every single person that came to me with a need and asked “can you take this on?” i got to say YES

and we cleared our sheet! (for today. tomorrow we begin again)

They’re so delightful to write. The annoyance of a forced structure to breathe life into.

I also used to write a limerick at work every day at my first job to entertain my coworkers.

By the way—if you’ve never read a villanelle you should. I love a good villanelle. I heartily enjoy Bishop’s “One Art” even though (or especially?) because it breaks form.

If you’ve ever spent a lot of time around writers and are of a certain age where you understand and find gallows humor in how messed up life used to be, it could be entertaining. I’m not sure anyone under like 40-45 would find it funny. Definitely more horrifying.

It was on brand though. Gotta say something.

New Yorkers also interpreted every Midwest thing I wrote as working class poetry. But it wasn’t, it’s just culturally different here. I was similarly mortified at that interpretation because I certainly didn’t earn those stripes and wasn’t faking.

I was remembering workshop and a poem I was getting critiqued and one of the guys loved it, but interpreted it entirely wrong and extremely sexually and I was mortified that something riffing on Yeats but veering off into a bit on vulnerability, freedom, and fear/protection was so misunderstood.

In a change of pace, I’m listening to Margaret Atwood’s memoir, which is cracking me up in part because of gallows humor of pre-second wave feminism hell, but also it’s reminding me of how bonkers poets are (my MFA is in poetry, I know that of which I speak).

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Also the GOP definitely doesn’t see me or my family as human. So I am disinclined to grant the current office holders/party members much grace as a normal outsider citizen.

I doubt there were huge ideological differences in the 1930s and 1940s between my grandfather (DFL) and his best friend (IR). That just wouldn’t be true now.

Part of why MPLS politics is so 🤬 is the ppl who would have been IR + ppl who would be DFL all in the same party because the GOP is unhinged

Even far more right wing people (anyone remember Eric Cantor?) got knocked out as the truly bananas racist and extremist response to Obama’s election in GOP circles drove it fully off the rails, hurtling towards where we are now.

This jumps off a different thread, but I worry a bit that the broad and accelerating radicalization of the GOP over the last 30-40 years isn’t more obvious to people.

Parties change and the IR (Independent Republicans) who I remember from my younger years wouldn’t make it past a modern GOP primary

It’s not a coincidence that Durenberger and Carlson have primarily endorsed Democrats for quite a few years now (and IIRC Durenberger changed his party affiliation).

These aren’t our parents’ (or grandparents’, depending on our age) political parties.

The MN GOP of the 1970s was incredibly different from now (it wasn’t even GOP, it was IR—though still Republican).

Most people I know who were Republicans of the Boschwitz/Durenberger/Carlson ilk are all Democratic voters now (who still think I’m too far left—but the right has shifted radically).

Elite Doctors Served Jeffrey Epstein While Treating His ‘Girls’

NEW: I and colleagues reviewed 15,000 documents to illuminate how Jeffrey Epstein used VIP doctors to control and manipulate young women* — and how the doctors helped him, treating his needs as more important than the patients'. Gift link.

*see next post in thread

We could have just kept the JCPOA instead of twice electing a domination-loving man who was so obsessed with undoing Obama’s presidency that we landed where we are today.

I can’t believe there are people who voted for him thinking he wouldn’t do the kind of things he’s done.