Nell Gwyn, Middle Class Commoner

I am like Charlie Brown and the football when it comes to "Best of/Greatest of All Time" music and film lists but I am still trying to grapple with how a list of best rap albums omits The Score by The Fugees while including...some of the other albums it included.

Cc: @zeblarson.bsky.social

NEW: L.A. Times journalists just voted to authorize the newsroom’s first open-ended strike.

Eighty-five percent of the @latguild.bsky.social voted to support the strike. Just over 200 workers — 98% of members — took part in the historic vote.

An elderly couple showed up at our door (at night!) to ask us about our political opinions and to give us the primary and general election schedule for 2026.

Yaaaay

Still can't believe it took me until this year to listen to Bob Dylan's version of All Along the Watchtower.

Thinking a lot.about those old "When Keeping it real goes wrong" sketch clips because I may have in fact Kept It Too Real with the most powerful employee at my org.

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

Cc-ing @zeblarson.bsky.social and @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social in this thread in case you both have any insightful commentary.

This isn't something that can be overcome with the right election campaign messaging. We need people to actually believe that Americans deserve a better collective system and not "everyone for themselves" and that it is possible to work to achieve it. That is a different (cultural!) exercise.

But anyways, the point is that Americans in many places are taught through their own cultures (Churches, suburbs/HOAs, parent associations etc) that abundance impossible, some people are a natural underclass, and all government is the enemy.

There are so many reasons for those loses, but the point is: that experiment has been thoroughly run, and in fact, even to imply people aren't running is false thing/red herring. The idea that people are running on culture, whether it wss AOC or Biden, is entirely made up

Thousands of people with pro-worker platforms - liberal qnd progressive alike - have run for office in local and state govt since Sanders ran in 2016, including all over rural US. Many, many, many of them lost, some in spectacular fashion. Some won in the 2018 midterm wave only to lose later on.

Heard yet another prominent Dem saying "we gotta talk pocketbook issues to win rural" and it seems like no one wants to admit so many Americans are indoctrinated to believe in scarcity, punishment and positionality that they aren't capable of hearing "here's how good govt helps you" messaging.

People keep trying to get to watch Love is Blind and i refuse. Watching that show actually made my blood pressure go up.

Respect to whichever staffer went back and pulled an Eric Cantor deep cut to show how far back this obsession with cutting healthcare goes. Pretty bonkers that the path to the US potentially actually collapsing started with a Black man being like "maybe everyone should be able to go to the doctor."

Okay Deadwood is a stressful show.

My whole thing about all this is: where does this woman be at in all the intermittent years between losing races for Congress?

Oop

"People in past fought so much more with so much less and yet still held onto the belief that a better humanity was possible" is something I find myself regularly repeating to staff and students.

Finally cleaned up my bookshelves in my room but a part of me is now deeply suspicious of it, like maybe this is too pristine and I kinda missed the lived in look.

PJ Harvey: Is This Desire? Read Ivy Nelson’s review of the album.

Ooo, today's Pitchfork retrospective is PJ Harvey album I don't think I have ever listened to.

Man clothes are so weird now. I am looking through lingerie trying to get burlesque inspired but man what in the geometric googly-eye looking thing is this??

Been trying very hard to convince myself that aging is sexy and I think I have almost succeeded.

You still can, she's available!

I am so jealous. Meanwhile i am over here trying to keep my dry cleaning budget under control (this is the most first world problem to have first world problemed, I know)

Thought I had tagged you hours ago @zeblarson.bsky.social because I thought you would find this funny.

a man holding a red cup stands in a crowd of people ALT: a man holding a red cup stands in a crowd of people

Anyways, that's wild. Assuming that would have been for The Mighty Ducks?! Man, you were *this* close to having Katie Holmes, Diane Kruger and Jodie Turner-Smith in the ex crew.

At first I got stuck on "I played hockey" because hockey somehow still isn't real to me (whenever someone mentions it I always the hear Cedric the Entertainer stand-up bit in my head).

…and while I concede it is surely the case JJ had already been cast, due to our uncanny resemblance, I do believe he has, basically, been living a version of my life!