alina pleskova

INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Hall by Alina Pleskova, Daily Ephemera Are the Meat Stuff "I never underestimate the power of having something to look forward to."

very excited to share my interview with Elizabeth Hall in Zona Motel! we talk about her terrific new book Season of the Rat, precarity & survival mode, pleasure, productivity, paying attention to mundanity, & more.... 🐀🌴

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

Zona Motel reminds me of the golden age of the bloggy literary internet—irreverent, human-sounding chatter rather than smooth, indistinguishable-sounding 'content'— so it's also only fitting that the piece contains a pic of us from way back when in 2017 👶👶

INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Hall by Alina Pleskova, Daily Ephemera Are the Meat Stuff "I never underestimate the power of having something to look forward to."

very excited to share my interview with Elizabeth Hall in Zona Motel! we talk about her terrific new book Season of the Rat, precarity & survival mode, pleasure, productivity, paying attention to mundanity, & more.... 🐀🌴

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

in the way that poems get lodged in us… i was just trying to say when the next full moon would be, hesitated, checked, then repeated what i had said, like an incantation, & was like wait a minute isn’t this— & went & found it on my shelf 🌝

NOT YET Not tomorrow night but the night after tomorrow Not tomorrow but the night after tomorrow Then the moon will be full Then the moon will be full

Joanne Kyger

Important to hear

Wow! We're up to 175 participants & more than $10k in pledges/direct contributions!

Let’s keep the momentum going ❤️‍🔥 You can still join the #sealeychallenge Poetry Pledge Fundraiser for Gaza, as a participant or sponsor, at any time. Details here: mailchi.mp/openpoetrybo...

i love this song

The Onion's process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That's why I don't touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they're already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that's working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it's that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don't actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

A.I. is inherently a mediocrity machine. It takes the precise middle of everything and attempts to emulate it. That's A.I. when it's working, and it's great for, like, TurboTax. That's also satire when it's total dogshit. The only times I've seen A.I. being funny are when it messes up profoundly. A full ten years before its rebrand into some sort of all -encompassing economic panacea, we used to call generative A.I. bots LLMs. One of them was called Horse Ebooks, and it was hooked up to a Twitter account that tweeted random sentence fragments from smutty books about horses. Everyone assumed it was a robot gone haywire. Its best work wound up being sentences hand-curated by a human in disguise. In short, A.I. has done a tremendous job of laying off roughly 10% of my friends and driving down the quality of the open internet, covering it with a layer of lorem ipsum. It's done a bad job of making pretty much anything that can escape the uncanny valley artistically, despite being three years into this hype cycle about how it's going to gain sentience and kill America's grandmas. All of this is being pitched as good for the economy, for some reason. Anyway, I'm sure Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg have our best interests in mind and this will be a net-positive for society.

can't say i've ever, ever loved any interview with a "CEO" until i read this one with Ben Collins (The Onion)— these parts in particular

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

hell yeah 🎉

Two wildfires in US west spur ‘fire clouds’ with erratic weather systems Containment slips for megafire in Grand Canyon and large blaze in Utah as hot and dry weather fans flames

the grand canyon being engulfed in flames since july 4 is just too apt of an augury for this empire

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The problem is far bigger than Jeffrey Epstein | Rebecca Solnit Treating the scandal as an aberration misunderstands the global epidemic of violence against women

"One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society."

🧙🏻 love to do a summoning!!

truly a blessed South Philly occasion

Glimpse of turtle in the tank

A parrot on a stool, eating cake

turtles in question were given privacy, but the parrot eating cake was out here mingling

Large board of turtle name contenders

Neighbors gather to cut the turtle cake

Welcome cake for Franklin & Donatella

Welcome to turtle pond sign in front of turtle tank updated with turtle names, to be revealed with masking tape removal

Help us name the turtles sign in front of a turtle tank with handmade vote box and instructions

refilled my dopamine reserves by going to a Turtle Naming Ceremony in my neighborhood….

(how it started)

brb swearing allegiance to the indomitable city-state of Philadelphia Except The Cop Parts

I found her gofundme! She's already raised 41.5k of her 45k goal for gas, vehicle maintenance, phone/internet costs (for posting the videos), food and supply drives for the community, and emergency funds in case she gets into legal trouble:

out here mentally regressing to early childhood (USSR), i fear

ahaha i didn't believe my coworker, either—was covertly typing into google on my phone while on zoom. but now i'm a believer!!

for a bit of levity (tho even then, it indirectly invokes extreme climate change-related heat): this week i learned (via midwestern coworker) about the existence of "corn sweat" as a colloquial weather term 🌽💦💦💦💦

in a deluge of shitty news, this rippled hard into my spirit. public media is essential. people NEED access to programming, news, & education that isn’t filtered thru corporate oligarchy influence & $$$. i learned the goddamn language that i didn’t come to this country knowing bc of sesame street.

one million percent, i'd wager that at least 1/4 of my bookshelf is a result of tw*tter alone

i think many ppl are here to be in dialogue & community, which is multidirectional. & i say that as a writer who had a book to promote on a small press & was immeasurably grateful to people on the internet for supporting me so much. but they're real people to me, not a category of prospective buyers

from my came-of-age-online millennial POV, writers who are comfortable being a version of themselves online, & being part of a conversation, often gain audiences/readers/friends just by doing that. when you like someone's whole deal online, it follows that you'll be into supporting their work

i'm sure many are saying this, but—as in real life 'networking'— ppl can tell when you only want to sell to them or want something from them. if you're a relentless engine of self-promotion & nothing else, & if you think of social platforms as strictly transactional, what you do here won't take.

Well, everything. The death of art. [Laughs.] A thing that I’ve been struck by in the last year of tech development around art is that what makes us human is making art, even if you’re not a professional artist. This is kind of corny, but I think about cavemen, right? One of the first things we ever did as a species was put our handprints on a wall, and it’s just this drive that has always been there. It’ll always be there. And I think it’s preposterous that these people are suggesting that they develop this technology, and the first thing they want to eliminate is art, so you have more time to…what, email? I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with my fucking day. Most of the population is not artists, but a lot of the population has artistic hobbies, and if you replace that with a computer doing it for you or whatever, it’s just pointless. I think there’s a death drive in these people, almost, and an actual hatred of artists; they are jealous of people with imagination because they don’t have one, and they almost consciously want to eliminate it.

My wife is in Vogue shitting on your AI-generated "art" 💜 www.vogue.com/article/matt...

The deadly risk of trying to reach food in Gaza An NPR journalist in Gaza describes his experience seeking food from a site run by private American contractors, facing Israeli military fire, crowds fighting for rations, and masked thieves.

. @npr.org is one of the only US national news organizations that still has a reporter inside Gaza, Anas Baba, and he keeps reporting even though he himself is starving. This piece is unbelievably powerful.
www.npr.org/2025/07/05/n...

how do these people sleep at night