Christopher Douglas

Just a polite reminder that we owe the concept of zombies to voodoun/Haitian cultures as an externalization of the fear of being compelled to labor beyond what was supposed to be the Absolute Freedom of death.

Most Americans are unaware that since 1992-1993, a surprising number of measures of societal dysfunction -- murder rates but also violent crimes of all types & property crimes -- have gone down.

And the biggest likely factor was eliminating Leaded gasoline, which is linked to brain damage.

YouTube video by Mike Birbiglia Bob Odenkirk | The Art of Anger in Comedy | Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out Podcast

Here, Bob Odenkirk (in a pod with Mike Birbiglia) says something I have been thinking about *so much* the last few years but I never, ever hear expressed in public. Lord, hearing it said aloud just made me burst into tears. (Yes I'm fine why do you ask.)

Starts at 39:00.

So many stories include quotes featuring performative lying like this from Trump regime flacks. Why?

Making a CLEAN, SHAREABLE dataset is fucking hard! I'm super proud, then, to publish this one, on a team led by @sdileonardi.bsky.social and @beccacohen.bsky.social, with @post45data.bsky.social. It has more than a decade of 21C int'l bestseller data, revealing how popular world lit circulates....

How is ancient kingdom of Israel relevant today–can you still be a part of it? Politically, no–that horse left the barn in 722 BCE. Religiously yes–but only as a creative imaginative act: for the Gospels, the true Israel is not the Jews but the mostly gentile Christian Church. What about nationally?

Want to know more about QAnon and its impact on politcal discourse? I may have written a book about it thst just came out 😏
www.routledge.com/QAnon-From-C...

What If God is a ‘Pagan Amalgam’: Marilynne Robinson and Historical Bible Scholarship Abstract. Marilynne Robinson is one of the most influential Christian writers and public intellectuals alive today, and her views on a range of topics shou

Well, I'm actually not pretending, and I'm pretty interested in questions of monotheism and polytheism. But if I strike you as discussing in bad faith, I withdraw.
doi.org/10.1093/litt...

If I understand you right, you're saying that because most people think the HB is an authoriative text about a monotheistic God, it functions as a kind of ground for argumentation and disagreement, which ChatGPT is now undermining by its constant hallucinations of texts?

God in Translation The Hebrew Bible has long been understood as condemning foreign deities. While many biblical texts do condemn other deities, many other passages show how early Israelites sometimes accepted the realit...

I guess 'monotheism' here is a metaphor or analogy, but there's been lots of scholarship in the last 40 years casting into doubt the monotheism of the HB and the "the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text". E.g., this response to Assmann

God in Translation share.google/iYlpcS96eF14...

34:
Māweth and Yām must be regarded as gods in the HB; what else would you call them?

Okay, why not: one like, one verse from the Pentateuch that I think is a post-compilation secondary addition. Let’s get NUTS.

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

Ok, I'll bite: one like=one Northwest Semitic or Biblical opinion.

How Liberalism Sabotages Itself Our intentional blindness to bad faith is a loophole fascists use to gain respectability and power.

"Right-wing operators in particular are groomed and trained to argue to embrace bad-faith argument as a tactic. And yet even in the Trump era, when the bad faith is so thinly veiled, liberals remain reluctant to treat it as disqualifying."

Man oh man is @brianbeutler.bsky.social right about this.

Matt Shea and the growing religious extremism in the Pacific Northwest The former six-term Washington state legislator was notorious for his ties to militias and is now active in the Christian supremacist movement.

A good new piece out of the SPLC on Matt Shea: www.splcenter.org/resources/ha...

I got to write the Polytheism in Modern American Religion and Culture part of this entry for De Gruyter Brill, and the whole entry on Polytheism is pretty interesting.

www.degruyterbrill.com/database/EBR...

Republicans are so comfortable covering up/excusing sex crimes of those in power because evangelical leaders have showed them how.

Opinion | Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

“For decades, American Judaism, built on the liberalism of the diaspora, has been interwoven with Zionism. What happens when the ideals of the one become incompatible with the reality of the other?”

Really excellent column by @ezraklein.bsky.social Gift link 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/o...

🧵I keep seeing/hearing mention of QAnon's "Satanic sex-trafficking pedophiles" conspiracy & hand to God it makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills that NO ONE MENTIONS THE ANTISEMITISM.

They are talking about Jews.
They are talking about Jews.
They are talking about Jews.

HERE LET ME HELP:

Brilliant review of a long awaited book.

Bullet Points: "We're in Danger" edition Substack's new funding round, doubting Epstein drama amounts to much, and NYT columnists should shut up about Mamdani.

Feels like the theme of this week is <ominous clouds gather>.
(...But that's also kind of the theme of the year, isn't it.)

Anyway, here's a bloggy rant about all the bullshit.

open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Reading Scenario Experiments. This series of prompts is designed to get you thinking about how the setting for reading affects concentration, comprehension, and even the existential experience of reading. Every week, one of the following prompts will appear on the syllabus. I encourage you to try all of them that you are able. How does a different reading setting affect your mood? Your receptiveness to the prose? Your pleasure or difficulty reading? What are the particular impacts of changing your lighting or surroundings? What do you notice about yourself and about the work you are reading during this experiment? 1. read by candlelight (use a small lamp in dorms where no candles are allowed!) 2. read for one hour without checking any devices, answering texts, etc. 3. walk out into nature (climb a tree, sit on a rock, grab a spot in a hammock) and read 4. host a reading night with friends & food (sit in companionable silence, reading without chatting) 5. read aloud a chapter to someone else 6. climb into bed at night and read by flashlight under the covers for at least 30 minutes, as if you’ve already been told “lights out” as a kid 7. reread a chapter and see what new things you notice the second time through 8. change your ambient-noise level: add music if you normally read in the quiet; or read without music if you are normally a music-listener 9. read with a sketchpad at hand and sketch scenes, characters, or other elements from the story 10. practice focused listening: have someone read to you 11. make yourself a special, fancy snack on a real plate to nibble while eating: pay attention to the cooking or arranging or choosing of ingredients to make it especially appetizing first 12. make tea (even if you’re not usually a tea drinker), and read and sip 13. invent a new reading scenario for yourself, or repeat the one you liked the best from this term [writing assignment using these prompts follows; text character limit prevents inclusion of it in full]

Here you go! I'll write some new ones for this semester too. They loved them. The "read without your phone or screens in the room" was a revelation, and many of them decided to keep doing it. They had NO IDEA (& were horrified) how often they interrupt themselves to look at a phone for no reason.

Trump’s endless toying with conspiracy theories has finally come back to bite him | Moira Donegan The president has long exploited useful fictions embraced by his supporters. Now he’s trying to change the narrative

Trump’s endless toying with conspiracy theories has finally come back to bite him | Moira Donegan

🔵 This week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic
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THE HEROIC TECH BILLIONAIRE LEX LUTHOR VS. THE EVIL "WOKE" ALIEN SUPERMAN!
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Brought to you by the super members of the Inner Hive, including long-time member RobbÜry415 and new member Bill Schaffner.
( bit.ly/theInnerHive )
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Read it right here👇

A key but rarely asked question of ancient literatures is who they addressed. Language lets you talk to anybody, even if they're "not there." You can talk to gods, as the Babylonian anti-witchcraft ritual Maqlû: "I invoke you, O Gods of the Night; with you, I invoke Night, the Veiled Bride!"🧵

Opinion | I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.

My NYT op-ed this morning
I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/o...

Canada’s proposed east-west energy corridors should prioritize clean energy Creating energy corridors is in the national interest, and the Canadian government should prioritize funding clean energy supply solutions.

theconversation.com/canadas-prop...

Opinion | Trump finds himself on the wrong side of a conspiracy theory He has leveraged conspiracy theories for a decade — now one lumps him in with The Elites.

Ahead of the 2024 election, PRRI found that 28% of Republicans qualify as QAnon believers compared with 19% of all Americans.
President Trump is facing backlash from many supporters concerning Jeffrey Epstein and the larger QAnon belief in a “global child sex trafficking operation.”

Trust no one. Also... submit an abstract to our ACLA panel on "Conspiracism" when the portal opens on August 1! (with @lalouverouge.bsky.social and @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social) www.acla.org/seminar/a770...