Tommy Craggs

Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...

Thought this was a really smart, sobering piece from @tcraggs22.bsky.social.

"Nostalgia for some older, bolder time is useless. Journalistic bravery is structurally produced. Cowardice, too."

Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...

"If Weiss is exceptional, it's only in her knack for making a spectacle of the sort of things that slicker operators in media say and do all the time without causing too much of a fuss."

@tcraggs22.bsky.social on Bari Weiss and all the Bari Weisses: defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...

There are Bari Weisses everywhere for those with the eyes to see defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

I foresee a lot of people writing "the transformation/moderation of Marjorie Taylor Greene" takes this year who'll forget that's she's arguably the most ubiquitous anti-semite in American life at the moment

MTG on the Epstein scandal—"elites doing horrible things and getting away with it"—may have an egalitarian air about it, but only if you fail to read it alongside the rest of her conspiracism. She's talking about the Jews. She's always talking about the Jews. flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s True Colors There was a long story in the New York Times Magazine about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s apostasies against the Trump White House last week that seems to have attracted mainly those with a kink for arguin...

TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the various ways to read Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent political transformation. “Alternatively, you could choose not to shove your head into your ass. She is talking about the Jews. She has always been talking about the Jews.” flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...

We launched Oakland Review of Books in 2025, starting with an events calendar and vibe reports and, as we've gone on, more and more blogs and reviews and even a few full-on bangers. (And The Oakland syllabus!) We've actually done a lot.

But 2026 is going to be The Year of ORB!

Bay Resistance Alert: ICE/DHS was observed present today *near* Hoover elementary in Oakland (please note that they did not attempt to enter any school) There is a request for a solidarity presence from schools during school pick up hours. Harriet Tubman preschool, 800 33rd street early dismissal Picket 11am- 11:45 Hoover Elementary 890 Brockhurst street entrance Picket 12:30 - 2pm YMCA preschool 3265 market Picket 2pm - 5pm

#Oakland please reshare!

ICE spotted near schools. Can you come stand in solidarity to protect our neighbors?

You have a knack

Gonna take the bait here and point out that the gap between athletes taking stuff to perform better and athletes accepting money to perform worse is so wide that you could roll Mark McGwire lengthwise through it.

What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.

Ouch. www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.

Nice piece of writing. Love the shout out to David Noble’s 1984 classic, Forces of Production: “Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men.”

And this observation from @tcraggs22.bsky.social is exquisite:

“The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.”

A very 1980s tableau in which a little kid in a Superman shirt is standing on the lawn of a small house he could never dream of affording as an adult, next to a woman in a cream-colored knee-length dress, belted with cap sleeves, who will never tire of asking him when he's finally going to write a book. They appear happy.

The mom in question:

Full podcast is here! pod.link/1055903427/e...

I talked about "Kpop Demon Hunters," the Eighth Army's occupation of Korea & the origins of Kpop, the only person more driven by resentment than Michael Jordan (my mom), rooting for pretty (again), and the greatest natural athlete the world has ever known (Kim Jong-Il)

Only If You Get Caught History Podcast · Updated Weekly · Only If You Get Caught is about how we can better understand sports and culture by appreciating the ways humans cheat in ways big and small.  Hosted by Patrick Redfo...

Regardless of how you feel about the above takes, do subscribe to the podcast. It's from @redford.bsky.social and @alexlaughs.bsky.social and @defector.com, and they make cool things: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Also, I got to talk about the early-aughts Sacramento Kings and my iron rule of sports fandom: always root for pretty.

Riding my hobbyhorse into the sunset, via @redford.bsky.social's rad new podcast: Sports conspiracy theories are how fans do structural analysis.

🥲 I have a new piece out today with ORB! Would love for you to read it. Truly a labor of care on everyone’s part & I’m grateful for that & the insistence that off kilter, slightly dark work Around Books fits & is in fact, the point. ORB forever! Messy girls with mental health challenges forever!!

"The Oakland Review of Books is coming!" it says on our website, and if you haven't noticed, we've started publishing ever-so-slightly-more ambitious things as we ramp up towards really cutting loose.

If you'd like to follow along, for the low price of $0 (American), you can get it in your inbox:

Are We Playing It All Wrong? | Defector At some point in the thick of the pandemic, I became briefly obsessed with a silly-seeming online controversy over what is known as the double-beat theory. The argument concerns classical music, which...

There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...

How Not to Fix American Democracy A new book argues for making the U.S. a “true” democracy, but fails at the essential strategy of persuasion.

George Packer hates this book! Buy it today! Out tomorrow wherever books are sold.

Bookshop: shorturl.at/ykg4a
Amazon: shorturl.at/0d7A3
Barnes & Noble: shorturl.at/EFA9I

www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Good time to revisit @tcraggs22.bsky.social on this very topic at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/who-made-cai...

All hands Like any movie in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is secretly about full employment

This is truly wonderful. It's about Sinners, yes, but it's about this moment, the power of the squad.
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/all-hands-si...

I think this is a good read on the movie, but I would push it even further. What do the movie’s vampires represent, anyway, beyond the dream of a squad permanently assembled--a eternal general strike against mortality, a perpetual mobilization against death? Smoke and Stack, the ex-gangster twins played by Michael B. Jordan, assemble a small and termporary communitarian escape from drudgery and oppression. But Remmick, the Irish vampire who chances upon the juke house, offers not so much an temporary escape as an entirely new settlement: “This world already left you for dead,” he tells Smoke. “Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.” Huh. If we follow Tommy in focusing on Sinners’ historical setting we might note that promises like Remmick’s--a new fellowship, built together across racial lines, in pursuit of dignity, pleasure, and freedom--were relatively common in the South of this period: Robin D.G. Kelley documents in his great Hammer and Hoe the outsize role played by the Alabama Communist Party, among other communist parties, throughout the interwar civil-rights struggle. I’m not saying the Sinners vampires are communists, exactly--the movie is too dense and expansive to function as a simple allegory--but I’m not saying they’re not communists. Remmick is, after all, a materialist, in a vulgar-Spinozist sense: “We are Earth and beast and God,” he lectures. “We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”

in this week's newsletter, a plea for robin d.g. kelley to write about sinners maxread.substack.com/p/who-are-th...

As the world burns, a few of us are making an Oakland Review of Books. We don’t have money, but why not? We’re moving slowly. We're trying not to break things.

But we’re trying to imagine: what if Oakland were enough and we cared enough to look? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Get together / Play a show Tommy Craggs on foxhole solidarity, and Rax King at the Dew Drop Inn

TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the Squads Assemble school of cinema, and the social context that makes them so seductive. "They are a dream of everyone fits somewhere, costarring Ludacris." flaminghydra.com/r/442ea64e?m...

A screenshot from the article that reads: "The idea of full employment has been too long in the hands of the technocrats for any of the old cultural feeling to endure. White paper by white paper, the country’s Poindexters have defined full employment down to the point that it is now understood as a statistical benchmark of acceptable immiseration, some unemployment being necessary, so they say, to the long, twilight struggle against inflation. But true full employment always meant just that: no involuntary unemployment. Everyone has a job, and there is a job for everyone. And the Squad Assembles movies, even the bad ones, are some of the last remaining cultural expressions of that ideal. They are a dream of ~everyone fits somewhere~, costarring Ludacris."