Elliott Holt

Talking to an AI fan at a party recently I was like “it lies, it uses stolen goods, it’s an energy disaster, it’s bad for humanity” and he kept being like “that may be true BUT if i give ChatGPT a photo of my smoke detector then ChatGPT can find me the user manual for my smoke detector”

MFA for All - American Short Fiction MFA for ALL MFA for All was born from our desire to create a space where MFA-quality instruction is widely accessible to writers no matter their age, background, location, or financial situation. MFA ...

Hello! This fall I am working with the excellent folks at American Short Fiction as part of their MFA for all online program (alongside the wonderful Tommy Orange and Kevin Wilson). You can study with one or all of us or even 2/3rds.

americanshortfiction.org/mfa-for-all/

Headline from Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Garber Tells Faculty He Is Not Considering a $500 Million Deal With Trump."

Text of story: Harvard prez Garber says report of a deal "was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials." NYT ran with it as a story.

Important details from this story:

1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal."

3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

What is required for someone to be an American? 30% of Republicans say being White is very or somewhat important. www.pbump.net/o/what-makes...

Columbia and Brown to Disclose Admissions and Race Data in Trump Deal

Columbia and Brown universities agreed to provide the Trump administration with detailed admissions data as part of settlements, including information about applicants’ race

Audio of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson arguments from Marriage Story used to scare off wolves in the US ‘Wolves need to know humans are bad,’ says US department of agriculture representative, explaining unusual strategy to save cattle

in other news

“Garber, in a conversation with one faculty member, said that the suggestion that Harvard was open to paying $500 million is ‘false’ and claimed that the figure was apparently leaked to the press by White House officials...”

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

We’re defying basic number theory at this point—riding roughshod over the intrinsic properties of integers.

“I managed to pass the course… but I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I had written an essay by myself, which was my favorite activity. This was the catalyst for me to stop using the app.”

‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the megaprison where the U.S. deported migrants Interviews with 16 former detainees of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the notorious prison.

“Here, the director said, the men would have no rights—no right to a lawyer, no access to the sun. They would not eat chicken or meat for the rest of their lives. ‘The only way that you will leave,’ he said, according to multiple detainees, ‘is inside a black bag.’ ”

JUST IN: A federal judge has blocked Secrretary Noem's move to terminate temporary status for Nicaragua, Honduran and Nepaii immigrants, finding the cancelation was likely rooted in "racial animus." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, New Documents Show

‘Clinton Plan’ Emails Were Likely Made by Russian Spies, Declassified Report Shows

An annex to the Durham special counsel report was the latest in a series of disclosures about the Russia inquiry, as the Trump team seeks to distract from the Epstein files

gift link:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/u...

NEW: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funds.

Then the harassment began.

Pizzas sent to his home in the name of Judge Esther Salas’s murdered son, Daniel.

Six credible threats to his life.

More than 400 “vile” calls to his chambers—including this voicemail:

Am I wrong or is the discourse around this entirely manufactured? I keep seeing claims that "the left is melting down" and the evidence is two people on tiktok. It's like they need wokeness so bad they have to invent it

ICE Arrested Cross Teen In Workplace Raid, Sent Him South; 150 Rally… Eleven teens stood chained together, side by side before a 150-person crowd, their hands zip-tied and painted red like blood. They were there to…

#ICE kidnapped a New Haven high school student. #NewHaven www.newhavenindependent.org/article/ice_...

Analysis | The grinding cost of climate change on one street, in one house The expense of preparing for climate change extends into thousands of tiny, expensive changes.

A few years ago, I talked to some Staten Islanders whose street (and homes) kept flooding during the increasing occurrence of storms like the one expected today. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

To lift this out of another thread, the professional creative's challenge is an American cultural challenge writ large. It's luck. It's all dependent much more on luck than maybe a human can process and stay sane. American have internalized a grind/pioneer mentailty that foster toxic individualism.

Colbert isn’t the news! It’s a comedy show. It’s not in the news division.

The “deal” that Brown made with the Trump admin is much more extreme than is being reported. It includes government oversight of course evaluations and no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring.

Read it for yourself here:

www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

House Dems Sue ICE For Blocking Oversight on Immigration Facilities Read more here.

🚨BREAKING: A dozen House Democrats sued Trump administration officials Wednesday, alleging that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has prevented them from conducting oversight on federal immigration detention facilities. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Senate, Rejecting Whistle-Blower Alarms, Confirms Bove to Appeals Court

Thinking of career DOJ attorneys I know who had the integrity to resign rather than participate in the dirty Eric Adams deal.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/u...

The Two-Pronged Attack on a Muslim Judicial Nominee How the smearing of Adeel Mangi became a bipartisan exercise.

This is why the Bove seat was vacant, and there’s a real throughline from the forces that defeated the previous Democratic nominee to where we are today.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-pol...

The number of people who write to me telling me they have made an incredible discovery using ChatGPT, or proved that it is conscious, is now roughly one per day. I wish there were a resource I could send these folks to gently try to steer them away from the brink

YouTube video by Senator Chris Van Hollen We were denied entry into an ICE facility in Baltimore

Today we were denied entry to an ICE facility in Baltimore where were exercising our oversight role as Members of Congress. The law is clear: ICE is REQUIRED to let us into these facilities.

They just don't want the American people to see what's happening behind closed doors.

YouTube video by Senator Chris Van Hollen WATCH: U.S. Army veteran gives first-hand account of suffering, starvation in Gaza

As starvation worsens by the day in Gaza, the Netanyahu government has been using food as a weapon of war — with complicity from Trump and U.S. taxpayer dollars.

This is painful to listen to but here’s what a U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who witnessed it first-hand recounted to me:

"Great. So let’s talk about this. If that’s a communication failure, I can’t tell the difference here between: “Every degree matters” and “We have been scaring you all unscientifically for decades in order to get you to move faster. But now that we’re moving slower, don’t worry too much.” Jenkins: To be clear, I wasn’t scaring people with that kind of rhetoric. The science is very clear: Get there as fast as possible. We are already seeing dangerous climate change around us today. The idea that there’s some safe zone and some dangerous zone, and there’s a threshold between the two, is just not scientifically true. The I.P.C.C. has never said that. There’s no consensus in the scientific documents that frame it that way. What they’ve said is that every degree involves increasing risk. That’s true — and so we have a sense of urgency. We want to make as much progress as possible, as rapidly as possible. That’s what the science says."

A very interesting moment in the latest Ezra Klein podcast with Jesse Jenkins and Jane Flegal. I've been thinking about this for a long time...

The special report on 1.5C never said that 1.5C was a magical threshold. It said that 1.5C was much better than 2C... 1/

This is the kind of gap between rank and file voters and the party establishment that will likely cause some real havoc and disruption in the party's politics and primaries. In a different way, it's what gave rise to Trump in GOP.

Breaking story here from @ryanknappy.bsky.social

DOJ files misconduct complaint against chief DC Judge James Boasberg

www.courthousenews.com/doj-files-mi...

Tom Lehrer, mathematician and singer-songwriter known for colorful satire, dies at 97 Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other…

Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities, has died. He was 97.

A non-exhaustive timeline of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s war on vaccines He's transformed conspiracy theories into action and reshaped American policy in just a few months.

A very brief timeline from @kieraevebutler.bsky.social and I, outlining some of the actions RFK Jr. has taken in his disastrous war on vaccines. It's hard to keep up with this stuff, and that's what they're counting on. Get up to speed here: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...