Daemon/ Dae/ Bunny / Bunne

Exactly, precisely correct

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

an excellent excuse to recommend @ddayen.bsky.social 's excellent and enraging book Chain of Title

you know what to do, bluesky

fiona the cat in a beam of sunlight, in black and white, with a dramatic cat-shaped shadow in front of her

#Caturday noir

Writing and especially presenting. Logical inconsistencies, bad storytelling, stuff that just doesn’t hang together all become incredibly clear

"It's got a fax machine!"

Close-up photograph of white blossom against a blurred background.

West Cambridge blossom. 📷 #photography

My photo shows a Roman fresco of a brown rabbit with long ears, curled on the ground, with a rounded, soft-looking body. Its head is lowered as if nibbling at three figs placed in front of it. The figs are small and round with short stems, painted in dark reddish and bluish tones. From Pompeii. Now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

Here’s a charming Roman fresco of a little rabbit eating figs 🐰❤️

From Pompeii, 45-79 AD.

Now at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. 📷 by me

#FrescoFriday
#Archaeology

This is such a cute project - cats! Solving crimes! We need more fun, more whimsy in the world (especially now) - help get this funded!

Quite the week of news + voices at @mississippifreepress.org. Just imagine when we get 3 new reporters on the ground across the state.

Thank you all for helping us grow. This team of Mississippians didn’t start with deep pockets. We’re people-powered, mission-driven and grow steadily as we can. 💜

The cover of an issue of the pulp THRILLING WONDER STORIES. A Roman Legionnaire about to blast a gorilla with a ray gun in an alien arena while the woman clinging to him (blonde, of course) looks at us, the viewer.

Sometimes the pulps cut to the heart of the modern condition. What else is 21st century life, after all, but Roman Legionnaires with blasters fighting gorillas in an arena while the women clinging to them break the Fourth Wall by staring at the viewer?

My photo shows a museum display with colourful Minoan pottery cups arranged on three clear shelves, one above the other. These cups, known as Kamares Ware, are from Phaistos, Crete. They were made in palace workshops, c. 1800-1700 BC. The cups range in shape and size from conic and cylindrical cups (top and middle shelves) to hemispherical and carinated shaped cups (bottom shelf). They are decorated with multi-coloured geometric motifs; with spirals and swirls painted in red and white pigment on black.

Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups!

They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made during the Bronze Age some 3,800 years ago!

Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me

#Archaeology

The Postal Service is a vital public good. #SaveTheUSPS

Matted watercolor and gouache on paper of a leafy, fruiting bread nut plant. Lush green in the detailed veins and juicy fruit cut in half on left side

I could get lost in these lush leaves.

A bread nut, created by “artist now unknown” (a phrase I like) (1825), from the Yale Center for British Art’s East India Company exhibition

Title page for March 4 article on "Reopening the Annmary Brown Memorial: Archives and memories for community futures." By Paulina Gasiorowska. With a drawing of the front of the building by Alena Zhang.

Outside of building with allegorical women on bronze doors. Letters spell out Annmary Brown Memorial MDCCCCV (1905).

View into wood paneled first room with cases and a few paintings, with a glimpse of the tomb at the back.

You Can Never Go Home Again?

Had a lovely time reminiscing about the (currently closed) Annmary Brown Memorial at my alma mater Brown University (curated by bibliographer extraordinaire Margaret B. Stillwell) for this student article! Hoping the renovations conclude soon!
theindy.org/article/3996

Exit Ghost is a witchy, queer, and riveting tale of family, vengeance, lust, the excellence of dogs, and a bit of ghost-induced madness. Donohue skillfully weaves magic (and Shakespeare) into the Jersey Shore landscape, delving deep into the complex and crucial bonds of friendship and love between the characters. It's a gripping read, full of heart, soul, and wicked witchcraft. ~ Maria Haskins, writer and reviewer

all in all, Exit Ghost is the book that I wanted to write, and it is the book I wanted to have published. Maybe with representation, it wouldn't have ended up like that. Maybe it would've been better. No way to know!

Shakespeare as you've never seen it and witchcraft as he never imagined — this brilliant modern retelling is a distillation of everything I love in Donohue's short fiction. It is a wild cry of pain and love and revenge and grief, a quest for justice, and a paean to friendship, packed with intrigue and action. ~ Premee Mohamed, Nebula award winning author of And What Can We Offer You Tonight

in Publishing, something is often old news the second that it's out, but three years later, readers are still finding Exit Ghost.

maybe you will too?

books2read.com/ExitGhost

jenniferrdonohue.itch.io/exit-ghost

OK. Imagine now that you are a idiot. You are someone who is profoundly stupid and has been all their life. By choice, you are also profoundly ignorant. People have offered you opportunities to learn about the world for decades. In recent years, literally thousands of people have been publicly offering you information about almost anything you choose to speak about. You reject all that education, expertise and knowledge. Because you are an idiot, you only value the thoughts you came up with yourself. Because (and I'm sorry to harp on about this but it seems key to everything else you are an idiot, you believe you are smarter than all these other people. Why would the smartest man in the room need to listen to so-called experts, you think to yourself as you stab yourself in the eyeball with your own pastry fork.

Turns out, experts can be useful if you want to imagine what someone else- who isn’t you- might do.

But, first you have to be willing to accept that other people are real, in the same way you are.

That’s where the US Administration has a basic problem.

A political movement or party which reaches a point of unrestrained power gets there by having ranks of stooges they can stuff in at all levels to just do what they're told. But they do a second job. Stuffing institutions with stooges also neuters them. This is great if you want to make sure that you just get what you want without any resistance from checks and balances. This is bad if you encounter a problem that can't be solved by a stooge. Because you've drained your system of all of its effectiveness, you are left just asserting things in the face of reality. This has been the Republican mode for decades. And it has worked for them, because they are surrounded by media and institutional stooges who are willing to tell the general public that they are right and reality is wrong. The US has never been more institutionally stooged than it is today. thegist.ie

About a year ago, I wrote a Gist on the consequences of relying on idiots to pack and neuter institutions.

I feel it may have even more relevance today.

www.thegist.ie/the-gist-tar...

I bought a 2016 Hyundai Veloster (in 2018) because it had a stick and does a decent impersonation of a sports hatch

Our elderly Dad just traded in his old giant GMC suv for the smallest Volvo suv - the 40 - because after his recent hip replacement, he wanted something he could easily sit down - NOT too far down! in. Terrific car for that. (& every possible safety bell & whistle, of course, so we kids are happy!)

I long for my old 9000turbo

Abbas Amanat IRAN AMODERN HISTORY

If you’re looking for a good “oh no I need to know more about Iran” book, I’m really enjoying Abbas Amanat’s “Iran: A Modern History” thus far.

the glasses maker and data harvester, as always

Two scientists walk through a cluttered old-fashioned science laboratory. The female scientist says “Analogue instruments! Paper records! Chalk boards! I thought you'd agreed to modernise the laboratory?” The male scientist replies “That's what i'm so excited about: we have moved to cloud-based storage for our data!” They step out onto a balcony. She says: “Please tell me you haven't built a library zeppelin” This is exactly what he has done. It floats across the sky and he adds “It's got a fax machine!”

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

Speaking of the late great Agnès Varda (motto: “all you need in life is a computer, a camera, and a cat”), here’s one of her photos from the early 1950s, tempting fate with a black cat almost walking under a ladder. Possibly taken on Friday the 13th? #Caturday

A beige pottery with two handles and a narrow neck, decorated with intricate dark brown patterns depicting a stylized octopus. The vessel is displayed on a white pedestal in a museum setting.

We all need a timeline cleanse right now, so let's start the day with this lovely jug with an octopus motif, dating ca 1200-1100 BC.

On display at National Museum Copenhagen.

A lovely weekend to all of you!

📷 me

🏺
#archaeology

Faster, Pussycat! Kill, kill!

awesome! thanks again for bringing his name to my attention!