Andrea Kaston Tange

The Searcher (2020). It's fantastic.

The Searcher. It's so good.

The dog needs a walk and it's sunny and beautiful out (despite being March in MN!), but also I only have 75pp left in this Tana French novel, and it's SO HARD to stop reading.

That's just nuts.

(I love David Austin Roses, which seems to name all its roses after characters from Victorian fiction. Much better life choice.)

PLEASE DO!

Eight days left till applications are due for this guaranteed MLA seminar "Close Reading, Professional Practice, and Public Writing." Write something for a general readership about why close reading matters & join this seminar to read other smart people's takes & get feedback on yours!

I was so shaken. It was such a blow. And a violation. And a bad ending.

The first time I read Wives & Daughters, I didn't know she died before finishing it. I was up reading till 2am bc it was so good & then suddenly the last chapter begins w/her editor going "so sorry she died, but I've written the end for you & I'm sure this is how she'd have done it." The horror.

Trump multiple times just today has said the country is at war. War can only be declared by Congress, and Iran posed no imminent threat. What Trump is doing there is a textbook illegal war and impeachable offense — if we still had a Congress.

Same here

The suit is mentioned in the article! I'm so glad they're doing this.

My employer Canterbury Shaker Village lost a small NEH grant. I wrote it. I used words such as "equality" and "citizenship." The same words were used in CHATGPT to cancel grants.

The same words are in the nation's founding documents.

This is so unbelievably infuriating and depressing. In this reckless, biased, and ChatGPT-based mockery of a process, they cut $450,000 for National History Day, a program in which 500,000 middle- and high-school students participate.

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

"Melt down the guns/DoD budget and turn them all into playground equipment" has been been my favorite platform for ages

These books absolutely made me think that the only barrier to my becoming a detective was a sad lack of a relative who owned a junkyard. Tapping so profoundly into kids' "we don't want your help, will build our fort ourselves" tendency was sheer brilliance.

I lived those books so much!

Actually, it contains self-reported data reflecting how you understand yourself. I rounded my height up to the nearest whole inch, though I am 1/2" shorter than that. No one cares if you shave off a few pounds when you say what you weigh; if you gain 30, no one makes you get a new license. 🤷‍♀️

My daughter reported that the ICE presence outside her school during recess last week involved ICE officers sitting IN AN ICE CREAM TRUCK. And this wasn't kids misinterpreting. We had an email from the school the day it happened; we just didn't get the ice cream detail in the email.

Brilliant

And that's AFTER killing 175 school girls because you were relying on an AI targeting system using ten-year-old maps to tell you where to aim.

These people think war is a video game, and they all belong in war crimes trials.

It definitely makes no sense. Every year, just as I'm beginning to feel like spring might actually come to Minnesota before I lose my mind, I am hurled back into morning darkness so profound that I want to cry. Just when I was beginning to be able to wake up into light. POOF. It's gone again.

Outside Magazine teaser for a story "Woman Survives in the Australian Wilderness on One Bottle of Wine." The photo shows an empty bottle without a label lying in the (presumably) Australian dirt. The teaser sentences says 48-yr-old Lilian Ip is grateful to be alive after five days stranded in the Australian wilderness with nothing but her wits and a bottle of wine.

The Independent headline says "Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables." The teaser sentence says "Camel owners has used injections to enhance the camel's lips, dermal fillers around their noses, and silicone wax to enlarge the humps." The photo shows a line of seven extremely proud camels, fillered lips plump against the blue sky, defying anyone to tell them that this was a bad idea because their faces slay.

Stories I Didn't Read Today Because The Headlines Were Too Perfect and I Didn't Want Reality to Spoil Them

I worked in restaurants for 10 years and knew a dozen charismatic dirtbag bartenders with severe personality issues and the state of Maine is acting like this guy is a unicorn

I’ve been asked if I would support Sen. Mullin as Noem’s replacement.

The answer is a resounding NO. The rot in DHS is deep, much deeper than any individual.

It’s a question of policy not personnel. The Senate should not consider any DHS Secretary nominee until DHS and ICE are reined in.

And if you're pitching to this (which you should!), you might also consider putting in a proposal for this seminar, which might be a useful place to get feedback on a draft in progress! bsky.app/profile/akta...

His confirmation should absolutely be contingent on a complete overhaul of DHS & dissolving ICE.

She has definitely extrapolated that fact from some gleaned bit of information that people recycled old clothes & cotton & rags into paper! I'm going to tell my Victorian studies students from now on that before wood-pulp paper was invented, paper was made from underwear. Thank your daughter for me!

Kristi Noem has done a stunning amount of damage and it’s good she’s gone.

But this doesn’t change the fact that we need a complete overhaul of DHS, impartial investigations into the killings of two American citizens, and information on children that were taken from Minnesota.

What if, and hear me out here, Markwayne were not confirmed?

It actually is possible to stop giving this craven goon what he wants, and it would be nice if the media would report it that way.