Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer

Truly landlocked people know they are. Know the occasional Bitter Creek or Powder River that runs through Wyoming; that the large tidy Salt Lake of Utah is all they have of the sea and that they must content themselves with bank, shore, and beach because they cannot claim a coast. And having none, seldom dream of flight. But the people living in the Great Lakes region are confused by their place on the country's edgean edge that is border but not coast. They seem to be able to live a long time believing, as coastal people do, that they are at the frontier where final exit and total escape are the only journeys left. But those five Great Lakes which the St. Lawrence feeds with memories of the sea are themselves landlocked, in spite of the wandering river that connects them to the Atlantic. Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless. It might be an appetite for other streets, other-slants of light. Or a yearning to be surrounded by strangers. It may even be a wish to hear the solid click of a door closing behind their backs.

Another amazing passage re: landlocked states and the Great Lakes

Milkman raised his eyebrows. He thought Guitar was going to let him in on some deal he had going. But he was slipping into his race bag. He was speaking slowly, as though each word had to count, and as though he were listening carefully to his own words. "I can't suck my teeth or say 'Eh, eh, eh.' I had to do something. And the only thing left to do is balance it; keep things on an even keel. Any man, any woman, or any child is good for five to seven generations of heirs before they're bred out. So every death is the death of five to seven generations. You can't stop them from killing us, from trying to get rid of us. And each time they succeed, they get rid of five to seven generations. I help keep the numbers the same.

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
#booksky 💙📚

sonic the hedgehog looks like how ska sounds

I’m bored with being sad.

Wouldn't have been a Sunday afternoon without this man on the box once upon a time.

To my British friends: forgive me.
To The Economist: fuck off, limeys

Maybe Platner is an ideological Zelig that bounces from one anti-establishment signifier to another, but my question to anybody who gets on here and does the "he's just a little boy marine who don't know better!" bit is why does a former mercenary deserves political rumspringa that ends in Congress

Democrats stop making “conceding points” your opening gambit, part infinity

"Gillian O’Shaughnessy is Australia’s most celebrated flash fiction writer and a highly respected journalist and broadcaster. Drawing from a lifetime of storytelling—from radio to stage to page—Salt City Runaway is Gillian’s first book."

Gorgeous book, gorgeous woman! Pre-orders are OPEN.

Salt City Runaway by Gillian O'Shaughnessy - Night Parrot Press Please note: Pre-orders of Salt City Runaway by Gillian O'Shaughnessy will ship in early May. Helen Garner moves into a letterbox. Dead bats rain from the sky. A woman offers Lou Reed her last ciga...

www.nightparrotpress.com/product/salt...

It’s me! Smoking on the Brandon pack/
The sleepy shit that wake up cataracts/
Lamborghini swerving, driving stupid (hella)/
Went to Hell, said wassup to ole Stan Chera

Sinners’ Jayme Lawson Says BAFTAs Were Exploitative, Not Inclusive ‘Sinners’ star Jayme Lawson says how the BAFTAs and BBC handled John Davidson’s Tourette’s tics was exploitative of him and harmful to her co-stars: “That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses.”

‘Sinners’ star Jayme Lawson says how the BAFTAs and BBC handled John Davidson’s Tourette’s tics was exploitative of him and harmful to her co-stars: “That man’s disability got exploited that night, and it led to multiple offenses.”

I Saw the TV Glow is now free on Tubi.

February hail!

Old guy that is obsessed with Greta Thunberg is such a weird type of guy

could a dying empire do THIS

lol, come on, man.

1. Iraq and Iran are different countries?
2. Dude died because his tank fell into a river!

a big thing when it comes to jrpgs is that in the 90s they offered a kind of storytelling you genuinely could not get anywhere else. the mixture of scale, music, sparse dialogue, theatrical sets of repeated animations etc. that kinda goes away overnight when voice acting is introduced

A black and white mixed breed dog looks at the camera with the Mets game on the TV in the background

Watching spring training baseball while a dog stares at you because he wants a piece of the cucumber you’re eating. Does life get any better than this

Great interview with a great artist

Yeah we're going to kill the government officials, also we're going to kill the opposition, also we're going to kill the retired politicians, also we're going to bomb a school of children.

[guybrush threepwood voice] never spend more than 3 years making a computer game

Last night I saw a magnificent performance of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" at the Antaeus Theater im Glendale, California. I go to a lot of theater, and this was the best thing I have seen in years.

This work © 2026 by Lee Zimmerman is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Flamenco

Love that Rilke 🤍

Did two 5k runs in a goody-two-shoes week for me, exercise-wise.

The first was piss easy, this morning's was even more arduous than the slow chapters in The Magic Mountain.

Still listening to my Deng Xiaoping audiobook.

vertical integration meets the snuff film

YouTube video by Warren Zevon - Topic Tenderness on the Block

m.youtube.com/watch?v=KPyo...