Douglas McDonald-Norman

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

It’d be exciting to think that Bluesky has people pretending to be American like Twitter but I honestly don’t think they could talk about Star Trek Deep Space 9 the way it’s expected here without having watched all the episodes a dozen times

It is a BOP and I am delighted beyond delight that you liked this

The ostensible origin story is that Suga made the beat and decided "huh, this sounds like a Psy song". And then it was!

In Australia, most (although not necessarily all) barristers have practised as solicitors first. In England, it is a bit more common for someone to become a barrister without having been a solicitor, although of course many barristers were solicitors first.

I RAN here to message you about That Bit Of The Verse

Exxy took me several reads to work out. My first thought was "...like from WJSN?"

What the closure of Teen Vogue means for journalism. Condé Nast folded a beloved magazine that treated youth and feminism as political topics, not trends.

Teen Vogue did some terrific work. Great story here on Teen Vogue and how the Vogue/Conde Nast bosses seem like the "liberal" types who have been eager to use Trump's rise as a pretext to silence progressives/leftists they disagree with. www.cjr.org/feature/the-...

Ryan Moulton @moultano Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

okay one more thing, if the filibuster was so critical to the interest of small states, why is it that it didn't exist until the middle of the 19th century and wasn't actually used with any regularity until well into the 20th?

the OTHER thing is that no filibuster defender has yet to articulate why it is that people who happen to live in low density states not only deserve additional representation but also deserve to exercise a veto *on top of that*

Zohran Mamdani has won, & will be the next mayor of NYC.

Zohran is stone cold man. Putting out an ad in Arabic after all the Islamophobic shit that’s been thrown his way? Pure swag.

Dems don’t need to copy his politics or even necessarily his campaign strategy, they need to learn how to grow a fucking spine.

Playing Earthbound for the first time ever in 2025 is fascinating, actually. You're just a kid and the world's gone mad. All the adults are useless at best or trying to kill you at worst. Everyone talks like a crazy person. Everything's too expensive. Your next door neighbor wants to be a dictator.

All time classic

this white house actively treats a large swath of americans as disloyal and outside the political community and it doesn’t merit so much as a peep from the political press

I've written about William Broome, the last British judge in India - who took Indian citizenship and retired from the Allahabad High Court a quarter-century after Indian independence, and whose kids and grandkids still live in India:
scroll.in/magazine/860...

K-Pop Demon Hunters is legitimately the global cultural phenomenon of 2025 and honestly there are far worse things to be a cultural touchstone this year than a trio of young women fighting literal soul-sucking hegemony through the power of their art

if your response to this - a basic statement of sympathy about an attack on a synagogue - is to bring up Israel, please delete your account

Since many of you are distracted by other things or not following any Jewish media, you should know that today, on one of the holiest days of the year, a man drove his car into a crowd gathering to go into a Synagogue in Manchester then got out and started stabbing people. Two people are dead.

An outstanding interview. Patrick Iber of Dissent Magazine has interviewed the legendary Polish political scientist Adam Przeworski about de-democratisation in the USA, and what lessons he’s gleaned from Chile, Peru & beyond.

Iber’s questions are stellar. Przeworski’s answers, chillingly candid.

How Democracies Fall Apart - Dissent Magazine An interview with Adam Przeworski.

It was a true honor to talk to legendary political scientist Adam Przeworski about how he understands the present crisis, what he learned from Chile and Poland, and how to move forward from here www.dissentmagazine.org/article/how-...

Theon Greyjoy should stay away from Bobby Yoghurt's dog.

"his own fee will" is excellent

the problem with doing WW2 revisionism on here is that everyone on this website is a thirty eight year old nerd who spent all of high school reading WW2 history books

This is just Seven in a scene from a @kateorman.bsky.social novel.

BBC News captures Doctor Who himself Sylvester McCoy at the Trump protest seemingly unaware of who they're interviewing.

The Number Ones: DaBaby’s “Rockstar” (Feat. Roddy Ricch) In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat:...

Number Ones on DaBaby's fast rise, his even faster falloff, and "Rockstar," gigantic hit that he made before everything ended.

This is INFINITELY better than a peer reviewed publication

A HAN reviewed publication

Australian War Memorial defers military history prize after judging panel awards it to book on Ben Roberts-Smith Exclusive: Governing council ‘retrospectively’ decides the Les Carlyon literary award should go only to first-time authors, ruling out Chris Masters’ book

A long-ish thread on this scandal and why it's so bad, which military historians and people interested in historiography may find interesting even if you're not Australian.

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I think the idea of Dying for Something is very appealing for young men because living for something is much, much harder.