Edith Zimmerman imagines books written by fairy tale and Disney princesses in their 40s, incl. “A Whole New World: Life With Bifocals” by Jasmine & “Where’s That Sea Witch When You Need Her? Turning Back Into a Mermaid Once the Kids Are Grown” by Ariel.
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Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected. Big congratulations to Matt Webb on his blogging silver jubilee. His is one of the most active & creative minds on the internet.
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Hi. I’ve gotten a few notes recently about the shift in direction here at KDO, so I wanted to quickly point back to this post from a few weeks ago that explains what’s going on with the site:
As you might have noticed (and if my inbox is any indication, you have), I have pi...
Trump expected to take control of USPS, fire postal board. “This is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.” That goes for everything else they’re trying to steal too.
An essay on the role of music in political change, with example from Belgium, Chile, the Baltic states, Russia, and the USA.
How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch. “The one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition.”
Surviving Fascism: Lessons from Jim Crow. “Accept that this is happening. Denial won’t change the outcome.”
How Democracy Supporters Can Still Beat Back the Rising Tide of Fascism. “We are (still) in the majority. They are divided. Extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy. Knowledge is power. Organization matters.”
“Masses of enraged, terrified people are looking at the analog, slow-motion leadership of Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and the zero-calorie rhetoric of House leader Hakeem Jeffries and want them replaced by people who know how to fight.”
My Open Letter to Elon Musk. “I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.”
A bunch of libertarians took over a small NH town and couldn’t stop the bear attacks. “Several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could.” Ah, FAFO strikes again.
Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities (and imagination). “The world we have known is the world that is bound up with the movement toward greater destruction. What about a world we are yet to know?”
Political scientist Adam Przeworski (born in Nazi-occupied Poland) is keeping a diary. “I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.”
“If you’re looking for some great databases of the ongoing resistance (as well as some other useful resources) here’s a thread of where to start.”
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Where Do Trans Kids Go from Here? “I never thought that my country would want to disappear my child, and would want to essentially deny her existence as a person.” Heartbreaking, infuriating, cruel, immoral.
In the most recent issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes about how Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” has been embraced by the Trump administration in both governance and in messaging.
The brain-breaking feeling you get watching something like the ASMR video or...
“The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried?” If the JWST can’t rule out an impact in the next few months, we may have to wait until 2028 to know for sure. “Bit awkward, if so.”
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Timothy Snyder recaps what he heard at the Munich Security Conference about the new foreign policy strategy being pursued by the Trump administration. He calls it “affirmative action for dictators” (of Russia and China).
Russell Vought is a Christian nationalist, a significant contributor to Project 2025, the policy director of the RNC’s platform committee for the 2024 election, and is currently the director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau....
If you’re wondering “where are all the protests?!”, they are happening all over the place. “From Stonewall to Tesla dealerships, protesters are pioneering a form of opposition that doesn’t necessarily center on Washington, D.C.”
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump. “I believe that it’s we elites, who do not enjoy getting dogpiled on social media or having college students yell at us about settler colonialism, who are the most put off by the hyperwokeness of our era.”
Lizzie Wade’s forthcoming book is about human resilience in the face of cataclysm. “For millennia, the rich & powerful have conspired to conceal how resourceful, creative, and resilient humans beings are, and always have been, when the worst befalls us.”
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This afternoon on Twitter, the official White House account posted an ASMR video of an immigrant deportation flight. Elon Musk quoted-tweeted the video with “Haha wow 🧌🏅”. Here’s a screen recording I made of the video & tweet:
A popular genre on YouTube, ASMR videos a...
Good read. “Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up.”
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