Just heard NPR describe Slovakian strongman Robert Fico as a “leftwing nationalist.” Yes he favors social welfare state. He’s also a mobbed-up supporter of fascist Russia, linked to murder of journalists, who campaigned on rabid anti-LGBTQ+ platform. This isn’t “leftwing.”

Pink phone, concrete Bible.

She was fleeing with her grandson, who was holding a white flag. Then she was shot | CNN cnn.com/2024/01/26/mid…

Knowing nothing of Slovakian politics other than that PM Robert Fico is a Putinist, adjacent or closer to the murder of a journalist, I'm nonetheless freaked out by the assassination attempt. Central European assassinations have a way of blowing up.

My Lucid essay about MAGA targeting of judges to turn the public against them and delegitimize the norms and protagonists of democratic justice. Trump has attacked federal judges and their families 138 times since 2022.
lucid.substack.com/p/judges-and-p…

I-244, “Dispersal Loop,” slashing through and above, draining wealth into the suburbs. Bill McKibben, in SwitchyardTulsa: “A suburb is a device for hiding how things work.”

Ed, who lives in the backyard of a boarded-up house next to I-244 in Tulsa. Can I make a picture? “No. Yes. Take it. Wait for it. Let me come into the sun.” He came into the sun. I took the picture. I said that I had. He agreed that we had.

Went looking for Dreamland, the heart of Black Wall Street, destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Loula Williams kept showing movies in the rubble, rebuilt, died of a broken heart; then this. Look up from the historic plaque. This is where it was. This is what it is, now.

This and the subsequent tweet are very reasonable and people would be foolish to dismiss them out of dislike for Silver

My book is out today! The Wannabe Fascists.A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy. On why Trumpism & Mini-Trumps (Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi) belong to new political breed, the last outcome of histories of fascism & populism. You can order: a.co/d/6vXp34U

I read about the Beverly in Patton Oswalt's Silver Screen Fiend, & ever since I've been living an imaginary life on the side in which I live in an SRO in L.A. going nowhere but it's fine because I go to the Beverly several times a week. (I live in Vermont. I've never been.)

I clicked on this. My 10 year old just saw Kingdom of Planet of the Apes -- without me. He said he's game to watch it again with me. 'Sufficient ape,' he says. When you're 10, quantity matters as much as quality.

I'm watching ep 1 of original Twilight Zone, and I think the fact that the everyman lead in an everyman diner is wearing a jumpsuit with *shin* pockets is the uncanniest thing about it

My town email list-serve is full of celebratory bird sightings, vernal pool posts & amphibian crossing concerns. Despite centuries of culture, economics & education shouting that we are separate from nature and one another, people still want the frogs to make it across the road.

“Not just through, but over, above”—Natasha Tretheway, in ⁦SwitchyardTulsa⁩, on the highway that slashed thru Tulsa’s rebuilt Black Wall St. “Hear the rumbling roar of engines”—and the house sparrows. Imagine the horn. switchyardmag.com/issue-1/ground…

Too on the nose. Walking beneath Tulsa’s “Dispersal Rd,” highway that sliced Black Greenwood—think massacre—i find broke-leg Uncle Sam. Up along highway I picture the window, boarded. Backyard I meet Ed. “Everybody want to buy it now. Buy-n-build.” ⁦SwitchyardTulsa⁩

“Don’t do the face!” he says. “Not the face.” Ok, no face. I think you still get the picture. He wants to know if I understand. He will explain. “I thump Bibles,” he says. I nod. I understand. Poor Bibles. Nothing, nobody, deserves what he does to them.

Mars Express done me in so complete I don’t even regret the fact that when at the end I felt my AirPod case clatter out of my pocket I said ok, may the wind blow your troubles away. Saw it solo soul in the theater, oldest cinema in Tulsa, which marquees new film grads

Now here is a bar. 7-800 distinct bottles. Place called Valkyrie, in Tulsa. “I can’t drink that stuff anymore,” I tell the bartender, “but I like to look.” “Window shopping,” she says. That’s what it is.

Knight Turner of the universal army ascends. Tulsa.