todays bird
DEAR READER
ojovivo
art blog(derogatory)
Kiana Khansmith
Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Keni
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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blake kathryn
Sade Olutola
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
we're not kids anymore.
izzy's playlists!
Janaina Medeiros
Origami Around
taylor price
tannertan36
seen from Netherlands
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@clarejgold
Just since I haven’t seen John Green post about this yet I figured I would tell everybody on…*Forgets name of this website*… This wonderful website, that crash course has put out their 2026 learner coins that you can use to support crash course now that they are a nonprofit.
cats and libraries ۫ ꣑ৎ
it is very interesting to see the language of contemporary book criticism co-opted by Christian Nationalists to remove books from classrooms and libraries.
One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."
(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)
But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.
It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.
On that front, the Christian Nationalists are right to worry. Books can be a path into loving one's neighbor as one's self, and seeing the full light of the sacred in the experiences of the marginalized. God forbid.
Ugh, this makes me so sad and angry. TAtWD is a truly important book. I personally know three people who saw some of their own mental health issues reflected in its pages who got help because of it.
It helped me too. My eldest hasborderline ocd and it grew my empathy for his struggles.
“But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order” THIS
Mothers Day is a weird holiday founded by a woman who eventually tried to get Mothers Day canceled because she found its commercialization gross.
WELL SORRY ANNA JARVIS BUT I MADE A GIFT BOX THAT IS A GENDER-NEUTRAL CARE PACKAGE FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE CHOCOLATE AND CANDLES AND TEA. YOU CAN GIVE IT TO YOUR MOM OR TO YOUR BUDDY OR TO YOUR AGENDER NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR WHO IS KINDA CUTE BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE A DEAL OUT OF IT.
It's $50 and all the proceeds go to support the Maternal Center of Excellence in Sierra Leone's Kono District. Get a great gift while also supporting critical maternal and neonatal care.
My signature is worth negative 2 dollars and 82 cents.
Vincent Price as a panelist on Hollywood Squares
did john green write about hudcon?
In response to all of my asks: No. I mean, my new novel Hollywood, Ending is about the experience of sudden fame and the ways that real human beings must navigate being seen as More Or Different From Regular Persons, but I started writing it in 2018 before HudCon existed.
If anything, it is about what I saw my friends go through, and to a lesser extent what I went through even though I was grown up and married and everything when my work got near the center of U.S. pop culture.
In the novel, I try to write about the cost of publicizing one's private life, but just to state the obvious, the heated rivalry fandom is not the first time this has happened--in fact, on some level, it happens to everyone who participates in the social internet.
Like, it used to be that the business of commodifying one's private experiences was primarily an issue for movie stars, but now everyone who uses the social internet understands the costs and benefits of trading your frailties for public attention.
Anyway, I really hope you like the book, even if it is not a specific response to your personal fandom.
hi John, I clicked your profile and it said "ask my anything" and you've always been someone I look up to a lot. I'm feeling very disheartened by the state of the world, do you have any advice for me about keeping hope?
This is hard for me to remember on a minute-by-minute basis, but when I visit insta/threads/twitter/tiktok/googlenews/etc, I am seeing a feed of information that does not reflect a complicated and multivalent reality but instead was created by an algorithm designed to maximize the amount of time that I spend on social media sites.
These algorithms do not give a shit what is true or useful or humane; they want me in bed spending as much time on those feeds as they can possibly get me to spend.
For example, if your information feed fails to remind you that global literacy rates have never been higher, that fewer children are stunted due to malnutrition, and that the rate of child mortality is the lowest it has been in human history ... there is something inadequate about your information feed.
But of course the fact that the world used to suck more doesn't negate the fact that the world still sucks (and in important ways sucks more than it did ten or thirty years ago). Injustice permeates every facet of human-built systems and social orders. This should dishearten us. It should anger us. But the proper response to this anger, imo, is not idle despair but engagement.
Progress happens (and it does happen) when hundreds of millions or billions of people work together to make it happen. We reduced the likelihood of a child dying by 65% over the last 30 years not because it was inevitable or ordinary but because hundreds of millions of people refused to accept so much needless suffering and built more inclusive systems to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and adequate nutrition.
Lastly, hope is not easy! There is nothing simple about the kind of hope that can withstand our current shitstorm. And yet, I believe that humanity is worth the effort to find that hope. I believe that we are worth fighting for. Inevitably, right now feels like the end of the story. My life is a story that begins at birth and ends today, the most recent day I've lived through. But today is not the end of the story. Together, we will change the story, and I believe we can change it for the better. That's why I believe that while hope is not always rewarded, it is always justified.
More to be revealed. There’s always more ahead and more people working to bend the arc of justice towards better.
hahahahahahahahahaha suck it JD Vance.
Everybody needs a hobby. Mine is making tuberculosis memes.
Pthisis is one of those words that seems specifically designed to screw with a dyslexic brain like mine. And yet I’d learn to say it perfectly , while standing on my head and juggling, if USAID got even half its TB budget back.
Grasshopper's Dream Cafe Located: Jeongseon, South Korea
BUG SEX HEADQUARTERS
how DARE you try to leave this in the tags
do you have any advice on how I can work to "retrain my default" for lack of a better term. I feel like i always default to scrolling social media and would love to retrain myself to make my default like, writing or going on a walk outside or something
You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.
(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)
So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.
Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.
The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.
That's difficult! But it's also possible. For me, it begins with acknowledging the difficulty but also acknowledging that what I want out of life is more and different from scrolling. Instead, I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. And on that front, both walking and writing are good work worth prioritizing.
Kinda like any obsession, noticing is the first step. Then noticing and interrupting. Then noticing, interrupting and choosing something else. Some days, that’s not a huge challenge. Some days it’s like trying to lift a car. Mainly you have to keep trying but also keep forgiving yourself when you fail.
This show was so good. Imagine if Hulu had told anyone about it.
So good. One of the best book adaptations ever.
After ten years of dreaming, eight years of government support, six years of fundraising (we needed $50,000,000!), and five years of construction, the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital finally saw its first patients on February 14th.
13 babies were born at the MCOE that day. Several were admitted to the NICU, the first in Sierra Leone's history. The MCOE is already radically transforming the kind of maternal and infant care available in eastern Sierra Leone.
Five thousand babies will be born at the MCOE this year. 5,000 more will be born there next year, and the year after that, and the year after that--hopefully for decades. The healthcare workforce of the entire nation will grow stronger because the MCOE is a teaching hospital training the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors.
The heroes of this story are those caregivers along with the Ministry of Health, PIH, and the hundreds of skilled laborers who worked together for years to build the hospital despite so many challenges. But if you're supporting this project directly or indirectly (by buying good store socks or soap), thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. I have seen the MCOE in person, accompanied PIH and Build Health International folks through the campus, who are just as thrilled and passionate about this as the Nerdfighter community. It’s beautiful. It’s a miracle. And the doors are open.
When you were, in fact, a teenage dirtbag.
One of these guys would go on to become a prize-winning novelist, a MacArthur genius grant winner, and the host of several important podcasts. The other is me.
Check out our new podcast, 32 years in the making: The Away End.
8 January, 1926 The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (1924-1941)
