Last week if you told me you had "Trump accuses Kamala Harris of racefaking in front of an audience of black journalists" on your bingo card, I would've chastised you for an incredibly poor-taste joke, but apparently you can mark that square today

In case you thought I was making an incredibly poor-taste joke,

So, something to understand is that he does not listen to his advisors or follow the strategy they set out for him, almost ever. His campaign strategists and advisors have been pretty staunchly pushing the GOP and the public-facing side of the campaign to avoid attacks on the basis of race or gender, because it loses them poll numbers and gains her support. This hasn't stopped him, or any of the other Republicans, they just can't help themselves, but his advisors are practically begging him to cut this shit out. The other important thing to understand about this event is that the appearance was cut short because his own campaign requested they end it, that's how bad a job he did following his advisors' strategy

This panel was set for an hour, his advisers had to cut the panel short and pull him away because he was so bad during the whole thing.

Also, if you watch this video, the FIRST THING he's going to do is start complaining about how THEY made him wait to avoid answering the interviewer's first question and I just want to set this straight: The ACTUAL reason it's start was delayed is he spent, like 30 MINUTES trying to browbeat them into A Promise Not to Do Live Fact-Checking of anything he said.

"Humble leafy greens? ?! As if they're eating a salad?! THEY HAD TO EAT ANIMAL FEED. MANY CHILDREN STARVED TO DEATH

"Wartime hunger" you fucking liar?! It's a planned starvation!

Everybody hates on paywalls but they've saved me from reading so many NYT articles 🫂

This is stunning.

The whole piece is quite long, please go read it yourself, it's quite definitive.

obsessed with the infamous "blorbo from my shows" shitpost being quoted in the opening of the new york fucking time's word of the year article without ever once mentioning that it originated in the unsung bedrock of internet culture: tumblr dot gov dot edu dot net slash careers

saddest/funniest part is that last time i checked op of the post fucking hated that it became part of the lexicon

the relationship between the linguists and the nyt is very funny bc its sweet and validating that they send reporters but on a whole reporters do not know much about linguistics so the linguists are trying to explain things like "what are words" (complicated) and "where do words come from" (society) and the reporters have this underlying belief that words come from this linguist committee on some level. it's really hard to disabuse them of this

anyways the american dialect society puts out a journal called american speech that has a feature called among the new words and they do in fact talk about blorbo being from tumblr in the linguist journal, they just usually do not succeed in making the nyt reporter read anything before publishing

tbf: it's pretty difficult to get the NYT to give ANYONE credit for anything. I've heard repeatedly that they regularly poach stories from other papers without attribution.

if you are a fan of the poem "what resembles the grave but isn't," you might be interested to know that the poet, anne boyer, resigned her position at the new york times magazine today, and her letter is worth reading in its entirety.

"If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present. "

This, itself, is a poem.

Well, this would be interesting...

This will be amazing, though!

Just think about it:

We are in the era after it caused SO MUCH, and caused so many sites to put in blocks and other restrictions to stop it from scraping everything

If they are forced to wipe their entire dataset then they won't be able to get even a fraction of it back!

America really is irredeemably evil. This article in the new york times ADMITS that prisons are an industry in America, yet tries to convince its readers to empathize with the people enforcing US law in these prisons, with NO empathy for the people incarcerated there

Literally “things were good until the Racism Factory shut down”

When I met Eva late last year, she looked smart in a jean jacket with a neatly tied silk scarf around her neck, small dangly earrings and cropped curly hair. Over the course of the last 44 years, as she continued to teach English to fifth through eighth grades, Eva’s rent increased almost fivefold, to 270 euros from 55, but her wages increased more than 20-fold, to 3,375 euros a month from 150. Viennese law dictates that rents in public housing can increase only with inflation, and only when the year’s inflation exceeds 5 percent. By the time she retired in 2007, Eva’s rent was only 8 percent of her income. Because her husband was earning 4,000 euros a month, their rent amounted to 3.6 percent of their incomes combined.

That’s about what Vienna was aiming for back in 1919, when the city began planning its world-famous municipal housing, known as the Gemeindebauten. Before World War I, Vienna had some of the worst housing conditions in Europe, Eve Blau notes in her book, “The Architecture of Red Vienna.” Many working-class families had to take on subtenants or bed tenants (day and night workers who slept in the same bed at different times) in order to pay their rent. But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation.

Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it. [...]

People ask me a lot where to start reading my books. Here's a suggestion from the New York Times today.

Oh this is just wonderful.

Adding a gift link.

That Open Letter to the NYT

I’ve barely been on social media lately, so only today heard about this letter, and I just signed on to it as a former freelancer there. The NYT keeps asking me to do op-eds for them, and I’ve refused repeatedly because the both-sidesism in their Opinion pages has been ridiculous in the last few years, as has their repeated platforming of racist, Islamophobic, anti-semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-poor, and just plain bigoted voices. I remain grateful to the NYT for giving me the opportunity to elevate other SFF writers when I ran the “Otherworldly” review column a few years back (and I continue to support Amal El-Mohtar, who runs it now, for that reason). But while there is something to be said for yelling back, I’m just not personally interested in that.  Or in being used as a “see? we’re not bigots!” flak shield for their reactionaries.

So, I think it’s worth linking to the Onion’s brilliant response to the NYT’s incitement of violence. And I think it’s worth considering whether you really need to keep that NYT subscription. I canceled mine years ago.

The Onion pulling zero fucking punches.