author of MAGICAL/REALISM, Tiny Reparations Books, 2024 and BEAST MERIDIAN, Noemi Press, 2017.
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It's frustrating to see people only now catching on to something I've been writing about—Palantir and Anduril, and fantasy as a site of white worldbuilding—since 2019. Here are excerpts from MAGICAL/REALISM, in the essays "The Final Boss" (1-2) and "When We All Loved a Show About a Wall" (3):
Nah. The orcs and Uruk-hai were constructed from Tolkien's deep-seated anxieties toward immigrants from the West Indies infiltrating his perfect little Oxford town. Monsters and migrant anxiety are built from the same fantasy imaginary, as I wrote about in MAGICAL/REALISM (May 2024).
Very much a Captain Obvious, baby's first materialist critique post up there from me, but it's not the idea I'm trying to capture, it's THE MOMENT. The time is now.
Something I'm noting as I research my next book is that the introduction of a new technology that abstracts and devalues labor is *always* an opportunity for a workers' revolution, and in the West, this has almost always been squashed. With AI, we have such an opportunity now.
everyone falls silent the moment there are actual political prisoners risking their lives for each other and for Palestine. that is the reality we have to contend with
👀🖼️ #looted #nazi #art
Here’s your morning mood, courtesy of Kiko Capile.
We’re revising US capitalism in a more statist direction. But not going socialist. Borrowing some of the politicized economic intervention from socialism and using it to advance a nationalist political project. Call it “social nationalism,” perhaps.
ICE gassed a school. I know the corrections are coming: “no, they gassed a neighborhood so much, it forced them to flee.” The school is in the neighborhood. They gassed the school. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
GRRM’s politics are far more progressive than you might think. He holds workshops for marginalized and indigenous writers and despite some outdated white man nonsense, wrote some pretty radical ideas into his books. As a postcolonial lit scholar, I was surprised. I don’t cape for white men lightly.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf was *fantastic.* Still haven’t gotten to Moon Witch but I plan to!
Why has no one at big 5 publisher picked up a book about Abby Ybarra and the other incredible latina pickup winders who worked for Leo Fender and, essentially, created electric guitar tone as we know it?
Treating magic like a science, IS PSEUDOSCIENCE, like theosophy (which gave us root race and Aryanism, scientific racism, “rational” religion, etc. TURNING MAGIC INTO SCIENCE, INTO A LOGICAL SYSTEM AND HIERARCHY, IS MORMONISM. SCIENTOLOGY. IT’S HOW WE GET CULTS! NAZIS! I cannot stand “hard magic”
This distinction in “magic systems” as hard vs. soft is a contradiction in terms. Sanderson’s need to rationalize magic into a “science” is masculinist bs that has dangerous implications. MAGIC IS NOT SCIENCE! IT IS INHERENTLY IRRATIONAL, ILLOGICAL, CHAOTIC, UNKNOWN, UNPREDICTABLE, UNCONTROLLABLE
ASOIAF IS A CHARACTER-DRIVEN LITERARY WORK, FILLED WITH UNCERTAINTY, MYSTERY, AND CRITIQUE. BRANDON SANDERSON IS A MORMON ZIONIST AND EVERYTHING ABOUT HIS FORMULAIC WRITING PHILOSOPHY IS ARTISTICALLY AND IDEOLOGICALLY OPPOSED TO GRRM’S GREY, EVER-COMPLICATING WORLD. collider.com/george-rr-ma...
📣 applications are open for periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color! 📣 if you’re looking for mentorship & more community & you’re a writer of color, you can find more info below. this will be the sixth year our collective is active docs.google.com/document/d/1...
If you live in Colorado get out there and make some noise about this however you can
This book rearranged my consciousness, if not time itself for me. Holy shit.
"Because making contact with the disappeared means encountering the specter of what the state has tried to repress" from Ghostly Matters, Avery F. Gordon
"the greatest social desensitization laboratory ever" That is exactly what it is.
“They are not migrants. They are not ‘undocumented.’ They are an invading army. The largest invasion in American history.” Y’all’s imaginations are wild
The Independent has identified Eric Lendrum as the DHS PR officer responsible for a relentless flood of social media posts on DHS pages using Nazis memes, slogans and images. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
The first three Alchemy Lecture Books. I am so proud of these books. This series. This collaboration. Please read.
JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH! This gave me old Google back! It killed the AI results dead!
very much saddened to learn that bucknell university press will be closing. they took a chance on my first book when other presses said it was too short or too narrowly focused on minor authors. www.chronicle.com/blogs/letter...
(Speaking to the audience member not you)
The entitlement is startling here. You’d rather insult someone and remind them of their mortality than just respect their process? You are not owed the books. In fact, now you don’t even deserve them.
This is on WorldCon. They should screen people’s questions in advance so this doesn’t happen. If organizers do this for panels I’ve been on—me, a nobody—for someone like GRRM, this should be standard practice. Serious negligence on WorldCon’s part.
So actually I didn't know what was going on at all 🤣 thank you for explaining it to me
Is that bad 😂
Absolutely no hate at all here, but I love that I only know what's going on in this tweet from a combination of Ted Lasso and old Beyoncé interview clips (look up the Beyoncé "Tottenham vs Arsenal we're having a bubble" video, it keeps me alive in dark times 😂)
Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.
Smithsonian exhibits "are the product of a lot of hard work by dedicated and honorable people who want to present the most accurate picture of American history as possible. That includes the triumphs and the tragedies.” --Annette Gordon-Reed, president of the Organization of American Historians
No, it’s not about that—spelling, grammar, punctuation. I don’t care about that. It’s about the state of political posts and discourse online, what rises up in our feeds, the hyperbolic language of “like” accumulation, the conspiratorial mess of it, that these posts are shared more than journalism
Ironically one of the first examples in the clip is movies about defeating Nazis, which if they were made now would be scorned as liberal propaganda.
This cannot be the state of literacy or news or discourse in the public commons 😭
It’s posts like these that make BlueSky feel more like Facebook than Twitter. The double line break between “she // shall bring”? The comma splice and spaces before the punctuation? Why is there a chick emoji? Is that Tweety? Why Tweety? “Smash the 💙!” No. Absolutely not.
The “goal” is to send “all Palestinian civilians from Gaza City” to “the” “camps.”
pay very close attention to Wikipedia to find a way out of the AI slop internet www.404media.co/wikipedia-ed...
Clair Obscur (2025) @zachweinersmith.bsky.social
Says the person with identity flags in their handle to a person with none. If you want to critique standpoint theory, do so, but first, ask yourself why you're defending someone who is denying the eugenicist turn in ad media, or fascist ideological creep in media at large.
This is incorrect. If your people group has never gone through colonization, mass sterilization, or medical experimentation, you don’t understand the full scope of eugenics as part of a racial project.
NSF and NIH cut off almost 300 grants to UCLA. Story by @dangaristo.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...
Bending the knee one after the next
Hmm yeah, would love for Bugs to explain why the criticism of eugenics in jeans ads is overblown though
Can you explain why it felt overblown? I don’t understand.
Oh I’m not arguing lol, but I agree. They’re not going to improve or change their mind, and it’s not worth engaging them, but I also just don’t know if blocking them doesn’t make everything worse? Maybe just mute? I go back and forth on it tbh. But yeah, take care out here 💕
White saviorism too! Love it, keep going
For real. And while I totally get you and support blocking her, I also think blocking people is kind of how echo chambers come to exist. Until they’re harassing or threatening me, I’ll let them be fascist from behind a screen. They betray themselves
His assault is an escalation of the treatment every other other freedom flotilla survivor has experienced while in custody.
Typical Islamophobic response under the guise of white imperialist “feminism” when it was us who took out progressive governments and installed extremists in the first place. WE deeply radicalized the region with our intervention. You’ve never read or listened to a single Muslim woman and it shows
I don’t see many people talking about this, but Christopher Smalls, Amazon labor organizer, was on a freedom flotilla that was captured and is now being physically assaulted in custody. newrepublic.com/post/198550/...
"But the reality of it is our industry has to have the Hispanic immigrant-based workers in it" The sheer amount of state violence, racialization, labor exploitation, imperialism, white nationalism, and colonial subjugation in that sentence absolutely BOGGLES holy shit
Let’s see who liked this comment: @jasonhifi.com. Gotta out Zionists wherever I can
Thomas Chatterton Williams also violently assaulted his Black girlfriend as a teenager and blamed it on “hip hop culture,” defended Drake, and said Kendrick was being antisemitic because Drake’s mother is Jewish. That he has ANY credibility whatsoever is proof of how clueless white people are
Palestine is a sovereign nation that was invaded and occupied by Israel, correct. Fuck you.
Israel is killing them all. They’re starving Gaza. A little four year old boy was eating sand. There’s nothing else we should be talking about. There’s nothing else to talk about.
First of all, libraries no longer carry CDs, hence the app. Second, have you ever seen how many CDs Goodwill has? Third, buying CDs use to mean you paid for an album once and played it as much as you want. Anything I rip I’ve paid for 100x over. Should I pay for a song every time I listen to it?
We have three urgent requests today: 1. Contribute to a trusted org or individual fundraiser. Don't keep scrolling.. We know that the many requests can get overwhelming - like your contribution won't make a dent. But we have strength in numbers. Here is one: chuffed.org/project/1132...
Is that your Rook?! Stop I’m obsessed I love them
K. Organize the revolution, guillotine the fascists and billionaires, seize the means of production, and you’ll get it back. Otherwise, it’s not coming back in remotely the same way anytime soon.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of requesting the service! But yes, I feel you.
I will never shut up about the Freegal app omfg
And if you have any extra money, consider donating to a rural area station. Their budgets were far more dependent on federal money than the big urban stations, and they are hurting!
I think you nailed it tbh
Ah okay, so a fiscal fascist. Got it.
Right?!
Okay dude, it’s clear you’re an investor in the AI drone company
I loved this book. And when I learned about its marketing campaign back in the early 2000s, I was FLOORED. They had horse and carriage deliveries of the book in WAX PAPER with a WAX SEAL
You’re comparing a farmer’s market to an AMC movie theater concession stand to Walmart. All three sell food, but in very different capacities.
This just simply isn’t true. I’ve used them all, and they’re not comparable. They are solely on the graph to put Spotify in the middle, but looking critically at the scope of service, market share, and payout per stream, Spotify is by far the lowest paying. This chart is misleading, and purposely so
The apps that pay less are not competitive or comparable apps re: market share (have you used Deezer? It’s not close), Pandora is streaming RADIO, and YouTube music is a different kind of service. So considering Spotify is the most popular streaming service, it is the lowest-paying per stream.
I’m very much not a liberal. I’m a landback prison abolitionist and believe workers should seize the means of production ASAP. And no, Spotify famously pays less than every streaming service. I also never said Joe Rogan, but now that you mention it, absolutely fuck that piece of shit.
And the problem is ABSOLUTELY Spotify. What they pay in streaming, the AI artists they’re promoting so they get streaming revenue so that they don’t have to pay human artists, the CEO investing in AI military technology … SPOTIFY IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING PROBLEM
I recommend it for the simple fact that using it does not help the CEO invest in AI drones or promote AI artists over human beings. I don’t need 24/7 access to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. I can check it out, and if I like it, then I can buy singles. It’s a different paradigm.
Libraries do not have CDs to check out anymore. If they do, they sell them. I bought a stack of CDs for $2. Now, they have a streaming app called Freegal and Hoopla.
Anyway, fuck Spotify for featuring AI artists, and fuck their CEO for investing 800 million into AI drones. If they can turn evil, the rest can too. Uber, DoorDash, etc. support ICE and the Big Beautiful Bill. Use the library, take the bus, go to restaurants again. Fuck these companies.
More screenshots of the Freegal and Hoopla library music streaming apps:
See this is why I fuck with Beyoncé heavy. All albums, singles, and remixes, free through the library. My queen. And she’s not the only one.
Another free music streaming app through the library is Hoopla. They have more current artists’ discographies, like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Taylor Swift, but a smaller selection.
They have lots of artists’ discographies: Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Nas, Wu Tang, Modest Mouse, etc. Rock was a bit lacking, but they also get rights to singles, so if they get the Stranger Things soundtrack, you get Master of Puppets, for example. Unlimited free streaming through your library.
They have the entire Beyoncé, Prince, Solange, Fiona Apple, and MJ discographies, and although it’s not comprehensive, they have a pretty impressive selection.
I’ve been looking for a replacement for Spotify for months. I want to stop giving all tech companies any more money, and decided to just check CDs out from the library, rip them, and take them back. As it turns out, the library has its own streaming app: Freegal Music. www.lapl.org/freegal/
Yes.
Yup, that’s what your subscription is. If you pay $5/month for a year, you meet the threshold. Make sense?
Go here buddies: www.pbs.org/explore/pass...
Hey! Have you signed up for PBS Passport yet? $5 per month, you donate to PBS with it, and you get all of their shows. I registered for annual at $60/year. Cancel Paramount, get PBS passport instead.
“I learned that seeing an instrument of power — an official map that commuters see everyday in this case — renamed is a powerful thing.” From this week’s Q&A with with Kenji Liu, designer of the Decolonized Area Rapid Transit Map and Ashaki M Jackson theoffingmag.com/interviews/q...
Incendiary work from Nathan Munn today, filled with rage and truth flaminghydra.com/issue-363/
Day 5. I am in Texas. Event in a little bit. Cannot remember where I am when I wake up and I am up at ungodly hours to catch transportation. I mostly eat sandwiches. Anyway, THE BEWITCHING is out if you need some supernatural chills to cool you down. Run to the bookstore.
Friends: If anyone knows of postdoctoral fellowships or faculty databases in Mexico, or abroad if necessary, please let me know. Thank you.
Yes. I know. I wrote about it in my book.
I’m not saying I do. In fact, one could read this tweet as a lack of faith in television to meet the moment, or that the Emmys will recognize them.
I have. It’s good. But temporary stories about “issues in our day and age,” like mass shootings, white male radicalization, antivaxxers, religious parents, pro-life moms, human trafficking, mass shooting … it’s 5 years too late and more than a little surface level with no commentary or real risks
Andor and Severance are the only shows on this list really engaging with our present moment of mass atrocity and technofascism. And even then, just barely.
Do THIS kind of reporting on everything:
Forever gratitude to Kaitlyn Greenidge for her editorial generosity and courage, especially amid so much harassment, surveillance, censorship, and risk.
I wrote about the email I received from my child’s school aftercare warning us about ICE activity in our area, and my concern for how this kind of state violence wounds our children’s imagination. For Harper’s Bazaar: www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/feat...