Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The words do not have to be perfect.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We still have time to mess this up!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

A consequence of cucumbers

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

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KULCHA!

Cool Science Open Thread: Horses As New Tech in the American West

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I remember reading the phrase: There was a horse-shaped hole in the Plains ecology. When a tech innovation drops that can really update the lifestyle of a whole society, there’s a strong incentive to become an early adopter…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Tis the Season, Alas

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Noooooo!…

Things I will miss if Twitter goes away:


(And the replies are full of people sharing stories & pics of their own trash cats & rescue dogs!)

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Late Night Open Thread: NFTs Are for Setting Money on Fire, HirstWorks Edition

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There are critics who aver that Damien Hirst’s career has been less about creating than about performing. He has, for many years, admitted that most of “his” work was actually done by his ‘assistants’:

Hirst once said he didn’t paint his own spot paintings because, “I couldn’t be f***ing arsed doing it,” according to The Guardian.

Given that pedigree, perhaps the latest Hirst performance was predictable. Per Matt Levine, at Bloomberg:

I guess you have three options:

1- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and get one of his dot paintings;
2- Pay Damien Hirst £2,000 and not get one of his dot paintings; or
3- Don’t pay Damien Hirst £2,000 at all.

I know what I would choose (what I have chosen), but the market seems pretty evenly divided between Options 1 and 2:

The British artist and art collector created 10,000 unique dot paintings in 2016 which corresponded with a collection of 10,000 NFTs, a unique digital token that can be traded online.

In “The Currency”, Hirst’s first NFT collection, he gave his buyers the choice to exchange their NFT version – worth £2,000 – for the physical artwork…

Hirst, reportedly the UK’s wealthiest living artist, pledged to destroy all the original artworks that people decided not to exchange their virtual token for.

As a result, he will torch thousands of paintings – collectively worth almost £10 million – starting on Tuesday afternoon at the Newport Street Gallery in London.

[Yes, readers: Hirst has publicly torched a bunch of dotworks, live at the Turner Gallery.]

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Late Night Open Thread: Opportunistic Cats in Art

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Modern art:

Pre-photo art:

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Friday Night Respite Open Thread: Speaking of Impossible Creatures…

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Not sure I could sit through a whole movie, but there’s certainly material for one. Olivia Rutigliano explains that “Charles Dickens really, really hated his fanboy Hans Christian Andersen”:

… [I]n March of 1857, Andersen earnestly wrote to Dickens to say that he was traveling to England, for no more than a fortnight, to take Dickens up on his offer. And so, in June of that year, Andersen showed up to Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s country estate in Higham, ready to become roommates with his hero. “My visit is for you alone,” he wrote. “Above all, always leave me a small corner in your heart.”

(If it weren’t for the fact that Andersen seems kind of cluelessly sweet, this would sound like horror movie. I’ve definitely seen this horror movie.)

Although the Dickens family was expecting him, in a way, they could have never expected him. Andersen, socially awkward and apparently one of the nineteenth century’s premier literary softbois, was not good at picking up on social cues or maintaining any kind of formal demeanor, demanding in one way or the other that he remain the center of attention. When he arrived, he asked that one of Dickens’s own sons give him a daily shave, explaining that this was a custom for hosting male guests in Denmark. Weirded out, Dickens made him a daily appointment at a nearby barbershop instead. One night, during a dinner, when Dickens held an arm out to one of the ladies present, Anderson scooted over and grabbed it himself, and walked with Dickens arm-in-arm into the dining room. Which is not even to mention the fact that he stayed for three weeks longer than he had originally proposed.

Now, this was a particularly bad time for Dickens to have any (let alone such an oblivious) houseguest—Little Dorritt was not doing so well critically, and he was attempting to leave his wife for a woman half his age. Plus, he was acting in a play—his friend Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep. So, he was clearly a busy man, doing many important things.

Then again, Andersen was difficult to be around. At the premiere of The Frozen Deep (with Dickens in the leading role and Queen Victoria in the audience), he loudly burst into tears. Afterwards, he apparently sulked because his presence at the event was not noted more highly. And when he learned that one of his pieces received a negative review, he hurled himself down on the Dickens family lawn and passionately wept. Despite this spectacle, Dickens’s daughter Kate called him “a bony bore.”

It is speculated by some that Dickens may have based his gaunt, obsequious character Uriah Heap on his guest. It is assumed that Anderson based his character of the Ugly Duckling on himself…

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Halfway Through the Week

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Short weeks, in my experience, are usually the longest — you try to do five days’ work in four…

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Late Night Open Thread: Historical Fantasy, Fun for the Whole Family

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The ‘American Conservative’ dreaming of a world where only a small fraction of upper-class men were considered citizens… and the normal people making fun of his Rome-anticism:

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