2025-08-23 03:23:05
There is a long history of people being weird about Sally Rooney: Her books are too Marxist or not Marxist enough; she glamorizes thinness, stigmatizes BDSM, and promotes unhealthy age-gap relations; her queer characters don’t have queer sex; worst of all, she had the arrogance to embark on career as a novelist without first having completed an MFA. But people demanding that she is pounced upon by an SAS unit and imprisoned for 14 years if she ever steps foot in Britain is, even by these prior standards, quite intense. By publishing an opinion piece in the Irish Times on Aug. 16, titled “I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it,” she has become an enemy of the British state and a hero to many of its citizens, who are unable to agree with her without facing arrest. That Rooney finds herself in this position is the result of the British state’s long-standing strategy, handed down from one government to the next, of misusing terrorism laws to suppress dissent and limit the boundaries of acceptable opinion.
In July, the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, akin to ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Under British law, proscription makes it a criminal offense, carrying up to 14 years' imprisonment, not only to be a member of the group but to support it in any way. The bill was rushed through parliament after Palestine Action activists broke into a Royal Air Force base and damaged two planes, in what they said was a response to the British army’s ongoing support of Israel. By that point, the ground for proscription had already been laid by months of lobbying from the arms industry and meetings with the Israeli government.
2025-08-23 01:15:12
TACOMA TO NEW YORK AND BACK — Nobody can accuse me of not being careful. I make very few real mistakes, instead opting for piles of wasted opportunities. Inertia takes me behind the woodshed. Anything worth doing is worth planning out within an inch of its life, and I spend an embarrassingly long time deciding to do anything at all. Applying to this internship was actually one of the most impulsive things I have ever done. At 26, I had finally started to make some progress. I wanted to write, I had gotten the school newspaper job at the local community college, and so one could be forgiven for taking me half-seriously at this point. I was making steady progress. But then the crash happened, and I kind of decided I needed to see my life deliver some sort of payoff as quickly as it could.
About a year ago, on my commute to my silly little community college job, I was almost undone by a little old lady in a Corolla. I had the straight green, she had a flashing yellow turn signal. When I swerved to avoid her, I set myself on course to give a telephone pole a 40-mph hug. In the half-second before impact, I knew for certain I was going to die. I didn't really have time to be upset about it, but this is not the timing I would have preferred. I would be annihilated by a not-quite communicative enough traffic-control device, in a truck I hated driving, just before I really got around to doing anything in the world.
2025-08-23 00:51:31
Some people are fans of the Minnesota Vikings. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Minnesota Vikings. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.
Your team: Frauds. Fucking frauds. Frauds on the field. Frauds on the sideline. Frauds in the front office. Literal criminal owners. Fraudity fraud fraud FRAUDS.
2025-08-23 00:14:32
Winfield is a sun-bleached spot of a city in the middle of southeastern Kansas’s farmlands. It’s unremarkable except that it is the home of the Walnut Valley Festival, a long-running bluegrass festival that hosts the National Flatpicking Championship.
My grandmother, Jane Laughlin, worked at the Walnut Valley Festival—"the Festival,” as we call it—for more than 40 years. The Festival is an outdoor acoustic music festival that attracts musicians from around the world every September. “Only the best guitar players played the Winfield festival,” she told me.
2025-08-22 23:31:16
Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a recurring series about books and reading them.
I have a terrible memory, but I remember every word of Margaret Wise Brown's iconic 1947 children's book Goodnight Moon. It is perfect because, perhaps more than any other literary genre, children's books must understand their readers. Children love the moon. Children love to say good night. But there's also something kind of haunted about Goodnight Moon, and children also love that. Or at least, I did.
2025-08-22 23:00:07
By night, spectral bats leave their roost and swoop through the tree canopy of Costa Rica, wings outstretched as far as three feet wide, in search of prey: unsuspecting mice and rats, birds called motmots, even other bats. Sometimes, after they snag something good, they will fly back home with the doomed victim in their stalactite teeth and willingly give up a meal to another bat inside the roost. At the end of the day, the world's largest carnivorous bat is a rather cooperative creature.
This is one of several findings in a new paper recently published in the journal PLOS One, which analyzes footage taken from a single roost in the tropical dry forest of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The roost in question is inside of the hollow trunk of a Manilkara chicle tree. Marisa Tietge, a behavioral ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, first found the roost in December 2022, when it held four spectral bats: a monogamous mated pair and their two pups. A year later, the researchers placed a wildlife camera inside the roost, which automatically recorded minute-long videos over the course of three months whenever the bats left the roost.
