Mick Jagger to play Josh O’Connor’s father in new film from Alice Rohrwacher https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/may/21/mick-jagger-josh-oconnor-father-new-film-alice-rohrwacher-three-incestuous-sisters #Film #FilmAdaptations #MickJagger #AudreyNiffenegger #JoshOconnor #SaoirseRonan #DakotaJohnson #JessieBuckley #Books #Culture #Music #Italy #Europe #WorldNews

BRECK: Dead Delivery:Chapter Sixteen: The Road That Knows You

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How do you plan the perfect road trip?

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BRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Sixteen

The Road That Knows You

This is Chapter 16 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern.

The Story So Far

Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who arrived in Crestfall on a routine delivery and found a town quietly strangled by a corrupt magistrate named Voss. He built the case, retrieved the original documents, survived a well-planned ambush in a limestone cut two miles above Crestfall, and walked out onto the north road while the gray morning arrived without ceremony around him. The letter is in motion — a grain merchant named Foswick carrying it toward the Regional Adjudicator in Millhaven. The originals are against Breck’s chest. Drav has received Senne’s message. What happens in Crestfall now happens without Breck in it. He is on the road. The road is the only place he has ever fully understood.

← Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew | Chapter Seventeen — Coming Tomorrow →

Chapter Sixteen: The Road That Knows You

This chapter explores what it means to move through the world with intention — and what the road gives back to a man who has learned to read it.

The north road opened after the limestone cut like a long exhale.

Breck felt it in his chest — the particular release of terrain that had been held and narrow becoming wide and possible, the road broadening from the single-cart width of the cut to the full double-track of a maintained trade route, the banks dropping away on either side to reveal the Lumenvale valley spreading itself across the mid-morning light like something that had been waiting patiently for him to arrive and look at it properly.

He stopped at the ridge’s crest and looked.

Below him the valley ran south and west in the particular luminous gray-green of late autumn, the fields stripped to their bones after harvest, the hedgerows thick with the last dark berries, the river — the Calwick’s upper fork — catching the weak sun in brief silver flashes between the tree lines. Crestfall was invisible from here, folded into the valley’s lower geography, its rooftops and its square and its eleven market stalls and its innkeeper standing at a cold hearth all compressed into the distance behind him into something too small to see.

He knew it was there. He knew it was different than it had been twelve days ago when he had come down the hill toward it in the flat colorless midday light and noted a market square with eleven stalls where there should have been thirty and a boy on a cooperage step with eyes too old for his face. He knew that Maret had gone to Sela this morning before the second bell, as she’d said she would. He knew that Pell was somewhere in that invisible town with a piece of chalk in his pocket and fourteen months of patient careful watching finally cashed in for something it had been worth.

He knew that somewhere in the valley below, a grain merchant named Foswick was on the Millhaven road with a sealed letter against his chest, carrying the weight of a dead man’s careful work toward the one authority in this part of Lumenvale with the jurisdiction and the obligation to act on it.

He knew that Drav was in Crestfall, receiving a message, making a calculation, standing at the edge of a choice that Breck could not make for him and would not have tried.

He adjusted the satchel strap across his chest, feeling the documents settle against his ribs, and turned his face north.

A man who spent his life on the roads of Lumenvale learned them the way a sailor learned water — not as static geography but as living systems, each route possessed of its own character, its own seasonal moods, its own particular demands and gifts. The north road from Crestfall to the valley junction ran twenty-two miles of mixed terrain: the limestone ridge country first, sharp and cold and demanding precise footwork on the frost-edged stone, then the descent into the broad agricultural plain that fed the river towns, then the long flat miles of farm road between harvested fields where the wind came in off the eastern hills without obstruction and a man either made friends with it or spent the day fighting it.

Breck made friends with it.

He had learned this on his first long posting after the war — a six-day route between two river settlements that ran entirely across open ground with no shelter and wind that came from three directions simultaneously, seemingly without regard for meteorological convention. He had spent the first two days fighting it, leaning into it, exhausting himself against it, arriving at the waystation at the end of each day with less in reserve than he should have had. On the third day, from some combination of depletion and accumulated wisdom, he had simply stopped fighting and started moving with it instead — adjusting his angle, reading its shifts, letting it carry him when it moved in his direction and conserving himself when it didn’t.

He had arrived at the end of the third day with something left.

The road taught you things, if you paid attention. It taught you the difference between terrain that demanded your full engagement and terrain that rewarded a kind of loose, watchful ease — the difference between the limestone cut, where every footfall required deliberate placement, and the farm road, where the ground was even and the miles accumulated without insisting on being counted. It taught you when to eat and when to wait, when to push and when to simply move, when the body’s complaints were worth heeding and when they were simply the body’s habit of complaint, which was different from actual limitation and worth distinguishing carefully.

It taught you, most fundamentally, that a road was not a problem to be solved. It was a relationship to be maintained. The routes that gave him the most — the cleanest arrivals, the fullest reserves, the particular quiet satisfaction of a day’s travel concluded at the right pace — were the routes he had run enough times to know well, to anticipate, to meet not as obstacles but as familiar territories with their own specific requirements and rewards.

He had run parts of this road before. Not this exact stretch, but adjacent ones, the connected network of Lumenvale’s north-valley routes that he had accumulated over three years of post-war courier work into a comprehensive interior map — not the paper kind, though he could draw those too, but the bodily kind, the kind that lived in the feet and the legs and the particular calibration of effort that came from knowing exactly what was ahead and how much it would cost.

He knew, for instance, that the descent from the ridge to the plain took forty minutes at his pace and rewarded aggressive walking — the gradient was sufficient to generate momentum if you committed to it, and the footing was good enough on this route to trust that commitment. He knew that the farm road section was where he could let his mind move freely, because the body could handle the terrain without his full attention, and that this freedom was one of the genuine gifts of the long road — the hours when the legs did their reliable work and the mind was left entirely to itself.

He thought, in those hours, about Crestfall.

Not with anxiety — the plan was in motion, the variables were what they were, the things that could be controlled had been controlled and the things that couldn’t had been left to the nature of things that couldn’t be controlled. He thought about it with the particular quality of attention he brought to completed work — the backward look that wasn’t regret and wasn’t nostalgia but something more like assessment, the honest accounting of what had been done and how, the filing away of lessons for the next time.

He thought about Pell, who had been paying attention for years before anyone gave him a reason to. About Sela, who had kept a copy warm beside a hearthstone for fourteen months on the slim and faithful hope that someday someone useful would arrive. About Maret, who had run a building for twenty years in a town that had been slowly made worse, and had done it without bitterness, which was harder than it looked.

He thought about Jorin, somewhere on the road to Brackfen with two silver coins and the specific relief of a burden that had finally found its purpose.

He thought about Drav. Stood for a long moment in the middle of the farm road with the eastern wind moving past him and thought about a man in a river town tavern three years ago, choosing structure over dissolution, loyalty over nothing, the only identity available to him over the absence of any identity at all. About whether that man, standing now in Crestfall with Senne’s message in his ear and Voss’s orders in his hands, would make a different calculation.

He did not know. He had given Drav the only thing he had to give — the truth about which side of the war they’d each been on, the acknowledgment that the roads they’d run had been the same roads from opposite directions, that the things done in that valley had been done by men with the same training and the same fears and the same impossible arithmetic of orders and conscience. Whether that was enough to tip the balance of a choice Breck couldn’t make for him — that was not something the road could tell him.

He let it go. Filed it in the category of things that were no longer in his hands, which was its own skill, the one that took the longest to learn and never became fully automatic.

The farm road ran between its stripped fields, gray and wide and patient. The eastern wind moved along with him in its indifferent, useful way. Somewhere ahead the valley junction waited — the waystation, the hot meal, the next job, the next road, the next town that would ask something of him he hadn’t planned to give.

He thought about the stone house. South-facing. A dog. Work that stayed finished.

He thought about the bracelet on the satchel strap — pale as grain stalks, small as a child’s hope, wound twice around the leather in the way it had always been wound.

He thought about a girl who had understood, at eight or nine years old, that the giving was what there was to do.

He walked into the wind.

This is Chapter 16 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier — a man who can’t walk past certain things — moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern.

← Chapter Fifteen — Stronger Than You Knew | Chapter Seventeen — Coming Tomorrow →

☕ Enjoyed this story? Writing Lumenvale is how I pay my bills. If these stories are worth something to you, a $1 Ko-fi keeps the forge burning — and tells me this world is worth continuing. 👉 Buy Chadwick a coffee

Qué bien me lo he pasado con esto, moder of de priti lof 🖤🖤🖤

#books #bookstodon #libros #novel #novela #horror #english #ingles #literatura #literature

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Fotografía en color del libro «Schuttler's Cove», por David Barnett

https://www.wacoca.com/media/?p=662147 乃木坂46 金川紗耶、クロアチアの海でカヌー満喫　1st写真集『好きのグラデーション』先行カット第4弾｜Real Sound｜リアルサウンド ブック #book #books #乃木坂46 #写真集 #書籍 #金川紗耶

let the printing begin
#humble #books

Happy International Tea Day!

It's always tea time.
Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

#teaday #today #onthisday #LewisCarroll #tea #Carroll #Wonderland #books #reading #BookTok #bookstagram #literature #bookstodon @bookstodon

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TeaDay today

Currently reading: "Cop Cop: Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing" by Mac Muir and Greg Finch, published last year:

https://zandoprojects.com/books/cop-cop-hardcover

The authors were "senior investigators at the largest police oversight agency in America, tasked with policing the police in New York City. They are our eyes on the inside, and this book takes us into their world.

Cop Cop lays bare the web of real cases investigated by the authors over nearly a decade working for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)...."

I'm only a tenth of the way through but I'm learning a lot, such as the basic historical timeline of police accountability reforms and backlash in NYC, and some exposition that feels like the missing manual every NYC resident should get about the fundamental structure, composition, and size of the NYPD.

#NYC #policing #NYPD #books

Libraries Are My Happy Place
Act Out Tees ~ www.ActOutTees.com
#libraries #books #reading #reader #booklover #cozy #quiet #escape #study #literary #PrintOnDemand #Tees

37 Vintage Library Ads That Perfectly Capture The Joys Of Reading

As public libraries began popping up across America in the early 1900s, these posters encouraged people to take advantage of their resources.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/vintage-library-ads

#books #literature #libraries

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"Sadie Wendell Mitchell created this poster circa 1909 that encourages women to read. Note the title of the book at the woman's feet — The Psychology of the Male Human." - from article slideshow. In the illustration a woman in profile wearing a long flowing dress is sitting in a chair engrossed in a book. She is surrounded by other books. There is a sign at the top of the illustration that says "Do It Now". There are two books titles shown at the bottom of the picture. One is "Study of Biology" and the other is "The Psychology of the Male Human". It also says Sadie Wendell Mitchell at the bottom and the caption of the illustration is "Dig."

Just finished "This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible" www.dukeupress.edu/this-nonviol... by Charles E. Cobb. Useful but uneven. Short review in Mastodon thread: social.coop/@brainwane/1... #books #USHistory #UShist #CivilRights

This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get Y...

https://www.wacoca.com/media/662177/ 【Hot Shot Books】池井戸潤『ブティック』首位、文庫版刊行の2作がトップ3入り（Billboard JAPAN） – Yahoo!ニュース #book #books #書籍

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【Hot Shot Books】池井戸潤『ブティック』首位、文庫版刊行の2作がトップ3入り（Billboard JAPAN） - Yahoo!ニュース

I’m so glad I got back to reading and watching #scifi, after many years of reprieve while I was very busy working and raising my family. But I always felt better returning to my roots.

Some works I’ve enjoyed deeply over the past year or so:

#TV:
Silo - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/silo/umc.cmc.3yksgc857px0k0rqe5zd4jice
Foundation - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/foundation/umc.cmc.5983fipzqbicvrve6jdfep4x3
The Expanse - https://www.amazon.com/The-Expanse-Season-1/dp/B08B48L4CQ
WondLa - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/wondla/umc.cmc.2ghd8ombh4fd37rfs27ivfa94
For All Mankind - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/for-all-mankind/umc.cmc.6wsi780sz5tdbqcf11k76mkp7
Pluribus - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/pluribus/umc.cmc.37axgovs2yozlyh3c2cmwzlza
Severance - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance/umc.cmc.1srk2goyh2q2zdxcx605w8vtx
Dark Matter - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/dark-matter/umc.cmc.4luj45vtqpmjsvb6sc2675oeg
Murderbot - https://tv.apple.com/us/show/murderbot/umc.cmc.5owrzntj9v1gpg31wshflud03

#Books:
The Three-Body Problem - https://bookwyrm.social/book/216801/s/the-three-body-problem
The Dark Forest - https://bookwyrm.social/book/76762/s/the-dark-forest
Friendship is Optimal - https://bookwyrm.social/book/769696/s/friendship-is-optimal
There is No Antimemetics Division - https://bookwyrm.social/book/174758/s/there-is-no-antimemetics-division

I hope to add more works to this list in the coming year. Many of these were read/watched after being personally recommended to me. In the spirit of sharing, are there any TV, books, or movies you would have me check out, knowing what’s already on my list?

The Band by Christine Ma-Kellams #books #literature #dedication

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To Luke, Josiah, Everest—you are each my favorite (don't let any of the others in this dedication tell you otherwise)

#BlackVoices #Books

https://www.threads.com/@everydayisjuneteenth/post/DYmW7V9m-0u

The Senator Who Used to Be Cory Booker

We taught at Rutgers-Newark in the same years, before he was mayor, before the Senate, before the rebranding. We shared a building lobby on University Avenue. I never shook his hand. I did not need to. Everyone on that campus knew Cory. He pulled the air toward him when he walked through a door, a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale-trained lawyer who had chosen Newark when he could have chosen Manhattan or Washington, a young man who spoke about education the way ministers speak about scripture. Students mattered to him. He believed a city scarred by Sharpe James and three decades of municipal corruption could be reformed from inside its worst housing project, into which he had moved on purpose. I watched that man hold a room without effort. He had a builder’s mind. He had, in the older sense of the word, character.

That man is gone. What sits in his Senate seat now is a careful imitation, a public figure who has learned to wear the early Cory Booker as a costume.

The honest word for this is disappointment, and disappointment weighs more than disgust. Disgust is cheap. Disappointment requires that something was once present to lose.

The pro-Israel money

Across his career, Cory Booker has collected an estimated $800,000 from AIPAC’s political action committee and from individual donors associated with pro-Israel networks that AIPAC bundles and channels.

1

AIPAC’s PAC is itself new, having begun operating only in the 2022 cycle. The recent direct contributions are the relevant ones. FEC filings show Booker received $481,175 through AIPAC’s PAC in the first and second quarters of 2025, with another $226,628 routed through it in the third quarter.

2

He kept cashing the checks while colleagues began refusing them. When the podcaster Jennifer Welch confronted him on this in October 2025, he sank into his chair and reached for the familiar evasion. Most of his money, he said, comes from small-dollar donors.

3

That was a deflection. Nobody asked what percentage of his haul came from AIPAC. The question was why he accepted any of it while Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe deepened and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.

4a

He has been among the more reliable pro-Israel votes in the Senate Democratic caucus since the 2014 Gaza conflict. He co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which the ACLU opposed on First Amendment grounds.

4

Asked recently whether he believes Netanyahu is a war criminal, he refused to answer, criticizing the International Criminal Court for what he called the singling out of Israel.

3

In March 2026, after months of pressure, he announced he would no longer accept “single-issue PAC funding,” a phrasing crafted to apply to AIPAC without naming AIPAC, arriving only after he had already taken more than $700,000 from the lobby in the prior year.

5

The fairness note belongs here: Booker did back President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear agreement against direct AIPAC and Netanyahu opposition,

5

so the alignment with AIPAC has never been total. Even so, the Gaza-era pattern is still the worst of it. The pattern is in the public record.

The pharmaceutical money

The pharmaceutical money is older and almost as ugly. In the 2013-2014 Senate cycle, when he ran a special election and then a general, Booker accepted $223,350 directly from the drug industry and its employees, the highest haul of any U.S. senator that year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

6

Add donations from drug-industry-adjacent lobbying firms like Gibbons P.C. and the figure climbs past $325,000. Across the six years leading into 2017, his pharmaceutical-manufacturer take of $267,338 led every Senate Democrat.

7

PolitiFact correctly notes that pharma-industry totals sometimes use broad definitions that include employees and adjacent entities,

8

and the figure here uses the broader definition. The narrower direct-corporate-PAC number is smaller, but the broader number is the more honest accounting of the donor ecosystem around him. He represented pharma-heavy New Jersey, and on that vote he sided with the industry’s position. He opposed the January 2017 budget amendment from Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar that would have allowed Americans to import lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada. The vote was 46 to 52, with thirteen Democrats joining most Republicans to kill it.

9

He cited safety concerns, co-sponsored a follow-up importation bill the next month that addressed the safety language, and then suspended pharma donations entirely ahead of his 2020 presidential bid.

10

Principle arrived second, after the calendar.

Wall Street and the private equity machine

The financial industry adopted Booker early and never let him go. From 2013 to 2014, when he ran in a Senate special election and then a general election, he raised $2.2 million from the securities and investment industry, more than any other U.S. senator that cycle, according to OpenSecrets data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

11

In the first quarter of his 2020 presidential bid alone, he led every Democratic candidate in donations from the six largest U.S. banks and the six largest private equity firms, totaling $88,492 from those twelve sources.

12

Apollo Global Management employees gave him $32,100 across twenty-eight donations in that single quarter. Blackstone added $10,200, with another $2,800 from its executive vice chair Tony James.

The clearest moment of apparent alignment with the donor class came on Meet the Press in May 2012. President Obama’s reelection campaign was running an offensive against Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Booker, then Newark’s mayor and an Obama campaign surrogate, told a national television audience that the Bain criticism was “ridiculous” and “nauseating,” and said, on a broadcast he had been booked for as an Obama defender, “Stop attacking private equity.”

13

His full remarks paired the private-equity defense with a criticism of Republican attacks on Obama’s former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which Booker tried to use as a rhetorical balancing weight. The pairing did not save him. Within hours, the Romney campaign cut the private-equity portion into an ad, and Booker spent the rest of the week walking the remark back. The remark had landed because the speaker had reason to make it. Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly had each given Booker’s first mayoral committee, Booker Team for Newark, $15,400 in 2002, putting more than $30,000 from two of the firm’s principal partners into his political career at the start.

14

Hedge fund manager Lee Ainslie had been financing Booker’s career since 2006, and the same Ainslie turned around and gave $100,000 to Romney’s Super PAC the same year Booker went on television to defend Romney’s industry. The arithmetic is suggestive even if the causation cannot be proved.

The fairness note belongs here too. Booker voted against the 2018 Wall Street regulatory rollback (S.2155), and he co-sponsored the 2023 Secure Viable Banking Act to repeal it after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.

15

He championed the Obama-era conflict-of-interest rules for retirement advisers. The Wall Street voting record is more complicated than donor capture would predict. The donor relationships still raise legitimate questions about influence, access, and the boundary between contribution and constituent service.

The charter school money

Then there is the education-reform industrial complex, where Booker served on the board of Democrats For Education Reform, a donor-backed education-reform organization that has promoted charter-school expansion and other market-oriented school reforms. In 2010, Booker and Republican Governor Chris Christie partnered with Mark Zuckerberg to take $100 million in private money and pursue a top-down restructuring of Newark Public Schools in which charter expansion became a central feature, with another $100 million in matching donations.

16

The announcement was made on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The plan rolled back teacher union power and pushed Newark’s charter enrollment from under 10 percent in 2008 to about 33 percent within a decade.

17

Dale Russakoff’s 2015 book The Prize documented how much of the $100 million was wasted on thousand-dollar-a-day consultants and politically connected vendors, with marginal improvement in student outcomes at the time of her reporting.

18

Later assessments are more mixed. Chalkbeat’s coverage in 2019 reported that Newark’s high-performing charter schools drove substantial citywide academic gains, while the traditional district schools continued to struggle and to lose students and funding to the charter sector.

17a

The Newark voters who lived through it answered the experiment in 2014 by electing Ras Baraka, a former public school principal who had opposed the privatization push. Baraka defeated Booker’s chosen successor Shavar Jeffries, a charter school founder backed by the Wall Street network that had built Booker.

17

The Newark Watershed

There is also the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation, the nonprofit that supplied water to half a million New Jersey residents and that was looted on Booker’s watch as mayor. Months after taking office in 2006, Booker cleared the way for his former campaign treasurer and law partner Elnardo Webster to wield influence at the agency. Booker appointed board members from a memo Webster had written on Booker’s old law firm letterhead. The new board then hired Webster’s firm, Trenk DiPasquale, as general counsel, an arrangement that paid Webster $225 an hour and generated more than $1 million in legal fees over five years.

19

Booker himself continued to receive payments of up to $150,000 a year from Trenk DiPasquale, totaling $689,500 between 2007 and 2012, under what his office described variously as a buyout, an equity interest, and a separation agreement for pre-mayoral work.

20

He initially omitted the payments from his mandatory U.S. Senate financial disclosures and amended the filings only after his tax returns surfaced. His 2010-to-2012 tax returns reported that he “materially participated” in the firm’s operations during those years, a description his spokesman later attributed to an error by a tax preparer.

20

The 2014 New Jersey Comptroller’s report on the Watershed is devastating in its own quiet way. It found that the agency had “recklessly and improperly spent millions of dollars of public funds with little to no oversight by either its Board of Trustees or the City.”

21

Booker, as ex officio chair of the Watershed board, never attended a single meeting during his entire mayoralty. He sent a city business administrator in his place, and when that administrator resigned in 2010, Booker never named a replacement.

22

His explanation, given to the comptroller, was that he had difficulty moving board nominees through the City Council. The Watershed itself was destroyed by corruption. Its executive director Linda Watkins-Brashear, a longtime Booker ally who had donated $5,000 to Booker and his Newark allies between 2008 and 2010 and gave $1,000 to his Senate campaign,

22

wrote unreported checks to herself for $200,000, collected $700,000 in severance, and routed more than $1 million in contracts to friends and her ex-husband. At least nine people were indicted or sentenced in connection with the bribery scheme.

In June 2016, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Vincent Papalia dismissed Booker from the civil suit filed by the Watershed’s trustees, citing the New Jersey Tort Claims Act, which protects public officials from personal liability for acts performed within the scope of their official duties.

23

No criminal charges were ever brought against Booker, and PolitiFact has correctly noted that there is no evidence Booker personally laundered Watershed money, as some right-wing actors falsely claimed.

24

These caveats matter and belong in the record. So does the rest of it. The honest description is narrower and worse than the legal outcome suggests. Booker followed many of his former law partner’s recommendations for board appointments, and that board then hired the law partner’s firm. The firm enriched itself. Booker took income from that firm while running the city the firm was billing. He failed to disclose the income. The board meetings went unattended for his entire tenure. He was personally protected by the immunity statute when the lawsuit came. The agency was hollowed out. He says he learned of the corruption from press reports. If his account is true, the failure was managerial. If it is not, the problem is worse. Either possibility belongs in the public record.

The 25-hour speech and the book that followed it

The speech is now famous. It surpassed Strom Thurmond’s 1957 segregationist filibuster against the Civil Rights Act by forty-seven minutes.

25

A Black senator, the son of civil rights parents, broke the record of a man who had used the floor to obstruct civil rights. Optics that potent write their own press releases.

Its legislative effect was zero. The speech blocked no bill, delayed no confirmation, amended no statute, and moved no vote in either direction.

26

What occurred was performance, an act of personal endurance dressed as political resistance. Booker’s stated aim, in his own words, was to disrupt the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as he was physically able. By that internal standard, the speech succeeded for twenty-five hours. Booker stopped eating on the Friday before. He stopped drinking water the Sunday night beforehand. He stood at his desk for over twenty-five hours so he would not require the bathroom.

27

As feats of human will go, the marathon was real. As legislation, it was nothing.

What the speech actually accomplished is a short list. It generated headlines. His national profile got revived. The New Hampshire town hall on November 14, 2025, strengthened the impression that he was positioning himself for a possible 2028 presidential run.

28

A defender will say the speech focused public attention on the Trump administration. Such focus is the cheapest currency in politics. The speech cost Booker nothing his donors did not want to pay for, and it bought him exactly what the cycle requires, which is visibility he can convert into political momentum without the inconvenience of legislative friction.

Within eight weeks of the speech ending, he had a book deal.

St. Martin’s executive editor Tim Bartlett approached Booker in response to the marathon. On May 28, 2025, the announcement landed.

29

The book, titled Stand, was scheduled for November 11, 2025. St. Martin’s then pushed the date to March 24, 2026.

30

The new date placed the book in the run-up to the United States Semiquincentennial and the early phase of 2028 primary positioning. CBS Sunday Morning ran an excerpt and an interview with Faith Salie on March 22, 2026, two days before release.

31

NPR’s Book of the Day featured Booker on April 6, 2026.

32

The book is exactly what one would expect from a politician shaping a campaign narrative. It traffics in virtues and North Stars and courageous engagement. The book tour can function as pre-campaign infrastructure, a list-building and donor-attention engine that runs alongside the official Senate office.

This is the loop the article is describing. The speech generates the brand. That brand generates the book. The book tour generates the donor list and the speaking circuit. The speaking circuit underwrites the next campaign. Nothing in the circuit requires policy outcomes or legislative wins. The inference cannot be proved as conscious strategy, but the pattern is real and self-reinforcing. The man at the center keeps a Senate office and runs an enterprise.

The Cory Booker of 1999

In August 1999, as a thirty-year-old member of the Newark City Council, Booker bought a tent, pitched it next to a drug-ravaged high-rise, and went on a ten-day hunger strike to force the city to address open-air dealing. He fasted and slept outdoors in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in one of the grimmest cities in America.

33

The strike worked. Police presence increased. Security for residents improved. The mayor who had ignored him pledged a community park. It cost Booker headaches and back spasms and ten days of his weight, and he came out of it transformed.

Twenty-six years later, the same man went on a different fast for a different purpose. He stopped eating that Friday in 2025 so he could stand on the Senate floor without a bathroom break. The abstention served logistics this time, a body-management strategy for the marathon and the book that would follow it. The residents of any housing project had nothing to do with it.

This is the measurable distance between the two Cory Bookers. In 1999 he starved because somebody else needed him to. In 2025 he starved because his own performance needed him to. The first version was a councilman without a national following risking his health for forty families in a stairwell. The second was a senator with $800,000 of AIPAC-associated money in the account performing solitude inside a chamber whose deliberations he could not actually move. One changed a block. The other built a brand.

Where the values go

One question remains. Where do values go when the soul changes?

The pattern is familiar in modern politics. Values do not have to disappear for a politician to betray them. They can be subordinated, rationalized, and repackaged. They attach themselves to whatever the politician still needs in order to remain who he wants to be. Booker still needs the language of justice, so the language stays. He still needs the image of the reformer, so the image stays. What dies is the friction between the words and the actions. Once a politician accepts the kind of money Booker has accepted from pro-Israel networks during a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the public language inevitably narrows. Condemnations soften. Positions get hedged. Principles get ground down into talking points smooth enough to swallow alongside the donor steak.

Modern Senate corruption rarely arrives in an envelope. It arrives as the agreement, year after year, vote after vote, donation after donation, to stop noticing the gap between who he said he would be and who he is becoming. The corruption lives in the consent to the slow exchange, in the steady muting of the inner argument until the inner argument no longer happens. Nobody can see inside another person’s conscience. The reader can see the votes and the disclosures and the press releases. That is what this argument rests on.

The young man in the Rutgers-Newark lobby would have refused the AIPAC checks. That same young man at Brick Towers would have voted for drug importation from Canada. The councilman who fasted for ten days in 1999 would have looked at a twenty-five-hour speech that achieved no legislation and asked the obvious question, which is why he had bothered. Today’s senator cannot ask. Asking would dissolve too much of what he has become.

What the accomplishments do not erase

None of this denies Booker’s real legislative achievements. He was an original co-sponsor of the First Step Act, the December 2018 criminal justice reform that passed the Senate 87 to 12, and he was instrumental in adding sentencing-reform provisions and juvenile-solitary-confinement limits based on his MERCY Act.

34

The work was substantive. Real people came out of federal prison sooner because of it. That accomplishment stands. So does the indictment alongside it. A senator capable of co-authoring the First Step Act was capable of refusing the AIPAC money. The same gifts that produced the bill were available for the refusal. The choice to keep cashing the checks was a separate choice, made with full knowledge.

What is uglier is the way the First Step Act has been weaponized as moral cover for transactional favors to donors. On May 19, 2025, Booker became the only Democrat in the Senate to vote to confirm Charles Kushner as U.S. ambassador to France.

35

Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner and the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump, was convicted in 2005 on eighteen counts including tax evasion, witness tampering, lying to the Federal Election Commission, and a revenge plot in which he hired a prostitute to seduce his sister Esther’s husband and recorded the encounter to send to his sister, who was the cooperating witness against him in the federal investigation.

36

Chris Christie, who prosecuted the case, called it one of the most loathsome crimes he had handled.

37

Trump pardoned Kushner in 2020. Booker’s defense of his confirmation vote was that Kushner had been “unrelenting in reforming our criminal justice system” through First Step Act advocacy.

38

The defense is too clever to survive examination. Charles Kushner had been funding Cory Booker since at least Booker’s first mayoral run in 2002.

39

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner held a fundraiser for Booker’s 2013 Senate special election at their Park Avenue home and bundled $41,000 for him.

40

The Kushner family is one of the longest-running donor relationships in Booker’s career. Criminal justice reform is the public reason offered for the vote. The donor history is the appearance problem that the criminal justice reason does not dissolve.

The status quo dressed as resistance

The pattern is the point. A senator who voted no on the March 2025 continuing resolution and then voted yes to make a convicted felon the ambassador to a major NATO ally has confused branding with conscience.

41

A senator who gives a twenty-five-hour speech on democratic erosion and then publishes a book titled Stand while still cashing AIPAC checks is in a different business than legislation. The marquee actions are real and shallow at once. The deeper actions, the votes and the donations and the silent decisions about who gets a return call, run the other way.

Booker may still be a more humane vote than any Republican on the same ballot, and that comparison is true and beside the point. What this argument is about is the distance Booker has traveled from the man he could have remained. The defense that his race or his religion or his rhetoric of love should disarm the criticism only reinforces it, because those defenses ask the public to evaluate Booker by his self-presentation rather than his roll call votes and his FEC filings. Roll call votes and FEC filings are the only evaluation that has weight.

Verdict from the lobby

I will vote against him in the 2028 primary if he runs, and the New Hampshire trip in November 2025 made clear that he intends to. The vote will be a sad one. That earlier Cory Booker, the one I watched in the Rutgers-Newark lobby, would have voted against the man who now sits in the Senate. The original had standards the current version cannot meet. He would have looked at the AIPAC tally, the pharma haul, the Apollo and Blackstone receipts, and the Bain Capital maximum, and refused each one. He would not have appointed a Watershed board out of his law partner’s memo, taken hundreds of thousands from that same partner’s firm while it billed the city he ran, or skipped every meeting of the board he was statutorily chairing. The book about a speech that achieved nothing legislative would never have been written. He would have written the bill.

The money and the speeches and the books are symptoms. What has been lost is the man. The young Cory Booker, the one who pulled the air toward him in a lobby on University Avenue in Newark in the late 1990s, would today look at the senator using his name and see a stranger who has agreed to be less than he was.

The saddest part of any American political career is the moment the person inside the politician stops fighting the politician. Booker has reached that moment. New Jersey deserves better. So did Newark, twenty-six years ago. So does the man who once believed his own first speech.

Author’s note on disclosure: For almost a decade, I have lived and worked at Journal Squared, a three-tower apartment complex in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City built and managed by KRE Group. KRE is the firm of Murray Kushner, who dissolved his partnership with his younger brother Charles Kushner in 2000 and has feuded with him publicly for a quarter century. KRE and Charles Kushner’s Kushner Companies are operationally and legally separate firms. The essay’s criticism of Senator Booker’s vote to confirm Charles Kushner as ambassador targets Charles, who has no business connection to Murray’s firm or to the building in which I live. My rent has never reached Charles Kushner, and no business relationship has ever existed between the author and any Kushner.

End Notes

[1]  For the career estimate of pro-Israel-network money, see coverage of the October 2025 Jennifer Welch “I’ve Had It” podcast confrontation, in which the $800,000 figure was put to Booker directly and not contested. Reported by Yahoo News, October 15, 2025.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/actual-f-ck-cory-booker-144930288.html For broader tracker methodology aggregating FEC-filing data on pro-Israel donations to members of Congress, see Track AIPAC’s published figures and Jonah Valdez, “How Does TrackAIPAC Actually Track AIPAC?” The Intercept, March 26, 2026. https://theintercept.com/2026/03/26/track-aipac-midterms-2026-israel-palestine/

[2]  Donald Shaw, “While Some Democrats Ditch AIPAC, Cory Booker Cashes In,” Sludge, October 16, 2025.

https://readsludge.com/2025/10/16/while-some-democrats-ditch-aipac-cory-booker-cashes-in/

[3]  Coverage of the Jennifer Welch “I’ve Had It” podcast interview with Cory Booker, October 2025. See Yahoo News reporting.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/actual-f-ck-cory-booker-144930288.html

[4]  For Senate co-sponsorship record see Congress.gov, S.720, 115th Congress, cosponsors page.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/720/cosponsors For the ACLU’s First Amendment objection, see “ACLU Letter to the Senate Opposing Israel Anti-Boycott Act,” July 17, 2017. https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-letter-senate-opposing-israel-anti-boycott-act

[4a]  International Criminal Court, “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant,” November 21, 2024.

https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges

[5]  “Booker swears off ‘single-issue’ PAC funding, cutting off support from pro-Israel donors,” JNS/Cleveland Jewish News, March 26, 2026.

https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/jns/booker-swears-off-single-issue-pac-funding-cutting-off-support-from-pro-israel-donors/article_7a9355b5-8bdb-515a-8669-88481e5f7013.html

[6]  Lev Facher, “The ‘Big Pharma’ candidate? As he runs for president, Cory Booker looks to shake his reputation for drug industry coziness,” STAT News, February 12, 2019.

https://www.statnews.com/2019/02/12/cory-booker-presidential-run-pharmaceutical-industry-ties/

[7]  Lee Fang, “Cory Booker and GOP Kill Drug Importation Measure,” The Intercept, January 12, 2017.

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/12/cory-booker-joins-senate-republicans-to-kill-measure-to-import-cheaper-medicine-from-canada/

[8]  Tom Kertscher, “Cory Booker and drug maker campaign cash: By the numbers,” PolitiFact, July 2, 2019.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/02/donald-trump/cory-booker-and-drug-maker-campaign-cash-numbers/

[9]  Senate Roll Call Vote, 115th Congress, 1st Session, Vote 20 (Klobuchar Amendment to S.Con.Res. 3), January 11, 2017.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1151/vote_115_1_00020.htm

[10]  Peter Sullivan, “Cory Booker puts ‘pause’ on fundraising from pharma companies,” The Hill, July 6, 2017.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/340303-cory-booker-to-pause-fundraising-from-pharma-companies/

[11]  Brian Schwartz, “Cory Booker lines up support in the financial industry to help him raise cash for 2020,” CNBC, March 29, 2019.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/28/cory-booker-lines-up-support-in-the-financial-industry-to-help-him-raise-cash-for-2020.html

[12]  Anthony DiMauro and Branko Marcetic, “These 2020 Candidates Are the Darlings of Wall Street. The Numbers Are Proof,” In These Times, April 2019.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/booker-harris-wall-street-banks-private-equity-2020-campaign-donations

[13]  “Why Cory Booker Got Bain Capital So Wrong,” RealClearPolitics, May 31, 2012.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/05/31/why_cory_booker_got_bain_capital_so_wrong_114326.html

[14]  For the Bekenstein and Nunnelly contributions to Booker Team for Newark in 2002 and the Bain Capital pattern, see ThinkProgress’s review of New Jersey ELEC records, republished by Truthout: “Bain and Financial Industry Gave Over $565,000 to Newark Mayor Cory Booker for 2002 Campaign,” May 21, 2012.

https://truthout.org/articles/bain-and-financial-industry-gave-over-565000-to-newark-mayor-cory-booker-for-2002-campaign/ For Lee Ainslie’s pattern of financing Booker and Ainslie’s $100,000 contribution to Restore Our Future, see Lee Fang, “Cory Booker’s Political Career Guided By Top Wall St Donors To Romney’s Super PAC,” Republic Report, May 22, 2012. https://www.republicreport.org/2012/cory-booker-romney-wall-street/

[15]  Office of Senator Cory Booker, press release, “Booker, Menendez Join Warren, Porter in Introducing Bill to Repeal 2018 Rollback of Critical Dodd-Frank Protections,” March 15, 2023.

https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-menendez-join-warren-porter-in-introducing-bill-to-repeal-2018-rollback-of-critical-dodd-frank-protections

[16]  CBS News, “Facebook CEO to Gift $100M to Newark Schools,” September 2010.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-ceo-to-gift-100m-to-newark-schools/

[17]  Patrick Wall, “Over 40 percent of Newark students could attend charter schools within five years. Here’s how,” Chalkbeat Newark, March 27, 2018, for the under-10-percent-in-2008 / 33-percent-by-2018 enrollment data.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/newark/2018/3/27/21104662/over-40-percent-of-newark-students-could-attend-charter-schools-within-five-years-here-s-how/ For the political and electoral interpretation of the Newark reform push and the Jeffries-vs-Baraka 2014 race, see also Branko Marcetic, “Cory Booker Hates Public Schools,” Jacobin, February 4, 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/02/cory-booker-charters-public-schools-president

[17a]  Patrick Wall, “Newark schools have made big gains since 2006, new report shows,” Chalkbeat Newark, June 18, 2019.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/newark/2019/6/18/21108423/newark-schools-traditional-and-charter-have-made-big-gains-since-2006-new-report-shows/

[18]  Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). See also NPR Fresh Air interview with Russakoff, September 21, 2015.

https://www.npr.org/2015/09/21/442183080/assessing-the-100-million-upheaval-of-newarks-public-schools

[19]  Associated Press, “Big NJ water agency failed in scandal when Booker was mayor,” via WHYY, August 29, 2019.

https://whyy.org/articles/booker-allies-ruined-n-j-water-agency-in-scandal-on-his-watch/

[20]  Bill McCarthy, “Roger Stone is wrong: there is no evidence that Cory Booker laundered $600,000 while mayor of Newark,” PolitiFact, October 14, 2019.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/oct/14/roger-stone/old-roger-stone-video-about-cory-booker-has-gone-v/

[21]  New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller, “An Investigation of Selected Activities of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation,” February 19, 2014.

https://www.nj.gov/comptroller/news/docs/newark_watershed.pdf

[22]  For Booker’s failure to attend Watershed board meetings during his mayoralty and his nonreplacement of the business administrator who resigned in 2010, see the New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller’s February 2014 report (cited in note 21) and the contemporaneous reporting in Brian Slodysko (Associated Press), “Big NJ water agency failed in scandal when Booker was mayor,” via WHYY, August 29, 2019 (cited in note 19). For Linda Watkins-Brashear’s contributions to Booker and his Newark allies and her volunteer work on his campaigns, see ABC News investigative reporting on the broader scandal, “For Cory Booker, water crisis awakens ghosts of past Newark water scandal,” September 6, 2019.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/newark-lead-crisis-raise-questions-city-scandal-cory/story?id=64969526

[23]  U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, Memorandum Opinion in Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corp. v. Watkins-Brashear et al., Adv. Pro. No. 15-2397, June 21, 2016.

https://www.njb.uscourts.gov/sites/njb/files/15-2397_Newark_Watershed_v_Watkins-Brashear_-_Final_Opinion_6-21-16.pdf

[24]  PolitiFact, October 14, 2019 (see note 20).

[25]  Rachel Treisman, “Cory Booker breaks a 68-year-old Senate record with a 25-hour speech,” NPR/WGBH, April 1, 2025.

https://www.wgbh.org/news/2025-04-01/cory-booker-breaks-a-68-year-old-senate-record-with-a-25-hour-speech

[26]  NPR transcript, Morning Edition, “Cory Booker breaks Senate record with a 25-hour speech in protest of Trump policies,” April 2, 2025.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5348031/cory-booker-breaks-senate-record-with-a-25-hour-speech-in-protest-of-trump-policies

[27]  Allie Yang and Hannah Demissie, “Cory Booker broke a record with his 25-hour Senate floor speech. How did he prepare to do it?” ABC News, April 2, 2025.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cory-booker-broke-record-25-hour-senate-floor/story?id=120394287

[28]  Holly Otterbein, “Booker sounds like a 2028 candidate in N.H.,” Axios, November 16, 2025 (reporting on the Saint Anselm College town hall held Friday, November 14, 2025).

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/16/cory-booker-democrats-new-hampshire-2028

[29]  Hillel Italie, “Cory Booker is capitalizing on his record-breaking 25-hour Senate floor speech with a new book called ‘Stand,'” Associated Press via Fortune, May 28, 2025.

https://fortune.com/2025/05/28/cory-booker-book-marathon-senate-speech-stand/ The detail that Tim Bartlett approached Booker in response to the marathon comes from St. Martin’s Publishing Group’s own announcement, as quoted in Daily Caller News Foundation coverage of the press release. https://dailycaller.com/2025/05/28/cory-booker-new-book-deal-stand/

[30]  St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan official page for Stand, listing on-sale date March 24, 2026.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250436733/stand/

[31]  “Book excerpt: ‘Stand’ by Cory Booker,” CBS News, March 22, 2026.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-excerpt-stand-by-cory-booker/

[32]  NPR Book of the Day, “Sen. Cory Booker on ‘Stand’ and how his party helped pave the road to ‘crisis,'” April 6, 2026.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/06/nx-s1-5773435/nprs-book-of-the-day-cory-booker-stand

[33]  David Segal, “Urban Legend,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2006, on Booker’s 1999 hunger strike.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/02/AR2006070200814_pf.html

[34]  Office of Senator Dick Durbin, press release, “Senate Passes Landmark Criminal Justice Reform,” December 19, 2018.

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senate-passes-landmark-criminal-justice-reform-

[35]  Aris Folley, “Senate confirms Charles Kushner to become ambassador to France,” The Hill, May 19, 2025.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5308588-senate-confirms-charles-kushner-ambassador-france/

[36]  Associated Press coverage of Charles Kushner’s criminal history and confirmation, as republished by The Times of Israel: “Charles Kushner pardon revives ‘loathsome’ tale of tax evasion, sex,” December 24, 2020.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/charles-kushner-pardon-revives-loathsome-tale-of-tax-evasion-sex/

[37]  As above (note 36); Christie’s “loathsome” characterization is also recounted in coverage of his 2014 memoir and 2024 podcast appearances.

[38]  David Wildstein, “Senate confirms Charles Kushner to ambassadorship, with Booker voting yes,” New Jersey Globe, May 19, 2025.

https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/senate-confirms-charles-kushner-to-ambassadorship-with-booker-voting-yes/

[39]  As above (note 38); see also Center for Public Integrity, “9 things to know about Cory Booker.”

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/elections/presidential-profiles-2020/9-things-to-know-about-cory-booker/

[40]  Center for Public Integrity, as above (note 39).

[41]  New Jersey Globe, “Shutdown avoided as some Senate Dems (but not Kim or Booker) relent on GOP funding bill,” March 14, 2025.

https://newjerseyglobe.com/congress/shutdown-avoided-as-some-senate-dems-but-not-kim-or-booker-relent-on-gop-funding-bill/

Ursus was perhaps unreasonably alarmed about the indiscreet remark, and the consequences likely to result from Gwynplaine's words.
Master Nicless, who had heard them, had no interest in compromising the poor inmates of the Green Box. He was amassing, at the same time as the Laughing Man, a nice little fortune. "Chaos Vanquished" had succeeded in two ways. It not only…

— Victor Hugo
https://palimpseste.vercel.app/#text/f4854f07-9181-44c1-96c8-2955ab30c945
#lit #bookstodon #books #literature

branded

https://subspacewagon.systems/branded-and-staked-time/

@poetry
@writingcommunity

#Poetry #PoemADay #PoetryCommunity #Poem #TodaysPoem #WritingCommunity #Literature #Songs #books #humanities #amwriting #CreativeWriting #WritersOfMastodon #writing #art #poetics #critcalThinking #community #bookstodon #humanRights #disability #SmallWeb #SupportHumanArtists #international #ICJ #Justice #legal #law #RuleOfLaw

For Rhythmed Oppression

https://subspacewagon.systems/for-rhythmed-oppression/

@poetry
@writingcommunity

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«To hell with both of them. I’m going to the pizzeria downstairs and getting a Margherita.» In a world of Pigeons and Peacocks, simplicity is the only honest answer. Offensive (Ch 10, p. 106). Link in bio! #books

Markham Public Library, Ontario, Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markham_Public_Library

#libraries #books #map

Alt...

A photo of or from a library from the linked website, overlaid on a cropped world map where it's located.

Is your enemy’s enemy always your friend? My latest novel ‘Friend or Foe?’ is a fast-paced thriller set largely in south-west Scotland during World War Two.

The spooky Cruggleton Church near Garlieston in Galloway is visited by the book’s two central characters as their hunt for a spy builds towards its climax.

Find out more on my website:
https://www.kenlussey.com/fof/index.html

#Books #Bookstodon

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Cruggleton Church near Garlieston in Galloway. This modern image shows a view up a sloping field that has a tall green crop growing in it. Set within the field across the lower central portion of the frame is a stone walled enclosure with a gate on the side facing us. Within the enclosure are mature trees in leaf and within them the gable end of a stone church is visible. The scene is in sunlight. The front cover of ‘Friend or Foe?’ is shown in the top right corner.

My review of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is up at Conspicuous Consumption.

https://afterblockhead.blogspot.com/2026/05/mrs-dalloway-by-virginia-woolf.html

#books #reading #bookstodon

「日プ新世界」穴あき順位発表 前回1位の加藤大樹に変動（モデルプレス） – Yahoo!ニュース

「日プ新世界」穴あき順位発表 前回1位の加藤大樹に変動（モデルプレス）  Yahoo!ニュース「日プ新世界」穴あき順位発表 前回1位の加藤大樹に変動  モデルプレス「日プ新世界」脱 [...]
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https://www.magmoe.com/2983999/entertainment-news/2026-05-21/

CONVERGENCE POINT - As long as you don't stop reading at the end of the chapter, you'll be okay. Someone tried that while reading Convergence Point and I got an angry email about a character death.

https://books2read.com/b/convergencepoint?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Book-Socials

#SciFi #Books

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The cover for Convergence Point – Yellow police tape with the title is crossed in front of a scene with two silhouettes of black jeeps with lights on. The authors name, Liana Brooks, is at the top of the cover and the tag line, “Who would you kill to keep your reality alive?” is in the bottom right corner.

It was Nina Simone who once wrote: “It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution - real girl's talk.” So, who were the women who developed Malcolm X as a leader?

Among them is Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama, who died in 2014 but in 1965, Yuri was captured by Life magazine holding Malcolm in the Audubon Theatre.

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/malcolm-x-women-who-shaped-man

#history #education #usa #america #politics #art #museums #japan #books #reading

"I find myself caught in the light of the room, entangled in the invisible field of energy moving between each object in space. I fall into it, my body easing into the sense of edges, places to be held and pushed away, the momentous force of movement spinning from one motion to the next. Inside a deep cavity, a surge of light shoots through my chest and opens a window into somewhere else." (David Connor, "Oh God, The Sun Goes")

#books #bookstodon

https://www.wacoca.com/media/661939/ 5/23（土）vs. 名古屋 STAHUG × BOOK PARK CLUB ピースウイングに1日限定の本屋が出現！ #book #books #書籍

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「サンフレッチェ広島 ファン感謝デー2025」 7/6（日）開催！RCC中国放送「イマナマ！SP」＆RCCラジオにて特別番組で生放送！ | サンフレッチェ広島 オフィシャルサイト

#WordWeavers 21/5: How do you make your MC likeable or relatable to in the first chapter?
Ha ha ha I can’t ‘make’ Jerya do or be anything. The entire Guild of Dawnsingers is about to have the same problem, just you wait and see.
All I can do is watch, and write down the important bits.
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https://www.wacoca.com/media/661940/ 頭のいい人が資料の「タイトルに必ず書いている」3つのこととは？ | 会社から期待されている人の習慣115 | ダイヤモンド・オンライン #book #books #書籍

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頭のいい人が資料の「タイトルに必ず書いている」3つのこととは？

#WritersCoffeeClub 21/5: What targets do you set for yourself? To what frequency?
I had 30+ years of writing to deadlines and set word counts. As a self published author now, I’ve kept to a schedule of a book every six months, but after a lot of disruption including family bereavement I’m not sure whether or not the next one will slip by a month or two.
I don’t set micro-targets like writing x number of words every day.
#books #writing #writersofmastodon

Pre-orders are now open for our latest book - Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu: The Ultimate History 💪

A 460+ page deep dive into one of the most influential fighting game series ever created.

Secure your copy here: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/fatal-fury-garou-densetsu-the-ultimate-history

Shipping starts 26th May 📦

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File under: AI Resistance

I'm reading – and enjoying immensely – @emilymbender and @alex's book #TheAICon.

I've been learning a lot of things and something that really stood out recently is the need to be careful about the language we use to describe these systems. Bender and Hanna helpfully explain:

"It matters what words we use when we talk about these technologies. For instance, in our writing, we don’t use the term “hallucination” to discuss the errors of LLMs, for two reasons. First, if it’s used tongue-in-cheek, it is making light of what can be symptoms of serious mental illness. Second,
“hallucination” refers to the experience of perceiving things that aren’t there. But LLMs actually don’t have perceptions, and suggesting that they do is yet more unhelpful anthropomorphization. That means we also avoid assigning thought processes to these systems, or saying that they can
“think”. Metaphors have power, they structure the frames of discourse, and they can subtly and insidiously encourage certain ways of understanding technology and the social systems it is embedded in."

Antropomorphizing AI contributes to AI hype. Thanks Emily and Alex for helping me see things this way!

#AIcritique #AIhype #NoAI #AIresistance #AI #books

https://www.wacoca.com/media/661969/ 高市政権にとって｢街の書店｣はどうでもいいのか…リアル書店の息の根を止める｢デジタル教科書政策｣の冷酷 | PRESIDENT Online（プレジデントオンライン） #book #books #PRESIDENTOnline #デジタル化 #プレジデントオンライン #書店 #書籍

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高市政権にとって｢街の書店｣はどうでもいいのか…リアル書店の息の根を止める｢デジタル教科書政策｣の冷酷 | PRESIDENT Online（プレジデントオンライン）

https://www.wacoca.com/media/661970/ 「育ちがいい人」の親が、「気づかい」より先に教えていたたった1つのこと | まいにちがたのしくなるおやくそく できるかな？ | ダイヤモンド・オンライン #book #books #書籍

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「育ちがいい人」の親が、「気づかい」より先に教えていたたった1つのこと

Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy by Whitney Goodman #books #literature #dedication

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For my husband. In good times and bad times, I choose you.

Paladin's Faith, T Kingfisher #Books #Fantasy #Romance #BlogFiredrakeOrg https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2026/05/Paladin_s_Faith__T_Kingfisher.html

Why Everyone is Talking About Salome These Days

Leslie Baird on Exploring Enduring Questions of Patriarchy and Feminine Agency Through Fiction

https://lithub.com/why-everyone-is-talking-about-salome-these-days/

Salome at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/4881

#Books #Literature

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Salome and the Apparition of the Baptist's Head, watercolor by Gustave Moreau (1876). A bejeweled Salome recoils before the radiant, bleeding severed head of John the Baptist floating in a blaze of golden light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome#/media/File:The_Apparition,_Gustave_Moreau_1876.jpg

#WritersCoffeeClub 21 May: What targets do you set for yourself? To what frequency?

I don't get on with writing words targets but on a good writing day I hope to do four good hours/2000 words - some of which will disappear or not be used in the edit.

I do set myself deadlines with angst. If I want another Crooked Medium Mystery for Sept 2027 I have to complete a novel to post editor standard in under 12 months and I doubt I can do that.

#writing #books #amwriting

Jensen compró comida en un restaurante donde le ponen laxante a los clientes para proteger el verdadero negocio: vender maryjuana. Luego invitó a Pancho a subir a su apartamento lleno de libros y secretos.
https://fictograma.com/d/2947-la-fachada

#libros #books #literature #writing

Respira. Sí. No cargues el peso del ayer como si fuera eterno. Hoy es un lienzo nuevo, una oportunidad distinta y otra vez tienes el pincel en las manos. Todo va a estar bien. Tú ya eres suficiente.
https://fictograma.com/d/2949-capitulo-1-codigo-verde-protocolo-de-reanimacion

#poesia #books #literature #writing

En "Vidas Prestadas": Lee murió en Chicago… o eso cree. Ahora despertó dentro de un cuerpo que no le pertenece, en un mundo donde los clones jamás desarrollaban conciencia.
https://fictograma.com/d/2950-vidas-prestadas-capitulo-1-3

#scifi #books #literature #writing

Quasit's Daily Book Recommendations:
"The Puppet Masters" (1951) by Robert A. Heinlein.

The Puppet Masters is, arguably, THE classic mind-controlling-aliens-invade story (if anyone has another candidate to suggest, please do). It might also be the •first• one, as far as I know. The Titans are small parasites that control their hosts (human and otherwise) through physical contact, most often at the top of the spine just below the neck. They reproduce extremely rapidly, and soon possess an extremely large percentage of the population of Earth—large enough that the protagonist, Sam, calls it a "saturation" point, and the Titans actually drop the masquerade in the areas that they control.

Sam is an agent for a mysterious agency that serves the President. When he first encounters the Titans, he's with his boss (the head of the agency) and another agent: a beautiful redhead that's an obvious representation of Heinlein's wife Virginia.

The invasion by the Titans is an existential threat to the human race, and turns into quite an exciting story. But unusually for Heinlein, it contains some serious plot holes.

Rather than discuss them here, I'll make a comment with a content warning. There will be a lot of spoilers. So if you want to read the book first, you can come back to the comment after. It's not that long a book.

And it's available free for borrowing from the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/bwb_P9-DGG-992

Happy reading! 🤓📖

#Books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction
#BookRecommendation
#BookRecs #QuasitBookRecs

From: Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino

#Books #reading #internet #читання #книжки

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Screenshot from ebook

En "Los viajes de Shin": Mar de Extrañezas.
Shin cayó en una oscuridad donde no existía la voz, la luz ni el tiempo. Y cuando por fin logró escapar… descubrió que...
https://fictograma.com/d/2951-los-viajes-de-shin

#epic #books #literature #writing

Hi!, I'm a bot posting selections from Francis Grose’s 1785 “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue”, a compilation of slang terms, the coded language of the underclass and the demi-monde.

[18th-century-content warning: possible racism, animal cruelty, homophobia, sexism, slut-shaming. Let me know of any problems.]

#FollowFriday #books #literature #dictionaries #history #society #crime #language #slang #18thCentury

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Montage of dictionary items posted by this account

En "Apóstol: Cap I": Despertó entre cenizas, cadáveres y ruinas, sin saber si seguía vivo o ya era otra cosa. Pero en la distancia lo esperaba un trono negro… como si alguien hubiera preparado su regreso desde mucho...
https://fictograma.com/d/2952-apostol

#epic #books #literature #writing

https://www.wacoca.com/media/661719/ 西野亮廣、約100店舗展開する丸善ジュンク堂書店の救世主に!? 社長に授ける秘策とは | GOETHE #book #books #書籍 #西野亮廣

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西野亮廣、約100店舗展開する丸善ジュンク堂書店の救世主に!? 社長に授ける秘策とは | GOETHE

Karina soñaba con ser profesora, pero terminó aprendiendo algo más duro: a veces uno se encariña tanto que las despedidas dejan vacíos imposibles de llenar. Mateo se fue a Lima… y con él, una parte... 💔
https://fictograma.com/d/2961-cuando-mateo-se-fue

#books #literature #writing