@aimeepokwatka
Author of the novels SELF-PORTRAIT WITH NOTHING (2022), THE PARLIAMENT (2024), and ACCUMULATION (forthcoming 2026) (she/her) www.aimeepokwatka.com You can preorder signed copies of ACCUMULATION here: https://www.bedfordbooks.shop/accumulation
At my book club on Saturday, we discussed The Correspondent, and people brought stationery so we could write letters of our own. One woman was writing a note to a friend whose mother had died that day and she opened her phone and COPIED a sympathy message from ChatGPT?!
This is obviously so gross, but His Turgid Manhood would be an incredible band name. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...
1. Did you know that Girl Scouts has, for a long time, accepted trans girls and nonbinary scouts?
Trans kids are under attack. Every year, I make a thread of trans and nonbinary girl scouts you can get your cookies from.
Lets get our cookies from them this year in solidarity!
A quote from Ted Chiang: I don't know if this is exactly what you're asking, but I'll say this. This has to do with the question of genre, which is often defined in terms of a certain set of tropes or a formula . But there's this other definition of *genre* that I find speaks more to me, which is to think of genre as an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I've read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction.
James Yeh interviews Ted Chiang for The Believer (2019)
www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...
a Christmas tree defended from a small black dog by laundry baskets
I'm in the final stages of getting the 2026 new horror list ready to launch, so a reminder: please let me know about your books if you haven't already! RTs very appreciated
Thing that rattles around in my head:
Fifteen or so years go I attended a book event for two ghost hunters. One of them just casually said, "As we all know, ghosts can't move anything heavier than a five-pound bag of flour."
I think about this ALL. THE. TIME.
I call it “joyful rigor” when I explain this effort to my students. I don’t believe in or rather, I’m not a “suffering poet.” I’m a writer who enjoys writing. The work works on me and I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the process at my own pace and to be changed by it.
As if I needed another reason to love librarians: yesterday my 8th grader, who's on a Stephen King kick, came home to report that the librarian at his middle school went to the high school library specifically to procure a copy of Pet Sematary for him.
When I was in college, I took a biotechnology seminar (this was 98/99?) and was made to read The Double Helix, memoir of nightmare racist/misogynist geneticist James Watson. JUSTICE for Rosalind Franklin, FUCK James Watson forever; I will FOREVER be furious I had to read his stupid, sexist book.
Be the Booksmith you want to see in the world. sfstandard.com/2025/06/26/s...
oooh 😍
For a while I naively thought children dying was just something the right wing was willing to accept. But it’s become unavoidably clear that it’s an active goal.
literal lol
if you want a place to channel your energy that isn’t raw panic?
you live somewhere with a schoolboard.
find all of its members’ emails. it isn’t hard.
find out their plans to deal with this. demand they ignore it. almost no one ever does even this much & you can legit make a difference.
screengrab of a portion of new yorker interview with former simpson's writer john swartzwelder: Mike Sacks: How much time and attention did you spend on these scripts? Another “Simpsons” writer once compared your scripts to finely tuned machines—if the wrong person mucked with them, the whole thing could blow up. Swartzwelder: All of my time and all of my attention. It’s the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.
hi this is my favorite writing advice, it's from former simpsons writer john swartzwelder (i think about the crappy little elf all the time) www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
This video from Fairmount Bagels in Montreal from their Instagram is the most impressive thing I've ever seen
OBSESSED.
Dug into these tonight, and I'm so grateful for this recommendation! Gobsmacking!
![Well, everything. The death of art. [Laughs.] A thing that I’ve been struck by in the last year of tech development around art is that what makes us human is making art, even if you’re not a professional artist. This is kind of corny, but I think about cavemen, right? One of the first things we ever did as a species was put our handprints on a wall, and it’s just this drive that has always been there. It’ll always be there. And I think it’s preposterous that these people are suggesting that they develop this technology, and the first thing they want to eliminate is art, so you have more time to…what, email? I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with my fucking day. Most of the population is not artists, but a lot of the population has artistic hobbies, and if you replace that with a computer doing it for you or whatever, it’s just pointless. I think there’s a death drive in these people, almost, and an actual hatred of artists; they are jealous of people with imagination because they don’t have one, and they almost consciously want to eliminate it.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:obalt57atoxc2zooldtuur75/bafkreifnjtvupzmkqg7cggiv2z5nckzpp5yd2sm7h5gg2kq3plbwv2btuy)
Well, everything. The death of art. [Laughs.] A thing that I’ve been struck by in the last year of tech development around art is that what makes us human is making art, even if you’re not a professional artist. This is kind of corny, but I think about cavemen, right? One of the first things we ever did as a species was put our handprints on a wall, and it’s just this drive that has always been there. It’ll always be there. And I think it’s preposterous that these people are suggesting that they develop this technology, and the first thing they want to eliminate is art, so you have more time to…what, email? I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with my fucking day. Most of the population is not artists, but a lot of the population has artistic hobbies, and if you replace that with a computer doing it for you or whatever, it’s just pointless. I think there’s a death drive in these people, almost, and an actual hatred of artists; they are jealous of people with imagination because they don’t have one, and they almost consciously want to eliminate it.
My wife is in Vogue shitting on your AI-generated "art" 💜 www.vogue.com/article/matt...
Profile shot of Kate in silhouette
Happy birthday Kate Bush 🎂
📷 Guido Harari, London, 1993
"One secret of Bush’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous - she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near."
- Margaret Talbot
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllR...
Alex de Waal has worked on humanitarian causes across the globe for over 40 years.
“There is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.”
One would hope the obvious fact that a crazy racist billionaire can reprogram an AI bot to also be crazy racist in the blink of an eye will make anyone pause just a sec before they open up any other AI tool and treat it as gospel.
Graham leans over, one of her legs high in the air. Her long full dress makes a half-circle.
For Barbara Morgan's birthday, her most famous photograph: "Kick" 🎂
Martha Graham portrays Emily Dickinson in her ballet "Letter to the World", 1940
Ooh!
A 7-year-old smiling over his collection of large rocks.
True story.
Casts of Apollo astronaut hands for spacesuit glove construction (1968).
Casts of Apollo astronaut hands for spacesuit glove construction (1968).
fuck off
Fuck this, absolutely fuck this, everyone who loves audiobooks loves their favourite narrators because they are great at their jobs and interpreting the author's words and they make the experience what it is www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
Laura Loomer & @LauraLoomer Replying to @drprevost WOKE MARXIST POPE
Mike D: Prospect Park down to Park Slope, it’s time to listen to
All 3 Beastie Boys:
