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A German hashtag phenomenon I ran across on Mastodon and Bluesky recently is #FotoVorschlag (photo suggestion). The idea is to post one’s own photo based on the day’s keyword from @[email protected] or @fotovorschlag.bsky.social. Today’s was “Bach,” which is not only the name of a composer but also German for “brook” or “stream.” I took the first photo here near Diana’s Baths in North Conway and Bartlett, NH, on May 22, 2023. It shows a trail that had been turned into a stream by the rains, which cleared the earth, leaves, and pine needles from the granite.
I took the second photo this afternoon near Pudding Pond in North Conway. The marshy areas near this spot are apparently beaver stomping grounds, as you can see from all the gnawing they did on this tree.The contrast between VP Harris’s performance in this NABJ interview and the other guy’s is stark. The first part, on economic issues, is familiar. Then the tough questions begin, and the VP has a lot to say, getting more eloquent when pressed. https://www.youtube.com/live/I3ZV5Ea3xro
Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024), chap. 1.
Just shipped a package from the post office. Clerk: Any hazardous materials? Me: Well, books. ⚠️📚
With his abysmal debate performance last night, the rotten orange shit accomplished the one thing that gives him and his acolytes the oxygen they need: Everyone’s talking about him again. We need that as much as we need bleach in our veins.

This TV map of the world as viewed from the North Pole looking down in all directions caught my eye. Screenshot (in color) from “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, season 2, episode 1 (1965).
Here’s another bit of decor that I added to the car last week.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/166262/2024/img-0244.jpeg" width=“600” height=“310” alt=“Bumper sticker with Ukrainian flag colors and an overlay text telling Putin to go fuck himself: “Путін іди нахуй”">
Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books
On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation.
Thing is, though, books could be powerful wherever librarians made them available in their collections and discoverable by their readers. That’s why I see in the image two sailors browsing books in a thematic library display that highlighted a selection of books of probable interest to Black people. The photo’s provenance also suggests as much: the U.S. Navy Department’s Office of Public Relations produced it, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserved it. What’s more, there is the photo’s suggestive chronological proximity to the end of the war and to Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order for the U.S military in 1948. Yes, the photo was taken in a broader context of prejudice and segregation, even atrocity, but the story does not end there.
We can’t allow our knowledge of historical and present-day racism to blind us to signs in the image of people with agency who worked toward a more just world. Someone in the navy’s PR office decided or was ordered to take and distribute such a photo, or have this done. One or more people in a navy library ordered and displayed the books that caught the photographer’s eye, perhaps owing to the cataloging innovations of Dorothy B. Porter. Moreover, someone shaped the command climate in which these things transpired.
Whatever led to these particular sailors posing for this picture, the camera recorded two young black men doing something about their present and future. We see them serving their country. We see them acquiring knowledge about it that had emancipatory potential.
Of course, nothing in this kind of framing can negate the history of racism in this country. What thinking about individual agency can do is open our eyes to the humanity and strength of the people who endured and made lives for themselves despite the oppression. The books on the shelves written by Black authors were also evidence of such spirit. And the unknown characters behind the making of this photograph? It is productive to think of them as individuals who made choices within a specific institutional, social, and cultural matrix. Human agency matters.
I decorated the car today. 🏳️⚧️

. . . It was their relationship with media, with televisions, radios, books, blogs, which helped them to re-imagine themselves over and over.
Peter Pomerantsev, This is Not Propaganda (2019), part 6
These days, I take a somewhat inconsistent view of polls. In general, I choose not to trust them. (Who answers pollsters' calls anymore?) But I say to myself that maybe the direction of change in such polls is of value.
An old problem explained with a new metaphor: “Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse” by Aaron Ross Powell.
"Two U.S. Navy sailors browsing library shelf labeled 'Negro Books'" – U.S. Navy Department, Office of Public Relations, ca. 1944-49.
To scrutinize the titles in this image, download a high resolution scan from the NYPL Digital Collections.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is clearly visible. Also: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (1943) and Louis Adamic, The Native's Return (1934).
Repository: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/22e61340-6379-013b-2df1-0242ac110003.
Follow-up remarks: Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books (Sept. 7, 2024)
Related post: Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation (June 19, 2024)
Russia has been testing drones and training their pilots with attacks on Ukrainian civilians in Beryslav (Kherson Oblast). Good investigative reporting by DW Documentary. https://youtu.be/kuTo94TnMPo
With its massive air attack today, Russia offers still more convincing arguments for lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-provided missiles. It’s high time we attended to Russia’s actions instead of its bluster.
I am happy to see all the Independence Day posts from Ukrainians on my socials today. 🇺🇦🌻 I am sad about the losses behind these posts. And I am angry about the little terrorist ringleader in the Kremlin and his supporters. Слава Україні!
I can’t remember a campaign in which the biographies and values of the candidates have mattered as much as they do now. The Harris–Walz team has done a superb job of linking upbringings, public service, and foreign policy to the family and community values that most of us at least try to live by.
It’s hard to imagine biographies better suited to the present moment than those of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.