johnedwinmason

Perfection

“Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame” Pops Up in DC The guerrilla artwork includes “stars” for MoMA trustee Leon Black, arts patron Les Wexner, and over a dozen other individuals mentioned in the Epstein files.

A “Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame” has appeared in Washington DC’s Farragut Square. Stickers resembling the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are printed with the convicted sex offender’s likeness below the names and titles of figures mentioned in the Epstein files.

You still got it.

The black and white photo shows a group of African American, posing as if they were studying a musical score. They wear tuxedos and are all men.

You can read a little bit about Leroy Smith hear. He never became famous, but he had seriously good musicians in his orchestra. www.discogs.com/artist/36246...

💯 So much faster than classical orchestras play it today.

Fascinating & very cool find. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue recorded by an African American orchestra only four years after its premiere.
Leroy Smith's orchestra included trumpets, a sax, a trombone & drums, but also a French horn, a bassoon & a violin. Plus dig how the banjo pushes everything along.

In Beirut, Israeli bombs unleash chaos Israel's ground offensive has triggered mass displacement in predominantly Shiite and Christian neighborhoods in the southern part of the city.

"In Beirut, Israeli bombs unleash chaos."
"Israel's ground offensive has triggered mass displacement in predominantly Shiite and Christian neighborhoods in the southern part of the city."
www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

lol

Splendid piece: I think "Noem was incompetent, corrupt, and seemingly indifferent to both the law and to human suffering. But in this, she was not so much a liability for the Trump administration as a perfect embodiment of Maga governance" especially apt and well said.

💯

It's been my guess that not even our present regime is stupid enough to put US troops on the ground in Iran. Hope I'm right. But I might be wrong.

Pardon Industry Offers Rich Offenders a Path to Trump One inmate paid lobbyists and lawyers with ties to the president’s team and walked free. Others are following his blueprint, but it is not always clear who can deliver.

A former nursing-home owner, who had been convicted of tax crimes, paid a lawyer and lobbyist at least $100,000 to help secure a pardon from President Trump and walked free. Others are following his blueprint in a lucrative pardon industry that has emerged around Trump.

My book, "Claiming Yosemite: The California Genocide, the Civil War, and the Invention of National Parks," is newly slated for spring 2027.

I think/hope people will be surprised at how the stories we were taught about the invention of the national park and about Yosemite were, um... not true.

Indeed. Those photos were part of the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project's 2022-2023 "Visions of Progress" exhibition at UVA's Special Collections Library.

Mine collapse in eastern Congo leaves 200 dead, authorities say. But rebels dispute the number A mine collapse at Congo’s key Rubaya coltan site has killed a number of miners. Officials and rebels sharply dispute the extent of the death toll.

The looting of African resources by outsiders & its tragic consequences for African people is an old story. Gold, diamonds, ivory, rubber... And now coltan, so that we can have fancy phones. apnews.com/article/cong...

Attempted suicides, fights, pain: 911 calls reveal misery at ICE’s largest detention facility The calls to 911 poured in from staff at Camp East Montana, the nation's largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, in its first months of operation in El Paso, Texas.

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
—Thomas Jefferson
apnews.com/article/suic...

1978!

My wife has a lot of family in Poland, and one of her cousins was asking how the US can possibly afford this. The answer is, our public infrastructure and services suck colossally

It's no surprise to see West Point cadets performing in blackface. Minstrelsy was a popular form of entertainment for whites & would be until the early '60s. But it's a reminder that racism is deeply embedded in the American soul. MLK believed that it would take a moral revolution to get rid of it.

Deseret News, Salt Lake City

Pius XI

March 5, 1926: Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical denouncing beliefs in white superiority and insisting the peoples of East Asia and Africa “can easily compete” with Westerners mentally. His encyclical, “On Affairs of the Church,” calls for recruiting more native missionaries.

March 5, 1926: Striking textile mill workers parade in Passaic, N.J., in a new show of solidarity two days after police attacked them with clubs. Many of the strikers are now wearing helmets in case of new violence. Radical activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn tries one on.

A friend who lives in San Antonio was saying something similar to me. For her, south Texas & Mexico are one place.

A Western That Goes Where Cormac McCarthy Wouldn’t Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender scraps the simplistic binary of cowboys and Indians in favor of a wild, multifaceted war story.

"Today, the southern U.S. border is depicted by right-wing figures as a hard line between us and them, two groups with irreconcilable interests. In fact, it is—and has always been—a polyglot meeting point."

I review Álvaro Enrigue's latest for @theatlantic.com:

www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

Walker Evans would have loved to photograph this store.
(So would @ruralindexing.bsky.social, except it's urban. 😄 )

Read it and weep.

(The second "should" is actually "shouldn't," a typo corrected in the thread.)

😄

His Instagram is also great. He has room to go into much greater depth.

Until I started reading Tyler Green, I had no idea that most of the things I thought I knew about Yosemite were myths — "pristine," "untouched" — that white people created to erase the thousands of years that Native American communities lived there.

Tomorrow Pompeii, especially interested in the graffiti such as: ‘Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates.’, ‘Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog.’ Words that echo through time.

This will cheer you up. 😄