nathanheller.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

In this week's Shouts & Murmurs, an important report from me with details of the new James Bond. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

A happy #Bloomsday to all! Hear Joyce reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in two rare recordings from the 1920s: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/james-joyce-reading-his-work-1924-1929 #Bloomsday2023

submitted 11 days ago • 7 comments

NYC this evening is in dead-on San Francisco summer weather: the temperature, the moisture in the air, the fresh breezes, the way it carries fragrances. Heaven!

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

A really lovely writeup of the Martin Amis event a bunch of us did onstage at 92Y a couple of weeks ago, from the Paris Review. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/05...

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Move fast, ask nothing, learn nothing, break things, go home. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

An interesting about-face to the past century or so of educational objectives. (JFK: "One of our most serious manpower shortages is the lack of Ph.D.s in engineering, science and mathematics; only about one half of 1 percent of our school-age generation is achieving Ph. D. degrees in all fields.")

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Google has become amazingly, terrifyingly poor for locating anything published online before about fifteen years ago, in case we didn't already know there's a big black hole at the center of the digital universe. (I've had better luck with the Wayback Machine.)

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

This week's efforts to hang the current state of America on, of all people, Joe Biden are a little odd.

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

Published #OnThisDay 100 years ago

submitted 43 days ago • 2 comments

A diminishing arts culture isn't a middle-of-the-list crisis for a country (or a city) but a top-priority emergency, because of everything else it supports.

submitted 44 days ago • 0 comments

This is this evening, and Salman Rushdie is joining us, too. Looking forward.

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote a post on @derekkrissoff.bsky.social ‘s substack about @maris.bsky.social ‘s new column for LitHub in response to the NEA cuts, with a menrion for a @nathanheller.bsky.social piece that has stayed in my mind! open.substack.com/pub/derekkri...

submitted 49 days ago • 0 comments

Despite seeing several people I totally trust say this was real I still felt I had to verify it with my own eyes. And having done so I still can't believe it's real.

submitted 58 days ago • 3143 comments

Happy Independent Bookstore Day. I was going to call out the ones I love most in the cities I know best, but such a list wouldn't remotely fit here. A couple of decades after we were all told that no one needed these places anymore and they were all going to disappear, that's testimony in itself.

submitted 61 days ago • 0 comments

Many people consider this postwar period the great age of American industry and innovation.

submitted 62 days ago • 0 comments

A quick note that I'm due to join Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lorrie Moore, James Wood, and other bright lights onstage at 92NY next month for an evening of tribute to Martin Amis. Omnia omnibus; consider coming if you can. www.92ny.org/event/a-cele...

submitted 63 days ago • 1 comment

good luck, everyone

submitted 70 days ago • 6 comments

Dept. of Fascinating: The putative lead bidder on U.S. missile defense is Elon Musk's own company. And an idea apparently being tossed around is for the U.S. not to have its own defense system but to get it as a subscription from SpaceX. www.reuters.com/business/aer...

submitted 70 days ago • 0 comments

@npr.org, itself under threat, has been doing some remarkable reporting.

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

This is an extraordinarily aggressive move, and one that won't go without significant challenge. It basically threatens an entire institutional sector. www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/p...

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

This is a great report, and something that, I confess, hadn't occurred to me as one of the educational pitfalls of A.I.: bots enrolling in online education and submitting A.I. work. "Last year, the state chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots."

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

Here's the high-school-debate argument for abandoning due process.

submitted 71 days ago • 1 comment

This is fantastic—and horrifying—technical reporting. www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments

Today's news is an important show of strength from Harvard and its leadership in the face of the Administration.

submitted 73 days ago • 0 comments

Here is an up to date list of Big Law collaborators along with how much in free legal services they have pledged to Trump's causes. Paul Weiss 40M Cadwalader 100M Milbank 100M Skadden Arps 100M Willkie Farr 100M A&O Shearman 125M Kirkland & Ellis 125M Latham & Watkins 125M Simpson Thacher 125M

submitted 76 days ago • 1554 comments

“I take J. D. Vance seriously when he says that he’s trying to destroy universities,” Gallope said. “I don’t think concessions are going to win us funding, and we’re trading away the tools we’ll need to defend universities in the future.”

submitted 78 days ago • 2 comments

Timely enough: my new @newyorker.com Comment on the Favoritism Grift. The President benefits by encouraging his allies and opponents to seek special favor—and many institutions that should know better are predisposed to play along. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

submitted 78 days ago • 3 comments

A lovely interview about what looks as if it could be a marvellous new translation of Les Fleurs du mal: lareviewofbooks.org/article/to-t...

submitted 78 days ago • 1 comment

Aha. Here we are. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” the acting ICE director says, meaning the rounding up of people against their will. And we need to be more efficient. Maximum efficiency in rounding up people! O.K.? michiganadvance.com/2025/04/09/i...

submitted 78 days ago • 0 comments

okay now that you all have gotten a taste of America's rational and predictable new trade policy, everyone who wants to build your new factories here just form an orderly line

submitted 78 days ago • 428 comments

Comparisons of the President to a small child have perhaps been overdrawn, but this really is like watching a toddler break various vases and burn himself on various hot surfaces in order to learn by experience what everyone else in the room told him would happen.

submitted 78 days ago • 0 comments

“While in the interrogation room, Makled said, a man in plain clothes entered and began speaking to him. He said he recalls the man telling him: ‘We know you're a lawyer. We know you take on big cases.’”

submitted 80 days ago • 110 comments

60 Minutes found no criminal record for 75% of the Venezuelan migrants the U.S. sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. https://cbsn.ws/4lC4Vp5

submitted 81 days ago • 1090 comments

james surowiecki has discovered where the completely fabricated trump tariff rate has come from for each country "...for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us."

submitted 85 days ago • 466 comments

It’s a points rubric. 8 points out of 40 is the threshhold. Allegedly-gang tattoos get you 4 points. Another law enforcement agency saying you’re in the gang (based on what, who knows) gets you 4 points. That makes 8 points.

submitted 88 days ago • 5 comments

This piece by @nathanheller.bsky.social is full of details that make you think in different directions. I’ve read a lot about this issue out of professional and personal interest (Columbia grad, Harvard fellow.) This is excellent www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

submitted 88 days ago • 1 comment

In light of Columbia’s president being replaced by the co-head of its board of trustees on a Friday evening—“effective immediately”—I’m re-upping my ground-reported big-picture piece about the tangled situation in which leading research universities now find themselves.

submitted 90 days ago • 0 comments

This marketing-team-working-lunch-style speech, missing only a lukewarm joke about our inexhaustible team leader Bill, is quite surreal any way one cuts it.

submitted 92 days ago • 0 comments

Hegseth is literally denying a story that the NSC has already confirmed and in which receipts were printed verbatim. Remember this the next time he impugns another journalist.

submitted 94 days ago • 265 comments

Watching a short video ad to get Wi-Fi access so I can keep bombing Yemen.

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

This is moving to see, and is like coming up against the strata in the cliff face of the past century in this country.

submitted 95 days ago • 0 comments

Presented with evidence that innocent people who are not members of any gang were wrongly deported to a slave prison in El Salvador, Homan flatly insists that all of them were in fact gang members (but he's unwilling to detail any evidence showing it)

submitted 95 days ago • 2224 comments

“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”

submitted 96 days ago • 1547 comments