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

Had a much-needed art break today. Went to the great Neue Galerie for the first time in years. Saw just-opened exhibit on the New Objectivity style in Weimar Germany. Three favorite works here: Lyonel Feininger's "Lehnstedt," Georg Scholz's "Of Things to Come" and Otto Dix's "Dr. Mayer-Hermann."

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

My belated best-books-I-read-in-2024 piece over on Dorian's blog! (Belated because I didn't write it until 2 weeks ago)

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Finally went back and read all of Intermezzo. Maybe her best? Not without quibbles, but I loved it.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

NEW, from me: Shaken baby syndrome--a diagnosis that has resulted in wrongful convictions across the country--continues to shape criminal prosecutions and child welfare investigations, under the name "abusive head trauma." My story of what happened to one family. www.propublica.org/article/shak...

submitted 55 days ago • 25 comments

A small green shoot in the icy sidewalk that is the world.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Just re-upping this from a while back since there was some Malcolm Discourse recently: I think reading “Fatal Vision” and “The Journalist and the Murderer” back to back, the way I did years ago, is a good way of reading them. And a good way to feel like the conversations around them are insane.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote about a new life of Robert Frost for the Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

The SNL special felt like an open-casket boomer funeral. With Gen X not far behind.

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

"We can do better than the divorce plot, which turns the marriage plot around while leaving its fundamental shape intact." Becca Rothfeld www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science & medicine—generations of expertise & public service & life improving benefits—is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast & effectively & unresisted.

submitted 9 days ago • 509 comments

The new flag:

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A favorite book of mine, too. Read it. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/b...

submitted 10 days ago • 4 comments

NEWS: The Kennedy Center board appointed Trump chairman and president Deborah Rutter said she was leaving www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

Trust me, I know rock is dead, but it’s not Rolling-Stones-win-rock-album-Grammy-in-2025 dead. If only pop addicts understood what this meant for their winners…

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

I’m fighting off (or not) some weird bug and slept so horribly last night that it wasn’t impossible that I hallucinated ESPN’s homepage when I opened it at 3 a.m. And yet.

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

movie nation, please repost

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

Newspaper Monticello, UT

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

Been at Sundance for the first time these past few days. Saw "Peter Hujar's Day" this morning, which won't be for everyone, but everyone it's for (like me) will love it. Ben Whishaw is astoundingly great in it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pkK...

submitted 27 days ago • 3 comments

Our report on “The Stringer,” which claims a different photographer took the “napalm girl” photo and just premiered at Sundance www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

I see my friend Gal's (more profound) piece about hopeful pessimism here and raise him a (dumber) piece I wrote six years ago about hopeless pessimism. www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/b...

submitted 32 days ago • 4 comments

Our Jules Feiffer obit www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

This is a good use of social media.

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submitted 34 days ago • 5 comments

Commanders on the money line just one nice part of a three-day weekend.

submitted 36 days ago • 1 comment

Lynch's reaction here is very affecting -- and very timely for me. I was in a cafe yesterday and "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" came on. It's a song I love, but I say that (and normally feel it now) kind of reflexively. But yesterday it came to me past/through all that somehow; moved me to tears.

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

The use of "generational" in phrases like generational talent is very unfortunate.

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

Seeing some R.E.M. discourse on here today, so I'll milk this review of mine one last time. www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/1...

submitted 39 days ago • 1 comment

A great write-up on the incarcerated firefighter program in California & the folks in prison helping out with the fires in LA. Appreciate The Marshall Project for reaching out to me. All too often, folks write about fire camps without talking to people who’ve been to fire camps. Not the case here.

submitted 43 days ago • 10 comments

If you haven't seen the Jack Smith report yourself, it's here (and written in a very accessible way): www.justice.gov/storage/Repo...

submitted 40 days ago • 4 comments

Thank you, Washington Post, for this terrific -- and informative -- review of my book. www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/0...

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

Reviewed my fourth favorite album of 2024

submitted 46 days ago • 3 comments

You sneak into my office and see a ship in a bottle. Looking closer, you see tiny crewmembers screaming for help. I'm suddenly behind you.

submitted 415 days ago • 14 comments

this is what swaggering defiance sounds like in Canadian

submitted 47 days ago • 6 comments

I'd love to log in to Meta/FB/Hell for the first time in years, to catch up on friends and/or deactivate my account. But ever since a long period of inactivity, all attempts end in them asking me to upload an official government ID. Which never fails to prompt a great bout of cackling from me.

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

it is so important to remember that IN THE MOMENT there was no one who thought jan. 6 was some innocent protest gone awry. everyone recognized it for what it was.

submitted 48 days ago • 197 comments

I wrote a lot about Jan 6 right after it happened, but given the history is being rewritten as we speak I will share the post I wrote about those who decided to help do the rewriting www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

submitted 48 days ago • 12 comments

If you doubt the accuracy of the enthusiasm below, look at the three-sentence run that includes the mentioned monkey.

submitted 48 days ago • 1 comment

I’m looking forward to seeing The Brutalist despite Vox Lux. Hope is a resilient muscle.

submitted 49 days ago • 1 comment

Quickly catching up on '24 movies. Conflicted feelings about "Do Not Expect," but admired it overall. Last 35 minutes are very memorably (and intentionally) uncomfortable. As Manohla Dargis wrote (in a positive review), the movie comes "close to exhausting you." True. www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/m...

submitted 49 days ago • 0 comments

Gift link to our first proper rave of 2025: @roncharles.bsky.social on Adam Ross’s “Playworld.” wapo.st/40ioA4G

submitted 50 days ago • 0 comments

No, thank God.

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments