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I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

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Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

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The best resolution to a missing persons case ever was that developmentally disabled person who walked off in 1986 saying he "wanted to be a cowboy in Texas", starting a twenty-one year search for him on the assumption he died somewhere in the desert or was murdered, only for everyone to discover that he had spent those decades working as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas. Missing persons investigators rarely consider that maybe they achieved their dreams

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My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.

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I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"

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Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.

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actually hilarious that colin bridgerton returned to london absolutely determined to be in his slut era. he said if there is one thing i am it is a whore. and then one (1) kiss with penelope later he was like neverMIND i am a MARRIED MAN i am MONOGAMOUS life is about LIFELONG PARTNERSHIP ACTUALLY

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“I could die tomorrow”

“You’re not going to die tomorrow”

“I could die and it would kill me”

“…. But you’d already be dead”

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i finally watched queen charlotte… when i saw “a bridgerton story” i didn’t think i would be CRYING MY EYES OUT about EVERYONE but HERE WE ARE

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No you won’t ever be exactly the same again and that’s fine, actually.

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Penelope: don’t worry we never need to hook up again

Colin: oh word? cool cool cool coool no doubt no doubt no doubt no doooouuubt

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pretty sure my dog peed somewhere in the house this morning but i can't fucking find it 😫 why is her pee so odorless 😫😫😫

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i’ve seen people saying that it’s annoying that bridgerton fans still harp on Regé-Jean Page for leaving the show because “it’s not like actors have an obligation to stay on a show just because you like it.” i couldn't reblog the last person i saw saying this bc it was a ghost blog (? idk what that means lol), but i already drafted the below so i'm gonna post this anyway.

i just… really disagree. when signing on to a tv show everyone knows there’s an expectation that your character stays on throughout the show, even if it’s not explicitly stated in a contract. he wasn’t going to be a main character in following seasons, but he would still be a character, like we’ve seen Kate appear in season three. it’s not just that he left the show, it’s that he left even though he didn’t have anything else lined up or conflicting with shooting (the likely brief schedule for) season 2, and that he acted like he was too good for bridgerton after benefiting from being in it.

plus, this is all happening in context, not a vacuum. there’s a long history of media being looked down on when its fan base is primarily women and girls, and it’s frustrating to see someone who benefited from that fan base acting like he’s too good for it.

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so, so valid of anthony to barely be in this season because he canonically can’t stop fucking his wife long enough to be a functioning member of society