Matthew Cheney

@melikhovo.bsky.social

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Writer, teacher, person.

Novella CHANGES IN THE LAND now available from Lethe Press

https://matthewcheney.net
https://www.patreon.com/matthew_cheney

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Matthew Cheney

www.workers.org/2024/07/79600/

Leonard Peltier: ‘I remain undestroyed’www.workers.org The following statement is from political prisoner, Leonard Peltier, in response to the U.S. Parole Commission that denied him parole on July 2, 2024. His parole board hearing is scheduled for 2026. ...

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Matthew Cheney

The billboard designers perfectly imitated the usual aesthetic sensibilities of wacko anti-abortion signage, and I need to stop and get a photo of this thing (can’t find one online yet).

Drove into New Hampshire today, and immediately saw a “Democrats Will Protect Your Reproductive Rights” billboard with an American flag and a bald eagle on it, from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). Excellent work. More of that please.

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Matthew Cheney

Sylvia Scarlett (1935) A very good, somewhat transgressive comedy about a con woman who poses as a man. One of the biggest box office flops of the 1930s. Starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant Directed by George Cukor, BOTD in 1899

All biographical approaches to the work of Alice Munro must be revised to wreckon with her covering up her 2nd husband's admitted (convicted) sexual abuse of Munro's daughter. The story is horrifying, the reporting scalding: www.thestar.com/news/in-the-...

In the home of Alice Munro, a dark secret lurked. Now, her children want the world to knowwww.thestar.com Alice Munro's husband sexually assaulted her youngest daughter. For nearly five decades, a conspiracy of silence haunted the family, and at times, tore them apart.

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Matthew Cheney

So much to process here but the courage in telling this story is off the charts.

My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with himwww.thestar.com In the shadow of my mother, a literary icon, my family and I have hidden a secret for decades. It’s time to tell my story.

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Matthew Cheney

all the culture you liked from decades past was made possible by cheap rent and artists' pay keeping up with what things cost

It's because we all have day jobs, advances are pennies, publishers don't market, one underperforming book tanks your career, and we're expected to be well-tuned brand machines on social media websites designed to suck our souls dry.

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Matthew Cheney

Saw this on mastodon and it is fantastic. AI in medicine

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Matthew Cheney

Hello social medias... You may not be aware a major Cat 5 hurricane struck an area that normally doesn't get them. The eye passed directly over Carriacou and Petit Martinique. The devastation is tremendous. The need is great. You can help and make a difference: www.gofundme.com/f/the-people...

Help the people of Carriacou and Petite Martinique recover, organized by Marine and Yachting Association of Grenada MAYAGwww.gofundme.com On 1 July, the eye of Hurricane Beryl bore down on two tiny i… Marine and Yachting Association of Grenada MAYAG needs your support for Help the people of Carriacou and Petite Martinique recover

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Matthew Cheney

This is particularly important to understand because Trumpist authoritarianism is the descendent of Jim Crow far more than say Hitler or Pinochet or Orban, and it's going to look a lot more like 1930s Mississippi than 1930s Berlin.

For most of its history, America hasn’t been a democracy, by any meaningful definition of the term! This isn’t some It Can’t Happen Here shit, in a way, it’s already happened. It just may not have directly affected you.

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Matthew Cheney

Not to be a vulgar marxist but the easy explanation for this is that business owners think as members of the capitalist class rather than as the owners of a specific business with specific needs

It will never cease to amaze me how little business owners understand how their customers reach their business

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Matthew Cheney

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

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Matthew Cheney

Listened to this conversation with Ocean Vuong this morning for probably the 4th time. Maybe more. The clarity of wisdom about language, grief, poetry, death, publishing, etc. is consistent balm. tricycle.org/podcast/ocea...

Getting Close to the Terror with Ocean Vuongtricycle.org In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen and co-host Sharon Salzberg sit down with poet Ocean Vuong to discuss his new collection, "Time Is a Mother."

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Matthew Cheney

They really meant it when they said they wanted to go back to traditional European values huh

so great that Europe's doing this again with the diseases

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Matthew Cheney

This is what we are condemning Leonard Peltier and millions of other people to in prison.

“Time has become so twisted with these lockdowns that night blurs into day, a miasma of time that has no sense to it. All hours are the small hours of the night. Life itself is suspended. We wait for a brief glimpse of what life looks like. We exist in cold, filthy cells, and we wait.”

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Reply to

Nevin Flanagan

Beer making likewise was women’s work until it was clear money could be made. It makes me snicker everytime I see a toxic masculinity style beer commercial.

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Matthew Cheney

Reply to

Katharine Hayhoe

It's important to note that this single-post analysis above is entirely consistent with a much more comprehensive analysis by @ketanjoshi.co showing that changes in the X algorithm and moderation policies that began in Oct 2022 have massively favoured trolls and penalized climate scientists. See:

Musk is remaking Twitter into a climate denier sanctuaryketanjoshi.co I got some data that analyses how climate deniers have changed their audience size, relative to pro-climate accounts, on Musk's Twitter. It's....not good.

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Matthew Cheney

If you have recurring monthly donations to, say, Planned Parenthood or the ACLU, please consider shifting that money to abortion funds where it can do the most immediate good

www.huffpost.com/entry/aborti...

Abortion Fund Leaders Have A Stark Warning For Allwww.huffpost.com After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, donations flowed to abortion funds, but over time the money has dried up -- endangering care for people across the country.

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Matthew Cheney

This is predictable but so important: Pasteurizing milk kills the H5N1 bird flu virus that is circulating widely in dairy cattle. It's easy to take a 150-year-old technique that has saved countless lives for granted, but don't fool around with unpasteurized dairy products. 🧪

Pasteurization Kills Bird Flu Virus in Milk, New Studies Confirmwww.scientificamerican.com Flash pasteurization destroyed H5N1 viral particles that were highly concentrated in raw milk, confirming that standard techniques can keep dairy products safe from bird flu

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Matthew Cheney

Do this. If you’re concerned about what’s in your sunblock (and this genuinely is a place where from a cancer prevention pov all formulas are exceedingly not created equal), ewg has got you: www.ewg.org/sunscreen/

Please for the love of god wear sunblock.

Sunscreen Guide - Rated by Scientists | EWGwww.ewg.org EWG scientists rated more than 1,700 products, and only about one in four products meets our standards for adequate sun protection and avoids ingredients linked to known health harms.

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Matthew Cheney

This is soooooo fucking CRUEL. What a damned shame. I'm sorry to hear this.

COLEMAN, Fla. (AP) — Commission denies parole for Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted of killing FBI agents in 1975.

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Matthew Cheney

RIP Ismail Kadare, my annual longshot pick for the Nobel Prize in Literature www.theguardian.com/books/articl...

Ismail Kadare, giant of Albanian literature, dies aged 88www.theguardian.com His allegorical stories, informed by life under state communism, drew international praise but he insisted that he was not a political writer

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Matthew Cheney

“Digital versions play more to a person's active curiosity than their passive curiosity. (With a newspaper that I can feel in my hands and physically turn its pages, for example, I'm more likely to scan a story I thought I had no interest in reading.)” ⬅️ Yes, this.

Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis displays a 100-year-old dictionary that weighs 25 poundsstrib.gift You can learn a lot from this weighty tome.

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Matthew Cheney

It is astonishing and dispiriting how many people out there are gleefully eager to demolish society for no gain other than the coddling of ignorances and satisfaction of bigotries that are their sole comforts from a world full of horrendous problems they've created.

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Matthew Cheney

Some Field Notes from the end of June, with edgeland relics, Canadians sweating their way through Tarkovsky Texas, Ballardian sunsets, baby spiders, migratory mamas, and some book news: fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/stalkers-c...

Stalkers, cherubs and settlersfieldnotes.christopherbrown.com No. 155

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Matthew Cheney

I like this a lot. We often talk of "plot" as a skeletal substructure of story in ways that reduce it to a summarisable sequence of events, but it's no bad thing to see plot as a causal chain it's your job to uncover in which every turn is determined by narrative logic from the initial conditions.

'Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' — Elizabeth Bowen Remarkable framing. Won’t apply to all writers but might *interest* all writers?

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Matthew Cheney

One of the most revealing things to come from the “ai” push is these bros’ limited vision of humanity. Saying “what are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than a knowledge, an intellectual production engine” isn’t profound, but it does explain why you think “ai” is the pinnacle.

Microsoft AI CEO explains why the economics of information are about to 'radically change'www.businessinsider.com Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival that AI is going to "turbocharge" our capacity to produce knowledge.

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Matthew Cheney

Sometimes you only ever hear about a newish press is when things go sideways. Anyway, here are some reputable presses that deserve attention. Black Shuck Books, Dim Shores, Fairwood Press, Invisible Books, Lethe Press, Neon Hemlock, Swan River, Valancourt, Word Horde.

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Matthew Cheney

Teen Vogue yet again outperforming The New York Times in adapting to today's threats

“authoritarianism in the United States is often discussed in terms of who will win the White House in November. What’s happened in the last few years under both Democratic and Republican leadership at the local, state, and federal level shows the need to hold all parties accountable.”

Welcome to the United States of Suppressionwww.teenvogue.com Our new series documents the recent crackdown on dissent and protests in the U.S.

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Matthew Cheney

57 percent of unhoused women report domestic violence as their immediate cause of homelessness. The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Oregon law could further limit their options. 19thnews.org/2024/06/ruli...

Ruling on homelessness raises the risks for domestic violence survivors, experts say19thnews.org 57 percent of unhoused women report domestic violence as their immediate cause of homelessness. The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Oregon law could further limit their options.