Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 Book Riot’s Literary Activism Newsletter explains: Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now.

🔖 Read The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian).

I’m trying to find a space where determinism and existentialism co-exist. I just keep coming back to the line from the TV show Angel: “if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.”

🔖 Read HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me by Tim Carmody (Wired)

Carmody and I came to HTML within a year of each other, both via Netscape, and I love this love letter to my favorite programming language (yes, I love HTML more than BASIC). Count me in as part of HTML’s posse.

🔖 Read:

• Letters from an American: February 18, 2025
• “So this is how liberty dies…” Making sense of Trump’s first three weeks
• Peace or partition?
• Putin Propaganda… from the Lips of JD Vance

🔖 Read The Courts Can’t Stop the Trump-Musk Coup.

Courts are not known for their harm prevention—they’re best used when trying to hold someone accountable for the harm they already caused.

🔖 Read The history of anti-authoritarian struggle is a history worth repeating by Sarah Freeman-Woolpert (Waging Nonviolence).

🔖 Read The Logic of Destruction by Timothy Snyder.

Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

🔖 Read How to organize under authoritarian creep in a closing civil society.

This is my playbook moving forward.

🔖 Read Trump’s education department says book bans are a ‘hoax.’ Teachers disagree..

🔖 Read Primark launches clothing range designed for people with disabilities.

I love this. I hope we see it spread to other retailers.

🔖 Read Please Don’t Use Generative AI To Mimic Historical Figures.

This is all kinds of a bad idea. The BlueSky thread linked in the post shares a conversation that makes me think the LLM wasn’t trained on Anne Frank’s writing, given its ignorance of the ethnic part of Jewish identity.

🔖 Read Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.

I first read this in high school and was long overdue for a re-read. If you’ve never read it, I urge you to read it today and let it prompt you to consider what is just and what work remains.

🔖 Read 799 Books: The Story of The Stanford L. Warren Library.

🔖 Read For Durham Artist Gabriel Eng-Goetz, Community Is the Greatest Muse.

🔖 Read Wake County Employs SROs in 80 Schools; Some Parents and Civil Rights Advocates Say Their Presence Harms and Criminalizes Students .

🔖 Read The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction by Elizabeth Minkel (Fansplaining).

If you care about fandom, fanfiction, bad actors, and the pull-to-publish pipeline, this is a great read.

🔖 Read The open social web is the future of the internet. Here’s why I’m excited. by Ben Werdmuller.

This is a great articulation of what’s good.

🔖 Read 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won.

This is helpful.

🔖 Read Please publish more (on your website) by Colin Devroe.

Micro.blog is the best way I’ve found to do this. (Full disclosure: I contract for M.b sometimes.)

🔖 Read Spinning your wheels by Annie Mueller.

This is a great read. Sometimes the only way out is through, and the only way through is patience, and that can feel really hard.

🔖 Read The IndieWeb is for developers.

This is a great set of points.

🔖 Read Chaos Layouts and Other Tales from Electric Worlds by Melon.

I love this so much. I want to be on Melon’s web. I think to make myself a space there but also keep using Micro.blog for my home will require me to enhance my technical chops.

🔖 Read The Comfort of Drawing Batman by Austin Kleon.

Austin Kleon’s newsletter is the one that I let come to my inbox even after I’ve switched all the rest to RSS. You should read the preview of this and if you like it, do the 7-day trial so you can read the whole thing.