The fact that Einstein never said any such thing only makes this tweet that much more perfect.
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"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." - Albert Einstein #quote #sunday
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Colin Dickey
@colindickey
New book: Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (7/23). Also Ghostland & others. Rep . Opinions mine. he/him
Colin Dickey’s Tweets
As a Gen Xer I'll be completely unsurprised if a nuclear war is started by a Boomer and Millennial arguing over who's more important.
Learned yesterday that there's a term for phrases like "It is what it is," "It's in God's hands," "YOLO," etc--things meant to short-circuit cognitive dissonance & end discussion. They're called "Thought-Terminating Cliches" and I haven't stopped thinking about that phrase since.
PSA: buried in Netflix's offerings is a collection from Kino entitled "Pioneers of African-American Cinema"--it looks at first glance like a "season" with 20 "episodes" but is in fact 20 feature-length films from Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams & Oscar Michaux.
Academic job postings should require 1) cover letter 2) CV. You can ask for letters, teaching philosophy & all that other crap once you've narrowed it down to 1st round candidates. Asking applicants to do all that work when you know you're going to ignore 98% of them is perverse.
omg in an essay one of my students just confused "emulate" and "immolate."
"Find the writers you admire and immolate them."
Fucking tired as hell having to call these goddamn ghouls every two weeks just to keep them from killing or bankrupting everyone I love.
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If you've ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany well then my friend here is your fucking chance to find out
Maurice Gordon wasn’t doing anything other than waiting for a tow truck when a NJ cop shot and killed him. He wasn’t under arrest. He wasn’t armed. This happened two days after George Floyd’s murder.
Buddy, lemme tell you, non-human species are like the *last* place you wanna go if you’re gonna make some claim that human gender roles are innate.
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One of the most wondrous things about Nature is that it is 100% not here for your heteronormative bullshit.
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“Women should stop demanding equality because......[checks notes].........uh, the oldest male clownfish in a group will spontaneously change sex when the dominant female dies.”
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🎵Birds do it🎵
🎵Bees do it🎵
🎵Even educated fleas do it🎵
🎵Let’s do it🎵
🎵Let’s smash the patriarchy🎵
On Indigenous People’s Day, a reminder that all American land is haunted because all of it is stolen.
The look on Little Miss Flint's face perfectly encapsulating the American electorate, 2016.
Honestly if these fascists are gonna entirely rewrite history they could at least delete their own tweets.
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tfw when the state gets epicurious about your labor practices
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Make America do a simple google search again, jackass.
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“To best understand why the #metoo movement has gone too far, let us look at the sea hare, a, uh............[squints]......a hermaphrodite who reproduces in chain-like orgies where each animal is the male in one coupling and a female in another simultaneously.”
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“It is important to note that animals’ reproductive habits are directly applicable to human culture. Take for example the male mantis, whose....[tugs collar]....uh, brain serves only to inhibit sexual function, so that he performs better once his head has been eaten.”
Folks, this is not an accident. In the 60s, college campuses were a place of progressive activism; the de-politicization of the university was a deliberate, decades-long project by the right, and it's worked exactly as planned. 1/5
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Shocking.
Watch what happened when I asked a bus stop full of CA students if they'd vote in their *key* midterm district.
Bueller?
While Trump's latest fire drill is underway, here's something else to think about: why young Americans don't vote.
More: on.today.com/2INVSis
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Hey it's my birthday. For my birthday could you do me a favor and tell a writer you admire how much their work means to you? Anybody but me; this is not a plea for compliments. But another writer out there probably could use a little bump from a cool reader like yourself.
I spend all day obsessively checking my email but every time an actual email arrives I panic and spend three days ignoring it out of pure anxiety
The dedication of this strip club to pictographically explain a very mundane and obvious pun is something
My review of ’s The Bomber Mafia is up at . It is a vile, deeply offensive book, where a shallowness of focus and the incuriosity of its author result in a work that is utterly morally bankrupt.
"What's that noise in the hallway?"
"Ice machine?"
"Seems like it's gone on too long to be an ice machine."
*peeks in hallway*
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tfw when “you don’t make the rules re: health insurance” but the state of New York sure as hell does
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I honestly don't know anyone on the job market who doesn't spend a full month out of the year focusing primarily on putting together applications. It is such a colossal waste of time and it's offensive. People on search committees know this & they need to take steps to stop it.
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Also, if you're on a search committee, stop asking for letters of rec. Ask for phone numbers. It's less work for the applicant & the recommender, and you'll get a much better sense of the candidate through vocal inflection, enthusiasm, etc., then you would via a letter.
Your annual reminder that if Jesus died on Friday at 3 pm and was alive again by Sunday morning he was not dead for "3 days," who are you all kidding with this math
J E Freeman, who played a string of unforgettable villains in the 90s, including Eddie “The Dane” in the Coen Bros.’s “Miller’s Crossing,” was at the Stonewall Inn the night of the riot, and his remembrance from 2012 is a stunning piece of writing.
sfgate.com/entertainment/
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This is absolutely the best thing on Netflix right now and the Oscar Michaux films--Body and Soul, Ten Seconds to Live, among others--alone are worth it.
I think if you truly love a work of art, it’s a good idea to have a sense of humor about it. Joylessly rushing to its defense every time someone doesn’t love it on Twitter like Aragorn has summoned you to war is not the good look you think it is.
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If you would like to learn more about how Nature is having none of Andrew Sullivan’s bullshit, may I recommend ’s Sex in the Sea:
You should, as a basic life hack, have a few poets you can always return to in dark times, whose rhythms and cadences force you to slow down, break your cycle of panic-breathing and anxiety, whose words and line breaks are like a slow, forceful embrace.
This is your holiday reminder that Home Alone is about a grieving mother who cannot accept that her young son Kevin is dead, so invents an increasingly elaborate fantasy that he’s somehow still alive, and if she can just get back home she’ll find him waiting for her.
Hi you can eulogize Philip Roth and still point out the deeply misogynist sense of male sexual entitlement that runs through the vast majority of his writings, you can do it I believe in you.
My god I hate how everything for kids now is a "STEM toy," sorry to be a cranky old person but that shit used to just be "toys" and "puzzles," now it's "get started optimizing your 9 yr old for a job at Google today," it's just so fucking bleak
tfw when you’re rotting inside but also you want everyone to think you’re happy
ohmygod some editor please send me upstate to write about this, I swear you will not be disappointed
cbs46.com/mysterious-saf
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Resisting tyranny begins with that first step, the first decision to take a stand. Everything else follows.
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The de-funding of Pell Grants to keep lower income people out of college. The assault on affirmative action to keep Black students out. The attack on "trigger warnings" and laissez-faire attitude towards sexual assault which make campuses unsafe for women & assault survivors. 2/5
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Meanwhile, tuition rises at triple the pace of inflation. Students are taught they can no longer "afford" to major in the humanities because they need professional jobs to pay off student loans. 3/5
I went to Nashville 6 months after this to research this for my upcoming book and was amazed at how much destruction this had caused, given almost no one outside of Nashville remembers it. There were windows blown out for blocks in every direction.
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the lax media reporting on the ohio train derailment is a good time to remind everyone that in 2020 a dude bombed an entire strip of nashville on christmas day and like nothing came from it
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These various trends all happened in concert with one another, some more intentional than others but all complementary, so that colleges became professional schools designed to deprive students of the necessary security/head space to engage in politics. 4/5
This CNN piece on what’s happening in Myanmar is breathtaking; and her team did extraordinary work under what must have been unimaginable conditions.
It is actually ok to do a nice thing for a stranger
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When we got to the Troll there was a group of kids just absolutely ZOOMED out on boba tea standing on top of it and they all started chanting SACRIFICE! SACRIFICE! SACRIFICE! and I fully understood what it would be like to suddenly stumble into a 70s folk horror film
Some of y’all write like your only goal is never getting roasted on social media by a 14 year-old with an anime avatar
This email is a masterclass in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility.
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Audrey Dickey, May 1, 1941-January 16, 2019.
Everything is now at rest.
Everything is now at rest.
All that ever was, and all that will ever be, is now at rest.
Weird how the kids in the Thai cave has become, for US media, a repressed proxy for Trump's child separation policy. People want a feel-good story about kids being rescued where the villain is nature, so they don't have to acknowledge how America's border tragedy is manmade.
Hey man, this is super irresponsible! I'd say you should retract it but the damage is likely already done. This is just really dismaying and I'm really disappointed in you & your editors.
When Alistair got sick in summer of 2017, I wasn’t sure he’d ever get to see the snow he loved again. After spring of 2018, I was sure he’d never see another snow. And after spring came this year, I was doubly sure *that* would be the last snow he saw. But here he is.
Thrilled to announce my next book, Under the Eye of Power, on secret societies real and imagined, from the Illuminati to Antifa, and how fear of these shadowy groups is used to repress and shape democracy.
Some thoughts for this gentleman, who’s having a mast cell tumor removed today.
Look, writing is stressful and awful and makes you zero dollars and fills you anxiety and self-loathing but there is nothing—absolutely nothing—like the feeling you get when a stranger connects with something you’ve written.
Will never get over the time I saw a non-alcoholic version of a Sex on the Beach that was called Snuggles in the Sand
Who has zero thumbs and is *still* in remission, over two years later, beating all expectations for a dog with lymphoma?
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The Bomber Mafia is not just a poorly conceived and failed book. It represents the failure of ’s methodology, where an obsession with Steve Jobs-esque “innovators” and “disrupters” leads to a tunnel vision and moral vacuity.
Ok all of my interests have suddenly aligned: image of the supposed mind control COVID-19 5G mind control chip is actually the schematic for a guitar pedal (the Boss MT-2 Metal Zone, to be precise):
guitarworld.com/news/conspirac
Just gonna move upstate and start a store called Two Nouns and an Ampersand
Best scientific discovery of the past year is that octopuses just punch people, fish, because they’re pissed off and fed up
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The Leica Freedom Train lasted until 1939, and saved hundreds of lives. Not just employees but their families, even casual friends.
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Under guise of transferring employees, he was able to circumvent travel restrictions. This way, Leica smuggled 100s of Jews out of Germany.
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I think it’s more accurate to say that Pizzagate, Q, and Trump election conspiracies are simply the latest iteration of white evangelicals’ longstanding embrace of conspiracy theories
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Respectfully, if anyone thinks the right's conspiracy-mongering (including pizzagate, Q, stolen election) hasn't penetrated deep inside the evangelical church, they have not spent any time around the evangelical church. twitter.com/HannahGraceLon…
tfw when you’re still in remission and also someone is holding your favorite squeaky toy behind the camera.
When Alistair wants to get up on the couch he’ll rest his chin on it to ask permission and wait for us to say ok. But sometimes when no one’s around (or when he thinks no one’s around), he’ll “ask” himself for permission and then, after a second, grant it.
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My hope for 2017 is we all find a fragile thing, and kindle some warmth into it, and let it live.
Yesterday tried to tell a friend to "stay healthy and well" and accidentally spoonerized it to "stay wealthy in hell."
Anyway, healthy and well for my real friends, wealthy in hell for my sham friends, or something like that.
To lose one Cabinet-level official over allegations of Russian contacts may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness
Alice Walker milkshake ducking with an anti-Semite who believes in actual, literal lizard people is the perfect grace note with which to end this utterly garbage year
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Happy to announce my next book, The Unidentified: on cryptids, UFOs, conspiracies and other delusions, forthcoming from .
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At the same time, Gladwell argues that since WWII, the American military’s adoption of precision bombing tactics means it can now successfully wage war quicker, more efficiently, and with minimal civilian casualties. The words “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” appear nowhere in this book.
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No one pads out the time sheet like your Lord and Savior JC
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I wrote this review before the IDF began its most recent campaign of using precision bombing techniques to foster a humanitarian crisis in Gaza—just one more horrifying illustration of why ’s thesis here is confused, offensive, and unforgivable.
When we landed in St. Louis my seat mate asked me if I was here for business or pleasure and I said “They’re kidnapping these kids and they don’t get natural light and they kick them in the ribs to wake them up” and her face turned unpleasant but sorry this is the new small talk.
Me, reading Faulkner: Some of these characters have really implausible first names!
The South:
For the record!
1) I've never called myself a "ghost hunter"
2) I also have a PhD! It's not that big of a deal, honestly.
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Replying to @sarahkendzior @HeerJeet and 2 others
But the funniest thing is that you hired a self-proclaimed "ghost-hunter" to debunk a PhD. 
Get out of TNR, Jeet, and find a better outlet.
Get out of TNR, Jeet, and find a better outlet.