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Martyn Wendell Jones

@martynwendell.bsky.social

5.9K followers 1.9K following 1.6K posts

Senior associate editor, The Bulwark. American in Canada, writer. Dad newsletter: https://martynwendell.substack.com/

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · Dec 18

I wrote about the time a UFO cultist brought me to the public meeting of his organization and then caused scandal by trying to accommodate me in a way that violated their esoteric norms: www.thebulwark.com/p/drone-hyst...

Drone Hysteria, Alien Cultists, and the One-Armed Prophet of Cosmic Enlightenment

My guided tour of the everyday impossible.

www.thebulwark.com

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5h

I identify strongly with this. I just want little verbal postcards, mainly, from the lives of people I follow—giving the captured moments form and some irony/humor, too, of course, but always staying close to the small and mundane. In sum, would that the TL were a feuilleton dispenser...

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Elizabeth Lopatto @lopatto.bsky.social · 6h

every once in a while I feel like I get a glimpse of what social networking would be if the platform incentives were just to give us a glimpse of normal people enjoying themselves...

What’s the Hold Up Pod Dan @jacketdan.bsky.social · 1d

He did it again for the 5 year anniversary

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70s Sci-Fi Art @70sscifiart.bsky.social · 17h

RIP Drew Struzan

Star Trek TOS art, featuring floating heads of Kirk, Spock, and Bones.

Poster for Blade Runner, featuring floating heads of the characters.

Poster for Back to the Future Part II, with Doc and Marty both lifting shades to look at their watches with the Delorean nearby.

Poster for ET, with ET in the woods reaching for a floating UFO, with the lights of a city grid in the background.

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Joe Perticone @cheetah.bsky.social · 15h

It’s all they can talk about this week

www.thebulwark.com/p/no-kings-r...

‘No Kings’ Has Republicans in Disarray

Why GOP lawmakers are spreading fear about the upcoming rally.

www.thebulwark.com

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utopia deferred @utopia-defer.red · Aug 23

Disenchantment is one of the most venerable, and contested, concepts in the vast literature devoted to understanding the state of affairs we call modernity… that we inhabit a world bereft of any intrinsic meaning or purpose and which thus generates relations of alienation and exploitation.

I am, of course, glossing a long and multifaceted tradition of scholarship, which has more recently included arguments to the effect that we have never been disenchanted
or that the world remains enchanted (although more like enchanting) if only we're willing to embrace certain modes of being. The former position is staked out by Jason Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment, and the latter claim is argued by Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life. And while I do have my own lightly-informed positions on these debates, I certainly don't intend to adjudicate them here.
Instead, I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.'

In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of
attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention??
In suggesting this correlation between attention and enchantment, I am partially endorsing Bennett's argument that "the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can
cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect." Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of
enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something "that we encounter, that hits us,
but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies."

One of these strategies is "to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things." I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer's, that "the mundane, observed, became the romantic"— or, the enchanted.

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 16h

Attended a beautiful wedding and saw many dear friends over the weekend in Minneapolis, which was so warm on the day of the ceremony that I ended up going in seersucker

A selfie of a moustachioed man in a brown seersucker suit, cream-coloured shirt, and oxblood tie with a repeating mallard pattern on it. The man is wearing Wayfarer sunglasses, too, and in the background is visible a ski resort called Afton Alps. It’s bright and sunny out, and the grass nearby is patchy and browned over.

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 16h

beans is how

Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 17h

Woke up with a terrible headache right under the dome today. It's as though the microplastics in my brain formed themselves into the horrible spoon we've all been hearing about and started trying to scrape their way to freedom through the top of my skull

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 1d

Happy Thanksgiving, friends 🇨🇦

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ceej @ceej.online · 2d

caught my vampire neighbor creeping through my front door. he claims my saying “for sure dude, we should definitely hang out sometime” the other night counts as an invitation, but I disagree. we’re on hold with the etiquette hotline

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Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 4d

get away from before the door

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Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 4d

cry havoc and let slip the frogs of war

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 4d

[non-ominous] And I will not forget it

Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 4d

sleeper hit (posted in the middle of the night)

Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

Andreessen Horowitz? More like And Please, Sir, No More of This!

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

Andreessen Horowitz? More like And Please, Sir, No More of This!

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

I do always seem to have a memorable time

Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

My volume was up too high, in the opinion of several people near me at the airport

Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

I am sitting in a classic “liminal space” near a baggage carousel, and a guy just started playing an adjacent piano, with great feeling! His man bun is swaying. What a country

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

Just laughed out loud

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Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social · 5d

10/10 no notes

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 6d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

At the airport earlier, a very tall and suave man verifying passports told me “please remove your hat… you look better without your hat…” People are saying all sorts of interesting things to me on this trip to AMERICA

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Martyn Wendell Jones @martynwendell.bsky.social · 5d

Once again en route to that quaint, troubled land of AMERICA. Taxi driver for my trip to the airport remarked “you look like you are either going on vacation or hunting.” Perhaps I should expand my itinerary to include those things. As always, am open to further suggestions from savvy travelers

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Alex Shephard @alexshephard.bsky.social · 5d

Me and @markkrotov.bsky.social wrote about Laszlo Krasznahorkai and the Nobel Prize in Literature newrepublic.com/article/2015...

The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Boring Now

László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the Prize on Thursday, is a brilliant novelist and consummate laureate. But has the Swedish Academy lost its sense of fun?

newrepublic.com

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Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 5d

a warning for every newsletter writer going solo right now: you can literally win the Nobel Prize for literature and still desperately need an editor

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 6d

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

violent alien @blipstress.bsky.social · 6d

An actual hot take: Too many authors are afraid of editors watering down their voice or whatever and not afraid enough of editors letting you put any old slop on the page.

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