Jonathan Cohen
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jkcohen.com
Jonathan Cohen
@jkcohen.com
560 followers 870 following 820 posts
Word-wrangler. U.S. history and philosophy teacher. Literacy tutor with delusions of efficacy. Friend.
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jkcohen.com
If you want the bottom half of the receipt email, just ask!
Receipt showing a donation of $21.15 to Capital Area Food Bank. (Chosen for laid-off Federal workers.)
October 26, 2025 at 6:43 PM
jkcohen.com
I think the dragon is more like this sulky little fellow.
A tiny, slightly peeved burgundy dragon sitting on their hoard, which is in theory gold but which looks more like popcorn. There's not a lot of it.
September 21, 2025 at 10:19 PM
jkcohen.com
Graphic saying: The Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Horacio Gómez Velasco, said a few weeks ago that people fearing kidnap by ICE did not have to attend church or receive the sacraments there. Archbishop Gómez was formerly a member of Opus Dei and was elevated by Pope Benedict. For him to tell his parishioners this is a complete red alert. There’s a disconnect between Cardinal Dolan characterizing Charlie Kirk as a holy and righteous man, possibly a martyr, and the situation of Archbishop Gómez’s parishioners. Cardinal Dolan recently retired, and perhaps he can now speak more freely. Perhaps Cardinal Dolan will tell the faithful of Southern California to return to church, be kidnapped, and become martyrs themselves.
September 19, 2025 at 4:51 PM
jkcohen.com
White rectangle with the following words: "Who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood he shed." (Genesis 9:6) BUT "[Rabban Gamliel] saw a skull floating on the face of the water. He said to it: ‘Because you drowned others, they drowned you. And in the end, they that drowned you will be drowned.’" (Pirkei Avot 2:6) Beware the cycle of violence and those who perpetuate it.
September 12, 2025 at 2:13 AM
jkcohen.com
Of all the great New York institutions Donald Trump could have chosen to emulate, he had to pick Leonard's of Great Neck.
An architectural mockup of an enormous gold-plated dining hall in two-point perspective, fading off into the infinite distance.
August 1, 2025 at 3:46 AM
jkcohen.com
What do they want? Indentured servitude?
LinkedIn listing for SAT tutoring position. "Senior SAT Tutor, Established Firm, $50/yr-$60/yr."
July 23, 2025 at 11:50 PM
jkcohen.com
Mercury is *always* in retrograde.
July 21, 2025 at 3:28 PM
jkcohen.com
"This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real." It's all around us now.
Quotation by Hilton Als, quoting James Baldwin. "I was chilled by their merriment. . . . It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real."
July 9, 2025 at 11:08 PM
jkcohen.com
There wasn't always room for due process in the world back in the fifteenth century. We have had ample time to improve, but our villains are worse than Clarence's Murderers. At least the Murderers had scruples that needed to be quelled.
Dialogue from Shakespeare's Richard III, I.iv: Are you drawn forth among a world of men To slay the innocent? What is my offense? Where is the evidence that doth accuse me? What lawful quest have given their verdict up? Unto the frowning judge? Or who pronounced bitter sentence of poor Clarence’ death Before I be convict by course of law?
July 6, 2025 at 1:28 AM
jkcohen.com
More honest than the "Thin Blue Line" flag.
An American flag. The field and canton are all in black. The stripes are barbed wire; the stars are the intersections of mesh fencing. Hail the Carceral State.
July 5, 2025 at 6:29 PM
jkcohen.com
Here's what's actually in Trump's Big Bad Ugly Bill. 👇
July 1, 2025 at 6:14 PM
jkcohen.com
When the Martians came, they had a habit of running into skyscrapers and toppling them. We didn’t know why. We figured that they had a kind of internal logic that made sense. Eventually, we realized that they didn’t topple buildings smaller than four stories. We could resettle most of the population across the river in three-story brownstones, and then we could live side-by-side with the Martians. So we did that. This was when the Martians brought out their death rays. Moral: The Supreme Court majority is inimical to human life.
June 24, 2025 at 5:34 AM
jkcohen.com
Meme: When you're taken into a cult, at the end of lovebombing, the members coerce you into doing something awful with which they can blackmail you. Once they have it, no one on the outside can ever look at you the same way; your lot is with the cult. This is what Netanyahu and Trump have done to us. They have led us to Gaza and Iran. No one in the rest of the world will see us with any respect for a long time. The end of that could be a detrumpfication process or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but in the past, returning to norms of justice has required failure as a state -- postwar Germany and Japan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, among others. It's a costly price to pay, and we may be on the hook. But seeing those bastards on trial at the Hague may be worth it.
June 23, 2025 at 3:36 AM
jkcohen.com
My old prayer book, used five days a week for five years, is in poor condition and has to go to special storage. It is on the right. The new, shiny prayer book is on the left. It's just a tool, and what matters is how you use it. I hope it will help tend me towards the good.
Two copies of the same Jewish prayerbook, "Siddur Sim Shalom for weekdays." The one at right is quite old and has been loved to death; the one at left is new. Both have the name of the book on a pale blue rectangular field in Hebrew and in English.
June 16, 2025 at 9:53 PM
jkcohen.com
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" Mario Savio, Berkeley, CA, 1967
June 12, 2025 at 11:17 PM
jkcohen.com
Black and white screen capture: "Timothy Snyder said in On Tyranny, 'When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.' We aren't 100% there, but violent, plainclothed, masked government operatives are indistinguishable from paramilitaries. We are starting to slide toward something more like Chile or Argentina, where they disappeared people, loaded them into helicopters, tranquilized them, and dropped them over the Pacific Ocean. It scares the crap out of me. "
June 7, 2025 at 9:56 PM
jkcohen.com
Day of the Triffids!
An enormous overgrown bush (Duranta) blocks the path to my door. Its vigorous growth suggests the plant will turn on its human caregivers, as plants did in the B-movie "Day of the Triffids."
May 22, 2025 at 5:27 PM
jkcohen.com
Several people have taken the "population drop" idea as a eugenicist rapture-like Muskism, in which non-billionaires are immiserated to the point of nonexistence. Could this instead be related to most nations falling far short of their replacement rate, which is legit demography?
Statement by Grimes, one of Elon Musk's paramours: "Overall, I think there’s quite a bit of abdication of responsibility around what we are going to do as people's jobs start being taken fairly aggressively. Luckily, there's a massive population drop coming. So maybe everything is just fate and it's gonna work out OK. But I feel like we might get, like, very, very, very good AI across every pillar of art before there aren't any more people to make art."
April 17, 2025 at 5:17 AM
jkcohen.com
A marble slab from the stoneyard today.
A greyish-gold heavily striated slab of quartzite for home decor. It has a green tag that gives the style name CRISTALLO, its thickness (2 cm), its finish (polished and brushed), and a 2D barcode, which allows you to add the stone to a rudimentary shopping cart app. It is in a warehouse the size of the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
March 22, 2025 at 3:17 AM
jkcohen.com
Michelle, my close relative (msfledermaus.com), in response to our current straits, has embroidered a War Snail.
A circular needlepoint frame in which the words "War Snail activated" and a fetching yet large and doughty snail are embroidered. Small tufts of grass are depicted around the snail's base.
February 12, 2025 at 11:45 PM
jkcohen.com
Chapter 7: Concerning Those Who Have Obtained a Principality by Wickedness.
February 8, 2025 at 5:43 AM
jkcohen.com
Sometimes you meet, coming down the leafy path along which you are walking, a man dressed as Napoleon; as he talks to you, you look at him with distrust, pity, and amusement—carefully do not look, rather. But as the two of you walk along, and people come up with wallpaper designs full of Imperial bees, rashly offer their condolences on the death of the due d’Enghien, ask for a son’s appointment as Assistant Quarter-master-General of the army being sent to the Peninsula, you realize that it is not he but his whole society that has “lost touch with reality.” Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
February 4, 2025 at 11:23 PM
jkcohen.com
For a State job years ago, I had to swear an oath that I would protect and defend the Constitutions of the United States and California. This is my duty today.

The symbols of our country cannot be appropriated by any group, faction, or party as solely their own. They are ours as much as theirs.
January 20, 2025 at 6:58 PM
jkcohen.com
OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM Dear Governor Newsom: In a few days' time, many, many scientists working for the Federal Agencies will be unemployed. Their work runs contrary to the avowed aims of our new President and Congress. We have an enormous opportunity to avail ourselves of these great minds, these brilliant exiles. I suggest the formation of a California institution not unlike New York's New School for Social Research or Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where these people can continue their work and increase our knowledge of phenomena that Washington would like to deny. At the American Geophysical Union conference in December, 2016, your predecessor, Governor Jerry Brown, spoke of launching California's own climate satellites if Trump turned the existing ones off. The beginnings of an institution to take in this freed-up scientific talent would not cost the amount of a single rocket launch; the alternative is to miss out on the greatest pool of available scientific ability since the Second World War. You can make this dream happen.
January 12, 2025 at 3:40 AM
jkcohen.com
In 2007, I edited a book by Beth Meyerson called "Ready To Go" about the A-Team of public health, CDC's PHAs, Public Health Advisers. They had quasi-police powers, and they used them to nail the U.S.'s syphilis epidemic. They could detain people and interrogate them to get their contacts. PHAs had lighter duties, such as running vaccination drives at county fairs. Still, they could rely on the full coercive power of the state to get the job done. A few hours after 9/11, a team of PHAs was on the only plane in the country allowed to fly, to assess the health effects of the explosions. ‪CDC phased the PHAs out, both for political reasons and for an HR dilemma. The PHAs had been doing the same thing for decades, and they were at the top of scale. They couldn't be reclassified, so they couldn't be paid more. They would be of great use today.
January 2, 2025 at 8:50 AM