Close Up Of Pluto From The New Horizons Space Probe.

"We do not have the responsibility of making gay life look good to straights so that they will accept us. I am not at all interested in promoting a cleaned up image to a straight world which is twice as corrupt and ten times as sick."

Vito Russo

Photography by Betty Lane, 1978

Tens of thousands of protesters mustered in cities and towns across the country on Saturday to sound off against the Trump administration's cuts to the federal government and its polices.

Carrying homemade posters and chanting "Hands Off," the protesters came out to the more than 1,200 rallies nationwide despite rain in many cities, according to organizers.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), spoke at the Washington DC rally, "Their tariffs are not only imbecilic — they're illegal, they're unconstitutional, and we're going to turn this around."

Paul Osadebe, a lawyer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, spoke during the rally in Washington, saying the oligarchs do not "value you, or your life, or your community. ...We're seeing that they don't care who they have to destroy or who they have to hurt to get what they want."

Multiple protests rallied in all 50 states — major themes included, 'Hands Off': our Bodily Autonomy, our Schools, our LGBTQ Rights, our Freedom of Speech, our Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, our Wallets, our Jobs, our Civil Rights, our Clean Energy, our Democracy.

And, importantly, there were no reports of any major disturbances or arrests at any of the over 1,200 rallies.

This is the living embodiment of a government that is "of the People, by the People, and for the People."

Democracy is a beautiful thing.

Item: big jar of serotonin

Advertisement for the Hello Nasty album by the Beastie Boys (1998).

To ravish

It is easy to make light of this kind of “writing,” and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues, and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, other ravishments.) We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there are two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of the eye), learned to rely on the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Give me a shock verb two lines in.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late nineteen-fifties, not unlike training with the Rockettes. Telling Stories, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion.

Nobody:

JD Vance:

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Pablo Neruda / Tonight I Can Write