Good news, everyone! My podcast’s test season earlier this year was received with such enthusiasm, we immediately got to work on building the machinery that would power a full series. It took all summer, as I and my team applied what we learned we could do differently or better going forward. I only wanted to do all that work once, because I want to do this podcast for years to come. I think we nailed it, and I think I get to hand off everything but the narration to the rest of the team.
So I can so happily shout from the top of a mountain that It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton Returns October 29th with a spooky story for the spooky season! And that will kick off at least FORTY new episodes.
FORTY!
I am so excited, I made a video about it!
I’ve been reading submissions from Michael, our content editor, and reaching out to authors for permission to narrate their stories. Can I tell you how warm it makes me feel when they tell me they enjoy my work? How happy and grateful I feel when an author tells me they already listen to my audiobooks?
Every single story I have read has been incredible for a different reason. I can’t hardly wait, as the Replacements said, to narrate them. I’m so grateful that I am getting to do what I love for my job. If you’re already subscribed to the podcast, please accept my warmest thanks; I wouldn’t get to do this without you.
One of the unexpected delights has been the Patreon. I did a couple of live AMA things there that were surprisingly fun, so we’re going to do that again, and more often. I’m hopeful that I can even do some author chats, where we can get to know the people who created these stories I’m reading to you. Last time I looked, there were 485 paid subscribers, and like 300 others who are checking us out. That blows me away and I’m so grateful for the support, I’m going to do a special, live, narration of a spooky story, chosen by Patreon, next week. If you’re interested in seeing that, there’s plenty of time to sign up.
A statistically significant number of people asked me if I would ever be on YouTube, but I never wanted this to be a video thing. For me as a performer, I can’t serve the words on the page and play to the audience on the other side of the camera. Imagine going to see someone do a reading in a theater, and they never once look up from the page. It’s weird, right?
But so many people wanted us to be on YouTube, we figured out a way that I think will solve that problem. I’ll introduce the episode on camera, and then the story will be an audiogram. Done and done. There’s no content at the channel right now, but as soon as there is, I’ll share the link.
Okay, one last thing: Yesterday, I remembered that I had done a narration of Ur Fascism for Radio Free Burrito about five years ago. I felt like it was a good time to resurface it, so I did. And if you want to listen to my favorite episode I have done of RFB so far, with a full production and music and the whole thing that I did entirely by myself, I’m so proud of The Cecil Hotel.
I’m supposed to say that you can subscribe to It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton wherever you get your podcasts, even if that particular link goes to Apple for stupid SEO reasons.
That’s all for now. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.
Senate Republicans voted to kill a bill on Wednesday that would have limited President Donald Trump’s war powers, according to a new report.
Trump had been pressuring Republicans to kill the bill, and Sens. Todd Young (R-IN) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) flipped their votes on Wednesday, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported. Vice President JD Vance was the tie-breaking vote.
Young said in a statement that he flipped his vote after securing a promise from Trump that he would ask Congress for permission on a major strike against Venezuela in advance of such an operation.
1920c. Lillian La France was billed as the world’s foremost motorcycle stunt woman, one of a handful of female stunt riders in the 20s and 30s. From Art Deco, Avant Garde and Modernism, FB.
It’s not just turning things back to the status quo ante, as we’ve discussed. We’re in an era in which it’s critical to make major structural changes when the opportunity arises and build new structures that are more durable than the ones which have fallen so quickly over the last decade and specifically the last year.
In a lengthy rant on Truth Social Monday, Trump claimed that the U.S. would have to “pay back … Hundreds of Billions of Dollars” to the countries and companies that pledged to invest in American factories and plants in order to avoid his tariffs if the Supreme Court determined his economic action was unlawful.
“When these Investments are added, we are talking about Trillions of Dollars!” Trump wrote. “It would be a complete mess, and almost impossible for our country to pay.”
He then tried to shift blame for the hastily constructed tariff plan—which was built on bad math—onto the judiciary. He claimed that the nine-justice bench would be at fault for the fallout of the plan rather than his office, which forced it through in April against the advice of at least two dozen Nobel Prize–winning economists.
These are occupations, with what looks and is intended to look very much like a military force, which is acting like a military — far more than actual soldiers and National Guard do, because centuries of training and law curb those impulses. They’re being sent into these cities to menace and overawe, like some modern day equivalent of the Normans dominating the English countryside with their motte-and-bailey castles.
Part of civilian government and civic democracy is that you can resist things all you want. You just can’t break laws. Most of civic freedom is contained in the empty spaces between those two things. If you look at the trend of Trump rule in blue cities and blue states, the clear trajectory is that not being dominated is getting closer and closer to being a criminal offense, likely through conspiracy laws and such.
When we think about how to understand Trumpism and what to do about it, we need to be thinking way beyond the literal and technicalities. It’s really about how we got to be like conquered territories in our own country and how we un-get there. That requires thinking beyond the narrow technicalities of civilian and military laws and life.
Never forget and never forgive the people who did this to us. When this is all over, when he is dead and gone, we must hold every one of these terrorist thugs accountable.
We know that Donald Trump sees America’s blue cities as a kind of conquered territory. We’re now seeing what that actually means in practice, when the potential violence which has always been coiled up in federal law enforcement is released on American citizens because of the predatory license granted by Trump’s example and his acolytes. The message is pretty simple. Your cities are a war zone, and any false move, any transient moment of non-compliance or any fidgety moment of misunderstanding can mean your death. Top Trump officials are saying emphatically that this is exactly how it should be and I don’t think that will stand.
Yesterday I saw a social scientist at Harvard commenting on a photograph of CBP commander Greg Bovino and a couple other agents, accusing them of cosplaying. What do they think, this person asked, that they’re like in Fallujah in 2007? This is a high school in Minneapolis. And yeah, they’re decked out with all the accoutrements of urban warfare. ICE and CBP have grown into predatory organizations in which an ethic of explosive and malicious violence against civilians, coupled with casual lying, is not only tolerated but aggressively encouraged. That’s how you get to this agent casually shooting a woman in the face because she may have momentarily angled her wheels in the wrong direction during a tense moment.
Videos from targeted cities over the past few months have shown such reckless conduct by immigration agents that it understates it to call it bad policing. It’s just not policing at all. It occupies a new realm of use of force, with outside federal units detached from local communities and with tenuous cooperation from local law enforcement coming in to knock heads, often while masked and driving unmarked civilian vehicles.
Incidents like the shooting in Minneapolis were not just foreseeable, but were foreseen and warned about, local officials angrily noted. Reckless conduct by immigration agents was already documented by a federal judge in Chicago, Chris Geidner reminds us. Two similar incidents occurred in Chicago involving vehicles, where the feds brought charges against the drivers, but the cases quickly fell apart and the charges were later dropped. Nationwide, it was the ninth ICE shooting since September.
