QueenofAngts

My country music heroes weren’t sellouts. They cared about Americans. The young, the elderly, education, small business, pro labor, national healthcare, anti-war and they said fuck you to the ultra wealthy and the establishment.

🇺🇸 Their values and their beliefs were 💯% contrary to the current crop of modern Maga sellout country pop singers.

Also preserved in our archive

Anti-science snake oil salesmen: "All these public health defenses are giving kids allergies because they don't build up their immune systems!"

An Arabian sand boa (Eryx jayakari) in Biddiya, Oman

March 30, 2026 - New Uber Eats delivery robots were sabotaged and vandalised in Sheffield, UK, with the vandals taking care to cover all of the many cameras on the robots with paint. [article]

Today is a terrible person's birthday, so here is a round up of some my favorite applicable graphics from the past year.

Donald Trump was elected president for the first time in 2016, just a few weeks after Dustin and I were married. And since we are celebrating our 10th anniversary this fall, that means we've been dealing with MAGA bullshit for more than a decade.

I see the impact of that decade all around me: in people lost to his mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, small businesses that were crushed by his economic policy, the friends and family members who died deaths of despair, members of my community who are afraid to leave the house because of ICE, anti climate policy that we will be "fixing" for generations...that's just the beginning of the list. 

I feel the physical and emotional toll of ten years of fear and rage. I am exhausted, but I know I cannot give up. Sometimes I'll be working in the garden or folding laundry and I'll think about all of the people around the world who would be alive right now if Donald Trump were never president...and I cry. So I know we have to keep fighting the fight to protect our fellow humans.

We are not doomed. It does seem as if Trump/MAGA's ugly, stupid house of cards is starting to fall. And it's happening because of the individuals and organizations around the world who refuse to give up, even when fighting is scary and hard.

We can't fix what has happened, but we can stop the damage and start rebuilding. Yes, Trump and his cronies are terrible people. People who continue to support him are filled with hate. But hate weakens people. And good people far outnumber bad people in this world.  When we work together, when we show up, when take care of one another...change does happen. So eat your vegetables, stay hydrated, get rest, and check your voter registration.  We have a lot to do!

I was standing in line at Chaucer’s Books, my local indie, when it occurred to me that the line was longer than usual. This has been happening regularly enough that I’ve stopped being surprised—Chaucer’s business is downright defiant. But just that afternoon I had read something about declining literacy rates, and the cognitive dissonance was hard to shake. I mentioned to the woman at the register that I was glad to see the place so full. “I keep waiting to read the worst news ever in the local paper,” I said, meaning the store’s closure.

She didn’t hesitate. “Not gonna happen,” she said twice, shaking her head.

I wanted to believe her. I still do. But I’ve been turning that contrast over ever since.

Here are the two facts, sitting in apparent contradiction. Reading scores for American high school seniors recently fell to their lowest point since the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) first administered the assessment in 1992. Only 35 percent of seniors tested as proficient in reading. Nearly a third scored below basic—meaning they couldn’t reliably locate details in a text to understand its meaning. The decline precedes the pandemic and is steepest among students who were already struggling. Meanwhile, the American Booksellers Association reports that the number of independent bookstores in the United States has grown by 70% since 2020, from roughly 1,900 to more than 3,200. In 2025 alone, 422 new independently owned stores opened nationwide. Barnes & Noble opened more than 50 new locations in 2024 and has plans for 60 more. The line at Chaucer’s, it turns out, is part of a national phenomenon.

One version of the story is about access and class. The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon. Jen Lemberger, co-owner of Chaucer’s, makes this point plainly. “Books are a luxury item for many,” she told me. She noted that the bookstore resurgence also reflects demographics—millennials and Gen Z, the highest users of libraries, are now at ages where they have the means and motivation to open small businesses and spend on books. Nicole Vasquez, who works at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, corroborates the geographic dimension. “Those living in rural parts of the country who don’t have access to bookstores or libraries have lower literacy rates,” she told me. “I would say that is a lot of America—more than people think.”

The numbers bear this out. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 88% of college graduates say they’ve read a book in the past year, compared to 60% of those with a high school education or less.

But there’s something else happening too that complicates both the optimistic and the pessimistic readings. Miranda Sanchez, owner of Epilogue Books in Chapel Hill, notes that the boom is heavily concentrated in niche stores—forty-three romance-specialty shops opened last year alone—and in bookstores that function primarily as third spaces, places to be seen and to belong. The nature of what’s selling has shifted too. Sprayed-edge limited editions bought and re-bought for the shelf, not necessarily to read; BookTok-fueled titles that sell out for months on the strength of a viral video.

The boom, Sanchez says, is “often centered around a book as a product, not as literature.” Books carry a cultural prestige that television has never had, according to Sanchez, a cachet that makes them a powerful vehicle for identity-making. It’s why influencers and actors want to become authors even after they’ve already achieved fame. When the aesthetic of literary life becomes the point, something about the relationship between books and the expansion of one’s inner life shifts. The bookstore stays full. The tote bags are beautiful. And it becomes harder to notice what’s changed.

Sarah Arnold, at Parnassus Books in Nashville, offers what I find to be the most humanly persuasive explanation for why people are flooding into bookstores even as reading scores fall: loneliness. “Technology and social media promised to bring us together,” she told me, “but more often it feels like they siphon each of us into a solitary lifestyle, and it’s hurting us.” Bookstores are filling a social void. People can come to Parnassus on almost any given night for an author event or a book club meeting, or simply browse and strike up a conversation. This helps explain how the bookstore boom and the literacy crisis can coexist.

People are coming for community and the experience of being around people who care about the same things they care about. The act of reading, which is slow, solitary, and at times, demanding, is a related but separate transaction. And yet, for all the talk of bookstores as gathering places, only 7% of American adults participated in a book club in the past year, suggesting that what people are seeking may be the feeling of literary community more than its sustained practice.

Mike Gustafson, co-owner of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, frames the phenomenon in explicitly political terms. Gustafson believes people are “desperately trying to support environments of books and literacy” while watching the infrastructure of public reading get dismantled. He’s not wrong. School librarians are being pressured or removed. Library budgets are first to be cut when municipalities face deficits. California’s adult literacy programs, Lemberger notes, are not guaranteed line items in the state budget. In this reading, people flooding into bookstores may represent something more than lifestyle preference—a kind of cultural self-defense, a community’s attempt to preserve the infrastructure of reading at the precise moment that infrastructure is being defunded elsewhere. The bookstore boom and the literacy crisis may not be the contradictions I originally thought they were, but symptoms of the same underlying pressure.

The optimistic version of this story is that bookstores can do some of the work that schools and libraries are being prevented from doing. Arnold talks about adults who started reading during the pandemic and found, in places like Parnassus, a community that extended and deepened that habit. Vasquez credits TikTok with giving Gen Z a genuine entry point into reading culture. If a twenty-two-year-old comes in for a romantasy and leaves with a staff recommendation that surprises her, that is the system working.

But the less optimistic version is harder to dismiss. If a third of American high school seniors cannot reliably comprehend what they read, then the customers filling bookstores on a Saturday afternoon are largely not the people at risk, and the beautiful new bookstore opening in a walkable urban neighborhood is not reaching the communities where the crisis is worst.