Tommy Craggs
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tcraggs22.bsky.social
Tommy Craggs
@tcraggs22.bsky.social
9K followers 1.1K following 37 posts
Writer and editor. Late of "Game Theory With Bomani Jones" on HBO, Mother Jones (no relation), HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, Deadspin, etc. Subscribe to @flaminghydra.com. Email: tcraggs22@gmail.com.
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Reposted by Tommy Craggs
lelandnally.bsky.social
I wrote about prediction markets, where we’re at and how we got here for Defector
January 27, 2026 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
pareene.bsky.social
I have a piece today in Defector making the case for "more training" for ICE agents. A *lot* more training. defector.com/i-have-a-gre...
I Have A Great Idea For Retraining ICE Agents | Defector
The several thousand federal agents currently running rampant in the Twin Cities have so far achieved little in the way of legitimate law enforcement objectives, but they have been rather more success...
defector.com
January 26, 2026 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
jpinckney.bsky.social
Thought this was a really smart, sobering piece from @tcraggs22.bsky.social.

"Nostalgia for some older, bolder time is useless. Journalistic bravery is structurally produced. Cowardice, too."
Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector
Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...
defector.com
January 12, 2026 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
albertburneko.bsky.social
"If Weiss is exceptional, it's only in her knack for making a spectacle of the sort of things that slicker operators in media say and do all the time without causing too much of a fuss."

@tcraggs22.bsky.social on Bari Weiss and all the Bari Weisses: defector.com/bari-weiss-i...
Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector
Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...
defector.com
January 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
There are Bari Weisses everywhere for those with the eyes to see defector.com/bari-weiss-i...
Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector
Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...
defector.com
January 12, 2026 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
dceiver.bsky.social
I foresee a lot of people writing "the transformation/moderation of Marjorie Taylor Greene" takes this year who'll forget that's she's arguably the most ubiquitous anti-semite in American life at the moment
tcraggs22.bsky.social Tommy Craggs @tcraggs22.bsky.social · 21d
MTG on the Epstein scandal—"elites doing horrible things and getting away with it"—may have an egalitarian air about it, but only if you fail to read it alongside the rest of her conspiracism. She's talking about the Jews. She's always talking about the Jews. flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...
January 7, 2026 at 3:56 AM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
MTG on the Epstein scandal—"elites doing horrible things and getting away with it"—may have an egalitarian air about it, but only if you fail to read it alongside the rest of her conspiracism. She's talking about the Jews. She's always talking about the Jews. flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...
Screengrab of story text that reads: "Alternatively, you could choose not to shove your head into your ass. She is talking about the Jews. She has always been talking about the Jews. She was talking about the Jews when she was talking about QAnon. She was talking about the Jews when she was talking about the space lasers. She was talking about the Jews when she was saying outwardly comradely things about Gaza. She was talking about the Jews when she was saying plainly uncomradely things about trans people. She was talking about the Jews when she was talking about COVID and Fauci and vaccines and the lab leak. And even when she was complaining about college kids from China using their student visas to get a leg up on Americans, which is to say that even when she was talking about gentiles, she was more or less talking about the Jews." Screengrab of story text that reads: "Conspiracy thinking like this, centering as it does on infiltration by certain alien concerns and their secret rule over society, is at least structurally antisemitic when not manifestly, cartoonishly so. In Greene’s thoroughgoingly racialist way of seeing the world, there is always a figure in back of things, some agent of modernity’s corrupt design, a human form in whom recondite truths about the workings of elite control are said to reside—'the Jew.' (The precise form may change, of course. That might even be happening now, what with the Chinese century aborning. For the next MTG, and maybe for this one, suspicions of capital will likewise be fitted to the form of an equally furtive, globally integrated East Asian.)"
January 7, 2026 at 3:26 AM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
flaminghydra.com
TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the various ways to read Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent political transformation. “Alternatively, you could choose not to shove your head into your ass. She is talking about the Jews. She has always been talking about the Jews.” flaminghydra.com/marjorie-tay...
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s True Colors
There was a long story in the New York Times Magazine about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s apostasies against the Trump White House last week that seems to have attracted mainly those with a kink for arguin...
flaminghydra.com
January 6, 2026 at 10:42 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
We launched Oakland Review of Books in 2025, starting with an events calendar and vibe reports and, as we've gone on, more and more blogs and reviews and even a few full-on bangers. (And The Oakland syllabus!) We've actually done a lot.

But 2026 is going to be The Year of ORB!
December 31, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
mostlymartha.bsky.social
#Oakland please reshare!

ICE spotted near schools. Can you come stand in solidarity to protect our neighbors?
Bay Resistance Alert: ICE/DHS was observed present today *near* Hoover elementary in Oakland (please note that they did not attempt to enter any school) There is a request for a solidarity presence from schools during school pick up hours. Harriet Tubman preschool, 800 33rd street early dismissal Picket 11am- 11:45 Hoover Elementary 890 Brockhurst street entrance Picket 12:30 - 2pm YMCA preschool 3265 market Picket 2pm - 5pm
November 19, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
graue.bsky.social
Ouch. www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...
What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.
October 28, 2025 at 5:21 AM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
neilturkewitz.bsky.social
Nice piece of writing. Love the shout out to David Noble’s 1984 classic, Forces of Production: “Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men.”

And this observation from @tcraggs22.bsky.social is exquisite:

“The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.”
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI
He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.
www.wired.com
October 27, 2025 at 3:40 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
I talked about "Kpop Demon Hunters," the Eighth Army's occupation of Korea & the origins of Kpop, the only person more driven by resentment than Michael Jordan (my mom), rooting for pretty (again), and the greatest natural athlete the world has ever known (Kim Jong-Il)
awesomechoi.bsky.social Amy S. Choi @awesomechoi.bsky.social · Oct 21
My old dear friend Tommy Craggs (@tcraggs22.bsky.social) is navigating this moment of Big Korean Energy in sports, fandoms, parenting, and culture by becoming an insufferable 삼촌. Just kidding! Kpop Demon Hunters and Dialectics! A convo made for us. Listen to the whole ep wherever ya get ya pods.
K-Pop Demon Hunters & Dialectics: A Love Story
YouTube video by The Mash-Up Americans
www.youtube.com
October 22, 2025 at 5:50 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
Riding my hobbyhorse into the sunset, via @redford.bsky.social's rad new podcast: Sports conspiracy theories are how fans do structural analysis.
October 21, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
eafreem.bsky.social
🥲 I have a new piece out today with ORB! Would love for you to read it. Truly a labor of care on everyone’s part & I’m grateful for that & the insistence that off kilter, slightly dark work Around Books fits & is in fact, the point. ORB forever! Messy girls with mental health challenges forever!!
oaklandreviewofbooks.org Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · Oct 15
This stunning piece by @eafreem.bsky.social exemplifies the kind of "books writing" ORB wants to publish: it's written around and through and about A Book, but is less a "review" than an effort to understand what it means to live in the world (in Oakland) and how books are part of the way we do it
oaklandreviewofbooks.org Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · Oct 15
"After I had sent a few customers home with Cassandra, I started to feel a bit uneasy. Should I be warning them? Am I obligated to tell adults to brace themselves? Call of the void, that’s a thing we all have, right?" www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/cassandra-at...
October 15, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
"The Oakland Review of Books is coming!" it says on our website, and if you haven't noticed, we've started publishing ever-so-slightly-more ambitious things as we ramp up towards really cutting loose.

If you'd like to follow along, for the low price of $0 (American), you can get it in your inbox:
ORB ⧹O⧸
The Oakland Review of Books is coming!
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
September 23, 2025 at 6:43 PM
tcraggs22.bsky.social
There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...
Are We Playing It All Wrong? | Defector
At some point in the thick of the pandemic, I became briefly obsessed with a silly-seeming online controversy over what is known as the double-beat theory. The argument concerns classical music, which...
defector.com
August 13, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
ositanwanevu.com
George Packer hates this book! Buy it today! Out tomorrow wherever books are sold.

Bookshop: shorturl.at/ykg4a
Amazon: shorturl.at/0d7A3
Barnes & Noble: shorturl.at/EFA9I

www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...
How Not to Fix American Democracy
A new book argues for making the U.S. a “true” democracy, but fails at the essential strategy of persuasion.
www.theatlantic.com
August 11, 2025 at 2:22 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
mariabustillos.com
Good time to revisit @tcraggs22.bsky.social on this very topic at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/who-made-cai...
August 4, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
scmaestra.bsky.social
This is truly wonderful. It's about Sinners, yes, but it's about this moment, the power of the squad.
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/all-hands-si...
All hands
Like any movie in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is secretly about full employment
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
June 19, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
maxread.info
in this week's newsletter, a plea for robin d.g. kelley to write about sinners maxread.substack.com/p/who-are-th...
I think this is a good read on the movie, but I would push it even further. What do the movie’s vampires represent, anyway, beyond the dream of a squad permanently assembled--a eternal general strike against mortality, a perpetual mobilization against death? Smoke and Stack, the ex-gangster twins played by Michael B. Jordan, assemble a small and termporary communitarian escape from drudgery and oppression. But Remmick, the Irish vampire who chances upon the juke house, offers not so much an temporary escape as an entirely new settlement: “This world already left you for dead,” he tells Smoke. “Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.” Huh. If we follow Tommy in focusing on Sinners’ historical setting we might note that promises like Remmick’s--a new fellowship, built together across racial lines, in pursuit of dignity, pleasure, and freedom--were relatively common in the South of this period: Robin D.G. Kelley documents in his great Hammer and Hoe the outsize role played by the Alabama Communist Party, among other communist parties, throughout the interwar civil-rights struggle. I’m not saying the Sinners vampires are communists, exactly--the movie is too dense and expansive to function as a simple allegory--but I’m not saying they’re not communists. Remmick is, after all, a materialist, in a vulgar-Spinozist sense: “We are Earth and beast and God,” he lectures. “We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”
June 13, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
oaklandreviewofbooks.org
As the world burns, a few of us are making an Oakland Review of Books. We don’t have money, but why not? We’re moving slowly. We're trying not to break things.

But we’re trying to imagine: what if Oakland were enough and we cared enough to look? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
ORB \O/
The Oakland Review of Books is coming!
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org
June 13, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
erocy.world
Watch the squad assemble now and see, perhaps, a dream of a different sort of social wholeness, not that of the battlefront and the homefront, of the barracks and the assembly plant, but that of people abandoning different parts of a system of domination, rejecting its perks and consolations, joining with each other not to reinforce or reshape the regime but to bring the damn thing to its knees. This is not a draft. This is a general strike.
June 13, 2025 at 3:09 PM
Reposted by Tommy Craggs
flaminghydra.com
TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the Squads Assemble school of cinema, and the social context that makes them so seductive. "They are a dream of everyone fits somewhere, costarring Ludacris." flaminghydra.com/r/442ea64e?m...
Get together / Play a show
Tommy Craggs on foxhole solidarity, and Rax King at the Dew Drop Inn
flaminghydra.com
June 12, 2025 at 12:38 AM