Andrea Kaston Tange
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aktange.bsky.social
Andrea Kaston Tange
@aktange.bsky.social
2.9K followers 1.3K following 2.7K posts
Victorianist & lit professor, gardener, lover of quirky details. Writing sporadically at https://andreakastontange.com
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aktange.bsky.social
Happy Thanksgiving break from your favorite professor cliché (negroni, typewriter I plan to get working over break, Scottish wool sweater)
A hand holds a bright red negroni with a large round ice cube in the foreground; on a small table sits a 1913 Royal typewriter. You can see the reflection of the person in the window behind the typewriter.
November 25, 2025 at 11:58 PM
aktange.bsky.social
This is from one year ago today. This year, I'm sorry today, the leaves have all come down already.
A nighttime scene of a long walkway covered in yellow gingko leaves leading up to an old college building.
November 22, 2025 at 4:12 AM
aktange.bsky.social
If it's hard to imagine how you could have had a worse week, may I recommend spending a few hours making a large cake for someone you love? There's something immensely soothing about delivering a heavy cake to an apartment full of college kids who are beside themselves to spend an evening in eating.
A tall layer cake with creamy white icing sits on a Japanese patterned plate. (You can't tell from the picture, but if you're curious, the cake is carrot, and it wears a cream cheese icing.)
November 15, 2025 at 1:48 AM
aktange.bsky.social
Even some of us aurora people are jealous...I had pretty, ethereal light pink and green, and my daughter one state south had this:
Swathes of dark purple, intense magenta, and bright green fill the sky. You can see stars, and bright vertical bars of light in the eot. The silhouettes of trees frame the photo. A mountain of magenta-red in the center of the sky is surrounded by purple and sits in a green base. Tree silhouettes frame the image.
November 12, 2025 at 5:02 AM
aktange.bsky.social
Twin Cities checking in
Big streaks of pink and green northern lights in the sky show in all four photos
November 12, 2025 at 4:10 AM
aktange.bsky.social
Chocolate chip cookies made with tahini and sesame seeds. Just what the doctor ordered for a chilly, overcast, winter-is-coming Sunday.
Three homemade chocolate chip cookies on a plate. You can see sesame seeds in the batter.
November 10, 2025 at 2:17 AM
aktange.bsky.social
I give up. The @nytimes.com has no shame and almost no integrity.
Push notification for an episode of the podcast "Interesting Times with Ross Douthat." The episode title is Did Women Ruin the Workplace.
November 6, 2025 at 1:24 PM
aktange.bsky.social
It's perfect porch-desk weather, except that the street sweepers are picking up fall leaves and the spiders are building webs, and every is so interesting that it's hard to concentrate on work.
On a brilliantly sunny fall day, you can see the picture is taken from a front porch, with other chairs in the foreground, and fall trees and blue sky in the background
November 3, 2025 at 6:05 PM
aktange.bsky.social
petition to return to black-and-white portraits with 1930s lighting for all faculty photos from now on
myrna loy portrait spencer tracy portrait langston hughes portrait katharine hepburn portrait
November 3, 2025 at 12:45 AM
aktange.bsky.social
How it started, how it's going. It's been many weekends of intermittent work (& swearing), punctuated by the astonishing goodwill of friends who loaned tools & advice, to get to this dreamy point where my deck actually has stairs down to the patio, new landscaping, and no carpenter ants. ♥️DIY
a janky old rectangular deck with visibly rotten boards and railing that's coming to pieces The deck resurfaced with all new cedar, railings removed, and new wide stairs cut into the side. The deck from the front, where you can now also see finished landscaping around its base and a matching cedar planter on the deck with mums in it. The most recent picture, with railings along the main staircase; autumn leaves everywhere show you how much time has passed since the first photo when it was summer.
October 27, 2025 at 11:30 PM
aktange.bsky.social
I feel foolish that bothsidesing White House demolition—which is after all a visual symbol & not life-or-death like SNAP benefits or health care—is what will make me cancel decades-long @nytimes.com subscription. But I just can't anymore w/the sanctioning of this wholesale destruction of out country
October 25, 2025 at 3:22 PM
aktange.bsky.social
October 23, 2025 at 5:06 AM
aktange.bsky.social
Hollywood writers typing furiously this week, trying to draft heist and dystopia and animatronic children's movies pitches before someone else beats them to a write-up of the week's news.
October 22, 2025 at 5:41 PM
aktange.bsky.social
"Fun" fact: the White House is exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act, and you don't need a federal or local demolition/construction permit to do anything to it because it's overseen by a special internal committee—sat on by the White House & by arts orgs the WH has been gutting lately.
headline reads "Crews demolish part of the White House to build Trump's ballroom," and picture shows the East Wing of this fraught, historic, iconic building, which represents all that is best and all that is worst in our U.S. past, being summarily demolished by a wrecking ball.
October 20, 2025 at 11:17 PM
aktange.bsky.social
Who is solving the Louvre robbery?

Right answers only
Bugs Bunny with his feet on a desk and wearing a giant caricature of a plaid deerstalker hat, sits in a room behind a window that advertises Private Eye
October 20, 2025 at 3:28 AM
aktange.bsky.social
It's spectacular out there today, Minnesota! Clear and sunny and breezy and just cool enough to make you put on a long-sleeve shirt and just warm enough to make you glad you didn't add a jacket before you went for a walk. So good for taking deep, restorative breaths. ❤️🧡💛
A spectacular maple tree in the foreground is crimson on top and fades to apricot at its center and lower branches. It's planted along a sidewalk by a black metal fence, and you can see autumn greeny-golds and oranges stretching into the distance down the street. The sky is cloudless and so blue it practically looks fake. It is a perfect fall day.
October 19, 2025 at 8:58 PM
aktange.bsky.social
‼️Estimates now say 100-150,000 people in Minneapolis.‼️
October 19, 2025 at 2:41 AM
aktange.bsky.social
Tens of thousands were out in Minneapolis. I was tickled when the conga line of inflatable unicorns & friends asked me to join them. Also fantastic were all the people around me going "yep yep yep yep yep yep yep" in that perfect martian voice.
A bright pink Yip Yip from Sesame Street carried a sign that reads: kings? Nope nope nope No. Democracy yep yep yep!
October 18, 2025 at 10:18 PM
aktange.bsky.social
Twin Cities No Kings represent!
October 18, 2025 at 10:15 PM
aktange.bsky.social
A+ SUPERB 10/10 NO NOTES
October 18, 2025 at 4:36 PM
aktange.bsky.social
a protest sign reading: see you later alligator, at your trial pedophile
October 18, 2025 at 3:33 PM
aktange.bsky.social
A protest sign that says "only the weak choose hate." Behind the words "choose hate" is a gold crown NO KINGS logo, so that both crown and words are Xed out in red.
October 18, 2025 at 3:20 PM
aktange.bsky.social
If this snip from an interview with Marjory Stoneman Douglas—staunch protector of the Everglades, journalist at the Miami Herald, and who lived to be 108—doesn't make you wish to have known her yourself and positively long to be someone she would call "bumptious," then I don't even know.
Mrs. Deering would always say to me, “You know, you’ll never be a great social success if you don’t play Bridge,” and I said “Dear Mrs. Deering, I don’t want to be a social success if I have to play Bridge.” I consider it one of the least interesting ways to spend an evening that I can think of….I’d rather spend the evening talking. I consider conversation one of the great social arts. (laughs) Much better than Bridge, which is a destroyer of conversation. But that was always good fun with Mrs. Deering, she was a great gal. She was full of humor and bumptiousness and sharpness.
October 17, 2025 at 5:58 PM
aktange.bsky.social
Friday timeline cleanse. The delphinium are still defiantly beautiful, defiantly late in the season.
close photo of a cluster of bright purple delphinium flowers; additional stalks can be seen, blurrily, in the background, against a silvered wooden fence
October 17, 2025 at 2:45 PM
aktange.bsky.social
Joyce. Obvs. Faulkner could NEVER:
The last two paragraphs of James Joyce's story "The Dead," which are as follows: Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
October 13, 2025 at 2:07 AM