Marvelous Hebden
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Marvelous Hebden
@marveloushebden.bsky.social
110 followers 130 following 61 posts
Writer • Grad Student • Cultural Studies • English Lit • Folklore, Myth, & Fairy Tales • Creative Nonfiction • Poetry • Art • Nonbinary, they/them.

https://marveloushebden.substack.com/
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The lower courts doing their best to maintain Checks and Balances despite the erosion and corruption of Checks and Balances within the Supreme Court
"I think we will continue to see lower court judges ruling against the administration as long as the administration keeps pushing the envelope," Epps said. "I don't think the Supreme Court will be able to get all the district court judges to stop trying to push back on the administration's lawlessness." This seems to be the case in many situations surrounding the Trump administration. They will face notable pushback or obstacles while trying to do something that hasn't previously been done, but they'll often be able to get around some of the major checks on their power. However, if a significant number of obstacles still remain, it does still slow their ability to achieve what they are attempting to achieve. The Supreme Court has been quite agreeable with the Trump administration thus far, but the administration keeps trying to push the boundaries, and it remains to be seen if the Court will reach a breaking point where it can no longer go along to get along. Regardless, the lower courts continue to do important work, and they will likely continue to upset an administration that calls them insurrectionists, despite the fact they're behaving as the courts are supposed to.
October 22, 2025 at 5:15 PM
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Short note and short video (roughly 2.5 minutes) by Timothy Synder on No Kings and propaganda.
Quote on a square blue background: “For me, protest is about love of country, where love means wanting my country to survive and thrive and be the best version of itself. I will be there on October 18th, and I hope you wil be too. The video has the thoughts about why lying about protest is harmful and why getting out in public with others is helpful.” Timothy Snyder No Kings — Freedom (video) Substack
October 12, 2025 at 3:47 PM
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“Many people who consider themselves non-political or independent, or moderate Republican, or who even voted for Trump last November, can’t avoid seeing what’s now come so clearly into the open.”

— Robert Reich
Sunday Thought: The Big Reveal
Quote on square green background: “Many people who consider themselves non-political or independent, or moderate Republican, or who even voted for Trump last November, can’t avoid seeing what’s now come so clearly into the open.” — Robert Reich Sunday Thought: The Big Reveal Substack
October 12, 2025 at 3:26 PM
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“If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump's deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.” — Greg Sargent
Quote from the article by Greg Sargent: “Miller plainly believes there's a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump's deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.” Quote from the article by Greg Sargent: “What's notable, in one sense, is how badly this project has failed. Despite months of effort, Trump and Miller have not come close to manufacturing the sense of fear or trauma out in the country they'd hoped for. But in the nascent Pritzker-Newsom understanding, assuming this will all take care of itself-that voters will resist Trump-Miller agitprop without prompting-is insufficient. We've learned, hearteningly, that majorities seem to harbor a deep attachment to liberal rights and liberties, one that instinctively recoils at masked kidnappings, at hypermilitarized vehicles on urban boulevards, at the trappings of totalitarian dictatorship. But this must be activated. That takes conflict and controversy-powerful imagery and language that rivets attention.”
October 9, 2025 at 4:40 AM
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“Is America Contagious?”
Discussing global politics
Article by Anna Merlan, journalist and Mother Jones contributor
Quote from the linked article: “The scholars I spoke to agree that the spread of far-right populism is, to some degree, organic, as such ideas pick up genuine popular support across countries. But it is also highly coordinated, with clear and deliberate cooperation among self-described anti-globalist groups who are working together to create an increasingly illiberal world. There are now versions of America's annual CPAC gathering in Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Paraguay, Poland, and South Korea-an irony, considering that far-right movements often position themselves as anti-globalist and concerned only with their countries' own self-interest. (The effects can be unintentionally hilarious: CPAC Hungary, for instance, proclaimed itself to be ‘the epicenter of the global fight against globalism.’)”
October 7, 2025 at 9:26 PM
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This was recommended by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Ezra Klein show the other day. I was halfway through the book and didn’t yet see why he was recommending it as especially relevant, but I finished reading it tonight, and it’s pointedly relevant. A must-read: The Sirens’ Call (2025) by Chris Hayes. 1/
The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes book cover. Black letters on a gray background. Each letter in the author’s name and title of the book has neon green streaks guiding the reader’s attention to a focal point, the subtitle printed in significantly smaller black text at the center: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource
September 30, 2025 at 5:12 AM
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🎨 Cailleach by Izabela Furlan, artist and tarot reader www.facebook.com/share/p/16EA...
Ink drawing. A timeless ancient. A woman stares into the eyes of the viewer, one eye focused, one eye unfocused, as though wandering, but not. The sky behind her is full of snow clouds parting to reveal falling snow against a black sky, giving the impression of the vastness of space and infinite stars. The snow on the ground cover mountain peaks, and the cloak the woman wears at once has the quality of wool and stone, a trick of the eye. Her hands are crossed and resting on the top of her walking stick. A spiral ornaments her heart.
August 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM
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Mother Goose, Linocut print by Diem Dangers, Feathers and Folktales.

Also known as Frau Holle: feathersandfolktales.com/shop/…
Mother Goose with a winterberry crown, a snow goose, feathers and stars.
April 28, 2025 at 6:51 PM
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Thread Collecting Fairy Tale Cannibalism Motif alternating with Modern Day Zombie Media

🎨 The witch welcomes Hansel and Gretel into her hut. Illustration by Arthur Rackham (1909) 3/🧵
An old hag walks out of her cottage in the woods on crutches to speak to two young children, brother and sister Hansel and Gretel
March 25, 2025 at 9:11 PM
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I’m entertaining some reasons for, connections, relationships, and the shift from the one cultural motif to the other
2/🧵

📷 Frank Ockenfels/AMC, from the article “15 Walking Dead Episodes to Help You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse” by Liam Matthews (2024) www.netflix.com/tudum/articl... #Zombies
A group of Walking Dead characters in a clearing surrounded by trees
March 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM
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Modern Day Zombie Films & The Threat of Cannibalism in Fairy Tales

I’ll casually add to this for a bit, but please chime in with your thoughts and examples at any point as I go along! 1/🧵

🎨 Vasilisa at the Hut of Baba Yaga by Ivan Bilibin (1899), illustration for Vasilisa the Beautiful #FairyTales
A young woman makes her way tentatively through a landscape dense with trees. She holds a wooden stick with a human skull staked on it, it’s glowing eyes lighting her way like a torch. Similarly staked skulls can be seen in the background surrounding a house. In contrast, impression of the warm glow of the living and the comforts of home are suggested by a lit window.
March 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM
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3.9 Warbler

Long delicate note
Songbird position theories
Warbler expressions

🎨 Warbler in a Wash Painting by Sam Georgieff, watercolor on paper

#DailyHaikuPrompt #Writing #Reading #Bird
Watercolor painting. A yellow bird in profile, gaze and long black beak pointing to the left. A yellow and black wash fill the background. The bird has clear definition in some aspects, the beak, the eye, the wings, but it is partially undefined, the feet, for example, that are obscured by the wash. Realism and Impressionism commingle.
March 9, 2025 at 3:49 PM
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“Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone.” 1/

—Mary Louise Pratt (2002) "Arts of the Contact Zone." Professing in the Contact Zone
Book cover. Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together edited by Janice M. Wolff Text on a copper background of overlapping and colliding circles of light
March 9, 2025 at 4:17 AM
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The above “book quote Wednesday” is from a discussion of the work of Ernest Bloch by contrast to Jung and Freud from chapter 7, “Ernest Bloch and Mariette Lydis: The Art of Daydreaming,” of Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales /3
Black and white portrait of Ernest Bloch as the image introducing chapter 7 of Buried Treasured by Jack Zipes. Illustrator unknown. Bloch is marking up a manuscript with a pen and smoking a pipe. The caption says “Ernest Bloch imagining a better world.”
March 5, 2025 at 3:11 PM
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A Harp in the Stars edited by Randon Noble Billings (2021)

An excellent collection of lyric essays—segmented, fragmented, mosaic, braided, hermit crab, and craft. Enjoying each work within for its own sake and for the high notes of intertextuality that ring throughout.

#BookSky #Reading #Writing
Book cover. Image of a robed being soaring among stars in the night sky with a lyre harp in hand evoking Orpheus. The text reads: A Harp in the Stars An Anthology of Lyric Essays Edited by Randon Billings Noble
March 3, 2025 at 6:54 AM
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“This is the brilliance of shame as a tactic of domination: it conditions us to maintain our own isolation. The genius of a social structure is that you cannot see it; it is built to be invisible to you, this machine that compels you to perpetuate it.” 1/

Melissa Febos (2021)
#BookSky #Reading
Book cover. Gradient shades of pink from fuchsia to white T ext on a black background with bestseller award stickers. The text is a repetition of the word GIRLHOOD with the author’s name at the bottom MELISSA FEBOS
March 3, 2025 at 3:05 AM
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Jack Zipes (2023) Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales

Zipes is a literary scholar (87 years old; retired in 2008; still bringing the expertise and doing scholarship) especially known for his work regarding the sociopolitical contexts and impacts of fairy tales #BookSky #Reading
Book cover in dark green and white. Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes. The background art features a canopy of leafless trees invoking the winter woods, an owl, a stag, a robin, a wolf, and a rabbit. Underground we can see buried and lost treasures. An open book, a string of pearls, a ring, a lock and a couple of keys, several bones and two skulls, a feather, a crown, pens, paint brush, paint pallet, musical instruments, and a few old fashioned medicine bottles.
March 1, 2025 at 9:02 AM
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In Greek myth, the four cardinal winds, the Aemoi, are depicted as blasts of air, men with wings, or horses kept in the stable of the god Aeolus. Also described as Poseidon’s stallions in the Iliad.

“Horses of the Wind” by Tom Paddle
Three blue-white airy-watery horses moving in unison in the shape of an ocean wave hitting the shore on a background the warm honeyed color of sand.
February 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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la rosa dei venti (Italian, wind rose) — predecessor of the compass
A compass from an old map key. A multi-pointed Star is in the center with four large points indicating the four cardinal directions, four smaller points indicating the meeting points between the cardinals, and three yet smaller points between each of those indicating further subcategorization of direction. Personifications of the wind ornament the background along with seafaring images, a ship on the ocean, a mermaid, Neptune with his crown and trident.
February 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM
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North Wind by James Jean
A portrait of the wind personified as a man fiercely blowing the breath out of his body as fairy creatures, possibly sylphs, and white doves, fly about in the currents.
February 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM
marveloushebden.bsky.social
The Venti, the winds, in Latin,
The Anemoi in Greek

Image: “Wind God” sculpture by Greg Wyatt, Michener Museum Sculpture garden, Doylestown, PA

Photo by Michael Kendrick
Grey sculpture of the wind depicted as a swirls with face, several small, one large personification, blowing. A golden yellow wall in the background offers nice color contrast.
February 27, 2025 at 12:00 AM