Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
LightNews LightNews
banner
mcorey79.bsky.social
Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
@mcorey79.bsky.social
500 followers 920 following 27 posts
TST member 😈 Lover of democracy & human rights💙Stephen King enthusiast💙Animal lover/adopt don't shop💙 Fierce ally 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈♀️💙Horror movies are my jam & anything related to Halloween 👻💀🎃Scorpio♏️
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
notalawyer.bsky.social
this scam is particularly effective because the scammers imitate Michael’s standard email greeting: “I’m Michael Hobbes - yes, THAT Michael Hobbes.”
michaelhobbes.bsky.social Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 11h
Scam alert: Someone is pretending to be me and reaching out to authors. The pitch contains enough specific details that it sounds plausible at first.

This is not me! I'm so sorry to anyone who has fallen for this.
I'm Michael Hobbes, yes, that Michael Hobbes from If Books Could Kill. I help run our little corner of chaos where 69,000 readers, writers, and mildly obsessive book nerds gather to talk about the stories that shape (and sometimes ruin) our brains. I picked up your book reminding us that and honestly.. I didn't stand a chance. The humanity, the humility, the sheer scope of what you do, it's staggering. You somehow make your topic feel both epic and intimate, conclusion of book We don't reach out to every author, mostly because l'm lazy, but your writing grabbed me by the collar. We'd love to feature you in our next author section, where our readers and listeners connect directly with the storytellers and thinkers who make us rethink what "impact" really means. Would you be interested if we chose your book for our next section? Thanks for making my week with your work. I promise this isn't one of those "team emails", it's really just me, geeking out in your inbox.
December 10, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Scam alert: Someone is pretending to be me and reaching out to authors. The pitch contains enough specific details that it sounds plausible at first.

This is not me! I'm so sorry to anyone who has fallen for this.
I'm Michael Hobbes, yes, that Michael Hobbes from If Books Could Kill. I help run our little corner of chaos where 69,000 readers, writers, and mildly obsessive book nerds gather to talk about the stories that shape (and sometimes ruin) our brains. I picked up your book reminding us that and honestly.. I didn't stand a chance. The humanity, the humility, the sheer scope of what you do, it's staggering. You somehow make your topic feel both epic and intimate, conclusion of book We don't reach out to every author, mostly because l'm lazy, but your writing grabbed me by the collar. We'd love to feature you in our next author section, where our readers and listeners connect directly with the storytellers and thinkers who make us rethink what "impact" really means. Would you be interested if we chose your book for our next section? Thanks for making my week with your work. I promise this isn't one of those "team emails", it's really just me, geeking out in your inbox.
December 10, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Uhh it kind of sounds like the key is to become a grifty money coach
www.reuters.com/lifestyle/ho...
Financial coach Brian Mitchell knows how easy it is to fall into debt. He maxed out two credit cards on a relatively low income and is now a money coach. The key, he says, is to build financial habits that force an individual to create a disciplined system. “As humans, we just adapt to what we have — and we will know if we get an increase in salary, we just very quickly adapt to it, and that becomes a new norm,” he says. “You can do the same in reverse. So, by paying yourself money, setting it aside, then you're just going to adapt to what's left. So for me, the golden rule is: pay yourself first.”
December 10, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
both!
 Mathew Finch @mathewfinch.bsky.social · 1d
Will this book be a future If Books Could Kill episode, or is it's content too insubstantial?
December 9, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
“I look down at the crashing swell. Alone at the after-party, a kind of honeymoon in hell. I am on the list, a bit of grave misfortune. I am in the New York Post, even worse. The ink is black, the pages yellow. Everything, some kind of lie. What of doubt? Scientists cannot see the soul.”
Sentences From American Canto That Sent Me To The Hospital
I reviewed Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto for Slate. There's far less RFK Jr. in it than you'd expect.
substack.com
December 9, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
notalawyer.bsky.social
this is the raw physical prowess that Olivia couldn’t resist
razzball.bsky.social Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 2d
In line for the TSA behind this guy
December 9, 2025 at 2:30 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Unhinged to describe the criticism of her journalistic ethics as a "freaksome lynching" when she has not denied any of the allegations and admits to most of them in her book.
colindickey.com Colin Dickey @colindickey.com · 2d
Possibly the only thing more freakish than Nuzzi's prose is the contortions her defenders twist themselves into. "She's not just hot, but she definitely is hot, while also being a vulnerable smol child. Also, criticizing her is sexist."
Lisa Taddeo in Airmail: "I think Olivia is smarter than she is beautiful, though she is unquestionably beautiful. I think Olivia is able to write something beautiful overnight and not a lot of people can do that, and her intrigue and wisdom are amplified, in my opinion, by how very young she still is. Her prose is never boring, even when it’s precious, and when I look at her I see a little girl, like my daughter, like myself, like us all, which is what she actually still was when all these older, powerful men navigated her, and, through that, she learned how to navigate them, and the world, in a way that I think has gravitas. But mostly I think the attempted patriarchal mass murder of this woman’s career and her personhood is a freaksome lynching the likes of which we will look back upon with a dazed compunction."
December 8, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
notalawyer.bsky.social
ending your resignation letter with “you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you cannot take New Jersey out of the girl” should be considered an actionable true threat.
December 8, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
I agree that we should not judge Farage solely on the racist things he said when he was a kid. We should also judge him on the racist things he has done with the entire rest of his life.
They include claims he said “Hitler was right” and “gas them” in reference to the Holocaust to at least one Jewish pupil.
December 8, 2025 at 12:54 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
markwelch.bsky.social
"money's real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored."
adambonica.bsky.social Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 4d
Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:
Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.
Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.
open.substack.com
December 7, 2025 at 6:41 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
beitz.bsky.social
a very coherent read. how can we all move this forward. @aoc.bsky.social are you seeing this?
adambonica.bsky.social Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 4d
Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:
Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.
Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.
open.substack.com
December 7, 2025 at 9:17 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
jonathanhopkin.bsky.social
This is absolutely brilliant. Yes it’s about the US but it applies in a less obvious way over here too. We need to free democracy from the grip of the billionaire class. It can be done, the vast majority of people agree that a tiny wealthy elite should not dictate how we are governed
adambonica.bsky.social Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 4d
Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:
Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.
Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.
open.substack.com
December 7, 2025 at 10:24 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
adambonica.bsky.social
Study after study shows campaign ads barely move the needle. So where does money’s real power come from? I ranked the five ways money corrupts politics—from least to most corrosive. What I’ve learned from 15 years of tracking political money:
Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.
Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight.
open.substack.com
December 6, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
georgetakei.bsky.social
Getting the grade you earned is religious persecution now?
University Of Oklahoma Places Professor On Leave After Student Cries 'Religious Discrimination' For Bad Grade On Essay
www.comicsands.com
December 7, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
I love this random exoplanet youtuber who starts all of his videos like "for those of you who've been living under a ROCK" and then talks about the most obscure shit.
December 7, 2025 at 7:00 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
It’s so good!
pallbro.bsky.social Andrew Johnstone, MD @pallbro.bsky.social · 7d
I‘ve been listening to Sarah Marshall’s The Devil You Know and it’s so great. She knows this stuff inside out and weaves a tale of so many subjects; the satanic panic (duh), evangelicalism, the patriarchy, media, so much more. Highly recommend.
December 6, 2025 at 3:33 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
hcrichardson.bsky.social
December 4, 2025
December 4, 2025
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said.
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
December 5, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
hcrichardson.bsky.social
A big deal (or it should be):
December 4, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
This clip is even more insane considering that in her book she basically admits that she encouraged him to drop out and join the Trump administration.
Still, the same uncertain environment, the same spirit of chaos, also presented an opportunity: Those who could abide the ridicule inherent to associating with the president would have the chance to benefit from his uncommon openness and suggestibility. I cited the example of Kim Kardashian. In the first administration, she had managed to lobby the president successfully to commute the sentence of a woman serving a lifelong prison term for a nonviolent drug offense and to sign into law criminal justice reform legislation called the First Step Act. For her willingness to appear foolish standing alongside the president, a kind of courage, she had wrought genuine good for others. He was also clear-eyed about the president himself. “I always thought of him as a novel: hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth,” he told me. As someone whose job was to bear witness to the president and explain what I had seen to others, and who had devoted many thousands of words over many years to doing so, this concise description struck me as about perfect. As a writer I was almost jealous—and I loved that. It was his responsibility to try his best to live up to their belief, to treat his every decision as a candidate, even if the decision was to end his candidacy, as a presidential decision, made in the manner of a public servant, with all personal concerns—about backlash in Hollywood and related friction in his private life—pushed aside in favor of the central concern of what would be best for the country. I was sure he could do that, I said, because I trusted him that much. He started to cry. “I wish I could just be with you,” he said.
December 4, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
hcrichardson.bsky.social
Lots of interest here, and I will write about it. But what jumped out at me was ZM's observation that the laws we need are already on the books. We just need to enforce them. I mean, OF COURSE, but... it needs to be said.
December 5, 2025 at 2:49 AM
mcorey79.bsky.social
Please tell us you're going to be adding this to an IBCK episode @notalawyer.bsky.social
michaelhobbes.bsky.social Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 6d
She follows Trump to a senior center in Arizona and includes this insanely rude anecdote?
December 5, 2025 at 4:08 AM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
1. Why is there a long description of black holes in your book about sexting an anti-vaxxer.

2. That is not what Hawking radiation is.

3. lol what
Spaghettification is the term astrophysicists use to describe what happens to all matter as it enters the border of this realm. It is a silly word for a gruesome process. “There was this medieval torture with horses, drawing and quartering,” a Harvard scientist told me. The murder mechanism saw one half of a person tied to one horse and their other half tied to another horse; the horses were then compelled to run in opposite directions, at which point the person was torn to pieces. That is the best way to visualize spaghettification, the scientist said: pulling apart and apart and apart and apart, reduced to ever smaller and smaller parts, dissolved right down to our very atom parts and then beyond them, beyond any concept of us, beyond any trace of our existence. But energy never dies, and as Stephen Hawking theorized, what enters black holes may find its way out. How else to explain the ring of light around their darkness? They are setting free what does not belong to them. Even black holes must learn this lesson: Nothing is yours to keep. Space-time moves in one direction: not ahead or back but down. At the heart of the heart, at the very bottom of a black hole, Albert Einstein thought we would locate the end of time, what he termed the singularity. A final frame. The last gasp. I will meet you there.
December 4, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
"In a just world, where the career of a political pundit was somehow tied to his ability to analyze politics, this would be an extinction-level event for these morons."
notalawyer.bsky.social Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 8d
My latest newsletter is about how centrist pundits got the lessons of the 2024 election wrong, and how the politics of 2025 exposed them.
The Pundits Were All Wrong
The Republican collapse has exposed elite pundits as clueless
stringinamaze.net
December 4, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Even her political commentary — the thing she is allegedly good at — is fucking gibberish. We're supposed to overlook her execrable ethics for this?!
www.latimes.com/entertainmen...
Yes, Nuzzi does provide some sharply insightful perspectives on Trump she gained through her “method reporting style” and talent for “talking to people who are abhorrent,” though she largely withholds judgement of the man she likens to a king who has been run out of his castle, after Biden’s election. Trump now “must resurrect himself,” she writes, “project the self that he wishes the world to see, and he must see it so clear that through his insistent clarity he conjures the vision for others until is it not a vision at all but the truth of his existence and the truth of yours.” She’s a witness to his powers of destruction. “His lawlessness inspired lawlessness. His rejection of norms called norms into question,” she notes.
December 4, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Michelle💙🌊🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇵🇸✌🏽
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
Finally updated my phone and I'm sorry but the thing where anyone can change the background of a text conversation is psychotic
December 3, 2025 at 10:03 PM