Mika Cooper
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mikacooper.bsky.social
Mika Cooper
@mikacooper.bsky.social
720 followers 2.4K following 240 posts
Once an English professor, now a layabout, laying stuff about.
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mikacooper.bsky.social
Google image search is your friend:
October 28, 2025 at 12:27 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Epstein b'day book entry that most amazed me? 2 "tit prints" from Annie Sprinkle—"specially commissioned" by … Henry Rosovsky (!), econ prof & longtime Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at—& sometime interim president of—Harvard U (& later a longtime Harvard Corporation member). HR knew AS?!
Amorphous pink & purple blob surrounded by the words "Specially commissioned by Henry Rosovsky in honor of Jeffrey Epstein's 50th Barfday." Amorphous mostly pink & purple blob under which are the words "Tit Print '2002. Annie Sprinkle" An image of a handwritten note: "Dear Jeffrey, For the man who has almost everything—but never enough of these! Sent with best wishes for your 50th birthday. As ever," [blurry signature, but maybe "H"?]
September 9, 2025 at 5:47 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
The prime function of social media: shameless bragging.
A drawing indicating that I got Queen Bee in the New York Times Spelling Bee game.
September 6, 2025 at 8:48 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
"Thank you for your attention to this matter!" is a really weird way to end a tweet threatening murder.
June 17, 2025 at 6:17 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
June 8, 2025 at 2:18 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
This nearly identical trompe-l'oeil is by Filippo Abbiati, ca. 1690. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fi...

How did he come to make such an extremely close copy of Vaillant's painting?
The image shows a still-life painting by Filippo Abbiati that resembles in many details the painting by Vaillant.
May 31, 2025 at 5:15 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
He's naming it after John Belushi's crazy drunk character in Animal House, Bluto Blutarsky.
May 16, 2025 at 12:17 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
LOVE this! But I gotta say that what makes M-D one of my fave novels is precisely its excurses, cetological & otherwise. For me, what's magical isn't the plot (peg-leg pursues white whale) but how Ishmael's mind transfigures whatever it brushes against—whales & whaling, sure, but other stuff too!
May 7, 2025 at 1:31 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
MacKenzie Scott Tuttle really is the kindest person. Weird, though, that she forgot to capitalize the "K" in her first name!
Screenshot of an obviously phony email, purporting to derive from "Mackenzie Scott Tuttle" (with a small "k" in "Mackenzie"), informing me that's she's giving me $1.5 million dollars.
April 29, 2025 at 4:12 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Admittedly, quite a stretch, but . . .
April 24, 2025 at 9:47 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Love that you cite Daisy's "whispered enthusiastically" (odd combo)! Love that she follows it with "It's about the butler's nose." Gatsby contains so many deliciously surreal conversations & descriptions (women balloon, curtains whip, pictures groan, underwear snakes, banners tut-tut). Happy GG day!
Text from The Great Gatsby: "The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor."
April 10, 2025 at 4:17 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Excellent description of the tech fascism now aiming to swallow the US. The GOP is "a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism," for sure, but Dems are infected too. A meaty installment of Edsall's usual roundup of academic/expert commentary.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...
These billionaires, Duran argued, “are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA party,” but their ambitions go beyond that. “The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,” Duran wrote, but “it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.” Duran pointed to the newly elected Democratic senators Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego, who, Duran wrote, were elected with massive help from the Fairshake PAC, which was funded by Big Crypto to the tune of nearly $200 million in 2024. This is the same PAC that took out Sherrod Brown and Katie Porter. The top strategists of Fairshake are Democrats, not Republicans. Now that Big Crypto has helped take control of the Republican Party, it is making a play to co-opt the Democratic Party. It’s crucial to realize that any Democrat who supports crypto has taken the side of the tech billionaires.
March 22, 2025 at 7:00 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
This is extremely upsetting. Despite the fact that the state provided no actual evidence of harm suffered by cis people because of the presence of trans people in bathrooms, the court basically said the harm was just sort of obvious common sense. Awful.
www.erininthemorning.com/p/9th-circui...
To justify this decision, the panel had to address the fact that the state failed to produce any evidence of harm caused by transgender students using bathrooms or changing rooms. Rather than confront this gap, the court sidestepped the issue by creating what effectively amounts to a transgender injury exception. It ruled that “common experience” is enough to assume harm to cisgender students, stating: “SAGA overlooks that this is an unusual situation in which the State’s privacy justification is easily corroborated by common experience… That some students in a state of partial undress may experience ‘embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury’ in the presence of students of a different sex is neither novel nor implausible.” In doing so, the court required no actual evidence of harm to justify the ban under heightened scrutiny.
March 21, 2025 at 12:30 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Just typed the words "Gulf of Mexico" into the Google Maps search bar. It returned this exact page. We live in the stupidest timeline.😡 Thanks, Trump voters!
A page from Google Maps shows search results for "Gulf of America" & shows the name of the Gulf of Mexico to be "Gulf of America."
February 10, 2025 at 11:02 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
A page from Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy":
A photo of two facing pages from a 1928 edition of Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq." showing that Sterne uses multiple em dashes in each paragraph.
February 10, 2025 at 5:19 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
OED has it back to 1596!
February 2, 2025 at 7:17 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Instagram is now hiding the search results for #democrat but not for #republican. That’s totally bonkers.
Search results for #democrat: “We've hidden these results. Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content.” Search for #republican returns a page full of images.
January 21, 2025 at 12:15 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Follow Listifications.app & it alerts you when someone adds your account to a list. I'm on various block lists for being a furry, a porn bot, & a Zionist. If you can find anything in my feed suggesting I'm any of those things, you have better eyes than I. Truth on this site is suffering a bit.
Screencap showing that various people have added me to lists with names like "Block Furry Posts," "Porn Bots," "NSFW/Pro-Ship," & "Zionist Allies."
January 20, 2025 at 10:49 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
I'm certainly no expert, but I wonder if Ribera had seen van Baburen's version from the previous decade. I don't know of other treatments where Marsyas is so upended & foreshortened. Plus Apollo's serene concentration seems similar.
Dirk van Baburen's painting of Apollo flaying Marsyas, who is dangling upside down.
January 12, 2025 at 4:55 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
?
A screenshot of the Merriam-Webster.com entry for "allude," which says: "'allude,' verb. . . . to make indirect reference . . . _broadly_ refer."
January 3, 2025 at 2:48 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Alice Marwick describes the demise of mainstream media & the rise of youth influencer culture. Billionaires certainly won’t fund media that calls for their curtailment www.niemanlab.org/2024/12/the-...
Text: Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, & inflation . . . seize on webinars & YouTube videos by people claiming you can hustle . . . your way to success . . . . Once drawn in . . . They consume a constant drone of conservative content that promotes regressive gender roles, American isolationism, & toxic individualism. Trump’s messaging works perfectly in this space.
December 10, 2024 at 12:00 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Allowing landscape view would also make this silly squishing to the right of deep threaded comments much more palatable. Flip the phone sideways, & suddenly the right hand text would be wider & easier to read. Why is this feature not available here, as it is on X & Threads?
November 23, 2024 at 3:53 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Absolutely. The reflexive reversal of victim & bully is a key move. Reminds me of this lovely joke from the underrated show Peacemaker, spoken by the title character, a jingoistic moronic douchebag.
Image of text: “But, hey, I got bullied too!” “How?” “By kids calling me a bully all the time & telling me I was abusive. Hey, that hurt my feelings!” . . . .  “What happened to the good old days when you could just nonstop fuck with somebody without them claiming to be a victim?” Peacemaker S1E5,11:02
November 18, 2024 at 2:33 PM
mikacooper.bsky.social
November 14, 2024 at 2:36 AM
mikacooper.bsky.social
Can't stop laughing at cabinet picks, each less qualified than the last. Rubio at least is an actual senator with experience on the foreign relations com, so SecState isn't completely nuts. But Hegseth for Defense! Thuggish Gaetz for AG! Too many words for a skeet, so here's a screen shot instead:
November 13, 2024 at 10:10 PM