Sam Anderson
LightNews LightNews
banner
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Sam Anderson
@shamblanderson.bsky.social
670 followers 320 following 42 posts
Staff Writer, NY Times Magazine

writing: www.shamblanderson.com
drawing: www.instagram.com/shamblanderson
podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/animal/id1749201553
Posts Replies Media Videos
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Enjoying the notebooks of Sonny Rollins
Excerpt from the notebooks of Sonny Rollins: It is crucial to resist resignation, indifference, the hardening of the heart, and the laziness of the spirit; otherwise one turns into a parasite who is entirely absorbed in the problem of his own metabolism and essentially nothing beyond that interests him. This government doesn't give a damn about freedom for the people. It has nothing to do with freedom. It's about power, it's about money, it's about racism and elitism and greed. It's about pride and stupidity and ugly insidious forms of paranoia, projection, and delusion but it had nothing to do with a commitment to freedom for the people and even less to do with their well-being. To make matters worse it appears the majority of the citizens that make up this nation buy into this nationalistic bubble like so many freshly caught carp. Which all serves to remind me of the words of Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
March 21, 2025 at 4:40 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Yellow handwritten thank you note with brown old leatherman stamp: “THANK YOU LONGREADS YOU ARE THE BEST (smiley face) SAM” with a note “I AM NOW POSTING HANDWRITTEN THANK YOU NOTES ON SOCIAL MEDIA BECAUSE I HAVE MANNERS”
March 19, 2025 at 5:49 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Handwritten thank you card on yellow paper with 3 stamps of the Old Leatherman fading left to right: “AAAHHH TOMMY THANK YOU SO MUCH! I’m so glad you think that. I love the Old Leatherman so much it actually kind of hurts. Sam”
March 19, 2025 at 5:39 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Handwritten thank you note on a bright yellow card (with a brown stamp of the Old Leatherman): “OMG thank you so much for this very kind social media post @drmilks I actually think grocery lists are a very interesting genre maybe I will try… Thank You! Sam”
March 19, 2025 at 5:21 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
😙🤌
A kickass transition: “… where he eventually would teach at Yale until his death in 1957. 1957 was the only good year of Jerry Lee Lewis’s life.”
March 1, 2025 at 5:05 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
I like Orwell’s description of racism as a “vast system of mental cheating.”

Lotta mental cheating going on out there these days.

(Quoted in Anna Funder’s great book WIFEDOM: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life)
A passage from Anna Funder’s book WIFEDOM quoting Orwell calling racism a “vast system of mental cheating”
February 27, 2025 at 5:35 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
new life motto
Scoot Henderson quote: "The thing I'm most proud about is me not thinking. I feel like I was thinking I wasn't thinking, but I was thinking so much to where I was thinking. You can't hide the fact that you were thinking."
February 19, 2025 at 4:19 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
“Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat”

— Andrew Solomon, THE NOONDAY DEMON: An Atlas of Depression
December 13, 2024 at 5:25 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
And her interviews / speeches — she was just relentlessly a living spiky THINKING honest brilliant feeling human being. Perfect antidote / supplement to American public discourse these days.

Highly recommend this great book BLACK WOMEN WRITERS AT WORK
December 10, 2024 at 4:10 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
I fell in love with Nikki Giovanni as a teenager when this poem "Balances" made me cry in a creative writing class (I'd never heard of her & imagined her at first as an Italian man)
"Balances" by Nikki Giovanni in life one is always balancing like we juggle our mothers against our fathers or one teacher against another (only to balance our grade average) 3 grains of salt to one ounce truth our sweet black essence or the funky honkies down the street and lately i've begun wondering if you're trying to tell me something we used to talk all night and do things alone together and i've begun (as a reaction to a feeling) to balance the pleasure of loneliness against the pain of loving you
December 10, 2024 at 4:10 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Pick up any of her books — they're so alive & engaging, full of laughs / rage / weirdness and tiny beauties like this
December 10, 2024 at 4:10 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024) appreciation thread

"When I die"
when I die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out and a million maggots that had made up their brains crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person that I probably tried to love
December 10, 2024 at 4:10 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Not to brag but I had a dream where i made up this joke — i actually woke up in the middle of the night & wrote it down on my phone
Screenshot of my immortal dream joke: Q: Why was the cannon sad when it looked in the mirror? A: Because it saw it had MOOBs
December 8, 2024 at 8:08 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
December 6, 2024 at 2:49 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
Eka Kurniawan, BEAUTY IS A WOUND
December 6, 2024 at 2:49 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
A.J. Liebling's book about Chicago (CHICAGO: The Second City, 1952) is VERY MEAN and entertaining.
A.J. Liebling on Chicago: "Chicago is neither dead nor dying; it is, as the sideshow men say, 'Alive, Alive — did you ever see a two-headed baby?'"
December 5, 2024 at 5:19 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
In the caveman days of eons past (2010) I started a Twitter account where I posted the best sentence I read every day. (I was book critic for @nymag.com so was reading constantly.) Reading is still my favorite thing, so now I'm gonna try some version of that here.

www.vulture.com/2010/02/ande...
Screenshot from 2010 NY Mag article about joining Twitter. Text: "I'm late to the Twitter party, but a few weeks ago I decided to start an experiment: tweet the best sentence I read every day. (NB: Someone else had already claimed my actual name, so I had to go with my alter ego: ShamBlanderson.) "Best," in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, stylistically amazing. My first tweet was a factoid from a New Yorker story about Whole Foods: "The key variable in deciding where to put the new stores is the number of college graduates within a 16-minute drive." (I love the specificity of sixteen minutes.) A couple of times, I've had to resist the urge to just comb through my favorite punchy books (Emerson, Amis, William James) and compile a twenty-first century micro-Bartlett's. The object is to use Twitter as a daily note-taking system: to document, organically, the various text-streams I actually pay attention to - novels, magazines, blogs, whatever. When Salinger died I went back to read Nine Stories and tweeted this sentence from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish": "She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty." One day, doing some background reading for a review, I discovered a sentence from Adorno that seemed like a direct comment on Twitter itself (or the Kindle, or blogs, or Sarah Palin's memoir): "In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one."
December 5, 2024 at 5:11 PM
shamblanderson.bsky.social
This sign has an actual photo of the terrible thing it warns against happening
Icelandic deadly wave sign
November 28, 2024 at 6:30 PM