Soraya Nadia McDonald
LightNews LightNews
banner
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Soraya Nadia McDonald
@sorayanadiamcdonald.com
94K followers 8.1K following 7.3K posts
criticism senior editor for @therumpus.net

submit work/pitches: therumpus.submittable.com/submit

she/her | sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
A still of No Face, from the animated film "Spirited Away," arms outstretched before an enormous banquet spread. No Face is a black mass with a white mask for a face.
November 13, 2025 at 1:48 AM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
"Sources said that the year-old admonishment of Dokoupil, who admitted to violating CBS standards and practices but defended his aggressive questioning of Coates, is behind much of Weiss’ desire to defang or even eliminate the S&P team altogether."
meme. image of Ta-Nahesi Coates, eyes wide with second-hand embarrassment for some dummy as he says, “Wow. That was really racist."
November 11, 2025 at 6:55 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
me watching the ongoing shitshow at CBS News:
a scene from “The Color Purple” (1985) in which Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) watches with exasperation as a hapless Mister, who has never cooked a meal in his life, nearly burns down the house trying to scare up some breakfast for his side woman Shug Avery. Celie is a dark-skinned Black woman. Her hair is in twists, and she’s wearing a gingham pinaforeover a chambray shirt. Her hands are holding her face, and her elbows are resting on her knees.
November 11, 2025 at 6:48 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Good morning from New York City, where hope is ascendant because we know we don't have to let our traumas curdle into fear, irrationalism, and bigotry. 💗

I LOVE Y'ALL! VOTE!
Soraya (a New York Jew) in a red collared top, Ray-Ban aviators, khaki riding breeches, and a hat in Zabar's orange that says "ZOHRAN."
November 4, 2025 at 1:37 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
if not Ponzi, why Ponzi-shaped?

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Screenshot text from The Atlantic: For now, money is still pouring into the AI industry. But there’s also something circular about these investments. To wit: OpenAI has agreed to pay $300 billion to Oracle for new computing capacity, Oracle is paying Nvidia tens of billions of dollars for chips to install in one of OpenAI’s data centers, and Nvidia has agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as it deploys Nvidia chips. Attempts to illustrate these circular investments have produced a series of byzantine charts that one software engineer referred to on X as “the technocapital hyperobject at the end of time.” The consensus seems to be that although this is legal, it likely cannot go on forever.
November 3, 2025 at 8:14 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
seems bad!

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Screenshot text from the Atlantic Here is where the bubble dynamics get complicated. Tech firms don’t want to formally take on debt—that is, directly ask investors for loans—because debt looks bad on their balance sheets and could reduce shareholder returns. To get around this, some are partnering with private-equity titans to do some sophisticated financial engineering, Paul Kedrosky, an investor and a financial consultant, told us. These private-equity firms put up or raise the money to build a data center, which a tech company will repay through rent. Data-center leases from, say, Meta can then be repackaged into a financial instrument that people can buy and sell—a bond, in essence. Meta recently did just this: Blue Owl Capital raised money for a massive Meta data center in Louisiana by, in essence, issuing bonds backed by Meta’s rent. And multiple data-center leases can be combined into a security and sorted into what are called “tranches” based on their risk of default. Data centers represent an $800 billion market for private-equity firms through 2028 alone. (Meta has said of its arrangement with Blue Owl that the “innovative partnership was designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.”) In this way, the data-center financing ends up being a real-estate deal as much as an AI deal. If this sounds complicated, it’s supposed to: The complexity, investment structure, and repackaging make exactly what is going on hard to parse. And if the dynamics also sound familiar, it’s because not two decades ago, the Great Recession was precipitated by banks packaging risky mortgages into tranches of securities that were falsely marketed as high-quality. By 2008, the house of cards had collapsed. Data-center build-outs aren’t the same as subprime mortgages. Still, there is plenty of precarity baked into these investments. Data centers deteriorate rapidly, unlike the more durable infrastructure of canals, railroads, or even fiber-…
November 3, 2025 at 8:03 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Here is the former Duke of York and his pedo pal Jeffrey in Central Park in 2011, strolling about the city that bears the name of Andy's dukedom.

They thought they owned this shit.

Nah. No kings, bitch.
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, in grey trainers, stonewashed jeans, and a black parka, strolling with Jeffrey Epstein (black parka, Black jeans and brown boots) in 2011 in Central Park.
November 3, 2025 at 5:09 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
"History will tell you that negotiating with racism or fascism or authoritarianism never ends well."

Exactly.

Also, it's good to have principles!
Screenshot text: I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns. These senators are demonstrating a willful blindness that has become endemic in the Democratic Party. Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class.
October 29, 2025 at 2:45 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Pssst.

Hey.

Hey, New York.

We have the opportunity to do something very punk rock and elect a mayor who doesn't suck shit!

GO VOTE!
A selfie of a smiling Black woman in a blue turtleneck, a black leather jacket and a big red BROOKLYN VOTES EARLY sticker
October 28, 2025 at 4:09 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Regina King as Sister Night in HBO's "Watchmen" saying, "I've got a nose for white supremacy, and he smells like bleach."
October 24, 2025 at 6:18 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
ANYWAY
October 24, 2025 at 2:50 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Everyone deserves to feel as deliciously unbothered as Radamès
A black cat on a black-and-white blanket, asleep on his human's lap with his legs splayed
October 24, 2025 at 3:48 AM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
tfw you make it through your mammo without your cancer ptsd fucking up the whole day!
A selfie of a smiling Black woman in sunglasses and a brown plaid blazer. She's wearing a black sweater with a white collar. It has a yellow Basquiat crown in its center. She's on a street in NYC.
October 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
this shit is blatantly unconstitutional and really, really, REALLY bad

www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Screenshot from Washington Post: ICE also reported a $2 million contract for Penlink’s Tangles and Weblocs data systems on Sept. 25, which combine social media and dark web data to build detailed portraits of individuals. Weblocs allows clients to track the mobile phone location data of targeted individuals, information that government officials would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Penlink did not respond to a request for comment. In another project, ICE has disclosed in recent days its potential plans to set up a social media monitoring team of 16 analysts who would sift through information from social media platforms and other databases to generate leads to locate targeted individuals. An Oct. 2 “request for information,” which comes before soliciting bids for a project that could change, listed Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Myspace and Google+ as some of the platforms that the team would scour to find clues about the possible location of the target individual. The target’s family, friends and co-workers could also be probed.
October 20, 2025 at 8:25 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
I'm pretty sure Chuck finds that notorious climate change denier revolting lmao
Britain's King Charles gives a speech at a dinner for President Trump Sept. 17, 2025. He's standing and literally looking down at the president, who is seated between Chuck and Kate, at a long fancy ass table.
October 19, 2025 at 1:45 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
We have unicorns and I passed a toddler with a sign that says "DONALD TRUMP SMELLS LIKE FARTS."

Terrifying!
A Black woman in black leggings and a leather jacket standing between two unicorns as children dance with bubbles
October 18, 2025 at 5:15 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
with that much internal putrefaction, giving corpse bride does seem appropriate
A still from "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," featuring the extremely skinny yet incongruously buxom titular bride in her wedding dress and veil. She too, has cartoonishly hollowed-out eye sockets. But that is not because of terrible makeup choices. It is because she is a cartoon character. Who is dead.
October 18, 2025 at 12:53 AM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
tonight is the night I became Dale Gribble and blocked the feds
Dale Gribble in a courtroom holding a cigarette. To judge: I'm not questioning your authority. I'm completely denying its existence.
October 17, 2025 at 11:46 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
People paid $200 a ticket to listen to Peter Thiel do bog issue antisemitism for four lectures about his belief in the antichrist.

Lots of fools wishing to be relieved of their money, I guess.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Screenshot text from The Guardian: He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.” It’s because the antichrist talks about Armageddon nonstop. We’re all scared to death that we’re sleepwalking into Armageddon. And then because we know world war three will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We’re going hard towards peace at any price. What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don’t think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It’s peace and safety, sort of the unjust peace. Let me conclude on this choice of antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it. How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen? Thiel rarely gives a definitive answer about who exactly the antichrist might be or how Armageddon might come about – a central point across his lectures is that nothing is written in stone or inevitable – but he does give the contours of what a global conflict that could lead to Armageddon might look like.
October 11, 2025 at 1:49 AM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
serving looks like they're posing for Feline Vogue
My gray tabby baby, Cio Cio San, lounging on a white plush cushion of the cat tree My spooky black son Radamès peeks from his plush white cave.
October 10, 2025 at 6:20 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
he a handsome lil moocher, I'll give him that
A silky black cat, curled up against a warm fold on a multicolored duvet. It's got a blue bird on a green background, and lots of flowers. Radamès appears to be pointing his front feet like he's doing Pilates in his sleep, and you can see his beans
October 9, 2025 at 3:41 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
look what I got! currently stanning
A copy of the 2024 winter edition of The Schooner of
October 9, 2025 at 3:01 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
still cute tho lol
A Black woman in a white oxford shirt and a denim vest smirking in front of the subway station
October 8, 2025 at 6:58 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
From THE BODY NEVER LIES by Alice Miller
Highlighted text from THE BODY NEVER LIES by Alice Miller: The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so. Their loyalty to these fathers is unswerving, despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure whom abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent by remaining blind.
October 4, 2025 at 6:54 PM
sorayanadiamcdonald.com
Cio Cio: don't try me bitch

(Radamès now sitting outside the bedroom meowing pitifully at this grave injustice)
Cio Cio San, a gray tabby with a light orange belly, having reclaimed her nap spot on the multicolor bed
October 4, 2025 at 4:22 PM