Jessica Winter
LightNews LightNews
banner
winterjessica.bsky.social
Jessica Winter
@winterjessica.bsky.social
4.6K followers 510 following 160 posts
sheryl lee's wig in fire walk with me
Posts Replies Media Videos
winterjessica.bsky.social
Letterboxd reviews of The Elephant Man (d. Lynch, 1980) are a festival of ecstatic devastation
Letterboxd review of The Elephant Man by Jonny that reads, "David Lynch didn't fuck with my mind this time... he fucked with my heart"
November 19, 2025 at 4:37 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Interesting
Headline asserting "abortion has remained mostly accessible," but "that may soon change"
November 12, 2025 at 2:56 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Always there when you call, always on time
Headline from a Ross Douthat piece: "Mamdani's Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think: New York's next mayor won't save the Democrats."
November 5, 2025 at 1:38 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Six U.S. states have fewer than a million people total
NYT tracker showing Zohran Mamdani with more than a million votes with 88% counted
November 5, 2025 at 3:09 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Just spectacular
Table showing Park Slope and Bushwick voters going 78% and 87%, respectively, for Zohran Mamdani
November 5, 2025 at 2:45 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
I went to a No Kings in a town with a population of 30,000 and there were "thousands" there alone
NYT headline reads "Vance Flexes the Marines' Might as Thousands Protest Trump's Agenda"
October 19, 2025 at 12:12 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Incredible
www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...
September 23, 2025 at 6:35 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
The only explanation Dr. Dunkel has seen, he said, is a paragraph on the institute’s website, which was updated Aug. 21 and states a rationale of optimizing resources for “maximum impact.” The Trump administration has slashed funding for the National Institutes of Health, of which the National Cancer Institute is a part, though it’s not clear whether this decision was connected to those cuts. The Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, which has conducted dozens of trials since it was established in 1999 by the National Cancer Institute, has six active trials; five are related to treatment. These are early phase trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of novel therapies for pediatric brain cancers — mostly “the very highest-risk types” of these cancers, said Dr. John Prensner, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at the University of Michigan, which is not a member of the consortium. “These are the ones that have very poor outcomes, often in relapsed patients who haven’t responded to prior therapy, and patients for whom the chance of survival is very low,” he said.
August 29, 2025 at 6:14 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Can someone explain to me how admitting girls into Scouting America is symptomatic of the "boy crisis of 2025"
"In other cases, previously male-serving institutions have gone coed while their sister organizations have remained single-sex. Boy Scouts no longer exists, having rebranded as Scouting America after the controversial decision to admit girls. Of the roughly one million scouts in the movement today, around 20 percent are girls. But there are also more than a million girls in Girl Scouts, which remains a single-sex organization. All told, there are now 50 percent more girls than boys in scouting."
August 16, 2025 at 2:29 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
People plugging their entire skulls into A.I. makes me think of this old Believer interview with Harold Ramis
Ramis: I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.” Believer interviewer: Does that offend you as a filmmaker? Ramis: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?
August 5, 2025 at 1:40 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!
"While the most narrow definition of alliteration is that it refers to the repeating initial letters, here, at Stone Soup, I want you to always be thinking bigger. Or, we can say, at Stone Soup, think bigger, bolder, broader. Think pattern. What does alliteration do for you writing? What use it? I want you to think about noise. I want you to go outside and listen to traffic, to sound of wind the trees, to anything that is repetitive. Busy restaurants with their chatter. Noise. Nothing to make one minute different from another minutes."
August 3, 2025 at 2:40 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
This week's A.I.-generated writing prompt is very Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
"This Weeks project. Every language has a quality that is played up in poetry that plays to each language’s strength. In English, one of the qualities of our language that has been used in poetry and in literary prose for over five-hundred years is a literary technique called “alliteration.” We are all aware of alliteration. It is a common technique used by corporation when they name products, or their companies. Stone Soup, Coco-cola. Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Costco. What you see here is the repetition in close proximity of a strong sounding consonant, usually at the start of each word. As “Costco” shows, repeating sounds can also be inside of words. You see that also in the name of the largest river in North America, the Mississippi."
August 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Just got the latest newsletter from Stone Soup, the journal of creative writing and art by kids ages 6-13, and I didn't even have to "click my heals"
"Friends — Well, ironically, it turns out that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I had the power within me all along to modernize the Stone Soup website. In this instance, I didn’t have to click my heals, what I needed to do was ask Anthropic’s Claude, the AI model I use everyday in my own research to come to my aid. As it turns out, just as we read that AI is replacing programmers, so, indeed Claude can design websites. As some of you will recall from earlier in the year, my goal was to create a home page that had static navigation — you could see what was in the website just by reading the home page. I also wanted a home page that was different — and graphically striki Finally, in the end, I am making the Stone Soup website myself, with technical assistance provided by a website developer. I am designing using Anthropic Claude’s Opus 4 Large Language AI model. This model is able to both design web pages and"
August 3, 2025 at 2:26 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
FOUND THEM
July 13, 2025 at 1:44 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
What's going on with my "boys" and, in some cases, "gals?"
The cast of David Cronenberg's Crash, photographed at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, from left: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Elias Koteas
July 13, 2025 at 1:24 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Regretted "poorly written...writing samples" as soon as I hit Send, I guess an A.I. would have caught that
Email that reads: "After reading this newsletter, I canceled my daughter's subscription. A children's literary magazine should not be endorsing A.I. publishing tools, full stop. It should not be auto-generating poorly written, at times semi-coherent writing samples of the sort that my ten-year-old would be ashamed to hand in at school. It is an insult to your readers and completely, diabolically antithetical to your mission and to the spirit of literature and humanity itself."
July 13, 2025 at 1:21 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
The newsletter also includes some writing advice.
Screenshot that reads: "So, who do you want to tell a story to? Who do you want to describe what you are seeing to? An email, you know, can be a real letter. It can be heartfelt. And beautiful. What a gift to you grandmother."
July 13, 2025 at 1:04 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
The founder of Stone Soup, a literary magazine written and illustrated by children, is a big fan of A.I. publishing tools, as evident in his newsletter today.
A screenshot that reads: "I just worked out that the AI model that I use for my writing — Anthropic’s highest end model - Opus 4 - is brilliant at creating the web pages that I design. I have a home page that seems to solve all of our navigation problems — I say “seem” because I do need to look more carefully — and that was only twenty minutes of work. I have a beautiful style for the site based on the American magazine, The New Yorker’s web design ideas. And much much more." Screenshot that reads: "I am also developing content to support you writers — and you writing teachers — that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the Internet. This is my first draft of a page design for stories as they will appear in our new website. This took me five minutes to make using the Anthropic Claude Sonnet model LLM (Large Language Model). This is my FIRST DRAFT! Five minutes!"
July 13, 2025 at 12:54 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
My Two Dads (1987-90)
David Cronenberg is in the Criterion closet holding up a copy of Eraserhead and talking about going to Bob's Big Boy with David Lynch
July 11, 2025 at 3:06 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
Today I’m driving my firstborn to the abandoned mule tannery for a month of summer fun
Lisa Simpson enjoys boating at Kamp Krusty
June 29, 2025 at 12:54 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
All of Bluesky right now
June 25, 2025 at 2:30 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
The Nihilists tell Jeff Lebowski "We believe in nothing"
June 5, 2025 at 2:23 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
I have just learned that Abel Ferrara has a memoir coming out in October, so at least one good thing will happen in 2025
May 29, 2025 at 1:34 PM
winterjessica.bsky.social
me when all my friends are no longer just out of frame
May 13, 2025 at 1:26 AM
winterjessica.bsky.social
It seems that many lawmakers' prescription for safe & affordable child care is <snaps fingers> "Magic!"
Existing day cares will adjust to looser rules, insists Rep. Rod Furniss, the other co-sponsor of H243. He believes the entire industry would benefit from more competition. “I’m a businessman. My degree is in finance,” he said. “I understand revenue, I understand expenses, I understand fixed costs. I also understand markets, and I think those people are really smart that run those day care centers, and I think they’ll get creative. They’ll sharpen their pencil.”
April 17, 2025 at 1:10 PM