Yvonne Lam
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yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Yvonne Lam
@yvonnezlam.bsky.social
6.5K followers 650 following 20K posts
I play with books, cats, food, yarn, and dirt, not all at the same time. Software engineer. Society of People Interested in Boring Things. She/her, cis.
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yvonnezlam.bsky.social
panel 1: a cartoon goose asks, "Who is given the assumption of rigor?" panel 2: a cartoon goose chases a person wearing a puffy jacket. The goose is yelling, "Who is given the assumption of rigor, motherfucker?"
November 22, 2025 at 6:04 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I hope I get a chance to read Harmony Holiday on Joni Mitchell and blackface.

thecreativeindependent.com/people/write...
When I talk about the language being traded on the internet and trafficked through memes and stuff, it’s pretty much all a function of black beauty or black aesthetics being universalized and codified into something that everyone can access and use as a life force. It’s a thing that the American personality runs on without really acknowledging it. I firmly believe that is the case, from the music to the dominant social and spiritual attitudes, to the way people stand, everything that people aspire to look and act like has some root in black aesthetics. I want to write about Joni Mitchell, in part because of her comments where she says, “I’m the only black Man in the room.” This is Joni Mitchell, white from Canada. She starts her autobiography saying that. So there’s a black muse, whether it’s for white folk music or weird pockets of the internet where people are talking about dating, using black slang. It’s the last bastion of Americanism before we run out of all native capital, and it’s not even native to here, but that’s another story.
November 21, 2025 at 8:50 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Elinor wanted to help.
Elinor, a black and brown bullseye tabby with white socks and bib, stands on her hind legs to peer into a very full spice drawer labeled "Coffee".
November 19, 2025 at 10:05 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
A very good piece on how we all act like pundits now, but we don't have to! (h/t @ninametz.bsky.social )
But there’s a trap. And it’s tautological. The problem with thinking like a pundit is that you end up thinking like a pundit. You end up caring more about having opinions about politics rather than actively engaging in politics, which is to say, actively engaging with other people, trying to build the world that you think we deserve. Or put differently, if you consider yourself a Democrat, why are you spending your wild and precious political life shouting and gesticulating about what “Democrats” should do? Just do that thing! And invite others to do it with you!
November 18, 2025 at 11:35 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
An excellent piece by @marisakabas.bsky.social (h/t @karenho.bsky.social)
“It suggests that there’s an obvious shortcut through the hard work that goes into reporting fairly and accurately, which is to just create a spectacle,” Miles Klee, culture writer at Rolling Stone, said of the ethically-dubious work that’s been presented as journalism. “It’s not a coincidence that Wolff and Nuzzi both made their names by printing what is essentially gossip. Sure, a lot of it may be true, but what you’re really selling there is the concept of yourself with total and intimate access to everyone who matters, which makes you just as important, a byline that magazines can always bank on.”
November 18, 2025 at 11:08 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Photograph of my kitchen after I put the keema cottage pie in the oven. You can see why this is a recipe started with an empty dishwasher. Not shown: the giant frying pan I used to cook the keema and the pan for boiling potatoes.
A messy kitchen counter with a white plastic cutting board with cilantro choppings, a used tasting spoon, and a dirty measuring spoon on it. there is a metal bowl that used to contain turmeric mashed potatoes by the sink. the sink contains a colander filled with dirty utensils including a potato ricer and a dry measuring cup. A glass measuring cup that used to contain cream is on the counter too.
November 15, 2025 at 2:05 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Given the scene in my living room just now, I might be willing to lend you at least one:
Oscar, an orange tabby cat, swats at Marianne, a small black and brown bullseye tabby, who becomes a whirlwind of stripes and paws in response. Felix, a gray and white piebald tabby, looks on.
November 10, 2025 at 1:44 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Preventing my large orange son from eating the kittens' food.
A large orange cat gazing balefully at an unseen light-skinned person whose hand is skritching him under the chin.
November 7, 2025 at 10:15 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
A rare photo of Marianne not looking coy.
A brown and black bullseye tabby cat lying on her side in a cat bed in front of a window.
November 7, 2025 at 2:12 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
bsky serendipity @annakornbluh.bsky.social @johnrogers.bsky.social
1. johnrogers.bsky.social: *pinching the bridge of my nose, eyes closed* And before the current hyper concentration of wealth, Mark, was there a stock market before then? reposting a Morning Brew article whose headline is "If you eliminate billionaires, the stock market will go, too, according to Mark Cuban" 2. johnrogers.bsky.social There has never been a more urgent need to have a society internalize the sentiment “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.” 3. annakornbluh.bsky.social speaking of heists! everything you ever wanted to know about the heyday of the cinematic genre and what that has to do with Hollywood finance reposting a link to the South Atlantic Quarterly issue on filming capital https://www.dukeupress.edu/filming-capital
November 1, 2025 at 6:33 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I don't know why the photo of a recent widow in the weirdly close embrace of another man onstage at her late husband's memorial is making the rounds, but this is what it makes me think of:
a gray tabby cat in a translucent pink peignoir set with floofy trim saying "No, I thought he was away on business. I'm terribly worried, detectives," like a film noir femme fatale.
October 31, 2025 at 5:35 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Rude. Accurate, but rude. (cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson)
A cartoon of a Siamese cat with two feet in tea cups, one in a glass, and one on a plate. The caption is, "Hi! Your to-do list is unrealistic. Someone had to tell you."
October 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
With this pro-cancer administration?

unbreaking.org/issues/medic...
What is happening? Link to this section The Trump administration and Congress are eliminating billions of dollars of funding for medical research while also gutting the scientific workforce. Specifically, they are: terminating or delaying more than $2.3 billion in research grants; More on this radically altering budget structures and reducing future funding; More on this eroding expertise and ending training programs. More on this
October 26, 2025 at 1:01 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
This piece of the interview reminds me of things that people like @blackamazon.bsky.social and @rustbeltrebel.bsky.social have said.

(TFEs: Transnational, Finance-oriented Economists)
Chase Burghgrave What have been the electoral consequences of TFEs and strategists, of this new generation of party experts in left parties? Stephanie L. Mudge In short: disastrous. Left politics has to speak for actual people, not a fictional ideal-type “mainstream” or “median” voter. Left parties’ turn to markets, spin, and strategy is a symptom of a failure of meaningful representation. Voters know the difference between marketing and substance: sooner or later people see the game for what it is, and they lose faith. I think recent history is proof enough on this, too.
October 14, 2025 at 8:39 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Reminder that "crime" in this context means "whatever thing the administration is mad about now, whether it is a crime or not, whether it it happened or not".
panel 1: a goose asks "What crime?" panel 2: a goose yelling "What crime, motherfucker?" chases a person
October 6, 2025 at 1:08 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Stefanie Povasec's Data Murmurations project looks amazing.

www.stefanieposavec.com/projects/peo...
But how do you visualise something that doesn’t have a neat dataset? Some information was inaccessible; the study’s data was messy, fragmented, and inconsistently collected over time. I set aside conventional data visualisation processes and started drawing, which became my way of making sense of the unknown system. I sketched biobank processes to map connections, then built a universal visual language with consistent graphic elements. This led me to Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass – not just an artwork, it's also an ‘artistic diagram’ of a process he wanted to visualise. Every visual element serves a purpose, and the piece can be fully annotated. Inspired, I created my own ‘artistic diagrams’ to explain the biobank, representing complex research processes while embracing necessary imprecision.
October 5, 2025 at 11:28 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Elinor has found a new crime to commit.
A screendoor with a brown bullseye tabby kitten clinging to the screen near the top, like Spiderman.
September 23, 2025 at 6:56 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I'm going to pretend this whole thing is a film noir.
Dr. Eva Burke on twitter captioning a photo of a cat wearing a pink marabou trimmed robe, cat eye glasses, and fake pink curlers with "No, I thought he was away on business. I'm terribly worried, detectives."
September 22, 2025 at 3:48 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Today's issues of @leahreich.com's newsletter reminded me, in a good way, of @debcha.bsky.social's 2015 essay "Why I Am Not A Maker"

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
What if we remembered that building isn't just about making an app? It's about design, verbal communication, being willing to exist in spaces that aren't as immediately or constantly (artificially) vibrant. It's about doing the actual work of building and maintaining community, navigating conflict, dealing with difference, communicating and finding compromise.
September 18, 2025 at 7:38 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I'm going to keep sharing an interview with Charles Taylor, who one of my favorite film critics:

www.slantmagazine.com/film/against...
I’ve heard people say that if a critic has a professed dislike for someone’s work, someone else should review it so the artist gets a fair hearing. Well, we already have that. It’s called publicity.
September 16, 2025 at 9:59 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Robert D. Richardson is not convincing me that it was TOTALLY NORMAL for Emerson to dig up his (Emerson's) late wife and open her coffin.
ON MARCH 29, 1832, THE TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD EMERSON visited the tomb of his young wite, Ellen, who had been buried a year and two months earlier. He was in the habit of walking from Boston out to her grave in Roxbury every day, but on this particular day he did more than commune with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he opened the coffin. Ellen had been young and pretty. She was seventeen when they were engaged, eighteen when married, and barely twenty when she died of advanced tuberculosis. They had made frantic efforts at a cure, including long open-air carriage rides and massive doses of country air. Their life together had been stained almost from the start by the bright blood of Ellen's coughing. Opening the coffin was not a grisly gothic gesture, not just the wild aberration of an unhinged lover. What Emerson was doing was not unheard of. At least two of Emerson's contemporaries did the same thing. A Unitarian minister and good friend of Margaret Fuller's, James Freeman Clarke, once opened the coffin of the woman he had been in love with when he was an undergraduate. Edgar Allan Poe's literary executor, the anthologist Rufus Griswold, opened the coffin of his dead wife forty days after the
September 10, 2025 at 7:10 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
"Moi?"
Elinor, a black and brown bullseye tabby with white feet, throat, and belly, sprawls on her left side. She gazes at the viewer with an expression of surprise.
September 10, 2025 at 6:38 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
@annehelen.bsky.social on bullshit jobs.
But also? I believe parts of jobs feel like bullshit. But I think the actual “bullshit jobs” — the ones where you truly do nothing — are vanishingly rare. Most people do work that needs to be done. It’s just that the work itself is structural, invisible, painstaking, or just…collaborative.
September 7, 2025 at 4:41 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
bluesky serendipity @cydharrell.bsky.social @erinbartram.bsky.social @dansinker.com
@erinbartram: It was other things too, but fundamentally, it was people facilitating a flawed but somewhat functional system of knowledge exchange through their own labor. You can't sustain that as the labor conditions erode over decades, and the challenge of AI isn't in addition to that--it's part and parcel. @cydharrell.bsky.social I think about this so much (reposting @dansinker.com: We couldn't possibly be in a worse information environment for what's happening. Which probably, in part, why it's happening)
September 7, 2025 at 3:32 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I don't even need to know when his obituary is published.
The bluesky moderating dialog showing the name "Malcolm Gladwell" being muted forever.
September 3, 2025 at 9:22 PM