Rebecca Seger

VP of Institutional Participation & Strategic Partnerships for @JSTOR and @ITHAKA_org. Non-profit publishing, libraries, family, friends, sports. Views my own.

[NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks]

'scuse me, coming through 🙂‍↕️

[Rebecca Seger @rebseger]

LGK 💙🧡

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Isaiah Martin @isaiahrmartin]

Reminder that Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to a protest like this and Republicans called him a hero

[kasey @kaseyklimes]

I just got off a call with a friend in minneapolis

I didn’t understand how bad the situation is right now, I don’t think any of us outside MSP do

they were patrolling outside her window as I was talking to her

there are thousands of them

she (a white woman) now carries her passport with her when she leaves the house

our call was interrupted by helicopters

last year the ICE budget was $10B

it’s now $85B

this is coming to your doorstep soon

the silence of CEOs and even Democratic leaders right now is shameful. if you don’t understand how 1930s Germany happened, this is how it happened.

there’s nothing more unamerican. my grandpa manned a machine gun in the south pacific to fight this ideology. our constitutional rights are being shredded to pieces, and the powerful are bending their knee to it.

i don’t care about your stance on immigration, if you support masked thugs terrorizing american communities, pointing guns at citizens and demanding papers, entering homes without warrants— please, take a hard look in the mirror and reevaluate the dissonance with your american values and the freedom your ancestors fought to give you.

[LJ's infoDOCKET (@infoDOCKET on Bluesky) @infodocket]

JSTOR's Path to Open Initiative Reaches 100 Open Access Monographs Milestone
(via @JSTOR) https://t.co/oVvkoYDYo0 #OA #scholcomm #publishing #monographs

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

In the early afternoon, ET, the Kennedy family announced that JFK’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg had died from cancer.

A few hours later, President Trump re-posted some social media garbage attacking the Kennedy family.

[Empire State Building Observation Deck @EmpireStateBldg]

GO NEW YORK. @nyknicks

[Tammy Duckworth @SenDuckworth]

Shameful.

From helping Chicago kids with autism to becoming the first African American and woman named our nation's top librarian, Dr. Hayden has dedicated her life to expanding access to knowledge.

She earned this role and has done an incredible job.
https://t.co/e6F3ZtRUFi

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

"One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day.

Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries.

The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence."
https://t.co/LneucerCp8

[Prof. Katarzyna PISARSKA @KPisarska]

A friendly Sunday reminder from the proud Polish nation to our American allies:
- Poland is the largest per capita NATO defense spender (4.7% 2025, 5.0% 2026) and has consistently met the 2% NATO spending requirement since it was introduced in 2014.
- 80% of all our military purchases are from US defense contractors, supporting the US economy and the American taxpayers.
- At your request, we have sent troops to support you BOTH in Afganistan and Iraq, sacrificing the lives of over 60 Polish soldiers. Poland deployed 2,500 troops only to Iraq and commanded one of four multinational divisions - Central-South.
- We continue to heavily invest in infrastructure and logistics of the stationing of 10,000 US soldiers on Polish soil.
- We are the country where over 10 million Americans find their roots.
- We have been with you from DAY 1 - sending you our best soldiers- such as Tadeusz Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski - the latter died in the American Revolution while saving the life of George Washington in the Battle of Savannah.
-We even forgave you when you ditched us in Yalta in 1945, after which we had to endure 40 years of Russian occupation.

You're welcome.

[Syracuse U Press @SUPress]

"Path to Open keeps resources circulating within the scholarly publishing community, from libraries to the aggregator to the publishers, while broadening access to humanities and social sciences research."@JSTOR #OAWeek2024 #PathToOpen #OpenAccess
https://t.co/AfaLtUN79L

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

the racism and hatred is just completely out in the open. no subtlety at all.

[Rebecca Seger @rebseger]

It's been a very busy few months, but I'm thrilled with our accomplishments and so excited for the future! #teamwork #JSTOR #ITHAKA

[JSTOR @JSTOR]

📚 Our journey of #learning together continues!

In the latest @ITHAKA_org Community Letter, Kevin Guthrie shares how #libraries, #publishers, and #educators are working together to navigate tech changes and make #education more accessible.

Full letter: https://t.co/GAQLFAsJeD

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

When I cast my vote for President Biden, I wasn't expecting much. I just wanted trump out of office.

I knew he was old.
I knew he had a stutter.
I knew he had a rep for "gaffes."
I didn't care. Just wanted trump gone.

Four years later, things are different.
I wasn't expecting that President Biden would be the most legislatively successful President in my lifetime.

I wasn't expecting him to help expand NATO.
I wasn't expecting him to lower insulin & inhalers.
I wasn't expecting him to create & recover 15m jobs.
I wasn't expecting him to bring manufacturing back.
I wasn't expecting him to forgive student debt.

But he did ALL those things, and more.
He surpassed my expectations by a lot.
And he has more planned for 2025-2028.

He's not a master orator,
He doesn't move so smoothly
But neither did FDR from his wheelchair.

Meanwhile, trump is STILL a threat.
He wants to be a dictator.
He wants to stay out of prison.
He wants revenge on his enemies.
He wants to take away from the poor and middle class and give to the ultra wealthy.
His Project 2025 will enable a national abortion ban to criminalize women seeking safe and legal abortions.
His Project 2025 will take away the rights of our LGBTQ family and friends.
His Project 2025 will transform the government into a loyalty pledge, not to America but to him ALONE.
We might never have another free election.

THAT is what is at stake in this election.

We can continue to progress with Biden policies, or we can let trump destroy democracy as we know it.

If you're looking for someone who's young and athletic, go watch a fucking movie.

I'll take the old guy who needs a nap while saving democracy over the old guy trying to overthrow democracy who needs a legal team.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

In @nytopinion

Next week, Donald Trump will be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for president.

“He is, quite simply, unfit to lead,” writes the editorial board.
https://t.co/wvhKDy5882

[nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR]

Scathing dissent from Sotomayor: "Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

I don't know if Trump is going to be reelected in 2024. But I know that, if he is, he's going to preface every blatantly illegal thing he does by saying, "Official act, this is an official act."