Shay O’Reilly

@shaygabriel

“The needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever.” NYC ➡️ Berlin. Climate organizer/campaigner/dad but this is a personal account. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈✝️

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Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· 19d

www.npr.org/2026/07/23/n...

Simpsons frame about the republican national convention with banners "we want what's worst for everyone" and "we're just plain evil"

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· 21d

Wir haben das Zwergflusspferdbaby gesehen

A child with her hands on her cheeks in an expression of “awww how cute”

A baby Pygmy hippo snoozing next to its mother. It is Brötchen, at the Berlin Zoo

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· 24d

I’m jet lagged so posting at 3am how proud I am of the American food I brought back to Berlin

Rice Chex (for making puppy chow), peanut butter chocolate malt balls, three bags of different heirloom bean varieties, blackstrap molasses, dang sriracha rice chips, bachan’s japanese barbecue sauce, Vermont goat milk salted bourbon cajeta, nutritional yeast, and four bags of vegan marshmallows.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· 26d

Boston in smoke

Wide angle shot of the brutalist Boston city hall against a tan yellow sky clouded with smoke

Another side of Boston city hall. The sky is khaki.

“The embrace” sculpture in Bostoncommon under a khaki sky with a red sun

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· 28d

I am in the U.S. of A so I simply must

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jul 12

It also overlooks the staging port used for the project, so you can see giant components ready for transport and installation. I spent ~7 years supporting this project professionally and so it is very special to see it become real. Some of the stuff I did is even part of the exhibit!

A model of a massive crane sits on the cement floor of the museum space. Out the window you can see a partial view of the same crane.

A cross section of the undersea cable for empire wind, which was manufactured in North Carolina and has three major compound copper wires surrounded by insulation and protection.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jul 12

If you’re in Brooklyn, highly recommend checking out WindScape, the interpretive center on the Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project. Great, interactive exhibits about wind turbines engineering, jobs in wind, environmental risk mitigation, etc. Also a VR activity where you climb a 500’ turbine.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jul 6

I’m ready for Big Congress

Screenshot of the population of the United States divided by 31k, which results in an ideal House of Representatives size of 11,051.612

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jul 6

wdym you have the *small business administration* as the spokesperson for your anti-offshore wind agenda. why are they so unserious.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jul 2

I have one question: why.

A photo collage of an orange cat in various stages of stealing a colorful chupa chups lollipop. Text over reads “he spent the whole morning plotting chupa chups heists.”

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 27

btw the best a/c I experienced all week in London was at the City of Quebec, London’s oldest LGBTQ meeting place (became a favorite of gay fighter pilots post-war and slowly transformed into a full gay bar).

A bar with magenta lighting and a red neon sign saying #cityofquebec

A pint of beer and a pair of sunglasses and an open copy of Michael Harrington’s The Politics at God’s Funeral bathed in the bar’s magenta lighting.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 20

I have been down in the ditch a few times!! I know of which I speak!

Two hikers pick their way across a narrow trail in rock scree above a red rock cliff, in the background are sheer cliffs, scrubby vegetation, and some verdant trees at the bottom of a creek canyon

A hiker looks out on a landscape of slopes and cliffs in reds and yellows and some scrubby green bushes. There is no one else in sight. The canyon extends far above and far below the man.

The Colorado River at dusk, canyon walls towering high above

A slot canyon deep in the Grand Canyon, with shallow creeks pouring down into the darkness.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 19

Have discovered a new museum/gallery pet peeve: exhibit intros that are both pretentious and overly prescriptive for how one experiences the art. (I saw this exhibit today, and yes this text was on the wall as you enter.)

KÖNIG GALERIE
The exhibition is constructed as a dialogue and an antithesis between two bodies of work. On one side are the birds, chirping and tweeting incessantly.
Within this far-from-idyllic birdsong, opinions, reflections, and theories are exchanged conspiratorially. Their songs intoxicate. Hugo
Ruyant's birds are not reduced to the cliché of flight and freedom; they are creatures with voices of their own, sometimes harboring sly thoughts.
Photo © Hugo Ruyant
A counterpart to the bird scenes are the seashell relics, emerging from the foam of days. In their silence, they muffle the chaos and invite us to sink into an ocean of emptiness. If the birds hover above the present moment-the ultra-modern modes of living and communication-then the shells stand for memory, for time stretched into infinity. And we, as observers, move between these two temporal modes of painting-between the fleeting and the eternal, between the speakers and those who listen.

Not only are the protagonists in the two series of paintings different, but the works themselves embody distinct techniques, gestures, and painterly sensibilities. The birds are large-scale and extroverted, executed with sweeping gestures as if in a single breath. The layering of caricatural figures, dense colors, and exuberant brushwork creates a dynamism that makes the paintings feel alive and pulsating with energy. The seashells, in contrast, are intimate, contemplative, and carefully considered. In the details of these vanitas-like works, Ruyant develops complex Baroque ornamentation and remarkable depth.
KÖNIG
PODCAST WAS MIT KUNST H
KÖNIG GALERIE
Watch on
• YouTube
The exhibition LEAVE A MESS AGE is turbulent, hurling us into different corners of the emotional spectrum. It is full of vitality and humor, but also of profound reflections on our social behaviors and the mess in which we live.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 12

In Grenell they found a gay so bad he stiffed the opera 😭

National Opera Sues
The suit claims Kennedy Center officials have refused to release $17
million the Washington National
Opera says it is owed.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 12

Successful thrifting day: Ralph Lauren madras patchwork shirt and these very strange (laudatory) brown suede shoes by a shoemaker, “Korielli,” about whom I can find nothing on the internet. They say they have Blake construction, though, and I’m happy to pay €50 for a pair of resolable suede shoes!

A pair of brown suede ankle-high shoes with boxy, apron-stitched toes that have a score or crease down the middle front of the toe box. They sit on the floor next to a loosely folded Ralph Lauren button-down collar shirt made of a madras patchwork in dark navy, white, cherry red and some forest green.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 11

This was in a Politico newsletter on 10 June, 2024.

Three years after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Trump's return to the good graces of top-tier Wall Street financiers is a direct rejoinder to Biden's claim that the former president poses a danger to the legal system that underpins the U.S. economy and its markets.
But many Republican donors - including those who had said they'd never support Trump again after Jan. 6 - believe the current regulatory climate for businesses is also an existential danger. Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City — a nonprofit organization representing the city's top business leaders - said Republicans have conveyed to her that they consider that "the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump."

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Jun 1

More from Farmer. "We have to stop telling ourselves horror stories about an unstoppable mutant virus, because those stories often legitimate our inaction." Just a few pages earlier he asks: "What if failure to treat, rather than treatment failure, is central to Ebola’s pathogenicity?"

During the West Africa epidemic, even well-nourished and healthy doctors and nurses had only slim chances of survival. If they remained in the clinical desert, getting out was their best hope.
Understanding how viruses kill humans—that is, understanding microbial pathogenicity in the human host—requires understanding the social context. And in West Africa, that social context includes chronic failures to deliver effective therapies available elsewhere in the world. The critical step in preventing future epidemics will be finding ways of delivering vaccines and therapies to those who need them—and who need them in part because they live in a clinical desert that was created when their predecessors were enslaved and subjugated so that people and nations in other parts of the world could amass great wealth and prosperity.
Additionally, we have to stop telling ourselves horror stories about an unstoppable mutant virus, because those stories often legitimate our inaction.

At the height of the western surge, one response team laid out the dilemma starkly, months after the Ebola-containment gurus had declared matters well under control. Acknowledging “a certain unease about treating a highly transmissible infection for which there is no vaccine, no specific therapy, and a high mortality rate,” the team went on to note that most viral illnesses, and most critical illnesses, actually fall into this category, but we don’t consider them “untreatable.” There is plenty one can do, they wrote, to treat Ebola. “After spending much of the past five months treating patients with Ebola virus disease,” they wrote, “we are convinced that it’s possible to save many more patients. Our optimism is fueled by the observation that supportive care is also specific care for EVD—and in all likelihood reduces mortality.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 30

From Paul Farmer's Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds about the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016:

Perhaps the most outrageous claims staked in those early months of the epidemic were that the afflicted and their caregivers obstinately refused to follow sound advice or accept modern medical care. People who should have known better -- public-health authorities, humanitarians, and journalists -- kept making variants of this claim. But few received sound advice, and almost nobody was offered modern care.

What drove Ebola sufferers underground, and sparked or fanned conspiracy theories and overt resistance to health authorities, was not the arrival of doctors, nurses, and other professional caregivers. It was, rather, the arrival of a vast machinery of disease containment: once the global alarm sounded in late March, the control-over-care paradigm was officially ascendant.
To be clear, effective containment in the spring of 2014 would have
prevented much of the suffering and death described in the pages that follow. The question raised in these pages is whether effective containment is possible without safe and effective care. From the start of the West African Ebola epidemic, the order of priorities advanced by international health officials was in view: the first order of business was to stop transmission, the second was to protect health professionals, and the third was to save the lives of those already afflicted. This was crystal-clear from the outset.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 20

If you want a lovely book about how home cooking can actually work in most cases (it’s not recipes for every meal) and be delightful, I can’t recommend this enough.

Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 19

recommended reading as an Ebola outbreak surfaces following massive global health funding cuts. especially as a sort of anti “the hot zone”

Fevers feuds and diamonds: Ebola and the ravages of history, by Paul farmer

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 18

It is so weird to me that @alexckaufman.bsky.social in the @heatmap.news newsletter consistently frames Republican clean energy obstruction as a response to Democrats’ actions.

Politico described the LNG
Export Security Act as "a bipartisan rebuke of former President Joe Biden's move in
2024 to free new export permits for natural gas" while the economic and environmental
effects of selling more fuel overseas were being studied. A federal judge later halted the pause, but the pause nevertheless enraged Republicans, who later moved to crush the solar and
wind sectors.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 14

After some down time, I went for a solo bike ride through the countryside while my kid and partner picked daisies and played at the small hostel playground by the river.

A torn-up asphalt road stretches through a landscape of forest, fields and canals. There are yellow flowers in the fields and the sky is brilliant blue.

A bicycle on a rough road that looks like it goes on forever through open fields and small stands of trees

A road curves through a field of varied grasses.

Grasses and reeds and fields of yellow flowers before a line of trees, all under a blue sky with puffy white clouds.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 14

First full day of low carbon leisure vacation. The hostel actually sets out supplies to pack your own brown bag lunch every morning, so cheese and cucumber sandwiches were the order of the day. Then, my kid’s first time in a kayak… which also involved transiting the lock system.

A green kayak’s nose points down a small canal with a bridge, willows, and houses right next to it.

A small child stands on the bank of a canal wearing a life vest, sun hat, and sandals with socks. She is holding a juice box.

The kayak nose pointing towards a sluice gate.

Brown bag lunches packed on a windowsill. Outside is a row of canoes and kayaks.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 13

After a chilly wet bike ride through the countryside, we arrived at a family hostel - affordable, no frills and with a canteen that serves basic hot meals. You make the beds yourself and it is by no means luxurious, but it’s good and pleasant. Bonus stork.

Large white cows graze in a field before a large country house.

A spread in an old dining room: brown bread, cheese, soup, pickles, salads, and hot herbal tea.

A stork nest over an old low-slung but sprawling German building with white walls and a mossy tiled roof.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 13

Low-carbon leisure vacation thread! We loaded up our bikes this afternoon and took the local train for an hour. Key element too: we got all our bikes secondhand, and the panniers were purchased secondhand off the German version of Craigslist.

Two adults and a kid with bikes wait on a train platform. The adults’ bikes are loaded with red panniers.

A view from the train of a green and wet landscape with a solar farm and wind turbines.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 12

That’s right

Shay O'Reilly @shaygabriel.bsky.so... • 18d
I do think that the key to being happy as a trans person* is to internalize the James Baldwin line, "There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me."
*assuming your basic needs are met, which I know is a large assumption for many of us!

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 8

W.H. Auden, it turns out, truly hated internal combustion engine cars.

A Curse
Dark was that day when Diesel conceived his grim engine that begot you, vile invention, more vicious, more criminal than the camera even, metallic monstrosity,
bale and bane of our Culture, chief woe of our Commonweal.

How dare the Law prohibit hashish and heroin yet licence your use, who inflate all weak inferior egos?
Their addicts only do harm to their own lives: you poison the lungs of the innocent, your din dithers the peaceful, and on choked roads hundreds must daily die by chance-medley.
Nimble technicians, surely
you should hang your heads in shame.
Your wit works mighty wonders, has landed men on the Moon, replaced brains by computers, and can smithy a "smart" bomb.
It is a crying scandal that you cannot take the time or be bothered to build us, what sanity knows we need, an odorless and noiseless staid little electric brougham.
July 1972

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 4

Walter Benjamin:

August 25. A Brechtian maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· May 2

What do you mean this is their “biggest fear,” the VCs are slavering for it!

NYTimes push alert

From Opinion
Silicon Valley is bracing for its biggest fear: that A.I. will create a worldwide permanent underclass, writes Jasmin Sun.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel· Apr 28

I would love to see evidence that “conservative critics of wind and solar” are motivated by the actual technological qualities of wind and solar. (From the Heatmap newsletter)