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Michael Flatt

@flatt.bsky.social
66 followers 44 following 96 posts

Poet, publisher of Threadsuns, book designer. Pain Olympics champion.

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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 23h
Watched E.T. with some neighbors and kids the other night, and there's a moment when Elliott is mad at his brother and he calls him "penis breath." Now I can only imagine Steven Spielberg hunched over his typewriter, desperately trying to think of a euphemism for "cocksucker." #the1980s
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Anything on Earth over Deadwood is mine.
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
ProPublica @propublica.org · 17/09/2026
When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients. (Published Oct. 2024 with @capitolforum.bsky.social)
propublica.org
Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments
When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
My new favorite thing is watching people who are saying really smart things about foreign policy or AI or whatever pause in the middle of a sentence for a tiny burp/heartburn moment. #acidrefluxsolidarity
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Certainly he won't be reduced to seeking sustenance and purpose from a lizard-brain driven, ever-shifting, amorphous hellscape!
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I really love when Instagram bots designed to lure me to OnlyFans accounts engage with my post about my son starting kindergarten. It really fills me with hope that his future will be stable, recognizable, and fulfilling.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Bo Nix is Ryan Tannehill.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
They don't call him Chicken Stick Cruz for nothing.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Do they know how to fill a run gap?
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Did you know anytime you do anything, you sign up for an email list?
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I watched Raw Deal far too many times as a child. That scene where he's driving around a construction site shooting people from a convertible blasting "Satisfaction" has to be the root of something terrible within me.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
You did?? We were roommates then!
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Cool job available in Satan's asshole!
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Disproven so many times. So, so many.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Was it to resist onanism?
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Anyway, universal healthcare now.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The problem is everyone has these stories and our collective memory of things being any better is fading.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I've helped him a couple times. His name is Albert. Big guy, hard for me to move, and there are people half my size sent as his driver to help him get home, who can't lift him even with a wheelchair. It's especially rough in the winter when his landlord hasn't shoveled the walkway.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
This is the experience of a family who has it relatively good! Way better off than the guy across the street from my office, whose medical transportation people usually can't help him up the stairs to his home, leaving him to push himself up the stairs one at a time from a seated position.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
My father's gone blind in one eye. My aunt can't afford her nursing home. My wife is fighting with an insurance company who won't cover the wig she bought for her second time going bald from chemo. Nobody will give my son stitches or help me with my hand numbness, and I'm ready to Luigi someone.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Also, I just self-diagnosed with YouTube because I won't be able to see a doctor about what I believe is cubital tunnel syndrome (a form of chronic hand numbness) because two years ago when I had extremely painful tennis elbow, it took three months to see someone.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
American healthcare is a flimsily bootstrapped web of incredibly uneven training, standards, and methodologies.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
All of this reeked of customer service. An amusement park medic not making recommendations, doing minimal work while pushing us to get back out there and have fun. An urgent care PA seeking reasons to avoid unpleasant work out of a pseudo-abundance of caution.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I laid down next to him on the table, held his head still with my hands, scissored his legs between mine, and my partner held his hands while the PA administered local anesthetic via numerous injections directly into the wound. Preferable to sedation or strangers restraining him, but felt insane.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
After he passed a neuro exam, she left saying she would consult another provider, and returned fifteen minutes later asking what we had decided. We said what we had been saying for over an hour: We wanted them to give him stitches. She reluctantly agreed and told us we would have to hold him.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The PA's first excuse was that he seemed nervous. "Some kids handle these things well, and some don't." She suggested going to the ER where they could sedate him. After we pushed back on that, she suggested he may have a concussion, despite exhibiting zero symptoms. No fainting, vomiting, etc.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
After we had paid to be seen, the nurses and PA did everything they could to pass the buck to an ER, because nobody wants the job of giving stitches to a young child. We spent 90 minutes waiting at an urgent care that had one PA, one nurse, and zero doctors, pressing them to give my son treatment.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
As a brief aside, urgent care may be the clearest indicator of the ramshackle nature of American healthcare. Emergency rooms were too full of people being seen because they didn't have health insurance, so we invented a third-party stopgap system of chronically understaffed strip mall care. Perfect.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Gave him antibiotic jelly and a band-aid and declared him safe for swimming: "There's so much chlorine in there, it'll be fine." After ten minutes, he was bleeding again. Our son's friend's mother is a doctor, and she took a look. "He definitely needs stitches." Off we went to urgent care.
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
R.D. Pohl @rdpohl.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
@justbuffalolit.bsky.social Poem of the Week: Excerpt from "Homeric Epic" by Kazim Ali from his new collection The Man in 119 (Copper Canyon Press). www.justbuffalo.org/kazim-ali-20...
justbuffalo.org
Excerpt from Homeric Epic by Kazim Ali - Just Buffalo Literary Center | Buffalo, NY
Read an excerpt from "Homeric Epic" by Kazim Ali - part of the Poem of the Week series, curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Had no idea he was from Buffalo! And a SUNY grad, which until last week was something I was proud of.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
As the FDA adds jalepenos to the list of recalled foods, @nytimes.com has a thoughtful recipe recommendation:
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Academic enshitification. One of the most reputable poetry centers in the world, producing an endless string of brilliant writers and innovative thinkers, attracting hyper-talented, super-active grad students... Creeley, Olson, McCaffery, Howe, Bernstein, Kim... But yeah. Fuck it, I guess.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Tempting! I have the book and could use a reason to read Benjamin and Foucault again!
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
"""""accidentally""""
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
About to sit through a full Catholic mass wedding ceremony. Good reminder that hell does exist.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Still time to cut our losses and admit the pursuit of AI was a mistake before it cripples the economy and worsens an already precipitous drop in literacy/capacity for deep focus.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Not the Pillsbury Rolls
theguardian.com
General Mills recalls 736,000 Pillsbury rolls over glass contamination fears
FDA notice warns of ‘potential foreign material’ as recall covers two types of frozen bread roll dough
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Fun epistemological question brought to you by the early stages of ecocatastrophe: Is smoke weather?
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Did you excel at losing spelling bees?
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
ProPublica @propublica.org · 07/04/2026
“You are not entitled to a response from us, or anyone, ever,” is what an Education Department spokesperson wrote to one of our reporters, @megomatz.bsky.social, after she repeatedly tried to get comment from the department and its officials. (Published Dec. 2025)
propublica.org
Our Reporters Reached Out for Comment. They Were Accused of Stalking and Intimidation.
Our journalists reach out to people they’re writing about to ensure fairness. But in this environment, they’ve found their efforts to do so are more likely to be vilified than appreciated.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
There is time for all of us to change how we live our lives.
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
Hamilton Nolan @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Good time to remember that rich people are okay with this in exchange for tax cuts
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Events & Pogroms
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Poetry is a last resort.
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
knife | fork | book @knifeforkbook.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
THIS TUESDAY 6-8PM #Rochester #threeheadsbrewing Hear/see MICHAEL FLATT read @senecareview.bsky.social www.knifeforkbook.shop/store/p171/M... & @asterismbooks.bsky.social asterismbooks.com/product/i-ca...
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Always good to be with friends.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Well, la dee da, Ms. I Still Have Ten Fingers.
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Michael Flatt @flatt.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
I'll have to keep tabs and unfollow as soon as you get there.
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Reposted by Michael Flatt
Walter Olson @walterolson.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
New from me at Cato: I go through the numerous and massive First Amendment and academic-freedom violations of Trump's proffered "compact" with universities and then talk about the mechanism by which it would be enforced, by way of what I describe as a "retroactive push-button guillotine."
cato.org
Universities Must Defend Their Independence by Rejecting Trump's "Compact"
The Trump administration has proffered a “compact” to universities that would require them to surrender their independence and academic freedom. How many First Amendment violations can we identify in ...
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