I wrote about the dirty, demeaning, absolutely booming business of turning something like a shitty bigoted college essay into a shitty public career as a bigot, and also estimated how old Marine Todd would be today. defector.com/the-conserva...

You, a dangerous radical: We have to change the system so cartoon villains can't wreck the country again Me, a wise pragmatist: What if we simply rebranded the system? Welcome to America Premium+

The billionaires who own much of the the infrastructure of our 21st century lives have progressively enshittified that infrastructure while expanding their wealth, and then they scold us for being small-souled peasants who don’t believe in progress anymore.

Cal rushing the field with like 200 people rules

Every rivalry game should be color vs color.

Remember when Amazon held a sale during Independent Bookstore Day in an effort to undercut indie bookstores? We didn’t forget. Support local bookstores during Small Business Saturday and beyond.

The cowboys really *are* America’s team (badly run by an ancient, unreconstructed racist and coasting on accomplishments from the previous century while daily inventing new ways to humiliate themselves)

"Imagine you stole all of the intellectual property in the world. And you're using it to help people write middling emails and make revenge porn about women, and also children. And you're powering this plagiarism and non-consensual porn machine by eating up what's left of humanity's carbon budget."

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Farewell to the great Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican singer who played a pivotal part in introducing reggae to the rest of the world. www.theguardian.com/music/2025/n...

hey don't be so hard on yourselves; it delivered oceans of sensitive government and citizen data to billionaires

This is quite the essay on MAGA Christianity, an insider lament about things I’ve observed from the outside, and things I didn’t know about. I’m not Christian, but I find some things admirable about Christianity, and think it’s a shame how the dominant form of US Christianity has inverted them.

It remains insane to me that DOGE was treated at the time as an impressive shock and awe accomplishment - “you can’t deny he’s getting stuff done!” - and then instantly memory holed by the press once if became clear it was a total failure by every possible standard including Musk’s own

hey does anybody want to mind some rich moron's five neglected kids while getting malnutrition in a shack full of dangerous snakes lmk. no pay

Study after study shows that using LLMs is bad for cognition, bad for learning, bad for understanding, bad for mental health. So why are our schools and universities still relentlessly pushing them?

And I get that a lot of people like the abundance frame, and how obvious “cutting red tape” sounds as the path to providing all the things we want. But please understand how that framing is actually being used in real-world policymaking. #Abundance #PermittingReform

i've a new dog defector.com/beware-the-j...

" If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read [a careful comprehensive argument] anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider."

It's not even 4 AM West Coast time and Ezra Klein has already annoyed me

one thing i think is true is that republicans assumed that democrats would not respond in kind and that the forceful pushback spooked them (a lesson to learn here, perhaps)

Oh, @cooke-m.bsky.social and I have a piece posting in @slate.com shortly on why this is a very real possibility given the weakness in the litigation against California's Prop. 50 maps.

AI is great for speeding certain processes up. It's a good tool for those who already have decades of domain expertise. But the race to bring AI into our world is sure to produce the most uncreative and unimaginative generation in the history of human evolution.

It's remarkable that the number of news analyses/pundit takes that the Democrats are too extreme--out of touch, too focused on divisive cultural issues, too beholden to progressive orthodoxy--far exceeds the articles on the Trump/GOP's connections to the far right. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/u...

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

Happy "Let's pick this up in January" season to all who celebrate!!

How dare anyone speak ill of the ACC? Are you not entertained?

Stoked to have this paper on age structure of Central Valley Chinook through time, and I mean a lot of time, out and open access: www.int-res.com/abstracts/me...

As all this disgusting Epstein shit starts surfacing more and more, I hope we don't lose sight of the fact that apparently every major media outlet knew everything and instead spent their time money and energy attacking the trans community.

every few years it's revealed that the NYT was sitting on information about some horrific thing that public knowledge of would have changed the country's course and for some reason a ton of people still give them money. you can play those games on other sites

for the first time in many years I think it's worth going out of your way to watch some San Jose Sharks games. defector.com/the-sharks-s...

really makes you wonder how many dogshit DAs are out there when every third email from these assholes is "FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJ: are we doing crime this weekend like we did on these dates: July 6, 2015, April 9, 2016, May 23, 2019"

The reflexive tendency of mainstream news outlets to frame all political news through the lens of partisan bickering rather than making definitive statements is also one of the benefits that have accrued to Republicans after a half century of bad faith attacks on "media bias."

Food banks are like grandchildren. They'd much rather have cash than some random item out of your pantry.

Who could have possibly seen this coming except for literally every single person who is not a democratic senator?

spoke with the executive director of my local food bank today and got this really incredible line: "if you donate 1 can of green beans, we can give away 1 can of green beans. but if you donate a dollar, we can give away 6 cans of green beans"

There’s actually an obscure state law that says that if you’re a white guy who went to Harvard and you can say “nothing can be done” in a snide tone while posing as a pragmatist, the New York Times is legally obligated to publish anything you write

Turns out poor people spent a lot of money on tea and sugar *because they were poor* and that was their inadequate replacement for unaffordable things like cooking fuel, food with actual nutritional content, and enough calories to slave away over a loom for 12 hours.

Yeah, sorry. That's an understandable confusion upon first seeing it. The first three screenshots are from Barro's NYT piece today. The fourth is from my article that came out yesterday. The character limit meant I couldn't spell it out. But yes: how can he not understand this? (By not wanting to.)

Outcomes aren't important to anyone, just positioning yourself as the pathetic dupes crying that the wallet inspector never gave it back. Voters love this. Excuses are so much better than delivering, and people really respect marks.

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

When you have no language for, or reject the concept of, what SHOULD be, it turns out that everything that happens feels inevitable and any outcome you can claim you had a hand in feels like success! That's bad! That's really, really bad!

apropos of nothing I wrote a book a long time ago about how the DLC and Bill Clinton redefined winning for an entire generation of Democrats as "getting something done" through bipartisanship and compromise rather than achieving (or even having!) a specific outcome in mind, and, what do I know.

"If you are going to pursue an uncertain outcome, you might as well pursue the uncertain outcome that you want, rather than one that will not give you what you want even if it succeeds."

Just need everyone to Google the name "Rosalind Franklin" at this moment.

It is worth saying that putting “Africana studies” in scare quotes as if it’s a ridiculous concept is not a political argument. It’s just racism. “Africa is not worthy of a major” is the implication. Yeah dude you’re just racist. (From Gerard Baker at the WSJ today) www.wsj.com/opinion/mamd...

you can convincingly portray this whole financialized AI edifice as a mortgage crisis-style house of cards without even mentioning that the fundamental product is unreliable, based on outright theft, and people don’t like it.

I know people love to donate goods, it feels concrete and satisfying, but a food bank can make that $2 or $5 go soooo much further than you can. Just donate the cash. And, then they also don't need to assign staff to sort, manage, and figure out how to distribute the random donations.

This is partisan hack analysis. This is "obvious" only to ideologues that already believed this. The Dems were hurt by rising prices, a doddering, unpopular incumbent, and the administration's enabling of a genocide. They tried to fix the second problem by dumping Biden, but it wasn't enough.

The people yearn for (democratic) socialism (this one will make you cry)

If SNAP benefits don’t go out November 1, it’s not because of the shutdown or because SNAP ran out of money. It’s because the Trump admin is illegally refusing to use the money in the SNAP contingency fund. The same admin that enacted the largest cuts to SNAP in history.