„Never forget: whenever Elon Musk walks up to a podium to bullshit you about colonizing Mars or whatever, he is walking on the bodies of dead children. He yanked their food and medicine away while telling lies and cracking stupid jokes.“ @dereklowe.bsky.social as usual not pulling any punches

It’s software, you numpties. It can’t ‘say’ anything.

“Survey after survey has shown that business owners overestimate how many customers drive to their stores vs walking or biking. In a 2012 Los Angeles study, more than half of the store owners on the bike-laned part of the boulevard thought most of their customers drove. The actual number was 15%.”

Okay, might as well get this started. It's January 1, which means, as I'm sure you all know, that there's a whole new bunch of characters who have entered the public domain. This time around, it's characters created in 1930. The following is a list of pulp & pulpy characters now in the p.d. 1/

Happy New Years!!!

My old pal @eniiler.bsky.social with a killer story. What we save defines us as a culture—the archive is our memory and our future. And we’re throwing it away? Madness. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

Also look I gotta just stop for a second and say: armrests made of marble? Spend a moment inside your mind and think if you would want armrests, for a chair, in which you sit for hours watching a show, to be made of marble, a mineral known for hardness and coldness to touch.

From Abraham Flexner, founder of the Institute for Advanced Study, in 1939:

I would love to see a California tech-enhanced billionaire try to live somewhere else. I would watch the reality show about that.

I’m not the first to say that the DMV is also often a place where guys like these must show polite respect to middle-class, nonwhite women employed there, and they hate that a lot.

Musk doesn’t have to go to the DMV because he’s wealthy and has assistants who do that for him. Cheong doesn’t go to the DMV because he’s never lived in this country. If either of them had been inside a California DMV in the past decade they’d know that you can make an appointment and it’s painless.

Moon’s haunted

The Enchanted Tchotchke Room

Not only do Jews go to Chinese food and the movies on Christmas, but in Southern California we also used to go to Disneyland.

Frankincense and myrrh are preservative resins, is why they’re valuable.

Climate beats robots.

Three ghosts hovering outside the White House like “yeah no not going near that, he’s clearly got some real demons he’s dealing with.”

oh no

Guy sitting on a pile of gold: "im all for Universal Healthcare, but how do we make it happen? Be realistic."

That main dish sure is tender and mild, sweetie. What is it?

At the last minute I realize we should’ve all been building a “The Game”-scale three-ghosts ARG for the president. Damn.

Swanson’s ”Sanitation Syndrome,” citing a bunch of prior work on cholera epidemics: “‘Epidemics do not create abnormal situations’ but rather sharpen existing behaviour patterns which ‘betray deeply rooted and continuing social imbalances.’”

one serious answer? a lot of elites—including many liberals—absolutely lost their minds the one time our government asked them make the same mid-crisis sacrifices for the public good as everyone else. and they are happy to fund and publish damn near anything to prevent that from happening again

It’s raining.

NEW: Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer turned right-wing media figure, made $474,313 last year from the conservative nonprofit org, the Leadership Institute. More striking than her total comp was the way it was structured. For @sportico.bsky.social 👇 www.sportico.com/business/med...

People who use “processing centers” to put humans into camps are the bad guys. Most of the world agreed on this. We had a war.

recalibrate your bullshit meter if this doesn't set it off at least 3 times

Critical to know that McCay drew in black and white and gave his engraver, Mr. Hunt, loose instructions. The art is McCay; the glorious color, the little-known Hunt.

pick your fighter

So I have had a day to think about this and look into it a little and let's just say I am deeply, deeply skeptical, and feel like certain people involved here should have known better.

The Black Dahlia killer…was the Zodiac killer??!! What the www.latimes.com/california/s...

Also! “Trading Places,” a great Christmas movie about class and race, shows that someone is a dumb, tacky rich person by having them tell a story, word for word, from *another* great American Christmas movie about class, “Auntie Mame.”

If you want to know more about why California resisted building housing (spoiler: racism) and why it's finally starting to, you should read this piece by @jetjocko.bsky.social www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Units in this building are going to have fantastic views of Starfleet Academy. www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/a...

I got a series of emails from my car dealer, all signed, "Maddie Nelson, Service Department Assistant." I finally called to make the appointment and asked for her. "She doesn't work here," the person who answered told me. "Sorry," I said. "I got emails from her..." "She's an AI."

Amazing results in New York remind me how disappointing it is that congestion pricing efforts have stalled in San Francisco. With congestion pricing, Muni service could be robustly funded, transit ridership would climb, and traffic through much of the Bay Area would significantly decrease.

CHOTINER: and when you're in water you PARTICLE MAN: don't get wet, that's right. CHOTINER: And this is because PARTICLE MAN: the water gets me instead. It becomes particle-manish CHOTINER: There's been some debate on this point. Triangle Man, for example PARTICLE MAN: I think we're done here

Did not expect 60 Minutes segments as samizdat

Shout out to the Canadian broadcast techs who brought us today’s entertainment.

So the only longtime staffers remaining at the right-leaning think tank will be heritage Heritage heritage-Americans.

Jason figured it out? Jason? This is a real low point.

everything aside, "this story is old/the public already knows" is often used to kill pitches or stories when, in truth, the public *doesn't actually* know. one or two stories in an elite paper does not a public consciousness make. it's a constant winnowing of collective knowledge.

the gall of this! and the gall of this being reported by the new york times. the appalling state of this industry will persist until people finally break the cycle and find another way.

The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision. "The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

Hoooo boy.

Yeah I’m thinking this debacle is about to get all the additional reporting it can handle

If you have the time to read every book and article in your area of study and in related areas, then we would probably have a lot to talk about.

There are a lot of unique road scenarios on the roads I can see being hard to anticipate and you just hope your software can manage it. “What if we lose contact with all our cars due to a power outage” is something you should have a meeting and a plan about ahead of time.

She had read at least parts of all of them, probably most of them entire, and honestly, in literature, summaries are often worse than useless, because the whole point, again, is the close reading! And then having your own ideas about it!

Being confronted with the fact that this is what pretty much everyone else thinks journalists, researchers, analysts, etc do. This is why our parents are confused about our jobs, and why casual acquaintances think they could write a book, too, and why’d ours take so long?