very funny to read these emails and then remember summers wondering whether the leaky pipeline in stem was because women are inherently bad at math

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

one of my "counterintuitive facts that explains everything" facts is that without new construction cities get less dense as they gentrify, bc wealthier households have fewer kids and fewer people per bedroom

While I’m confident this article would have gotten me into a big fight with my commie union organizing grandmother, may her memory be a blessing, I do not actually know what specifically she would have been mad about. It might’ve been this.

The real Mother Jones, a founder of the IWW, would roll in her grave if she saw her name on a piece promoting market fundamentalism, aka trickle-down economics, or "abundance" in modern liberal geek-speak. This 5,000-word hagiography of Scott Weiner by @jetjocko.bsky.social is just more YIMBY tripe.

“SB 827 was a BC/AD event for housing policy in America,” @hanlon.bsky.social says. “We’re not going to solve this through marginal tax credit, low-income housing projects. No. You just need to legalize fucking apartment buildings.”

Cable car wheel replacement

If I ended up in a Pluribus scenario I too would reject becoming part of the unified consciousness but I would absolutely be driving all kinds of cool cars like a goddamn lunatic

Tom Baker put on the coat and scarf to get his slightly-less-than-a-knighthood. Gotta be hard for an actor to get locked into a single part, but Baker has always understood the significance to…well, people like me. He’s still my Doctor. www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/do...

It’s important to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t like even the people around him that praise him 24/7z The only people he ever seemed to genuinely like were Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein

This is supercool, a real-world validation of the Belyayev Russian Fox experiments. But also the raccoons at my house seem to be getting more and more thuggish, so I dunno. www.scientificamerican.com/article/racc...

Thinking of starting a podcast. Concept is, I, a middle-aged white man, interview some people. Different person each time. I’d also record it all on video. Differentiating factor is the interviews would be very long.

This is really good article whether you love, hate, or couldn't care less about Wiener. It gives a good sense of what governing is really like. How long it takes, how many valid yet competing interests are at play, and how most observers & participants can only see their own side.

I will no doubt read and enjoy all your very good Nuzzi jokes, but I also want to say earnestly, so many of us (myself included) are on the verge of being pushed out of this industry and it's genuinely so dispiriting to see the worst among us, ethics-wise, get such preferential treatment.

1/ If you're interested in housing and the debates within the Democratic party about how much is needed and how to get it built, you need to read this profile of CA NIMBY slayer @scottwiener.bsky.social by @jetjocko.bsky.social. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Got a new story up, a profile of CA state senator and congressional candidate Scott Wiener, and a whole bunch of state housing politics and policy—to me, the totalizing political issue right now. Get people cheap housing near jobs and you fix *a lot*. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I’d like to know what some other differences are between people who want a robot simulation of a dead loved one versus people to whom that idea is repugnant. Seems like a line that’d covary with interesting characteristics.

Clowntown. Seriously. Come on. www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s...

Michael Wolff tried to buy New York Mag — with money from Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. So Wolff didn't just have a reporter-source relationship with Epstein. Nor was Wolff his informal PR adviser. They saw each other as potential business partners. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

But that would mean

In addition to being straight-up Nazi rhetoric, the "undocumented immigrants caused the housing crisis" lie seems designed to drive me, personally, insane.

The flip side of this is please share the stuff you DO like! Even if you’re not buying a subscription to wherever they work, it’s a valuable thing you can do.

you could fact check this — there aren’t 30 million illegal immigrants and there is no evidence that the presence of an immigrant in say houston has any impact on housing in madison, wisconsin — or you could note straightforwardly that this is just nazi rhetoric

“I wish national leaders would take housing seriously as a policy issue.” [finger on monkey’s paw slowly curls]

I would love more Poker Face, and I would love a Rian Johnson-run detective show with Peter Dinklage doing the detecting, but come on. Don’t try to gaslight me. deadline.com/2025/11/peac...

It’s gonna be so funny when they get nothing but The Acolyte fan fiction.

This is completely convincing and terrifying. Everything enjoyable or important reduced to monetary-value extraction and gaming of systems.

Oh sure yeah the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of connections but also this one includes a rape island

May the history of the Daily News, when it is written, reflect that upon unanimous ratification of the first contract in more than three decades, the next words uttered in the Zoom call were those of street reporter Kerry Burke: “Okay, I got a homicide. I gotta go.”

Finally gonna find out who *did* start the fire

I thought people who did bad things were supposed to experience consequences. Like from laws.

Wait, "hacked" wikipedia? They gotta mean they flooded with other edits, right? Not an actual hack? And...Edge was a science- and tech-heavy social and writing club centered around literary agent John Brockman. Early 2000s influential in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. www.edge.org/conversation...

Right I keep forgetting! These emails are a *different* Epstein Files. These are the congress ones, not the FBI ones! Lordy.

Renfield!

These emails are making my eyeballs pop, sure, but I keep thinking: Large groups of people have read these. They are old. And these people did nothing but try to hide them.

Wild how every single member of the political and business elite went into full drooling fascism the second the prospect of consequences for abhorrent behavior started to seem possible

Panic! In the Situation Room

One of my earliest moments of radicalization was in 2005 when Larry Summers said that women biologically have less aptitude for science than men. Following that, scores of equally unimpressive people wrote pieces trying to explain or justify his remarks, when they should have called for his removal.

Collaborators. We are talking about collaborators.

What must Leavitt be feeling right now? I assume it's that cold, prickly sensation of adrenaline leaking into the gut and the roaring sound of blood rushing past the eardrums, but maybe I'm projecting.

DOGE ATE MY HOMEWORK

Wait wait we're dropping the penny the same day a penny drops?

I agree - I point this out because people have grown so used to regulatory complacency on this front that they don't realize there's political recourse. The solution is to elect a CA governor who will appoint Commissioners willing to draw on dormant authorities and protect other state prerogatives

Anyway I just apologized to an editor for writing a piece that indulges more rabbit holes than Watership Down so

Right, these are the two options: Either they tolerated Epstein's eugenics to get to the sex crimes or they tolerated his sex crimes to get to the eugenics

Honestly, one of the things that's most shocked me about the last 10 years is the revelation of how many highly-educated elite white men who self-identify as moderates, liberals, and/or Democrats, still seem to be 100% on board with race science and masculine superiority.

I find myself more furious at the Renfields than the Draculas. Not that it matters, probably wrong, etc. But the lickspittles and strivers hoping for perks and enabling these monsters, emailing jokes, suggesting with winks that there might be “opportunities”… and it works!

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed 4 years ago. In new research @urbaninstitute.bsky.social we study its effects. US transport spending increased by 30%, but: —Funding for non-highway projects flatlined —Construction cost increases resulted in no actual increase in infrastructure

Aurora looks different from my place

I continue to naively think that we could fix a lot of stuff by simply following up with the question “how would that work, exactly?”