If I were still an editor I might be asking the copy desk, if I had one of those, to come up with usage guidelines for talking about AIs that didn’t imply they had agency or selfhood. The face generated for the AI actor-avatar is a character, like Mickey Mouse, not a person.

private equity’s youth sports push www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazing. Though Joe McCarthy didn’t start McCarthyisming until 1950; before that it was just sparkling House Unamerican Activities Committee.

Lol I read this to my class

These people keep saying stuff that makes me have to stop working and go walk around for a few minutes to get myself together.

Anthropologists and historians tend to think of the color palette humans used tens of thousands of years ago as unreflective of the real-world gamut, limited to black, white, and the ochres (red, yellow, brown). If they also had blues and greens, it changes the picture of their culture.

On Issue 614 of #Comicast, @one-punch.bsky.social & I had a fun & fascinating conversation with @jetjocko.bsky.social, the host of The Official #AlienEarth Podcast. Adam speaks with us about his career, hosting the podcast, & his own head canon about the show. Is Boy K a genius or just a tech bro?

They accidentally defunded their own police?

A guy who espouses a bizarre meldings of biblical scripture and Nazi philosophy is shorthanding for you. That’s an easy call. It’s like a secret base in a volcano or treating henchmen as disposable. It’s a mustache twirl. Come on.

On Sunday, #Zürich residents voted 52.8% in favor of increasing parking fees for cars according to weight. The owner of a BMW X2 (Diesel), which weighs 1,675 kilograms, will now pay equivalent of €717 Euros per year to park on a public street. (Before, about €321.) Direct democracy!

The military, as you guys know, doesn’t applaud speeches. They’re apolitical. The most a speaker wld get is a “hoo-ah,” but only if the speaker said it first (Also, most of the audience was sr enlisted, not gens, & most were Marines, prob local (from Quantico or Pentagon). Most gens didn’t come)

It turns out the universe-killing AI doesn't just turn everything into paperclips. It turns everything into one very specific paperclip.

Sometimes I look at Olmsted’s original plans for Jackson and Washington park from before the Columbian Exposition and I feel SICK

Hints of an eldritch war as significant as the one between Morrison and Moore in terms of defining the skin of reality today.

I grew up in the beautiful single-family home neighborhoods near here. (One of the classic forms there, btw, is a two-unit duplex.) It’s great. They should build more homes so more people can live there, too. beverlypress.com/2025/09/home...

So now, what, all those generals leave the room looking at each other making a mental tally of who is thinking ”fascist bullshit, absolutely not” versus “hell yeah, here we go”? Less than ideal.

The one you really didn’t want to turn out prescient was Miller and Gibbons’ Give Me Liberty, yet here we are.

Keith David briefly quotes Hamlet in this week's The Lowdown. Writing that recap sent me down a rabbit hole of his history with Shakespeare, including this shot of him and Kate Mulgrew in Titus Andronicus in 1989:

Whole Avengers: Endgame-scale final battles happening all the time, all around us, at spatiotemporal scales of which we are wholly unaware. Alert Level: Tchaikovsky.

Learn to recognize news outlet typefaces and you will be a savvier social-media user

Two plans were floating around that everyone turned to after 9/11. Gary Hart’s proposed centralizing congressional oversight across multiple agencies. Joe Lieberman’s suggested centralizing the agencies. Hhhh.

If I could get non-autistic people to understand one thing, it wouldn't be that I have support needs. It would be that YOU have support needs.

"experts say" www.cnn.com/2025/08/11/b...

OK, just help me understand here

“Write a Chotiner interview with a character from the book you just read” would be a fantastic high school literature assignment

CHOTINER: You’ve always liked plums? WCW: Sure, colder and sweeter the better. C: But you ask for forgiveness for eating them. WCW: Yeah, I did say I was sorry. C: What I was going to say was, if you knew your roommate also liked plums and had plans for them— WCW: OK, the thing is—

Chotiner: so you’re building a monument? Me: yes it’ll be quite the works. you should come look in a while Chotiner: and you consider yourself mighty? Me: Well I mean just look at the size of those trunks! Chotiner: sand Me: what? Chotiner: nothing else remains Me: wait

Chotiner: where is the center of danger? Me: it is of a particular size and shape, and below us Chotiner: is anything valued here? Me: no but we’ll have signs Chotiner: what kind of signs? Me: well we’re still working on that Chotiner: and you consider yourself a powerful culture? Me: wait

The new-improved Spirit Halloween Beetlejuice sign is pretty great, but the main part of the sign does not light up. I added COB LED strips and used the ON-DEMO switch as an ON-OFF. Bonus is the flashing lights can now be turned off separately. #Beetlejuice #Betelgeuse #Halloween

As president one of my top priorities will be ensuring raccoons cannot domesticate other animals. We won’t want a whole mouse guard situation here.

CHOTINER: I don't know, I just feel like I've been tacitly operating in a moral framework that would fall apart with even the barest scrutiny. But maybe that collapse would bring new clarity DOCTOR: Listen, there is an interviewer I want you to talk to. The best in the business. CHOTINER: ...

CHOTINER: And you didn’t know this person - what did you call him again? CELEBRIMBOR GREATEST OF THE ELVEN SMITHS: Right, his name was Annatar but CHOTINER: And you taught him to create a ring harnessing all his malice and cruelty? CELEBRIMBOR: Well I mean I was deceived CHOTINER: So you’ve said

CHOTINER: And when was that? MY CAT: I mean at least 14 hours ago CHOTINER: Well hold on. You're telling me you haven't been fed at all today but if I look in your bowl here I see a- MY CAT: An untouched serving, I know, but if you'd let me finish- CHOTINER: Yeah, of course.

9/ I had launch with Paulina Borsook last month in Oakland. Her life is hard, but she still has a lot to say! She's trying to raise funds to get a new version of the book reissued on the Internet Archive. Some of her friends have a running GoFundMe to support her: www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...

Fascinating history of a once-beloved ultra version of D&D that was multicultural and multi gendered, got suppressed by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax, and then turned out to be created by a secret neo-Nazi. thebaffler.com/latest/ruins...

2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint. She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:

Sorry but parking "cops" are good, unarmed civil servants rightly ensuring access to public spaces remain accessible. I own a car and almost never get parking tickets because I park correctly and in consideration of other people who need curbspace.

CHOTINER: You used the special editions to make some changes. LUCAS: Yes. CHOTINER: In the original release, Han Solo spends most of Episode IV as a morally ambiguous character. LUCAS: He still is. CHOTINER: One of the scenes that shows this is the confrontation with Greedo. LUCAS: Listen ...

CHOTINER: I guess I don't understand why you wouldn't train a team of astronauts to in deep core drilling instead of trying to train a bunch of drillers as astronauts. MICHAEL BAY: Can we go off the record for a minute?

That's five times the amount of the Trump Administration is trying to claw back from California HSR -- www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

That's twenty years of money we didn't have for NPR and PBS: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The line to look for is "as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted"

sixteen million dollars dollars

I used to love the giant whale mural next to the freeway in downtown LA, and the Zorba mural on Broadway...but this is better. You can just hear the Monty Python Sousa theme.

Me: It ends on a cliffhanger! Bro, what are you doing to people? Noah Hawley, showrunner: I'm trying to get a second season. It's the finale of Alien: Earth, and of Alien: Earth - The Official Podcast. Thanks for listening—you're my lucky stars. www.fxnetworks.com/shows/alien-...

It's possible—just speculating—that certain kinds of people get a huge social boost from being perceived by peers as important enough to get pureed by Chotiner in the New Yorker. Totally worth the scant damage with the rest of us.

CHOTINER: They call you Vlad the Impaler. DRACULA: It is a folk legend among the peasants. They are simple people. CHOTINER: Simple people, many of whom you had impaled. DRACULA: I don't think any of the people I have had impaled are accusing me of anything. CHOTINER: That's certainly true.

CHOTINER: But you’ve had romantic entanglements in the past. For instance, Lucy Westenra? DRACULA: Tragic case. The poor girl. CHOTINER: Died of acute blood loss, I believe? DRACULA: Attacked by a wolf, I think. CHOTINER: You can turn into a wolf, right? DRACULA: That’s right. CHOTINER: Thank you.

From a Berkeley Hills control room, a team from Cal’s Space Sciences Laboratory is set to lead the first university-run mission to Mars.

CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right? IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If— CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother? IKARI: Look, let me answer the question. CHOTINER: Sure.