Contributor: The results are in, and same-sex marriage was a win for children and society

Season Four of Loot would have been wiiiiiild

It is worth thinking about why Fareed Zakaria was allowed to keep his highly-paid media sinecures despite committing serial plagiarism while Claudine Gay was forced out of hers over paraphrasing common concepts in her dissertation. Race, gender, AND partisanship all played a role in their outcomes.

aside from the shocking! reveal, it really goes to show how much they love getting lied to that the amount she was getting taxed on $11,000 in tips is supposed to cover cancer treatment, the loss of her husband's income, and a few vacations plus an $1,800 car repair in the next post

A really interesting methodological approach separates within- from between-person effects and challenges the broad belief that social media use promotes political expression, and suggests instead that people already predisposed to political expression tend to use social media for politics. #CommSky

Between publishers overloading their pages with surveillance spam and breaking the back button with exit splash pages, AI agents forcing a human-verification captcha whenever you follow a link, and re-writing content to be generative-friendly for search results, the web is practically unusable.

Woot! Most lead-poisoned generation FTW! Fr tho glad we fixed stuff for our kids

The same week the NYTimes was devoting its significant resources to producing this ridiculous piece about Lauren Sanchez Bezos's call for rich people to not worry and be happy, Ryan Hass, an independent journalist in Oregon, was investigating this horrifying story about a death in an Amazon plant.

Another way to put it is... if you don't use AI platforms because you have a moral objection to them, but you publish your words on Substack, you haven't really thought about this stuff.

Having just lost a PowerPoint for reasons no documentation will explain, I have come to believe that forcing people to use Office365 and One Drive for their income should be considered an act of violence.

The books eventually written about this war will obviously vary widely in quality and focus, but the ones focused on the Poasting aspect of it will probably be the most interesting. This is a war of shit talkers, and we are losing the talk. It’s fascinating.

“It’s harder to exploit certain types of labor under fascism” is both on brand for the WSJ and kind of an insane way to view society.

We have many decades of verified, repeatable, consistent research showing that is exactly how mass media works. Several enormous industries are built on the idea of media affecting attitudes and beliefs. Reporters who deny this in a fit of pique at facing down their own behavior just look unserious.

Boy, is there a whole lot of Gender going on at the Times these days. They just see Gender everywhere.

A great week at Cambridge Disinformation Summit! I was grateful to be joined by speech defenders @jameeljaffer.bsky.social @attorneynora.bsky.social and @jemimahsteinfeld.bsky.social for our panel how censorship and freedom of expression operate within today's systems of information control.

There has to be some interesting philosophy about how the Internet is both forever, and also a remarkably fragile storage medium for knowledge and history.

I guess it’s just a let down that we’re quadrupling the cost of electronics to make production space for an AI to mirror the personality of a famously un-personable oligarch.

The point of the university as a concept is that it's been here for a thousand years and meant to be here another thousand. Turning education over to producing what the market needed five years ago is never going to work well.

Also it’s kind of sad to look at 6-month old build guides when the component costs were 40% lower 😕

I don’t care how many times you explain to me what it means, the world “horology” will always make me laugh. Always.

Again, tech companies open embrace of authoritarianism and the fact that every new product is a more invasive spy device than the last one are not coincidences.

There simply isn’t a good justification for these kinda of devices especially after the Google glass violence. The rush to capture “the next iPhone” market is just supply seeking demand by companies that have hoarded so much wealth from that they literally don’t know what else to do with it.

“American higher education is facing down a process of authoritarian capture that threatens the long-term viability of our system of higher education.”

It’s quite interesting that people feel like they have less money when every bit of data we have says otherwise. Reality-perception gaps are interesting! But I wish the same folks who know the media lie about politics also realized it lies about the economy as well, since that helps to explain it.

So it’s kind of funny that vibe coding and Mythos clones are going to kill off GitHub and possibly the entire open source library stack, right? A whole industry made like 25 men absurdly wealthy by building on volunteer labor so central and invisible no one ever bothered to secure. Whoops, I guess?

I just saw a commercial that featured an animated pile of poop and droplet of pee talking about diaper absorbency. It reminded me of that pregnancy test commercial that had an intricately detailed stream of pee impacting the wand. I am… not prepared for this level of product honesty in our media.

More of that “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” journalism I hear so much about from people who don’t actually do that

“The novel touches on many of today's most controversial subjects, such as interracial relationships, gender conflicts, gender identity, and same-sex pairings – and views them with a lens toward the future.” From a 1995 book by Felice Picano; feels like we’ve been frozen time for 30 years some days

So, Project Hail Mary is a pretty good adaptation of the book. For better and worse, which I wish was a little more visible in all the hype about it.

We have science! “The current results suggest that individuals… choose a number of different strategies in response to information that conflicts with their important beliefs, including increasing the importance of consonant information, [and] directing attention to the immoral acts of others…”

I genuinely struggle to imagine the minds of people who could live through the last year and a half and somehow still believe that liberal arts professors are the primary problem facing 2026 America - I struggle with that more than I do with imagining what it’s like to be an octopus.

Let us also specifically condemn Douthat for playing the utterly juvenile “you liberals only care about Epstein raping children now because it hurts Donald Trump” card. What a sad, mean way to contextualize the mass sexual abuse of children.

Nothing demonstrates the rotted mentality of even self-proclaimed conservative “intellectuals” like the fact that Sasse is on his deathbed and he and Douthat still seem to think the #1 issue facing America is “liberal arts professors who don’t vote the way I want them to vote.”

Really is one of the cooler cyberdecks I’ve seen lately

In 2025 dollars, this Toshiba laptop cost more than $18,000 when it was released.

For All Mankind has gotten kinda… soapy and melodramatic this season, right?

I love this piece and agree with all of it. Modern fandom is way past must trying to pick up on subtext and implication. I get the sense that many fandoms, especially on Reddit, would prefer a Wikipedia-style biography on every character instead of stories. It’s what soured me on Stars War and Trek.

Somehow, the Harper’s Letter people, if they ever deign to acknowledge things like this, still find a way to blame it on Oberlin sophomores or teens on Tumblr and not the actual Republican legislators engaged in rampant censorship or their own role in legitimizing it. Kind of remarkable, no?

1. Idaho banned the pride flag on government property. So Boise made the pride flag their official city flag, which allowed them to fly it. Then Idaho banned new city flags. So in response, Boise has now wrapped the poles themselves in rainbows! Subscribe to support our journalism.

I don’t want to start an argument, but games studies as a field really needs to move beyond analyzing ludonarative dissonance in 20-year-old games, even if that is what gets by the journal gatekeepers. It just isn’t surfacing new insights anymore, and video games just don’t need to be canonized.

ChatGPT alone is plausibly responsible for the deaths of more children than lawn darts, which were pulled from the market due to safety concerns.

How has no one made gummy tardigrades?

Most of the time, dogs don’t actually want to catch the car

Y’all need to decide whether teen pregnancy is good or bad before starting up on this fertility rate nonsense

This is *begging* to be copied as a cyberdeck, no? Replace the central game selector with a e-ink display, cut in a slide-out keyboard, keep the retractable controllers for RetroArch, and the whole thing could run off an SBC, if they’re ever affordable again.

I agree with all of this and think the arguments against reforming 230 highlight the weaknesses of our current legal speech regime and why it has become a vehicle for empowering abuse instead of empowering more speech.

She did the thing!

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." The real world outside DC's elite bubble know the deal: Elon's fascist funhouse is basically an ugly, diminished, toxic shell of Twitter's former self. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Hmm, do you think months of police violence, expulsions, deportations, explicit censorship, and billionaires targeting teenagers for lifelong employment blacklisting — all things that happened but Lauren Eagan couldn’t find space to mention here — did anything to tamp down protest energy on campus?