All the great prestige shows came from showrunners who worked on 22 episode seasons, which makes sense: film school teaches "how to write movies," how to write tv seems like it's a skill learned on the job, primarily in a writers' room.

"Ask a coach what FPC2 means for their athlete and the answer involves an integral."

Learning “what makes good leftovers” is a key part of adulthood IMO

PHIMBYs will really be like 'you believe in permitting more market rate housing? That pales in effectiveness to my strategy, mass provision of socialized housing' and then not provide socialized housing

🤫 Subway archaeologist Max Diamond makes an interesting discovery at Canal Street station. This is the next secret from #50SecretsofTransit, a new series celebrating the 50th anniversary of the #NYTransitMuseum.

Big news for small cogs

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/13/s...

go cavs @nycwater.bsky.social

That’s @mariaa.bsky.social’s music!

second roll of the month was taken out in iowa jamellebouie.net/blog/2026/5/...

The overton window has moved a lot! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Just remember, next time they come asking you to subscribe, what it gets you. Credulous reporting on a pre-print, whose results are derived entirely from a simulation (whose code isn’t available!), used to launder NIMBY talking points

I have escalated my aversion to Spotify.

When there isn't enough housing, it gets rationed, and in a world where lots of people own brownstones, we ration it by price. And thanks to the weight of racism and history, white people are richer on average. This is downstream of inadequate construction throughout NYC and the whole metro area.

I wonder how many people keep a vintage car because they think "it'll be worth something, someday," but end up spending more than that in maintaining it? (eg, the below)

Ow #bikesky (Gravel ride around cold spring. Some bushwhacking)

Ow #bikesky (Gravel ride around cold spring. Some bushwhacking)

One of the rules of good writing: "always leave 'em wanting more."

10 years ago was 2016; I was in grad school then. This was not the case. Maybe 30+ years ago?

Probably related, from several months ago:

"Welcome to Big 10 football school. We've won national championships, and our library has one of the most extensive collections of [obscure language] on Earth. We also have a cutting edge hospital right next to campus."

Hot(?) take: the iPod was more revolutionary than the iPhone

Hot(?) take: the iPod was more revolutionary than the iPhone

The presence/absence of FTL travel/communication creates four scenarios for governance: FTL travel + comm: big polities, gov can respond appropriately to crises FTL travel only: big polities, every crisis gets maximal response FTL comm: small polities, long response to crises Neither: Tom’s post

Boston, MA

*Pulls pin from discourse grenade and throws it* Just run a regression and call it selection on observables. Now it’s causal, problem solved!

It will always be my mission any time a Roy Lichtenstein theft appears in my feed to remind the world others did it first and better — in this case Russ Heath, artist for the story "Aces Wild," written by Hank Chapman, and published in All-American Men of War #89 (Jan-Feb 1962).

“Some nights” by fun., “Call me maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Sugar we’re going down” by Fallout boy Basically, you need something anthemic, that everyone will sing along to when it comes on at a house party

Views from the Mt Beacon fire tower

New York suburbs remain undefeated in putting up a wall and refusing to build

Pic unrelated

Data from hundreds of thousands of ancient coins is used to reconstruct granular time series of trade and real consumption around the Mediterranean from the 4th to the 10th century, from @johannesmboehm.bsky.social and Thomas Chaney www.nber.org/papers/w35156

Touch of Funk (@daveweigel.bsky.social's DJ alter ego)dropped a new mashup (70s Funk x contemporary pop). It's good!

Touch of Funk (@daveweigel.bsky.social's DJ alter ego)dropped a new mashup (70s Funk x contemporary pop). It's good!

new reaction image just dropped

This is interesting. It's not *good,* but it's interesting

a "canvas hack?" I didn't realize we were discussing Thomas Kinkade!

teaching henchmen via Zoom? That's a... ... ... ... MOOC for mooks 😎

The one professor with a box of bluebooks who keeps all their grades in an Excel spreadsheet

this is also one of my hobbyhorses. you want a better caliber of lawmaker? you want to reduce the odds of corruption? pay them more. a lot more.

Every Jacobin article is the same article. This reads like a pathetic attempt by a middle aged professor to hit on a 22 year old at a dive bar.

a "canvas hack?" I didn't realize we were discussing Thomas Kinkade!

teaching henchmen via Zoom? That's a... ... ... ... MOOC for mooks 😎

My favorite example is We totally changed the system of government from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution in the 1780s, because it turns out, you need to collect taxes!

Subway lines in Manhattan occasionally punch through some quite deep rock sections, e.g. north of 168th, but in Brooklyn and Queens they prefer to avoid or sneak through gaps in the Harbor Hill Moraine, the big pile of dirt dumped on Long Island by retreating glaciers about 15,000 years ago.

I think the Great Society and Civil Rights wouldn’t happen in the same way; Vietnam still happens & becomes a quagmire (JFK was a hawk), and you still see Nixon in 1968.

KOTOR was one of the last things to make Star Wars feel *bigger.* The Rakatan, the Star Forge, more Mandalorians, and no Solos or Skywalkers!

Finally uploaded a revised version of this preprint on parameter identifiability arxiv.org/abs/2502.04867. Approach called 'invariant image reparameterisation' though 'image' used in mathematical sense not picture sense. Took me a while to revise for various reasons, but fairly happy with it now