seems kinda DEI www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

The Good Place’s Janet pretty much nailed AI in 2016

Read this right now if you (like me 10 mins ago) hadn’t read this before

I used to cringe whenever I noticed the typos that typically litter my sent emails. But there's been a subtle shift lately, as I think, well, at least they know it was an email from *me* and not AI.

I just heard the first Mr Softee of spring!

I remember scratching my head a lot when @katie-drummond.bsky.social posted a bunch of politics jobs after she was named Wired EIC in 2023. Today, I can't think of a recent editorial bet that's paid off more. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/b...

Meta's hiring and layoff whiplash numbers are crazy: per Benedict Evans, Meta has laid off 49k people in the last six years which is more than the 45k employees it had in 2019

A confession: I don’t listen to podcasts. I’ve never been able to find the right time in my day to listen to an hour or so of people talking. I do realize that in the year 2026, this makes me odd.

I added a widget with the price of oil to my home screen because I realized that is the best way to do a “has anything completely insane happened?” check when I pick up my phone.

This bit in Semafro tonight reminded me that one of Peter Kaplan’s wisest decisions at The New York Observer was to ban Donald Trump quotes. A frequent job for a young writer there was to get as many famous(ish) names to engage on whatever that week’s m cover story social trend.

random search: the time Jeffrey Epstein told Peter Thiel, on an email thread setting up a lunch, that sifting through the Panama Papers leak was "keeping me busy" jmail.world/thread/vol00...

It's pretty remarkable that this sentence doesn't come until the end of the 14th graf of the story: "Investigators were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/u...

Trump’s non-endorsement in the Texas GOP Senate Primary has led to one of the bloodiest intramural GOP fights of the midterm season and a kind of natural experiment: What happens to Republican politics when Trump exits the political stage?

Deadwood re-watch report: Swearengen-Farnum scenes feel very AI chatbot to me, including (and I am paraphrasing) ‘stop repeating what I just said’ frustrations

"I see as much misery outta them movin’ to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm."

I will never buy a cat toy that interests my cats more than the packaging and box it comes in, will I?

seeing someone who reads Axios via the Bloomberg terminal is wild

“I am learning that being an American means that I have to be worried for the people I love.”

“Since 2015, the median age of an Economist subscriber has risen from 51 to 61” So, basically, they haven’t added any new readers in a decade? www.semafor.com/article/02/2...

Hiring 1,800 snow shovelers at $30/hr for, I dunno, 20 hours each costs $1 million. They each get $600 they probably weren’t expecting this month. And a bunch of snow shoveling happens, too.

What they used to call a “bleg”: Anyone know if the elevated subway lines (mine are the J and M) are likely to be running normal in the morning? None of the MTA sources I’ve looked at have addressed this admittedly niche transpo concern!

There is way, way, way too much “straight line to infinity” thinking about AI. Like this piece positing that all white-collar workers will be laid off in the next two years because AI has become so good, cheap, and ubiquitous doesn’t ask how those laid-off employees will respond.

Maybe the main difference between Bluesky and X is simply that the people here are angry and depressed about the state of the world and the people on the other site think the good guys are winning?

The “Democrats are forcing us to do something you will hate” Trump admin playbook does not seem to have a very successful track record

I plan to offer my condolences to Canada by binging on Shoresy for the rest of the day.

Cybertruck vs Ford Edsel sales. (Note: the U.S. population in 1960 was half the size as it is now.)

The backstory of the Sony Hack was a lot less interesting than I was hoping. But it does remind me that in a lot of ways, the Sony hack, Wikileaks State Dept cables, and the DNC emails hack were the cultural forerunners of the Epstein files. www.wsj.com/tech/cyberse...

Belarussia couldn’t get to the Board of Peace thing because their visas didn’t come through. 🤦🏻‍♂️ www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

✨If I Style Guided the World! ✨

Percentages, if they're not attached to hard numbers, are always bullshit. I assume you're trying to obfuscate something, or that you're just terrible at communicating information.

Another style rule I wish I could permanently make: never ever state an increase of a percentage in percentage! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/n...

Stumbled over @timbl.bsky.social’s “Brief History of the World Wide Web” which a hilarious title because it was written in 1994, which is well before anyone had ever used a web browser, but still four years after he started working on it. www.w3.org/DesignIssues...

If the sadly underrated "Westworld" had premiered in 2023 instead of 2016, it would have been a huge cultural phenomenon because it gets so much of the AI discourse right. Like, here, here's how a script writer works in the show... looks like vibe coding, no?

One of my pet theories is that "live TV" was a mass hallucination that existed for about 75 years and has now gone extinct.

Science: Mars is a cosmic hellscape so dangerous that if it once supported life, virtually all traces of it would have been wiped out by radiation damage. Tech bros: Occupy Mars!! science.nasa.gov/blogs/scienc...

A simple hypothesis to explain the current national polling: Trump won in 2024 with an exceptionally effective negative campaign against Biden. But once Biden exited the political stage, “Sleepy Joe” attacks were no longer salient, and Trump had no positive argument to sustain that prior support.

For a year or more after the Wikileaks post of State Department cables, they were the source of a steady stream of news stories on all sorts of foreign policy topics. Thats what the Epstein Files is turning into: a giant heap of information that will be a rich source for journalists for years.

If I could make one copy edit correction forever: T-shirt is *always* spelled with a capital T because it refers to the shape of the shirt. A lower-case t-shirt would have short arms and a really weird waist.

The leopards were eating people's faces, for real! www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

my Bad Bunny listening continues to be off the charts

read this in @katz.theracket.news ‘s latest and though, oh, huh, I wonder what the 1982 Up With People Halftime Show was like and I was not prepared. at. all. you can watch it here if you dare: youtu.be/pxK3qTsj_eE?... theracket.news/p/the-most-a...

I’ve been a longtime Olympic primetime stan no matter how out of fashion it goes. But the Peacock replays have been my go-to for Milano-Cortina. They’re pretty compact (usually -1 hour) and most blessedly: virtually ad free. Plus they have a bunch of extras like the arena during ad breaks.

The NYT Ed board's about face on pot reads a lot like peopel who believe in the lab leak or the Bell Curve or reject vaccines or "wokism": it seems to be mostly animated by some still very hurt feelings about being called "wrong" www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/o...

I can’t believe I’m looking forward to balmy 37 degree weather

1. Kendrick 2. Prince 3. Bad Bunny 4. Dre/Eminem

What you’re missing on the other show

We Accept EBT!

That’s the first time I’ve seen an ad for butts

If you’re paying to stream the Super Bowl, me and my HD antenna feel bad for you.

It’s 2026. I think we should be able to have a reasonable common definition for what “canceling” is. Because changing the name of a dorm at a school I’ve never heard of isn’t it. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...