The best way I know to summarize the various speculative booms of the last couple of decades is that we keep passing orders of magnitude in money.

An annoying part of Twitter has migrated to Bluesky: hyperbolic responses to display copy because no one reads articles anymore.

Update: "After these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism — or at best, authoritarianism," said Dreher. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/jd-vanc...

My first summer job at 13 was at a car wash. It sucked: the work was hard, in the sun all day, and the pay was like $3/hr. A lot of the guys I worked with had just gotten out of jail. How twisted must your moral compass be if you pass a car wash and think “F— those freeloaders!”

This headline didn’t age well

Someday “Westworld” is going to be available for streaming again, and it’s gonna blow people’s minds.

Straight Outta Pottersville

Fun fact I like to repeat every time the “filibuster” is all over my feed: the fist use of the word in US politics was 19th century private citizens who were raising armies to invade and take over Latin American countries.

This encapsulates the anti-Mamdani movement: He’s not the good guy he seems! Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Well, thank you, PBS. It does actually feel like a pigeon nature documentary kind of night, after all.

The thing the “people are fleeing NYC” and “I’d never live in NYC” crowd doesn’t know is that all New Yorkers love the fact that most people think it’s crazy to live here and wouldn’t know how. Because they’re not New Yorkers. Related: the best thing New York is good at is making new New Yorkers.

I buy stuff off Amazon more than I'd like to admit, so pretty familiar with their billion-dollar "shopping experience" and I can't say any of these would be the first thoughts to come to my mind about it assets.aboutamazon.com/2d/47/680122...

The New York Times once had one of the loudest voices in NYC local politics, especially on Democratic primaries, but ... if the 2025 mayoral race has proven anything, it's that the paper of record is now the view from Montclair. www.newsweek.com/conventional...

“I wouldn’t like for anything terrible to happen to this nice city you have going, you know what I mean?”

American history is kind of simple: The Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal” and Americans have been arguing about it ever since.

TIL: New York royal title namesakes Duke of York and Duke of Albany have both been tossed onto the British monarchy's ashheap of history. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/royals/...

The Venezuelan refugee crisis is one of the least understood and least told stories in the US, despite the cataclysm being one of the biggest drivers of our current politics. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezue...

These measurements are stupid and clickbait at best. I still can’t believe their value is still a hill that people choose to die on. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Superintelligence as conspiracy theory or how Silicon Valley got AGI-pilled www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

As usual, @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social said it better and earlier: www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-subway...

Why is a sac fly so hard?

moar baseball!

Why did I think anything else would happen?

Just saw *another* Cuomo ad showing a depopulated NYC … it’s like a vision for him

🛎️🛎️🛎️!

The strangest part of this ad is the “scary” part is just images of the subway. The same subway that me and my kids ride every day. The target audience of this ad is literally people scared of the subway, which is not the 3.4 million people who ride it every day. To me, it’s not dark at all.

... and Meta has decided to monetize AI

I love the Wikipedia image of the day widget because sometimes it shows you something like this

Another example of how big cities often hate democracy: judicial elections. This year I was offered to the choice of nine candidates to fill nine judgeships. Not much of a choice! I can however pick which party line (Democratic/Republican/Conservative) I prefer to vote for some of them.

In addition to enjoying watching a World Series for the first time in ages, I have also been enjoying watching a good old fashioned ad war between Sherrill and Ciatterelli

A glaring contradiction in Democratic politics is while "democracy is on the ballot" nationally, local Democrats are habitually fearful of too much democracy. Holding local races on off-years is a way to suppress the vote and keep city politics in the hands of a local political elite.

There's something sad about a centrist manifesto emanating from centrist political consultants in the year 2025. It's impossible to read them as a cri de couer; they're more like the swan song of a dying power base thrashing against the world's refusal to return to the way it was.

Here's a NYT article from 1907 in which they demonstrated the "wireless telephone": "A HINT OF WHAT MAY BE ... By and By You Can Talk to Your Wife When She's on a Steamer Out at Sea" (for a sense of how long ago this was: Teddy Roosevelt was President at the time)

“expedited review” sounds a lot like “managed democracy,” just saying

I was curious who runs the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation these days: a former Trump admin official and longtime GOP DC hand David Trulio. Earlier this week, as it happens, he hosted Eric Trump at the Reagan Library www.reaganfoundation.org/about-us/exe... www.vcstar.com/picture-gall...

Epic demonstration of the Streisand effect: GO!

The most important thing I’ve read to explain our present political predicament is a 2006 paper, “Separatjon of Parties, Not Powers” that argues that the Framer’s ideas about checks and balances in the Constitution three-branch design was a fantasy. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I took a look at Trump’s revised lawsuit against The New York Times that he refiled last week, and it’s one of the wildest defamation complaints I’ve ever read. 
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The NYPost’s “bombshell” poll is an excellent demonstration of the hole Cuomo’s mayoral campaign has been in. Their headline finding is that Cuomo could beat Mamdani if Sliwa drops out. (Let’s set aside that their poll still shows Mamdani beating him 44.6 to 40.7) nypost.com/2025/10/20/u...

Oddly, this data analysis did not include the primary measurement that people are interested in in elections: Who won? www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/o...

the current enduring retro 90s trend has brought this meme to life and I am Steve Buscemi

I just watched a Starbucks TV ad boasting how they now have “real pumpkin” in their pumpkin spice. This feels like a new low in the dumbing of America.

Manhattan vs Brooklyn

“TO THE DEFENDERS OF THE UNION” Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn

“I agree, by the way”

The more I think about it, the problem with “AI won’t take your job, someone who knows AI will” is that the person who figures out to do your job with AI will first take *your boss’s job* and then get tasked with laying off you and all your coworkers.

Gee, that news headline looks out of date. Oh, that dummy print edition is dated September 15, 2024, over a year ago. www.axios.com/2025/10/14/n...

This is quite the disclosure: If you, like the author, count the subject a close friend because of shared disgust at the people who criticize her, then you too will find this piece persuasive. Otherwise, you’re deranged.