May we never run out of the “I could survive a Chotiner interview. I’m built different.” people.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

The NYT liveblog on the autism press conference is a fascinating read -- largely because it's written by health reporters and not political reporters. Look at how direct and appropriately shocked these posts are! www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

Ah, fall, when a young man’s fancy turns to soup.

dudes rock

Good thread on why I'm waiting for 26.1 across the board mastodon.online/@nikitonsky/1...

While people are suddenly and uncharacteristically paying attention to media regulation, please take a moment to notice all the massive harm Brendan Carr has done to consumer protection and public safety as well me, back in April:

Executive cowardice is solving the “too many subscriptions problem” pretty soon the only thing I’m gonna pay for is PBS, Criterion, and the hour I spend a week fiddling with bittorrent.

I’ve seen a few “smart glasses are good now???” reviews this week and not a single one mentioned they are a physical node on the most grotesque, exploitative surveillance network devised by capitalism and overseen by amoral sociopaths.

"Fascism is a temper tantrum disguised as an ideology" is a great line

This is obvious and dumb and clownish in all the usual Trumpian ways he's too ignorant and self involved to give a shit about. The important message to corporate media is: one day you will need something — a merger approved, a license renewed — better obey in advance to make sure you get it. www.bl

You should cook Brussels sprouts and also subscribe to Mike’s magnificent musings.

Local media getting gobbled up by right wing petty tyrants is one of the more unremarked contributors to the 21st century rise of fascism. Everybody knows Murdoch and Zuck, plugged in folks know about Sinclair Media. Almost nobody knows Nexstar.

I will max out my contribution to any political candidate who runs on throwing these ICE sociopaths in jail.

Wonder if it’s sinking yet for all the shitty comedians who backed Trump because some libs hurt their feelings.

This gets to my annoyance with the lionizing of Kirk perfectly. He wasn’t elevating political discourse on college campuses. He was humiliating college kids using his massive dark money funded propaganda apparatus.

In the same way Instagram is the worst social network, this will be a much bigger disaster than Musk buying Twitter. There are TikTok alternatives built on the same foundations as Bluesky @skylight.social @sprk.so

the only consistent lessons i think you can really draw from sarah's experiences with reprogrammed terminators 1) always jailbreak 2) prefer reliable last-gen products to bleeding edge 3) invest energy refining prompts to get results 4) don't anthropomorphize but don't be mean 5) run local

Coates just doesn't miss. He doesn't. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

A story no one is talking about - last week's high school shooting in Denver. 16-year-old white boy radicalized online and promoting white supremacist and anti-Semitic conspiracies, inspired by - and a fan of - terrorists who promoted replacement theory. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Use of the word "evil" in official congressional e-newsletters, over time, by party

The six year old came home and declared he wanted to make his own lunch for tomorrow, assembled a pickle and cream cheese bagel sandwich, pretzels, dried apricot, apple sauce, and a bit of turkey jerky. I have nothing to add to this development?

Everything is completely nuts right now, so I thought I’d take a minute to celebrate a few good things I’ve been enjoying lately. dansinker.com/posts/202…

Finally wrote something responding to that silly piece from a few weeks ago about why everyone should stay on X (they still wanted to call it Twitter, but Twitter is dead). You can stay in the system designed to hold you back, or you can be a part of building something better. It's time to build.

Here's how to support my work: I'll be teaching a version of my Columbia class on Race, Media and International Affairs 101 and 102 next month for @resistanceschool.bsky.social. The course is online/ hybrid. Deadline is Sept. 19th! Sign up! www.resistancesummerschool.com/fall-2025-re...

Firing a Black woman for quoting Kirk’s horrific statements about Black women is insane. It seems the Washington Post would rather perform politeness (and demand that the people Kirk harmed do it too) that tell the truth: karenattiah.substack.com/p/the-washin...

Anytime I see someone wearing these fascist surveillance glasses I’m just gonna yell “Hey guys! I found Waldo!” and point until they take em off.

“How you die does not redeem how you lived.”

Seems only fair, given my professed love for Thanksgiving, that the neighborhood turkeys should turn my newly seeded lawn into a buffet.

"Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them." Always read @jamellebouie.net messaging-custom-newsletters....

NEW: Since giving NYT hacked info from a Nazi and sending a swastika push alert, Substack's extremism is in the spotlight again. An investigation finds Substack is a haven for newsletters dedicated to white supremacy—with the co-founders' blessing. A collab between @katz.theracket.news and me:

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

This is starting to remind me of the press's complete befuddlement about the varieties of the counterculture in the late sixties. A transformation is happening in American society that's absolutely essential to understand, and the elite media is absolutely unequipped to understand it, or to learn.

Everyone capable of explaining this to a mainstream audience — which is to say former Gawker writers — has been blacklisted by traditional media.

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but this being the biggest story in the world at present really speaks to how much Twitter still serves as a universal assignments editor for English-language journalists.

An antisemite shot two kids in Colorado, at least one of whom is Jewish. The White House “fighting antisemitism” doesn’t care, because the shooter was a student radicalized online into far right beliefs, which the regime is cool with, rather than a student verbally criticizing Israeli govt policy.

Don't sleep on the chance that the Ellisons could, in a year or two, own CBS, CNN, HBO, *and* TikTok. That'd be *literally* unprecedented media concentration in U.S. history — and all that's needed is enough Trump ass-kissing to ensure he doesn't get mad and sic Brendan Carr on him.

pro tip: if you mute the name of the dude everyone’s talking about on here, the more nuanced, subtle and/or insightful comments on the news of the day suddenly rise to the top of your feed and so much bs disappears — there is little to no downside.

Was curious how media covered the fatal shooting of Malcolm X in 1965: "His Life Story: A Study in Hate" One AP report on the murder opened: "Malcolm X, fiery renegade of the Negro radical movement, was assassinated Sunday..." Philly Inquirer called him a "Merchant of Venom"

Blacksky is doing the most interesting, innovative work on the decentralized social web these days. Pay attention to not just what they’re doing but how they are doing it.

The idea of right-wing hypocrisy is comforting because it suggests that the right could be accountable to some kind of principle or worldview that could be tested and rejected. This is preferable to the truth: their reality is organized by power and expediency.

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Not only is the Blacksky PDS the largest community server on atproto, it’s also larger than 29.9K Fediverse servers as well (incl. Mastodon, Lemmy, etc) They had 8 years and couldn’t do what we did in 1 month. And we’re just getting started.

If you see a big story happening that's paywalled and you can't find a gift link, head to sill.social/links/trending. For example, here's the gift link Sill has for the big WSJ story. www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

I've long maintained the Times Style (and real estate) section is staffed by secret marxists determined to expose the plutocracy for all their petty tackiness in order to pave way for the revolution and looks like they're crankin' bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamda...

“That Clegg failed to convince Zuckerberg of any of this makes his story almost a tragedy: he is apparently constantly sitting at the right hand of the powerful, unable to influence them. Perhaps he just likes the view from the seat next to the top chair.”

So I'm grumpy that we seem to be once again creating a dynamic in our party where the people who got to the right answer sooner are marginalized for doing so, while people who were wrong get credit for changing their minds once it became obvious they were wrong. (See also NAFTA, Iraq War, Gaza.)

The reason the eugenics couple get so much press is because there’s an elite constituency that desperately wants an aristocratic conservatism to exist, rather than the tacky/gaudy jet-ski owner petit-bourgeois/lumpenprole movement that actually does.

As a parent you like to think you're preparing your children for the world, knowing you can't protect them from everything only give them the tools to be their best most authentic selves in a culture that wants anything but that. And then your son is singing Benson Boone at 7:00am on a Sunday.