Brighton Beach mentioned!!

Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system.

New Year’s Eve is the perfect day to talk about language ideology: Across the English-speaking world, we are about to sing a song that nobody understands, but that most people assume is in English.

I always tell students if you ask a good question the article will write itself

Scientists Suggest Hunter Biden Laptop Linked to Gatherer Biden Fax Machine

Among the groups suspended: World Vision International (an evangelical Christian org), American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker org), Caritas Internationalis (Catholic, based at the Vatican) and the Near East Council of Churches.

147 - Communal Eating * Without communal eating, no human group can hold together.

Great question from the group chat: What gift do you give somebody to celebrate their taking a vow of poverty?

Liturgy six winged Seraph https://www.wikiart.org/en/natalia-goncharova/liturgy-six-winged-seraph

Mykola Pymonenko, Carolers, 1880s

A kid I went to high school with got the nickname “Chops Bustable” cause someone thought it was really easy to bust his chops

Merry Christmas, everybody.

5 - Lace of Country Streets The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

A cool thing about being Orthodox is that we venerate St. Nicholas with great seriousness because of “his countless miracles on behalf of the poor, the abandoned, of those suffering injustice and of all who call upon his fatherly protection” For example…

@sirskeltal.bsky.social as a person who picked up all his vocal mannerisms from radio announcers, I think your voice as heard on TAL is groovy

Ezra Klein Episcopalian arc

All the cool church people at coffee hour were jazzed to go watch the Amanda Seyfried Shakers musical today, and here’s one of them posting about it in a semiprofessional capacity!

🤔

hope Jacques Pépin is having a great day

It's honestly going to be funny when these DOGE right wing carnivore diet style morons accidentally annihilate the US cattle industry, arguably the bastion of reactionary landed fascism in the vast majority of the United States

this is kind of like how Henry Kissinger dated a bunch of actresses and models in the 70s

I am far from the first person to point it out, but I think I will not be tuning in for a discussion of God sponsored by a bank.

shake a hand shake a hand

"We don't want to be Luddites --" brother, Luddites were opposed to bosses concentrating wealth by using technology to make inferior product with warehouses fulls of starving exploited child labor. You don't have to wear the team jersey but respect the game.

It's astonishing that somehow we have whole swathes of the political class that have not managed to connect "everything seems like a scam now" to a useful political platform.

Half-convinced I should insist on showing my passport to the idle National Guard in Metro stations, unsolicited, out of spite.

This is what it comes down to: Do you believe all trans people are lying or deluded, or not?

Fun fact: you can automatically generate esoteric texts by machine translating Arabic Wikipedia pages on grammatical terms.

I am 34 but on the other hand I am ineligible for the presidency

Mid-Advent reminder that @hundredsofbeavers.bsky.social is a Christmas movie (once it is Christmastime, which of course it is not yet)

there is a LinkedIn year in review and they make “you’re still unemployed!” look so glam

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

The US Administration has banned Americans from *adopting babies* from much of the African continent. Adopting. Babies. What trait do those babies have that, when they grow up as fully American adults, would make them a threat to our country in any form?

Two things: *They are only cutting these funds in seven states that lean Democratic *Support for people with disabilities was a relatively bipartisan position. Trump has repeatedly made clear he does not see them as people worthy of support or dignity.

this is what every podcast i don’t already listen to looks like to me

In DC, Trump officials celebrated the decimation of USAID with a sheet cake. In South Sudan, USAID budget cuts closed a health clinic in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Tor Top had to take his sick mother to the hospital, 8 hours away. She died on the way. www.propublica.org/article/usai...

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

This hits on the real danger of generative AI: not that it can ever equal a truly competent and creative human's work but that its output can be middling enough to meet the frequently already dialed in expectations for mediocrity that are typical of so many sectors of modern life

David Ogden Stiers as a Russian Fabergé hunter on this episode of Murder, She Wrote: “I must find egg!!”

“I couldn’t be less interested in computers and fake things.”

At my second Social Security office in three months to get a number issued to my baby (the hospital’s request simply… vanished?) and suddenly paranoid that DOGE robots somehow chewed up our data.

This is where the Soviets were when I was born; I would have starved to death if we hadn’t had an American on the way with a suitcase full of formula. (True story.)

Bedtime stories led me to research the mystery man who translated Pushkin’s fairy tales into English for Soviet publishers in the ’70s, about whom no information appears in English, and little in Russian. The translator active today appears to be a Kremlin dupe. Do I have to do everything?

a lot of AI search results have kind of a mom vibe. like if you ask your mom ‘was mel brooks in death by lightning?’ she might be like ‘did mel brooks die of lightning? no i don’t think so!’ it’s much less cute coming from the entire world of searchable knowledge tho

taking steps to make the legal immigration process simply work the way *the average american thinks it already does* would be the single most progressive government action of my lifetime.

*sounds the James C. Scott klaxon*

Obsessed with the quiet comedy of the Montessori parents admitting defeat at the hands of the Fisher-Price Kick & Play: www.reddit.com/r/Montessori...