Mayor Zohran Mandami’s crime reduction strategy notches early win.

We're just going to be arguing about AI in one form or another for the rest of my life, aren't we.

Having Grok issue an “apology” is not just insulting and stupid (obviously Grok cannot actually “regret” anything, deeply or otherwise) but cowardly: It asks us to assign responsibility to an unconscious piece of software rather than the humans and institutions who should actually be blamed.

"However, an honest assessment of the past year suggests that the most immediate, real-world changes that students and schools have been experiencing have taken place at the state and local levels"

Assessing 2025, ‘you are not entitled to a response,’ & laughing reporters: 🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (01/02/2026) NEW: All the week's best education journalism, plus newsroom changes & juicy insights. alexanderrusso.substack.com/p/assessing-...

By far the most wholesome development of the last 18 months has been The Onion acquisition, followed by a pivot to "funny with a dose of leftism" instead of "leftism with a dose of funny".

What's the endgame here? The stock price is absurd so you can't really do an acquisition.

I think it's very possible that AI tools *in some circumstances* can provide useful learning support, especially when teacher/TA time is relatively scarce.

America First!

Maybe some day some public health professionals will get together and recommend some modest changes to best practices around airborne respiratory viruses.

little unclear on why we're doing congestion pricing discourse to close out 2025 but for what it's worth the largest benefits of congestion pricing accrue to drivers whose saved time from decongestion is more valuable than the congestion charge they pay, which turns out to be most of them

During the mayoral Purge I'm going to paint an unauthorized crosswalk

Holy shit it's real

Mamdani setting up a permitting reform and land inventory task force is some real sickos yes stuff.

I bet this is about Tottenham, but I like to imagine Greg is watching Tim Duncan midrange videos from 2013.

Protect The Needling At All Costs.

He's got a new National Geographic Show!

Hilarious that the New York Mayor has to pay $9 to complete the inaugural process

So movies are now an $8.5B industry instead of $10.5-11B.

Dudes Rock.

It's less of a Rocking Eve and more of a 360 Brand Activation Opportunity.

If you got to choose the location of your mayoral swearing in in your current city, where would it be?

You can't convince me "Tucker Wetmore" is a real person

A genre I need more of is people saying “if you google [term] at [timestamp] PM on December 31” and finishing with what Wikipedia rabbit hole they’d fallen down by midnight

This graph gets reposted a lot, but the author normalized the numbers to match total alcohol sales and assumed all drinkers were underreporting their consumption by the same fraction. The general trend is correct, but it isn't this sharp.

"The Space Science Data Coordinated Archive has been offline for several months. With it inaccessible and the library closing, NASA is losing both history and vital information for future space missions, according to Dr. Williams and other scientists."

Important (and correct) clarification from the Google AI -- dedicated music channels are shutting down but the flagship "mtv" (which has been a reality TV/pop culture channel with some music tossed in for decades) is still around.

Sound Transit turns one (1) shovel of earth on an ST3 project, before the 10 year anniversary of the vote.

The committee should have put Duke in the playoffs.

Why Jack Smith didn't immunize Roger Stone or Steve Bannon (which I think was a mistake).

sickos.jpg

Metrocard was an actual example of nyc implementing a world leading product if memory serves. Very few if any cities had digitized fare media.

Completion of the Sound Transit 2 line before school lets out. (Currently scheduled for 5/31 but we'll see) Value engineering on the ST3 expansion

If we lived in a just media landscape, this would now be a trilogy.

a billy joel writing in 2017 would definitely include "scaramucci." he would love chanting "scaramucci"

A Clay Davis spinoff would have been epic

Imagining explaining to my grandchildren that "The Seattle Times" used to be an Instagram account and before that they published an actual print newspaper. (No idea what it'll be in 2045 or 2050 or whatever)

Mark your calendars, Discourse Participants (via @iankarmel.bsky.social's Instagram)

"We talked to the last 12 people in America who answer a phone call from an unknown number about politics"

I do not own a pet snake and/or tarantula.

this guy is, unfortunately, my cousin

THE HATER BOWL

At the risk of doing #notallbillionaires, "real estate tycoon backs HRC over Trump and then supports Chris Christie in 2024" doesn't really make the news. The billionaires in the news are deeply weird even for billionaires!

CEQA gets most of the publicity, but New York’s environmental review law (SEQR) is a copy-paste of CEQA, only unlike in California, there have been essentially zero reforms to this law.

If you confidently predict that bond vigilantes will attack the world's most liquid financial market which also happens to be the world's most important reserve asset, as so many have done for so many decades, I'm going to ask you to show some work on what is changing here and now.

The wins against the Rams and Panthers means the Seahawks SOS and SOV is now respectable. Beat the 49ers and they're a downright very good team.

No. 40-21 (Cupid & Psyche, by Benjamin West, 1808, 📸 via @V0LofTheWild): www.artbutmakeitsports.com/p/the-best-o...

No. 60-41: (Self -Portrait Strangulation, by Andy Warhol, 1978) www.artbutmakeitsports.com/p/the-best-o...

no disagreements from me with the criticism in this article but having spent plenty of time myself living in single aspect open floorplan apartments I am just not super bothered by the prospect that we’re going to build some sub-par buildings on the path to re-learning how to build nice ones