At the end of the day, don’t we all just want a cottage in the Scottish Highlands, an Agatha Christie novel, an alluring snowstorm, a crackling fire, a kettle on the stove, and a basket of freshly-baked emotional support scones?

kind of amazing that everything trump does can be understood through the lens of narcissism and it's related needs (e.g., self aggrandizement, revenge, domination, grievance validation). i don't think any character has been so one-dimensional, not even wile e coyote or scrooge mcduck

NPR continues to bring you all the news you can use about Nazgul.

Respect the troops by making them bid against each other to see who will take the smallest bonus and screw over everyone else 🙄

A British grandmother with a valid visa detained by ICE for 6 weeks. "So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. 'Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,' Karen says."

It's slipping out of the 'top news' cycle. I hate the way news orgs work the public. It shapes social media focus almost lockstep.

this is how i witnessed an ICE kidnapping in western mass, i paid a $250 bail for a woman accused of trespassing (right...) and ICE snatched her as soon as we got out the door

Trans people for the past decade: This isn't actually about sports or ensuing there's appropriate screening before someone starts medically transitioning. The goal is to effectively criminalize the existence of all trans people. Very Reasonable Journalists: You're crazy

A Slow-Motion Eulogy for the TV Industry It really is such a bummer … but at least a handful of executives are getting crazy rich 🙃 By @rickporter.bsky.social

Between social media, apps, the removal of tactile knobs in cars, AI slop, short-form video... really everything. Everything about these designs signals active disdain for older people.

I think this is the likeliest story of what's happening at present: bsky.app/profile/reic...

I keep this image on my desktop now because of how often I have to use it.

as the facct rebuttal period is in session, let me repeat what i've always said: critique is service! identifying & mapping the problem space is in & of itself a legitimate scientific contribution. we can’t proceed to “solve” a problem if we don't have a clear & comprehensive understanding of it 1/

Flood watch through Saturday with ice jams spotted along Fall Creek. Alert officials if you see water backing up behind ice jams in area creeks, and check basements for signs of flooding in low-lying neighborhoods. www.14850.com/022144958-fl...

U.S. was ONLY int'l destination that had tourism decline in 2025. Gee... I wonder why.

An 1871 editorial article in the New York Times argued that women should not be granted the right to vote or hold political office because they *check notes* wear high heels and so are clearly senseless and just mindlessly follow trends. Misogyny is so bizarre.

A lot of people are what I would call “privacy doomers”. They have such a cynical view of everything that they think everything is equally bad and there’s nothing that can be done

I honestly think one reason Millennials are so angry about all this is that many of us grew up during the brief period in American history where the official line was that we had won history *because* of our values, and most of us actually internalized that.

It does not matter how many times I have done this in my career, I will *always* feel like a weirdo sending out interview requests.

The worst figures on campus arguing that campuses had become overrun with wokeness were all best buddies with Epstein. Quelle surprise. www.salon.com/2026/02/19/j...

Genuinely after a *long* time on this form of social media (I was something like Twitter user 10,000), I can *strongly* advise you to block early and often. You have no responsibility at all to engage with people you don’t like. If they’re someone you would avoid in real life, just block them.

i know truth and politics are frenemies at best but to say scotus struck a blow for the rule of law - much less democracy - is simply not true. this was a win for global capital. and that’s fine, as far as it goes. but don’t kid yourself about what happened here. it wasn’t about the republic.

Question for newsletterers: Let's say you have a friend (let's call him "me") who is planning to move off Substack to either ghost or beehiiv. Your friend is functionally illiterate with all-things-code, so he should pick the option that is more total-idiot-friendly. Which site would you recommend?

They're having trouble getting jurors in one of the cases against Elon Musk because "so many people hate him so much" www.law360.com/articles/244...

I suspect we'll start to see some resignations in the coming weeks, as the people who have prospects besides the Trump grift that they can return to start reconsidering their life choices.

Rachel Notley is not mincing words:

extremely funny that the Supreme Court says absolutely nothing about how the tariffs are supposed to be reimbursed ahead of the endless flood of lawsuits that are coming the administration is already running out of lawyers! have fun with that

WATCH: “Johnny, you blatantly lied.” Rep. Johnny Garrett, running for Congress, RUNS 🏃🏻 from us + Tennessean reporter Vivian Jones to 🦆 Duck Q’s about his lie that undocumented immigrants commit 50% of crimes in TN (Per the AG it’s 2%, 90% of those non-violent/traffic. Also we’d love details.)

one thing that drives me insane about modern platforms is how many default to "3 months" or "1 year" instead of showing the actual date of a post, very frustrating

The three journalists who helped ruin Ava Cordero's life when she tried to stop Epstein in 2006 *currently* work at NBC News, New York Magazine, and News Corp Australia. The one at NBC News is covering... Epstein.

The Supreme Court:

yesterday i woke up and the first thing thomas told me after "good morning" was "they arrested prince andrew" this morning it was "the supreme court struck down the tariffs" what shall tomorrow bring??

It’s giving middle passage

I’m always heartened to see fair critiques of leftist politicians in office from the left, because the actual embrace of democratic values like holding people in office accountable is one of the key differences between the right and the left

We use 'vice signalling' mainly to mean edgy posts or eating at Chick-fil-a etc., but really it means that to succeed in certain groups you *need* to show that you enjoy causing suffering. This is as true of the News of the World as it is of SS units or just groups of lads telling rape jokes.

New from me: What do Jeff Bezos, Bari Weiss, and RFK Jr. have in common? Each has used the trust trap: they bemoan a loss in institutional legitimacy as a justification for radical actions that further undercut trust in their institutions. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-trust-...

“Umm dangerous…cause…left…and nice…” astute political observations here

the main reason to go after the rich is that if you don’t the entire structure of your society is predicated on the whims of people who are entirely disconnected from ordinary life billionaires are simply too dangerous to exist, and any budgetary stuff that comes out of it is just a bonus

This is actually bad news because everything is terrible and we should be spending money to fix it, not hoarding it to impress The Market! www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

This picture is so crazy that if you had this as a scene in a made-for-TV dystopian scifi movie in like 2014 people would switch channels because you’d ruined the suspension of disbelief.

It didn’t go wrong he did what he was hired to do. There’s this weird insistence that Bezos didn’t want to turn it into Der Sturmer

It's funny how during the Me Too era we talked non-stop about Catch and Kill, them Bezos and Ellison decides to catch and kill whole news outlets and pundits are like "what are they doing? What's theirs master plan?"

Build it

The UK's problem for decades has been underinvestment. So graduates are coming out of college, laden with debt, looking for jobs that don't exist because we've been rapidly declining towards a low-skills economy

The heist movie almost writes itself.

"One of my little theories is that these are all horrible people, who have surrounded themselve with horrible people, and they have no idea that not everyone lives like that ." www.eschatonblog.com/2026/02/the-...

Channel 4 report started, “It was once unthinkable that a man born a prince could end up a prisoner.” Well that depends how far back you go.

Sometimes when the dog goes berserk out of nowhere I get sad and think maybe he just had a lifesaving idea that could change countless lives and he’s trying to tell me and I don’t speak dog