Weiss, men say, only fools rush in

What a sweet story

Finished Adèle by Leila Slimani today. Reminded me of Anaïs Nin and to a lesser extent Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras. Or maybe Catherine Breillat films. Frank (and French) writing about female desire and states of compulsion.

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/13/s...

Does the White Sox recognition of Pope Leo mean the Cubs have to commit to recognise the Avignon papacy?

For the longest time, accents sat pretty at the top of the chart of things people claimed not to have even though they did. Then bam! Pronouns hit the top of the chart out of nowhere

I have heard a lot of critiques of Bluesky, some more, some less valid, but “like an upscale mall” is definitely a new one

A spy scandal involving Oxford is very Le Carré coded (insert Smiley face emoji)

I am going to spread the gospel of sepak takraw, a sport where the typical action looks like this

Sad to see a prominent Daryl lose his job

Someone on Reddit approximated the Prince symbol in ASCII and I was super-impressed: Ƭ̵̬̊

There are so many insane wildly misleading stories coming out about data centers almost every day now that I'm mostly having to give up on commenting on them to focus on actually getting blog posts out, but it feels like a tsunami. This is one of them. Will go into it in a thread below.

Poisoned by the web

My funny little memory of Ted Turner is from a Nuclear Threat Initiative function at the Swedish Embassy (he cofounded NTI) about 15 years ago. Was waiting in the restroom line, and Turner finished his turn and walked by me. I said “hi Mr Turner” and he winked at me and gave me the dual finger-guns

a critical difference between woke 1 and woke 2 is the understanding that woo is something to be fought tooth and nail

If you reject a shot and your child dies as a direct result, you caused your child’s death

Since it’s Star Wars Day, here’s a photo of my personal porg

Name your favourite black & white film: À bout de souffle (1960)

Star Control II All the Sierra games but especially Police Quest, Quest for Glory, and the Dagger of Amon Ra (underappreciated game) Sentinel Worlds: Future Magic Lemmings The Monkey Island games

Mad Men The Simpsons It’s a Sin Blackadder Monty Python’s Flying Circus State of Play Collateral Pride and Prejudice This Life Lovesick The Wire The Sopranos 30 Rock M*A*S*H Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Another great AI water article from an actual scientist. Great to see californiawaterblog.com/2026/04/26/a...

Thinking your AI is alive and conscious is both a pathetic fallacy, and _the_ pathetic fallacy

One thing I regularly think about is how poorly represented huge chunks of the economy are on social media or even legacy news media and how that skews our perceptions of the economy.

“Two down, top left, that’s all you baby,” said Jeremy Weinrib, who urged Ora to pop a bottle of champagne in celebration of her description as “Competition TV judge songstress Rita.”

Predict Halley’s Comet, get everyone to call it Daryl’s Comet, and try to avoid being burned at the stake for my magick

Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s one of the books in my Women's Studies class was "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, a collection of essays edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky. Really stuck with me, as the best college assigned readings do

Exciting news in Seattle! Banning cars from Pike Place Market from 10am-4pm saw retail sales rise 9.2% and restaurant sales rise 10.2% last summer. Now, the city moves to make the pedestrianization more permanent.

Twin Daughter: “Argh! An ant! Get rid of it!” Twin Son: “Don’t kill the ants! The ants are helpful!” Me (blowing gently to shoo the ant away): “The ants are our friends… they’re blowing in the wind”

For the love of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Montresor!

Friendster lives! And to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life. ca98am79.medium.com/i-bought-fri...

One of the annoying things about growing older is that the longsightedness doesn’t cancel out the shortsightedness

The news of Alex Cora’s firing reminds me, almost 4 years ago I had the greatest job interview of my life. Received an email from the Red Sox out of the blue saying that they were looking for a Director of Baseball Initiatives and asking if this was of interest to me 

I like the way the map of the Gambia has straight lines in the west and then curves in the east. The Gambia indeed knows when to hold ‘em, knows when to fold ‘em

Cars and driving have become a perfect microcosm of the growing reflexive rejection of any social responsibility at all I think you can trace a direct line from the COVID convoys to Ford ordering all the speed cameras removed

As I like to say, car brain, especially in the U.S. is a bipartisan affliction. Decades of auto industry propaganda and car dominant policies have poisoned brains so much that people really have trouble viewing a future beyond car dependency.

Things that make Singaporeans laugh: seeing Lanjiao, Longmen Province on a map

Today is Indie Bookstore Day! There’s a DC Bookstore Crawl going on for those in the DMV www.dcbookstorecrawl.com/map

Oh baby you… got what I need… Give me just Alsace-Lorraine Give me just Alsace-Lorraine – Count Otto von Biz Markie

Who called them art museum heists and not haute takes?

My anecdotal sense of Reddit’s growth is it’s the most topic-driven platform and that makes its feeds probably the best at surfacing stuff of interest (Side note: It’s funny to say legacy platforms are losing ground when Reddit is older than Twitter/X)

I know people joke about Tim Cook being Tim Apple but do people named Philip working on Claude introduce themselves as Phil Anthropic?

I want to throw a real Great Gatsby-themed party. Come dressed in a way that expresses the hollowness and spiritual emptiness of the American dream! The signature cocktail will be called the Green Light and it’s out of reach at the end of the bar.

Such a great article ranking Shakespeare’s plays qua stage plays. It also did leave me more than a bit jealous of all the great productions that Michael Billington has seen – Anthony Hopkins / Judi Dench as Antony & Cleopatra sounds amazing www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-int...

With pengs like this, who needs enemas?

In Detroit for a conference and couldn’t resist getting a couple of coney dogs

I have this issue too. I wrote to my son's school to complain that they need to stop using these "inspirational" quotes that are incorrectly and nonsensically attributed to famous people. One of the key things I want my kid to learn in school is how to cite sources correctly!

I preferred it when I thought the Mahan competing to be Governor of California was the author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

On the negative mirror, I also hate when people reflexively go to “grift” as a criticism even when the person being criticised is clearly a pure true believer in (insert nutty conspiracy theory). It shows a paucity of imagination to assume that greed is the sole motivation

Great news but it never ceases to annoy me that we had a Lyme disease vaccine that got pulled because of antivaxxers