Superb reportage on Minneapolis from one of the all time greats.

If the admin's strategic goal was to break public resistance to immigration enforcement activities, it was a tactical mistake to go to the Twin Cities.

Always read Kerry Howley

nine years old

Kerry Howley reports from Minneapolis as the city fights back against Trump’s ICE invasion. “The chaos is both real and routine, a stasis that will hold until it doesn’t.” Read the full Cover Story: tinyurl.com/55xjswrn

I wrote about Minneapolis. nymag.com/intelligence...

What we call generative AI is actually the logic of poetry infused into the humanity of an insurance table

Just finishing watching Task. Great show. But it struck me that depicting federal law enforcement as apolitical and professional in a contemporary setting now feels like a dispatch from an alternate reality. The feds as the competent grown-up cops is a broken trope.

Just a normal dog

America has a housing shortage. Every single housing proposal you see that is not "build more housing" will have the primary effect of pushing up the prices of existing housing, and is therefore, in reality, a plan to enrich current homeowners. In conclusion, build more housing.

Fuck it I don’t care anymore

Just published, my “The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World.”Philosophy and Society 36 (4): 985–1000. Open access. journal.ifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php/fi...

Go Hawks!

Here's a particularly juicy nugget I found in my reporting . . .

Who needs a village when you can have parking lots?

They have made enormous headway. The central issue is that driving isn't _really_ a rule-based process; the rules are codifications of social mores but fundamentally driving around other people is about theory of mind and social negotiation, which ML is largely hopeless at; here's a thing I wrote.

So I get paramount+ through Walmart+ which I get through Amex. Walmart lets you choose between Paramount and Peacock so I tried to switch but it didn’t work because I already have Peacock through Instacart+ which I get through Chase. The way we live now, I guess.

Nobody has ever asked me to apologize. Probably an oversight.

pursuing the dream of a life lived as pure "data creation," with the ultimate goal of being completely manipulatable by the data processors who have a plan for your life

This is extremely important

The idea of declaring fentanyl a wmd reminded me of this… www.nytimes.com/1993/02/22/o...

Amazing. My kids are suddenly Canadian.

“It's not my duty as Mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me it's the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you're going to put them.” — Mayor of Pontevedra, Spain (re-elected 6 times)

It's annual con law meme time, from my undergraduates

Trying to round out Christmas shopping for the kids (ages 6 and 11) with some fun/cool smaller gifts. What’s good fellow parents?

In addition to all of the other benefits already reported about NYC congestion pricing, "In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ)" news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Good on Penn Jillette. Having to come to terms with your entire political identity and philosophy being wrong is not easy and most people could never do it.

Remember when the internet wasn't awful? We can go back to that. Some friends and I have released the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call to bring back such a time, to see if we can bring back a world where technology works for us, rather than against us. resonantcomputing.org

Obviously, betting on future states of the world is pointless unless parties on opposite sides of the bet agree in advance on how to authoritatively verify what the relevant facts turn out to be. But opinions differ in the first place largely because people don't agree about that.

Once again: “generations” are fake

impeccable and harrowing, by @kerryhowley.bsky.social: nymag.com/intelligence...

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Every day is a good day, but today is an ESPECIALLY good day, to re-share @kerryhowley.bsky.social's profile of Pete Hegseth. nymag.com/intelligence...

This piece is amazingly written! No surprise but thank u @kerryhowley.bsky.social & @nymag.com

How RFK Jr. destroyed the CDC. Another banger from Kerry Howley @kerryhowley.bsky.social nymag.com/intelligence...

I wrote about the private, intimate, often ridiculous agonies of working for a man who think you’re a monster nymag.com/intelligence...

There are so many different reasons to believe that LLMs cannot have beliefs, cannot know anything, cannot reason and cannot be a form of intelligence.

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

i’d not endorse all of the cost computation choices. but the key point—changes in the price of participation in contemporary life are not taken into account by conventional purchasing power measures, and that price has grown much more than is reflected in inflation and poverty measures—is correct.

Learning that Annemarie Gray (no relation) of Open New York, NYC's YIMBY group, has been appointed to Mayor-elect Mamdani's housing transition team. This is FANTASTIC news!

A friend who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which are often hot topics.

WATCH: If you really STILL don’t understand how car-dependent suburbia is HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED by downtown & all the urban parts of your city, please watch this EXCELLENT video by #NotJustBikes helped by #UrbanThree & @StrongTowns.org. And then please SHARE it as much as possible. youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

Warren proposed a bill that would make the PE firms liable for the debts of the companies they control. It really is just common sense

WATCH: If you STILL don’t understand how car-dependent suburbia is HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED by downtown & all the urban parts of your city, watch this EXCELLENT video by @notjustbikes with @UrbanThree & @StrongTowns. And then please SHARE it as much as possible. youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

The potential benefits of migration are not identical everywhere. This remarkable new resource from @niskanencenter.bsky.social maps the US counties where the economic benefits of immigration might be highest —> www.niskanencenter.org/mapping-amer...

An Oregon pilot program giving cash to homeless youths sees a staggering reduction in homelessness. The program gave participants $1,000 cash payments each month for two years, and at the end of the project's first phase, 91% of participants reported being in stable housing.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

Good morning. I've got a banger new post out today that develops a new method for placing voters on the left-right ideological spectrum, and adds a new, "non-ideological"/affordability axis to usual way we chart & think about US voters (esp swing voters). www.gelliottmorris.com/p/not-just-l...

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

The USDA has designated 444 counties as farming-dependent; their average vote share for Trump was 77.7%. investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/t...