Honestly believe that I could wriggle out of Chotiner's traps simply because I've been married to @kerryhowley.bsky.social for 12 years.

instant classic

The AI kids just don’t care about our old-person debates about AI.

I spent some time wandering around SF with some kids who read minds, raise millions, and subsist on Celsius nymag.com/intelligence...

Hey a thing I really don’t want to get lost here is that while Tylenol doesn’t cause autism, IT’S FINE TO BE AUTISTIC. Let’s not grant them the premise that autism should be eradicated in our way to correct the science, okay? Okay.

My son is autistic, largely nonverbal. He reads a lot, is smitten with all things Lego. He excels in school. He finds his ways to communicate. There’s nothing wrong with autism. The rhetoric drives me mad. It’s on us to make the world easier for neurodiverse folks, not to push them to conform.

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

One obvious problem with social media platforms is that they are inevitably dominated by people with an unhealthy level of interest in social media platforms, leading to mind-numbingly tedious meta-discourse, like this.

We got a new puppy and his name is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wanna see?

Zojo-ji Temple, Shiba. Twenty Views of Tokyo, Kawase Hasui, 1925.

my latest with @newrepublic.com liberalism isn't the 'referee of politics'. it's a player, & it must win newrepublic.com/article/1992...

This is masculinity too

I've had it with data.— www.unpopularfront.news/p/against-po...

Sometimes people need to hear the simple, obvious thing.

I want to enthusiastically endorse this piece from @cselmendorf.bsky.social & @profschleich.bsky.social. Thus far YIMBY has been almost entirely focused on More Housing, but ultimately, if you want people to accept density, you have to make it *nice*, and that means more than just housing.

continuing to run the UBI experiment 14,000,605 times every decade in search of one time it ever won't produce clear positive results for everyone involved so there can finally be an example for the ultra wealthy people to point to illustrating why we can't do that like they've always been saying

Is the story that both cases were made up, there never was any trafficking, and Comey is being held accountable for her role in this miscarriage of justice?

I went to Iowa’s 3rd best state u., knew so little about elite schools that I wore a Harvard t-shirt in one of my senior pictures because it just seemed like an aspirational brand, like Polo or something, lol. It’s just alien and weird to me how people remain forever engrossed by teen status markers

tldr: boredom drives us together; we are lonely because isolation has become too amusing.

Feels like we’re struggling to come around to seeing that Robert Putnam was right.

The Niche Machine is here. We are now not just seeing AI slop about current events and natural disasters, we are seeing hyperpersonalized AI slop that combines "news" and disinformation with any interest / celebrity / hobby you could possibly imagine www.404media.co/the-ai-slop-...

I sincerely believe there is a massive untapped market of people that haven't ridden bikes since childhood who are one e-bike ride experience away from realizing how pleasant and useful they are for getting around urban areas.

I’ve always been amused by this rhetorical gambit, in which party x tries to negatively polarize party y against their own candidate by claiming that, ACTUALLY, party x will be delighted if party y triumphs.

A fun fact for philosophy people is that Kaczynski did in fact take classes with Quine at Harvard.

"two first-rate economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have made a stab at estimating the impact of cuts at NIH. Their analysis suggests that these cuts might save $500 billion in federal spending over the next 25 years — while imposing more than $8 trillion in losses."

The draft syllabus for my fall course on the political economy of AI. One missing reading that I need: something good and comprehensive (academic, policy report or serious longform journalism) on how the AI labs raise money. www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...

Every American should read this ACLU lawsuit about what is happening in Los Angeles and California. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. This is not immigration enforcement. It is positively stuffed with videos and articles documenting racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow.

"The China challenge isn't what American policymakers think it is. It's not primarily about security threats or unfair trade practices—it's about Chinese companies making better products for less money, and winning hearts and minds in the process." musgrave.substack.com/p/oh-no-i-be...

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality." - James Baldwin

In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the greatest speeches in US history. Today it’s often presented in abridged form, though, and skips what seems like a long-winded introduction. If you read the intro closely, however, there’s an ingenious structure. THREAD👇🏽

“Positive-sum solutions to multi-period stag hunts select for time consistency more than cost effectiveness.” @akhilrao.bsky.social akhilrao.org/blog/2025/07... remarkable insights what leadership and coordination actually entail, in the dry language of game theory. except with death cults. 1/

Build it

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

I compared ZIP code level rents versus homes permitted from 2018-2024 and guess what! Places that permitted the most new homes had the slowest rent growth, and in places where almost nothing was permitted, rents *skyrocketed*

RUN FROM IT DENY IT SCHELLING THOUGHT COMES FOR YOU ALL THE SAME

This is such a rich text. LLMs have no semantics. “Error”has no meaning but “improbable given training set.” It cannot know what is “missing.” If the PROBLEM is that grok doesn’t produce ideologically favored outputs, you can’t use it to produce a new training set that will. Just wild on every level

Thinking about this piece I wrote eight(!) years ago, for some reason. www.washingtonpost.com/posteverythi...

In April, Pete Hegseth fired three of his most senior advisors at the Pentagon—Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll—without explanation. Now, all three speak in depth about what happened inside Hegseth’s chaotic Department of Defense.

New York Magazine reports on the menswear happenings inside the US Dept of Defense, including Pete Hegseth’s Chief of Staff, Joe Kasper

This is *such* a good read. I was unable to pick a pull-quote - every graf is better than the last. My eyebrows got a workout. Also, I laughed out loud several times. Also, it's terrifying that these people are in charge now.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth added. “Why would Pete Hegseth say this into the Signal group?” Micah Lee, an independent security researcher, asks me, sounding genuinely puzzled. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this and I think he was just trying to sound cool.” nymag.com/intelligence...

Oh boy, these closing paragraphs.

Heckuva line in the riveting account of Pentagon disarray published by NY Mag today (and presumably written days or weeks ago) ... nymag.com/intelligence...

Outstanding writing and reporting here. Takeaway is what you might expect: The Dept. of Defense is a shitshow under Hegseth. But the hows are articulated in such impressive and absorbing detail.

Howley is one of the best prose stylists writing nonfiction today. I've thought so since THROWN and this only reaffirms it. If you are not hooked by the 3rd graf, check yourself for a pulse.

This story is impeccably reported, full of jaw-dropping scenes and scoops, but even better, she wrote the shit out of it--it's consistently, surreally funny, our own real-life, real-time Dr. Strangelove. (Seriously, though, we're all doomed.)

My big story about Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon: nymag.com/intelligence...

what a fabulous paragraph