Absolutely incredible that Folarin Balogun (the football player Trump got back in the game through corrupt dealings) is only American because his mother was visiting New York while pregnant with him.

Our paper is special because it can never be replicated. We captured lightning in a bottle by conducting surveys before and during a time of autocratic transition. It is no longer safe (or legal) to conduct surveys that ask these kinds of questions in Hong Kong.

Once again, I am just a small-town international relations professor, standing here, begging our media & our Congress to take our most important signed, ratified international treaty seriously & threats by the One Special Boy to violate it as the presidency-ending scandal that it should have been.

This promises to be a banger of a podcast for those of us in the how-did-we-get-here crowd

As I sign off for the weekend, news from my unfinished weekslong effort to photograph the California scrub jays teaching a fledgling to fly in the surrounding yards. Their squirrelly attitude first drove me to digital and then to lust for the land beyond 200mm. #photography #birding #canoneosr

Was Hines v Stamos Cheryl Hines suing John Stamos over the long-awaited Full House/Curb Your Enthusiasm crossover? Nope, it was an attempt to suppress academic research into the organized manipulation of online platforms. After three years we finally won. But at great cost.

Too slow, too much damage done, but good.

Been digging to fill in childhood memories around the CO-1 story, which I vaguely remember, and have concluded that Kiros is kind of a poetic next step in the arc that started when Schroeder won on an anti-Vietnam War message when Nixon was on the ballot.

Been digging to fill in childhood memories around the CO-1 story, which I vaguely remember, and have concluded that Kiros is kind of a poetic next step in the arc that started when Schroeder won on an anti-Vietnam War message when Nixon was on the ballot.

I truly do not understand the “seniority” argument. The beef many voters have is that the leadership of the party, and its behavior in Congress, is limp and complacent. If we keep the _unnecessary_ norm of long tenure=committee priority/leadership, removing an old-timer makes room for a mid-timer.

Not a great economy alert! Wall Street Bets users think Palantir spiked today because The Onion story titled “Palantir Acquires Pentagon for $800 Billion” hit their front page. They’re guessing trading bots indexed the top post on the subreddit reddit not understanding source.

A big oops and an even bigger endorsement for having a public editor to write something like this.

In the models’ defense, you could be as capable as the average human in all respects and still be shit with checking facts.

Well I'm gonna listen to ATC today. All the hallmarks of a pre-written obit and an accidental "publish," but here they're attributing the error to Totenberg explicitly. Unless that's a screwup, something weirder happened.

Signing off here again for a while. Here's a surprisingly old-timey view of Astor Place from a few months back. #filmphotography #neopan100arcos

Despite Anthropic's ever-escalating measures to block Chinese users, people still think Claude is best and keep trying to access via VPN, "transfer station," and illicit accounts and IDs bought off Telegram. Newsletter this week on Anthropic & China's cat-and-mouse game w/ @mattburgess1.bsky.social

They charge by the _page_ for digital documents. This is about all you need to know to be sure the pricing is utterly meritless.

"When a person abroad — or a foreign national inside the United States — sends a prompt to an AI model and receives a reply, has the AI provider 'exported' anything?" harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/06...

Sign me up for a tent where people who reflect downtown Manhattan/Brooklyn values and people who reflect suburban Ohio values and, I swear, even people who reflect literal Dick Cheney values are gonna try to stop the white nationalist reality denial tent, together. If you mad no patriotism for you.

NYT: Choppy markets have “caused OpenAI’s advisers, in conversations with the company over the past week, to caution that it may not find much enthusiasm from retail investors for its own shares, two of the people involved said.” @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/t...

People are rightly focusing on the racism in the TPS case from the Supreme Court today. In the other, it's worth noting that the message of the United States now is, explicitly, if you're desperate, innocent, and seek refuge here from terrible dangers: "Die, get raped, we don't care. Fuck you."

“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.” apple.news/A3RgW1wmiSvm...

Every now and then I think about Rufus Hussey and the days when the Internet brought wonder into our lives. youtu.be/9ieWrWLjii0

I would call this extralegal repression if it were in China. Extralegal because there are legal mechanisms for repression too, but in this case they are making threats beyond what the cited law covers and therefore are simply using intimidation.

Compare Alito's description of Trump's racist statements (on the left) to Justice Kagan's anthology of Trump's racist statements (on the right). These are passages from this morning's opinions in Mullin v. Doe.

Considering a new printer. The existing Brother has been cranking since 2010 in at least 9 homes across four states, but it's feeding difficulties are mounting.

If LLM-generated code did not contribute to this, I owe Mark Zuckerberg a Coke.

Someone in the neighborhood has an avocado tree. I know because half eaten avocados get stashed in the yard. Today I pulled a weed from a planter to discover a squirrel had buried a seed and it was very happy. Have replanted and hoping for the best.

📚 My book 𝘿𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙂𝙡𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝘽𝙞𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙄𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 has a publication date of Dec 2026, and the website is live and now available for pre-order at @columbiaup.bsky.social! cup.columbia.edu/book/dreams-...

Man SK just can’t catch a break in the US-China hullabaloo.

I was just getting used to it

Trump Cedes Future of Dominant General-Purpose Technology to China. … would be one way to put it. Everyone’s panicking about a hairwidth lead in another possibly emerging GPT…

“Apple issued a lengthy statement arguing that [EU rules] would present unacceptable privacy and security risks, criticizing regulators’ ’extreme interpretation’ of the law and refusal to accept compromises. “Curiously, Apple does not appear to have published any similar objection in China’s case.”

There is a LOT going on these days

#filmphotography and @archive.org. hard to beat the combo. See below from 2024.

Grades turned in. Academic summer* in full swing! *Yes there is now all the other work that had been deferred, but this late afternoon is for me and the dog.

Pick your favorite real TR quote. I’ll take: ”they are very saucy and at the same time very cunning and shy” www.nps.gov/thro/learn/h...

Congrats to this year's MIP class!

See also bsky.app/profile/zeyi...

Absolutely repulsive, devoid of any understanding of history and/or the vulnerability this kind of tech could make for patrons.

So the Iran “deal” is actually a 60-day ceasefire (already had one, though all sides seemed to violate it) plus an understanding about the Strait for now (among totally untrustworthy people) plus a promise to negotiate a settlement. Nothing here is “done.” www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06...

Export controls as limit on access to an online service Seems like would result in Real ID verification for users of such service, to prove nationality. Another thing rights advocates rightly raised alarm about when it was China.

Remedial, but: there is no such thing as suspending habeas JUST for [insert category of people], because a habeas hearing is the chance you get to challenge the government‘s assertion that you are in the category of people who can be detained.

relevant for my analytical community amidst this dizzying story

“we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers”

How many lessons does this story pack?! - If you ever thought everyone obeys the will of Xi, consider what this says about workarounds. - 上有政策下有对策 - And they have a sense of humor about it - Tesla “safety” theater - ”AI” guardrails vs user innovation - Online discourse in China—a goldmine

Apple's nag to open the new AI-packed version of Pages et al. really needs a "don't ask again" button.

1/ People who work on/in #Japan know how notoriously stringent personal information is protected within the country. The Japanese government is set to revise this legislation (個人情報保護法) to make a big exception for #AI companies to scrape data on its residents off the internet without their consent.

Just use Signal.

I felt nostalgic being back in D.C. 20 years after I moved there out of college. So I compiled this list of 20 things I surely didn't see coming in my life and the world back then. Tag yourself. I'm "I like sour cream now." herecomes.transpacifica.net/p/20-years-o...