New study finds that people who prefer excitement- and suspense-heavy entertainment (like thrillers, crime, horror, and mystery) were more likely to believe conspiracy theories, particularly those who are more easily drawn into stories and enjoy suspense. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Today’s stage of the Giro is one of the best bike racing I have ever seen

This isn't Cyrus, this the Golden Calf, all we're missing is fire from heaven cooking Mike Johnson in the midst of Congress.

Deepfakes are everywhere, but digital forensics investigators are fighting back. Learn more: https://scim.ag/42dMPBg

NEW: From dismantling guardrails that upheld the integrity of past elections to gutting federal agencies and installing allies who supported Trump’s claim that the 2020 vote was stolen, here are the key takeaways from our recent investigation.

My and @abenewman.bsky.social Underground Empire is on sale at $1.99 for the Kindle edition. If you've been sitting on it, this is the time to buy it. If you've read it and liked it, would love it if you shared this post, and be more grateful than I can say if you starred/reviewed it on Amazon.

Build the dang spider or the terrorists win!

I'm beginning to believe that the easiest way to solve the whole AI problem is to 1) Make all AI services opt-in, and 2) have a per-token charge for any interaction above a certain level of usage. I'm pretty sure that the "need" for new data centers would drop to zero

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

impeach trump push for repeal of bbb re-fund every program that trump defunded subpoena every motherfucker make it so those assholes can't make a single breath without 20 congressional committees investigating every atom

No one seriously thinks it is. Venture Capitalists are investing other people's money into anything that looks like it will fail so they can collect their commissions and fold. Think Mel Brooks' "The Producers"

As an ongoing happy supporter of the Banner, this is great news!

a movie couple who would definitely have a podcast

Congratulations to photographer Andrew Harnik who has won the White House Correspondents’ Association award for presidential news coverage with one of the greatest Oval Office photos ever captured.

In Turkey, an elderly man who earns his living by shining shoes is visited every morning at the same time by a cat that asks to have its fur brushed. The man never turns down this little friend.😍👍💙

A few years ago I looked up the police budget for every major US city I could find and Baltimore was double the next highest per capita - and I wasn’t including overtime where BPD really shines. To pay so much for such nightmarish results is infuriating.

I had forgotten how good Le Guin is. Thanks for reminding me. Now I have to read LHoD again

Go to the talks and the rehearsals if you have the chance. Fun! No pressure!

Random numbers are wild. I mean, you have *no* idea

I had an idea of starting an alt-channel named something like "boring sane facts". Not edgy hot takes, but like, grounding facts. Like, the earth is round. Bombing children is bad. Biofuel is wasteful. MSG is safe. Vaccines don't cause autism. Removing cars from streets increases shop revenues. etc

I wouldn’t be surprised if this volatility correlates with inequality too. We are rupturing many maybe all aspects of our order when we fail to adequately regulate wealth and power for some degree of fairness and justice. Cf late 1800s through half the 20C #inequality #regulation #resilence

Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.

In light of the conversation about how hard it is to promote your own book: Post a link to buy your book here and I’ll boost it cause you destroyed yourself to get it done, your publisher won’t help you sell it, and you deserve cheers and admiration for your accomplishment.

I launched IgnoreMore.com this week! It's a suite of free tools for protecting your attention online. The first tool helps you decide whether a comment is worth your energy — reply, ignore, or block, grounded in research. Still coming soon, but I'd love your input while I build it.

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

Fascists like to start wars and will use the consequent crises they created, from economic hardships, loss of lives to terrorism, as another vehicle to consolidate power at home. Popularity is less relevant when the state & instruments of power are already corrupted to favor the entrenched.

Also I think a lot of ppl LIKE algorithms. It surfaces things they can get excited or mad about. We're living in bleak times that can be numbing, algorithms are focussed on you feeling SOMETHING at all times. Even if it's fury.

This is the funniest thing I've read in... months?

I think this one is getting traction. Ironically, if this works right, there should be nothing about it in the news. Or news about anything else. I have a sudden vision of Jeff Bezos trying to run WAPO software

it's pretty well known that seeing the earth from space can give you a whole new Outlook

This is great stuff. Revolutions are a bottom-up phenomena that can be shaped in effective ways

You know how much I love an oral argument. I am a big fan of the law. I like the faint, wheezing sound it makes as I trample on it, and the mountains of litigation that result. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Anyone wanna see the funniest 12 seconds that include a murder?

Minnesota photojournalist Rob Levine is suing the FAA over a a drone no fly zone which is designed to stop people filming ICE. www.404media.co/journalist-s...

I would really appreciate an initiative that said "Okay, let's stop goalpost-moving and stop pretending that data centers have 20x the heat output of power plants. The actual problem is disruption of existing career paths and a risk that power/wealth becomes more concentrated. Let's address both."

No really, I am not kidding when I say that the data broker industry must be destroyed: www.npr.org/2026/03/25/n...

ONE WEEK FROM TODAY: March 28 will be the biggest protest in US history. Find your local No Kings event to make clear you're part of The Resistance to this regime’s brutality at home, pathetic ineptness, perpetual lying & their illegal war in Iran. ✊https://app.sosha.ai/s/39HA7UDd

Absolutely. For reference, my AI assisted essays all came out of at minimum multi hour conversations and iterative refinement. I care about them and put significant effort into them. I stand by what they say. I wish there was a shorthand for this kind of high effort AI assisted writing...

Donald Trump letting you know how the authoritarian capture of the media is going, in case you missed it. Unlike other authoritarians in places like Hungary and Poland he has no worries about advertising his authoritarian take over of the media.

"career-pressured officers 'detour' through repressive units not because they are fanatics, but b/c the detour is the only viable path upward. The regime does not need to recruit extremists. It only needs to create the right organizational conditions and then let ordinary career anxiety do the rest"

I have watched 6 hours of a DOGE bro deposition. The whole thing, start to finish. It's a fascinating, and horrifying, look at the people who caused so much damage, didn't really achieve anything at all, while still being so sure they are right. Here's what they said: www.404media.co/i-watched-6-...

New study. We had adults place historical figures on the left-right ideological spectrum. Folks most often place history's villains (Hitler, Stalin, etc) as extreme examples of their opponents. But they place heroes (Jesus, MLK, Lincoln) are on their own team. 1/4 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is so good! Also, flashbacks

I'm sure that only good things will result from this

This is really good. It reflects my thinking that a major cause of damage from AI is not any kind of AGI. Rather it will be malicious use of generative AI, possibly with purpose-built, guardrail-free models. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/narr...

Strong reminder: women have not been independent for as long as some folks would like you to believe. We’ve lost rights that we never should have lost.

Wait, what? Who thought that running .docx and .pptx files as python was a good idea?