out from 2025: butlerian jihad in for 2026: full prohibition on graven images

this week's "work friend" advice column features an extended mo salah/liverpool metaphor, proof that the premier league transfer market has lessons for all workers and workplaces

this week's "work friend" advice column features an extended mo salah/liverpool metaphor, proof that the premier league transfer market has lessons for all workers and workplaces

very interesting !

30 lists and 15,000 words to round out the year from (among others) @tomscocca.bsky.social ! @bcmerchant.bsky.social ! @caseyjohnston.bsky.social ! @taylorlorenz.bsky.social ! @choire.bsky.social ! @rilaws.bsky.social ! @libbycwatson.com ! @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social !

really really enjoyed talking about this with the great @maxread.info felt like we got to a place at the end where some broader attention economy stuff locked into place! www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...

what is slop? wrote up this short tweet thread at only slightly greater length: maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...

one thing about roger ailes i feel like people sometimes lose track of is that in addition to being a propagandist he was a genius tv producer

if you went to an ivy league school and traveled out to LA with a pilot in the peak tv/streamers era and couldn't get a solitary job in a writers room you must have been an UNBELIEVABLY bad hang

went to see pirates of the carribbean with two really beautiful older girls from my high school and they taught me the trick where you pour reeses pieces into your bag of hot popcorn and get a sort of makeshift peanut-butter candy popcorn. nothing happened otherwise but it was a life highlight

I'm live with Ganz right now open.substack.com/live-stream/...

literally don’t think my 5 y/o would believe me if I told him that Santa is not real. I don’t have the credibility

An interesting shift in perspective: LLMs not as replacements for individual workers, but as replacements for the output of a whole industry (from maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...)

feel like an ethnography of the people who get paid by the piece to "rank" LLM outputs would also explain a lot about the kind of prose the models are optimized to generate maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...

read max paid subscribers were put on to los thuthanaka two weeks before pfork's review. 'being on the cutting edge of culture' not even a listed subscriber benefit!!

as a kid who also went to CTY, it's crazy how recognizable the culture of late silicon valley (thinking not just of yarvin but of like "tpot" and the "post-rats") is identifiable as and identical to "gifted-kid camp" culture

here's this week's work friend, about racist jokes and italian dreams. please submit your work-related advice questions to workfriend at nytimes dot com !

circling around a definition of 'slop' as something like 'fully optimized to the point of texturelessness/characterlessness'... RLHF'd ai product but also: save the cat is scriptslop, aerodynamically efficient crossover suvs are carslop, three true outcomes is baseballslop, crabs are crustaceanslop

oh you think the jokes in thomas pynchon novels are corny? the names? you don't like the songs? you might like the single greatest stylist of the 20th century and the one novelist who almost grasps the totality if he wasn't so "cringe" for you? should we throw a party? call the papers?

really funny thinking comparatively about how little trump was successfully charmed by elon or jd vance

like Bernie Sanders got there by doing #3, Bill Clinton is #2, and I think Donald Trump is probably the defining version of #1. they all work, and obviously you can mix and match in various ways, and it's a matter of a politician figuring out which kind they are and how to leverage it

thought this was really interesting though i tend to think it would be useful to tug apart some of the different senses of "ideology" being used here (and in the ongoing 'moderation' discourse more generally)

I'm going LIVE on "Substack" with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social in 10 minutes. Tune in at the link below; recording will be available to paying subscribers at 9am tomorrow.

I'm going LIVE on "Substack" with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social in 10 minutes. Tune in at the link below; recording will be available to paying subscribers at 9am tomorrow.

as someone who subscribes to defector SOLELY for jaguars junction i'd love to know exactly what the uptight college boys in charge think is so "befuddling" about it

jeff epstein and so many ai guys just barely missed each other

epstein would've loved chatgpt so much. he wouldve gotten ai psychosis immediately and sent a million emails to sam altman. tragic he missed all this

phrenology confirms this, so many keepers have clear "baseball player face" ... these are all 800 OPS guys you can just tell

good LLM writing and good human writing have the same problem--lots of resources required to create an idiosyncratic (and likely polarizing) voice for which there usually isn't much demand. in a real sense "why ai writing is mid" and "why most professional writing is mid" have the same answer(s)

my first WORK FRIEND column covers labor-law violation and unwritten-coworker-law violations. please submit more questions to [email protected] !!

remember, if lois mcmaster bujold calls you, insist she elaborate the entire vorkosigan family tree before you take the call

genuinely very few things more satisfying than reading the kinds of emails rich and famous people send each other

the decision to make these movies turgid auteurist slogs with rigid continuity for 30somethings who reply to "DiscussingFilm" is one of the pre-eminent signs of the decline of the west

we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

clip to encourage click thru's: highly recommended read and Max Read is a great account to follow. see alt text

This is going on now!

Going live on Substack with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social and Jay Kang at 2pm ET. We'll talk about the elections and whatever else--recording will be available to paid subscribers tomorrow. open.substack.com/live-stream/...

god he would have been an INCREDIBLE wide receiver if the US had annexed holland for some reason

realizing that cameron winter's mom is the woman who wrote the brooklyn open-marriage memoir from a couple years ago, and mentally adjusting to the fact that basically any way you slice it i am a member of her cohort and not his

Good (if characteristically blogstyle) Max Read on “platform temperance” and big tech as big tobacco. Dickish of me to say, but may I once again note that I made exactly the cigarette comparison, down to the details, in 2012, a time before The Atlantic’s CMS natively supported deks or top images.

Interesting post: maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

good @maxread.info newsletter on @wertwhile.bsky.social's (also good) proposal for a new strategy in big tech regulation the grip of Brooklyn Soccer Dads on the discourse has never been tighter maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

"One way of thinking about the past half-decade or so of life on the internet is that we’ve all become test subjects in a grand experiment to see just how bad 'good enough' can be." Good essay by the villain max read. maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

I'm going to be giving work-related advice as the NYT "Work Friend" for the next little while. Please submit questions! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/b...

this has been updated slightly since originally published to draw in some other environmental factors contributing to the discourse, and also to illustrate some of the caution i feel based on the tiktok ban/sale maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

on an emerging movement in the discourse: "platform temperance" maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

This by @maxread.info is really interesting on shift from a liberal-market critique of Big Tech to a (potentially far more potent) public health critique maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

on an emerging movement in the discourse: "platform temperance" maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

visualizations like this arent per se bad but they are basically designed to foment bitter factional fights on short text sites like this one bc they imply a ghost candidate reverse-engineered from a set of policies when most of us experience politics as a real candidate from whom positions flow