ISAAC CHOTINER: How are you today? ME: I just ate some onion rings out of the garbage, wait, shit ISAAC CHOTINER: Interesting.

“Or, they might learn the lessons of the FHA windfall profits scandal. To once again quote the 1954 Senate report, there is an alternative to subsidizing speculation: ‘It is better that the Government build such projects itself.’”

once again, if tylenol caused autism, america would have a better rail system

Tylenol bad, paracetamol good. As with most things, a simple rebrand can fix the underlying problem.

I appreciate the thing you have just done but, I’m sorry, I don’t know you well enough to say I appreciate You as a whole

What’s really to be made of polling? A sizable majority hated this guy on his way out last time, largely preferred him on at least a few issues in the last election…

The rapture is real, it was conceived of by private equity to reduce headcounts

In middle school I put cologne on and then after a while couldn’t smell it so I put more cologne on and I dunno, maybe his eyes keep adjusting

these guys look like outsider art sculptures by people in mental hospitals to describe their emotional states

Infinite Jeets, by Daveed Fosterwalla

Learned a new acronym today

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Threatening them with being ruled by Taliban ²

Before I got a fridge with an ice maker, I prided myself on always having a hoard of big solid cubes. Now I live with this quick-melting ovaline shit ice. This is a metaphor for AI.

We all know how to launder money. We just need a Bitcoin for journalism.

I think a lot about the narrative of the black plague launching Europe out of the dark ages.

I’m writing an alternate history in which Ayn Rand was appointed to the lead the Fed. It sucks. Not the economic outcome (though, that too), but my writing. Just atrocious. Worse than Ayn Rand’s.

Whatever the trajectory of AI, I know Hot 97 will seamlessly transition from the death of Funk Flex doing 6 hour sets with his trademark constant interruption, if they haven’t already

In New York, that would be a party size bag of Doritos

Lionel Hutz business card edit for “Are we the baddies?”

The Dunning-Krueger sweet spot is slightly left of where the lines meet.

It is a rule, with few exceptions, that the “person” in Personalist Authoritarianism be an idiot

I don’t think the Democratic Party has a very good theory of how people decide their vote. For a political party, this is probably bad.

Every time Ezra’s employer quotes a Trump voter, they tell us “well I don’t agree with a lot of what he says, but…” What if people felt like Democrats affirmatively stood for something?

Striding onto stage at the Neo-Luddites conference, the applause almost drowning out Cher’s Turn Back Time

Needing to claim an injury in order to assert oneself

The consultant class was revealed as worst than useless and yet, judging from my text messages, nothing has changed. open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

the yglesian "good politics is when you antagonize the left, and than yell at the left for being mad" is just trolling. it isn't politics!

The consultant class was revealed as worst than useless and yet, judging from my text messages, nothing has changed. open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

The escalation of emotional language without a treadmill effect. Everything is stressful, trauma, or whatever. But instead of those words evolving to signify milder things, instead of that meaning corresponding to a lower level of stress/trauma, the trivial is elevated.

Elected lawmakers aren't just there to carry out bureaucratic technocratic procedures. They are your agents, to stand between you and the force of the state, empowered with the people's "she speaks for us." This is what representative democracy is for, at its best in the face of its worst failures.

One of the most incredible government statistics that I have ever seen is called the cocaine seizure effectiveness rate, and it’s the official estimate of how much cocaine is successfully smuggled into the U.S. at land border ports of entry. It has never been above 5%.

Deaths in NYPD custody have surged to levels not seen in at least a decade, with 43 people dying in 2023 and 2024 combined — roughly double the toll of any two-year period since at least 2016, according to police data and officials.

If Christ himself came down to let you know Charlie Kirk is a hell-bound piece of shit, I’m 50/50 on whether it would change anything at this point

So fucking blatantly obvious from the moment people started talking about free speech again a few years ago that it meant right wing political speech and not left wing. No one but the most craven career driven media moron ever thought otherwise for a single second.

Anyone with an extra $2000 want to buy this Aileen Wourmos sweater?

Some smart publication should reach out to every single person who signed the Harper’s letter and get their comment / explicit no-comment

Chuck Schumer won’t endorse his party’s own mayoral candidate for his own city because Mamdani is a brown muslim who refuses to be a mouthpiece for Israel but Schumer will also do nothing to stop a national day of remembrance for a nazi who is on the record for recycling blood libel against the Jews

Do you think Trump believes he’s acting within the law (just nobody thought of it before him), or is surprised that he’s getting away with any of it?

If only there were a word for the process and system by which elected officials seek to change public opinion

I don’t agree with your cahooting, but I will defend to the death your right to cahoot.

Cringe libs were right to focus on Putin, but for the wrong reason. I don’t care if they are buddies or cahooting, I care that Russia’s last 25 years is the closest analogue for where we’re headed.

If I start using a portmanteau of Vichy and Quisling, will anyone get it?

America will get much worse for a long time. The purpose and hope in fighting Trump is to get from the red line to the yellow one.

I have zero hope for America recovering from this in the next 20 years unless I hear prominent Dems laying the groundwork for a new constitution, and even then…

A genie appeared and told me I could have 3 wishes but warned me there are 3 rules, wishes that can never be granted: 1. No wishing for more wishes 2. No wishing harm on anyone 3. No time travel I wished for Chuck Schumer to be useful. Genie pauses and says: ok actually there are 4 rules.

Chuck imitating Newsom imitating Trump, delivering the rhetorical killshot.