When I was on CNN's northeast desk, the first job at 6a every morning was to read the local papers. That guided some of what the massive CNN machine followed every day. When those papers die, CNN doesn't hire new regional reporters. What you get instead is more panel shows, more punditry.

I’m at the point where I would be genuinely interested in seeing what the world would look like today if the internet had just kind of flamed out. And: Merry Christmas!

2025 summarized.

It’s true that this essay contains wisdom and warmth (they often accompany each other, I find). But this snarkier early paragraph is also so great.

I realize there’s far too much going on to have a one-plank platform, but if elected I *will* mandate that any movie not about a real war — and one of the major ones — is less than two hours long.

The Cracker Barrel thing was THIS YEAR. We have three more years of this shit. Anybody who makes it to 2028 without looking like Nosferatu will be required by the state to start a skincare brand.

Let’s be reasonable, if 60 Minutes found proof that the Ivy League’s only goal for 2026 was to increase the enrollment of foreign trans students by 900 percent, but the Ivy presidents hadn’t commented yet, I’m sure Bari would hold that story too.

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

The male loneliness epidemic partly explained.

Attacks on feminism are similar to attacks on vaccines. We begin to take for granted a world where women have rights and most children live to see adulthood, and then, over time, we begin to forget, neglect, and (now) reject the movements and innovations that brought us here.

I almost never go to Threads, but glad I caught this funny take on Geese (about whom I don’t have a strong opinion).

Whatever make it 10 factor authentication.. I don't want to be able to sign into anything ever again

I'm rocking an eight-day head cold that's starting to feel like it will just be how I am forever.

Genuinely, one good example of what social media *can* be.

check it out For the first time, every cover, article, and issue in the magazine’s hundred-year history can be enjoyed on newyorker.com. www.newyorker.com/news/press-r...

There should be more thought and writing about luck. This is a very brief response to an overlong essay many are sharing.

I wrote about Rob Reiner's shockingly good performance in The Wolf Of Wall Street in this, but it's striking how many different films and parts Defector staffers wanted to write about. He was a mensch, but he was also just everywhere in the culture for 50 years. defector.com/defectors-fa...

Worth remembering that the running time of Spinal Tap, a perfect movie, is 82 minutes. The new Knives Out installment is 144? What a world.

OK, stick with me, but if I ranked my favorite hundred movies by how much I loved them when my love for them was at its peak, then The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap would be tied with about a dozen others at No. 1.

Ah, another round of debating Twitter participation. Twitter was marbled with crazy people of all political stripes from the start, but it was still (just) possible/fun to navigate it. When the world's most noxious people turned it into the wall-climbing scene from "World War Z," no thanks.

One of the great failures of contemporary political news coverage in a lot of media is the unspoken principle that no violation of norms or decency by Trump is really news, worthy of sustained attention, unless it also upsets people who love him. It isn't "not taking the bait"; it's sleepwalking.

My own movie capsule reactions lately are very underwhelming: Couldn't make it past six minutes of After the Hunt; Jay Kelly had some expected charms but was disappointing; I really like Lynne Ramsay, but Die My Love was bad in a half dozen different ways.

Enjoyable thread of capsule reviews that show good taste. (Warning, it's up past 180 movies now...)

Future historians, should the future and historians exist, are going to have so many questions.

ESPN on my laptop keeps redirecting to the ESPN UK homepage for some reason, and it's like entering a bizarro universe where I know nothing about sports.

I regret to report that I am very much not in the quiet car.

"....unclassifiable gem of a book...." Becca Rothfeld on Roger Shattuck's The Forbidden Experiment. "For what this remarkable book reveals is not that Victor’s labored humanization was unique, but that none of us can hope to achieve humanity without the aid of a community."

I have very discerning friends who don't understand or care to explore the greatness of Van Morrison, and it's starting to bother me.

I just finished this novel, and there are mixed reviews that are convincing (I have some qualms myself). But this is a disastrous pan; the lede could be taught in a criticism class as one thing not to do (whatever it is). www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Off top of my head/bookshelf: Mrs Dalloway Zeno’s Conscience Norwood

i asked chat gpt to fact check an article for me

I could post so good from here

Becca Rothfeld is really good. We still get the Sunday print edition of WaPo. Her reviews and essays are the first thing I look for in that paper.

My life wrapped (more or less).

This comment on an NYT soup recipe is a banger

Adding alt text to this because this is fucking amazing and everyone deserves to read it.

My two memories of watching the first season of "Stranger Things" are a general enjoyment of the '80s nostalgia as well as its own vibe, plus a sense that the ending was (a rarity) very good, somewhat daring, and ... final. So I was never really interested in what follows; ultimately a good thing?

The first episode of Backlisted was published on 30th November 2015, ten years ago today. @backlisted.bsky.social ‘We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever.’ - J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country 🙏 www.backlisted.fm/episodes/1-j...

Two episodes in, the tone and pacing of Pluribus feel way off. And the concept both over- and under-cooked. I'm mostly alternating between bored and irritated. Can feel the plug being pulled.

Two favorite examples of language this weekend: Colin Burrow, in a recent LRB, describing Derek Stanford as “a standard issue 1950s literary critical milk-sop and would be-poet, whose love of language outstripped his skill in using it by several furlongs.” 1/2

Lastly, from my fave Randy album "Good Old Boys" RS youtu.be/FxrJIJBTOvE?...

Just another way in which I’m elderly, but the Fangoria-fication of mainstream movies kind of bums me out. And Weapons was disappointing in other ways too.

One of my first man crushes. (And I mimicked his delivery as a 10-year-old pitcher.)

No. No, no, no. No. No no no no no no.

I see that the footnotes vs. endnotes discourse has reemerged. And that's my cue.

Obvious snark in this, but I meant it with heart. Partly because I truly loved SW. Partly because I have no standing to be a snob. And partly because a fave memory is reaching for a Stormtrooper toy at a store, my mom saying, You already have two of those, and me thinking, You understand *nothing.*

Ranking Star Wars: 1. The feeling I had unwrapping the Millennium Falcon on Christmas when I was 7. 2. Star Wars 3. The euphoric dream I had when I was 8, that I was allowed to grab as many SW-themed toys as I could in a toy store. 4. The Empire Strikes Back 5. I'm in my 50s now.

A few things I like less than I did before I joined social media Doctor Who The idea of cake Forthcoming books Politics Discussion of any popular TV series Human nature Social media Myself

Books I bought during a lovely trip to Ireland last month. Do I travel simply to buy books? Yes and no.