Highly recommended! I love their blogs and my most commonly-expressed sentiment is "this blog was worth the subscription on its own." (Personal favorites: politics & Creaturefector, but it's all great.)

Flyers Fans Not Sure  Whether Gritty  Supposed To Be Eating Live Bird https://theonion.com/flyers-fans-not-sure-whether-gritty-supposed-to-be-eating-live-bird/

they used to have these books you could print out for kids back in the day with the kid's name inserted into the narrative and this is just the high tech version of that for ostensible adults

chris carter getting sick of the all-timer monster of the week material his writers were banging out on the x files:

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

"We should not follow in the footsteps of Lincoln and Jefferson, both of whom expanded the Supreme Court, but should instead leave in place a deeply corrupt and rabidly anti-democracy Supreme Court supermajority of illegitimate origin so it may thwart our every initiative."

every single thing I have learned about this person has been against my will

Don’t wish ill on Labour, but with constrained public finance they aren’t my priority for investment.

Happy April 28 to all who celebrate!

I guess having specific data points to gesture to is good, but this is like a study whose abstract says "drinking bleach still isn't healthy." Like, yeah, sport, I think we picked up on that.

You really cannot overestimate the level of status trauma a lot of white Americans experienced at the election of Barack Obama and how much of our politics is still influenced by it bsky.app/profile/beau...

I hate talking about the ballroom bc I don't give a fuck about the White House and nothing there is sacred to me, but it feels obvious to me that allowing an authoritarian, who attempted a coup the last time he lost an election, to build a "top secret" military complex under the WH is a bad idea.

Many people are saying that the vagrant class of career-climbing admins wandering from role to role, campus to campus, setting fires that become everyone else's problem when they walk away is not a great system.

It’s eight people. Eight men whose personal net worth tallies more than $1 trillion. Median US resident net worth is less than $125,000.

“I have a PhD in atmospheric physics. I spent a decade measuring greenhouse gases from satellites. The thing that made me good at it was reading poetry. It trained me to notice what was not being said in a dataset. Every critical decision I made as a scientist was interpretation, not computation.”

every time someone's like Claude deleted this or Claude convinced a teen to kill themselves I picture a mischievous french guy

I get this a lot as a clam man. I used to get mad, but these days I feel pity for people with this mindset

I've been thinking a lot lately about a related phenomenon, which is a kind of emotional laundering--people experiencing distress somewhere in their life (god knows there's plenty of distress to be had) and funneling it into internet discourse, often to troubling effect.

Appreciate this detail from CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs. It's an important part of the story that seems to be missing from a lot of comments & coverage.

I don’t think I can take another news cycle of Democrats solemnly tutting about how violence is never the answer while Republicans promise to put their political enemies and whatever immigrants they can find in a wood chipper

They got RFK Jr. out of there immediately because they were concerned he’d take the dead shooter’s penis

Yeah I dunno but I wouldn’t claim to call myself a journalist and president of the WHCA while sitting next to the man who said Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi probably deserved to be dismembered alive by a bone saw. Just a grotesque group of people.

mollior lacte coacto is really a top-tier compliment

journalists applauding and dining with a fascist, president and cronies cartoonishly bumbling out of the room, secret service allowing this to happen, outlets throwing out debunked headlines. the only people who covered themselves in glory tonight were the kitchen and wait staff

or, hear me out, maybe some people on the left end of the spectrum are not nationalists, and perceive that half a win in an illegal war of aggression to preserve a decaying rogue state's "strategic bandwidth" is of dubious benefit to them personally and antithetical to their values

My favorite art history genre is "Judith beheading Holofernes"

Edward Gibbon, early master of the drive-by footnote:

Maybe people are less appalled by the idea of someone breaking the law in 2026 because they’ve watched the elite do it so brazenly for so long

is this truly the only earth we can live on??

The indignity of Italy playing in a World Cup that everyone knows it didn’t qualify for only slightly outweighs the expected outcome in which they have to admit they didn’t qualify and would not agree to this proposal.

"Multa sunt quae Romani per ablativum casum solent efferre: immensa enim est huius casus licentia. (Diomedes I.310 GLK)" (Very loosely, "There are a bunch of things the Romans tend to do with the ablative case - for the freedom/boldness/licentiousness of this case is very great.")

A very kind review of my book in Greece and Rome, making some of the connections between Roman autocracy and contemporary society that I hadn’t been *quite* willing to say out loud in print… www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

people who say this act like if they weren't at the airport they'd be at home curing cancer. what exactly are your big plans for your extra 45 minutes at home you fuckin loser

Amazing that anyone’s brain is infantile enough to believe that tech overlords who would burn the world down before they would pay taxes and who don’t even want you to have healthcare or mail delivery really want to see you get a big check every month for nothing.

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

The Columbine massacre was on this date in 1999. Instead of energizing our country to get gun violence under control, it kicked off a new normal. One of the best explanations ever of journalism's destructive impact on mass shootings came from Roger Ebert in his review of Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant.”

The currently escalating tech backlash must be put in the context of: “people have been listening to the most insufferable techbros in the world gleefully threaten everyone else with mass unemployment for over 6 years, and they’re sick of their shit”

Gonna spend the next two years spamming every elected Dem about the concept of "damnatio memoriae." Chisel his name off every inscription. Build over the various Trump Towers like they're Nero's Golden House. Remove him from physical memory, not to forget but as a sign of disrespect to the man.

this is it right here. AI violates Vonnegut's number 1 rule for writers: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." AI shifts the burden of effort from the writer onto the reader/audience and that is unacceptable

[Werner Herzog voice] And yet, does Luigi not persist in exploring the haunted mansion? Does he not confront this same fear of lingering death as he brings these haunted souls to rest with his vacuum cleaner?

"Complimentary" to mean "free" always made me wince, but now I find out that apparently this is my own personal Mandela. (I could've sworn it used to be complementary...)

Not if that job is physical comedy

Sword & Sorcery is when the soft animal of your body has to slay a fucking necromancer.

My dad once had this gigantic Rottie-mix who steadfastly ignored the neighbor’s hysterical male Sheltie. Then one day the Sheltie got loose and went at him in full view of like ten people and the Rottie sighed, grabbed the Sheltie, and dragged him into the barn. Just remembering that for no reason.

...and then there's the third thing of archaeology.

I've always found the framing around men and women's dating choices re political "opponents" really telling. Men are supposedly more tolerant - but for the most part they're not being asked to date people who literally view them as second-class citizens undeserving of bank accounts and voting rights

I'm the product of state schools and I'm passionate about their value. (Though I will gently point out that UIUC is shockingly* expensive for a state flagship, with about $20k for in-state tuition alone.) *Shocking to me; UNC was/is much cheaper. I'm looking @ flagships & UIUC still seems high.