Hey all, it’s publishing day for my book “How to Sell a Genocide,” which is a data-driven account of centrist and liberal media’s role in creating the conditions of mass death in Gaza. 100% of royalties go to @mecaforpeace.bsky.social. > www.plutobooks.com/product/how-... > a.co/d/00CQcElr

This is a good conversation. Klein can’t seem to use the right words when the reality clearly calls for them, but given his position and the power he wields, maybe that’s a good thing. Descriptively, he’s not far off base. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/o...

We sent humans farther into space than ever before, but I feel like it barely made waves. It’s strange, but at the same time, it’s not.

You love to see it. obdev.at/products/lit...

Nicholas Carlini, who works at Anthropic, gave this talk last month. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd2... Near the end of his talk, he says that he’s found so many bugs in the Linux kernel that he can’t yet report because he hasn’t validated them.

Focusing on Trump’s mental health is a veiled attempt to justify the system that produced him. It is a tendency liberals fall back on because they cannot face their own moral vacuousness.

My first Pelikan! M400 Tortoiseshell Brown in B. For some reason it took a month to arrive but it finally did. I’m not a big fan of Pelikan. I think they’re overpriced for what they are, and this one is particularly pricey as it’s a special edition, but I got it at an *amazing* deal.

You never know where you’ll end up playing GeoGuessr.

Heard stories about people ordering fountain pens from Amazon and receiving a different one, and it happened to me too. I had ordered Platinum #3776 Century Black Diamond in M, but instead I got the same model with a gold trim in B. I wish it weren’t in B. Might have to send it back because of it.

Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly idlewords.com/2026/03/arte...

I skim through a sociology textbook every couple of years to keep my mind fresh, and this year I started reading Steve Bruce’s introductory book published by Oxford. I am only a third of the way through, and so far it trashes postmodernism, implicitly praises capitalism…

Temelkuran has been living in Europe since 2015, not out of necessity but by choice. She doesn’t know the first thing about living under an authoritarian regime. She does know how to make a career out of it, though, by selling anodyne stories to well-intentioned but gullible Westerners.

Good riddance. I hope he didn’t die in his sleep.

Literally no different than ISIS. Killing little girls, and destroying heritage sites. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/w...

Platinum #3776 Century Bourgogne in coarse (double broad) nib. My first step up with Platinum, moving up from Preppy. Look at how thick that nib tip is!

I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?” www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...

Violence Prevention and Monitoring Centers in Türkiye reduced intimate partner homicides and physical intimate partner violence by 20 percent, mainly by improving access to coordinated protection services, from Asik, Erten, Tekin, Tumen, and Ulucan www.nber.org/papers/w34886

Oh, fuck off.

I am embracing my obsession, instead of denying it.

Good on China for giving them a taste of their own medicine. www.anthropic.com/news/detecti...

Got to test Sakae’s Iroful today. Hard to capture it in a photo, but it does show sheen as great as people say they do.

My first set of Iroshizuku and aren’t they just gorgeous. Now I have to think about which pens to pair them with.

“Someday this war’s gonna end.”

Goodbye to a filmmaker who taught me so, so much. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/m...

"...fascism became objectionable to Europeans only when it unleashed in Europe the brutality they had inflicted on the “inferior” peoples of Asia & Africa." Similarly now: Europeans are upset, and paralysed, that Trump is treating him like those 'others' www.equator.org/articles/aft...

Wu’s not an idiot. She knows what her words mean, but she spews them out anyway because she can. This is who she chooses to be. She belongs to a certain social and cultural class and it should be on her community, whatever is left of it, to make her realize the bottomless pit that is her soul.

My questions about the interpretation of the data aside, I agree with @draliceevans.bsky.social‘s conclusion. Women in Turkey are culturally leapfrogging men. I suspect this is true in most countries though, particularly those with a prevalent internet culture. www.ggd.world/p/cultural-l...

My Pilot VP is out of ink and I am wondering if I can use this as an excuse to get my first Iroshizuku. Feels like it’s meant to be.

My first eyedropper and, naturally, an Opus 88! Had some doubts about the nib (M) but it writes as good as my gold nib pens. Filled it up with KWZ Gummiberry. This has got to be my most fun pen, in terms of its looks. Normally I go for plain colors or demonstrators, but I thought I’d make a change.

Please enjoy our research paper on how Bluesky is the preferred home of academics of all stripes, including professors of rare moths. (Yes, we actually have lots of entomologists here). academic.oup.com/icb/article-... 🧪

Time to do some swatching.

Bought too many inks again. It’s a disease.

I rely on AI a lot for my personal coding projects, which are always whimsical, and while it’s undeniably capable, I won’t consider it truly successful until AI companies themselves stop shipping Electron apps and commit to native ones.

“…the state-approved version doesn’t include chapters on media and technology, global inequality, race and ethnicity, social stratification, or gender, sex and sexuality. It also scraps a section on the government-led genocide of Native Americans.”

Bought this today. It’s probably the greatest invention in history.

King

I’d say welcome to the club but even Erdoğan didn’t threaten to prosecute the governor of the CBRT. It’s easy to look at any headline these days and say “that’s insane”, but this actually is insane.

Fuck, I just found out Robert Jay Lifton passed away a few months ago. Shame on me. What a terrible loss. An exemplary scholar with a moral compass, deeply committed to Verstehen, willing to engage directly with difficult realities to reach genuine and meaningful understanding. May he rest in peace.

I could go on invoking any number of theories or ideas from symbolic interactionism to Marianne Weber’s social person, from sexual division of labor to field theory and each of them could help explain this multifaceted reality, some more than others. But the one thing I would’ve done…

In 2026, I wish more people to read Bourdieu, evil people to die painful deaths, and decent people to take their place.

Apple should have known that Alan Dye lacked taste when it first promoted him, but it’s good that he’s now someone else’s problem. Even better, that someone is Mark Zuckerberg.

Some good news. www.aeaweb.org/news/aea-sta...

Always love it when a Pope visits Turkey. Conspiracy theorists can be so creative.

Anxiety about their kids falling behind may be driving parents' decisions to adopt AI technology, despite personal support for restrictions, from Leonardo Bursztyn, Alex Imas, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Aaron Leonard, and Christopher Roth www.nber.org/papers/w34488

Better late than never? Now bring back PWA support the same way Chromium does please. @mozilla.org www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox...

Google’s lead in LLMs is not because they know how to design or innovate on a product, but mostly because they’re an aggregator. Using their APIs makes that patently obvious.

Big and Little Spoons xkcd.com/3166/