the thing is I am old enough to remember this and no it wasn't and no it wasn't

“give an example of the thing you claim is commonplace” challenge. TCW edition, impossible difficulty.

Having taken the MPRE last August, can confirm that “don’t talk to jurors outside the narrowly circumscribed official settings. No, seriously, DO NOT, under any circumstances, do that” is one of the things they drill in by far the hardest

one interesting thing so far about loudly hating AI is the way AI lovers are like "wow so you're just totally closed off to hearing another perspective??" as if their perspective hasn't been relentlessly pushed down our throats with no space to push back (particularly in professional settings)

There are a lot of problems with the law review model, but one good thing about it (at least where I was) is that the first step after a piece is accepted is for a team of editors to go through every single footnote to make sure it says what the author claims it says and to mark every uncited claim

"who was president from March 2020-January 20, 2021?" is one of the most fiercely contested questions in American politics

There’s a whole cottage industry out there that seems built on misconstruing mockery for outrage

congrats to jared polis for getting played like a chump

Thinking about the reaction from Generation Z/Alpha to Charlie Kirk’s death, and the extent to which it reaffirmed that his primary audience was not the youths but the olds who cared deeply about trying to influence the youths and who were convinced he was doing so

There’s an honest version of this—“sometimes people seem too busy chasing fads to enjoy a cold one”—but this guy could never write something that straightforward, and I have trouble believing anybody would see fit to publish it, so congrats to everyone involved for clowning themselves

trying to razzle dazzle us with gustatory only to fuck up antidote / anecdote is killing me

I have become heavily invested in the box-office success of “The Sheep Detectives,” a movie I would give like a B at best, solely because it might convince studios to make more pretty good non-blockbusters

There are a hundred "Is Mamdani Being Insensitive to Jews By Acknowledging that Palestinians Are Human?" stories in outlets like the NY Times, meanwhile multiple Republican politicians LITERALLY say that all Muslims are terrorists who should be expelled from the U.S. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/n...

I don’t think law enforcement should drop charges against child molesters and hand the molesters checks from US taxpayers just because said molesters also got convicted in court for assaulting police officers as part of a violent attack on America. Sorry to get so partisan, but that’s how I feel.

Also because a lot of the media seems very loath to point out overt differences between parties and politicians, because doing so would be biased

Farewell, Tulsi Gabbard. You didn't stop any regime change wars, but at least you pretended you would.

I think George Bush doing a global network of secret torture prisons and Trump starving millions of children to death is worse than Barack Obama maintaining the decades-old custom of letting career prosecutors make charging decisions, personally

One striking thing about the modern era is how hard people work to create elaborate pretexts for actions taken in furtherance of Trump’s corruption, only for Trump to immediately come out and say “no it was the corruption”

Cabinet members Trump has dumped: -Bondi -Noem -Chavez-DeRemer -Gabbard Good thing all the men in the Cabinet are competent: -Lutnick -Hegseth -Duffy -Turner -Zeldin -Wright -Bessent -etc

How does every subsequent trailer for the “Moana” remake look and sound worse than the one before

It’s comforting to think candidates’ strategic choices decide every election, because it means you can argue they could’ve won/could win next time by doing exactly what you personally support (which ironically, after ~two thirds making this exact case, is what the last ~third of this piece does)

The Biden administration’s decision that it wasn’t worth it to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon was a *years*-long talking point about how he wasn’t tough enough on China

Republican senators like Tillis are calling the fund "tyranny" and the best the NY Times can muster is "unusual"

Remember how in 2014, the right made a huge deal out of Ebola with the barely-veiled message that our AFRICAN president wasn’t doing enough to stop the AFRICAN disease, a message they then dropped immediately after the midterms?

Haven’t seen “Obsession” yet, but it was so frustrating watching this happen with “The Pitt,” with people utterly convinced the writers didn’t realize Robby was being an asshole for much of season 2, despite them having *almost literally every other character* call him out for it

No amount of ducking the issue will change the narrative that Democrats care too much about LGBTQ+ rights, so we might as well just do the right thing and be as committed to them as the right and the media say we are

One thing that drove me crazy about the efforts to gin up corruption scandals about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden is that each of them had *decades* of tax documents available, and nobody could find a whiff of actual impropriety among them.

I think part of it is that therapyspeak type stuff about “spoons” and non-work labor has led people to drastically overstate the toll of regular errands

Or even the non-cynical version, which is writing something counterintuitive because they have an intellectual project that ends up getting too deep in the weeds of some weird technicality instead of just treating the thing for what it obviously is

I would *love* for my two sinking feelings about Platner—that the stuff people are blowing off about him will come back to bite him and he’ll crash and burn in the general, and that if he wins the populist vibes won’t actually translate to good policy—to be dead wrong

It was already starting to become evident in 2020, when a lot of the agita over “shutdowns” (which never really shut things down) was from middle-and-above-class people explicitly upset that they couldn’t access services provided by people poorer than they were

It’s bad enough from the ideological folks, but it’s so galling to hear this kind of obvious BS from people who know they’re just blowing smoke

The movie cost Amazon $75 million and it made $16.3 million at the box office, plummeting 67% in its second weekend after all the MAGA fans already made their pilgrimage to see it. Meanwhile, in this same interview, Bezos insists that the Washington Post must be profitable.

The political valence of the Epstein files remains one of the most baffling parts of modern politics

Here’s a thought: What if, instead of dropping all this money to turn their product into a new and unproven thing, they spent it on making the product that already exists work again?

One of the things I find most frustrating is the exaggerated incredulity pro-AI people express toward anybody who is anything less than 100 percent on board

Just imagine the level of criminality that compels a President who was already personally granted full immunity by Supreme Court for anything related to 'official acts' to think that's not enough, he must *also* have his DOJ release all civil claims against him, two of his kids, and his company.

Just sophistry all the way down

However appalled you are by this, it’s not enough. It’s a frank statement that Trump and Trumpists are above the law and need not even plausible excuses to loot your tax dollars. It’s a total failure of our civic institutions.

If you ranked the 1000 most corrupt things ever done by an executive branch official in the history of the United States something like 950 of them would have happened since Jan 20 2025.

It feels like there’s a non-zero chance we’ll look back and be like “well yeah of course the 7’4 guy who by his third year could also handle the ball and shoot threes is the greatest basketball player of all time”

Wemby having a Hakeem vs. David Robinson game

A “fun” thing about the 1776 number is it makes it more clear how much the settlement agreement is corrupt. Todd Blanche signed his name to an official government document claiming this figure was “based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims,” which is clearly, obviously, a lie.

Another synecdoche of why I’m skeptical of AI hype: So many of the uses advocates tout require treating problems people have solved without AI for generations are suddenly insoluble without applying brand new technology

Why did they even *need* AI for this? What problem was AI suppose to solve, here? Are the deans of the college illiterate

Worth remembering the double self-selection of people who both went to the movie and decided to rate it on rottentomatoes

One of the things that makes me the most fearful for the health of our democracy is this bizarre behavior by the press in twisting stories to make Trump's activities fit within normal frameworks that are completely inappropriate for the circumstances.

It’s a combination of Green Lantern Theory and Pundit’s Fallacy: “If they just did exactly what I want them to, they would win in a landslide. The only possible explanation for them not doing that is that they don’t want to win.”

The president is stealing tax dollars from the public treasury to pay off his criminal cronies.

This is the kind of thing that feels most like the NFT bubble: You can tell me there are legit uses, but there are also clear instances of companies wasting big money to shoehorn it into business models in ways that make no sense, because they’ve bought into the hype that it’s the way of the future