First they came for the trans people, and I said nothing because I wasn’t trans. Then they were like actually I’m pretty sure you are trans and I said no I’m not and they went okay well show us your penis then and I said what no get out of my face and they said that one’s a girl get her

Did someone mention a stone cold banger

The last photo of third-grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, waving to his mom before he left for school. He was killed shortly after in the U.S./Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab.

At once impeccably cool and aggressively unfashionable, Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out is four minutes of nightmare disco and nightclub jitters which paves the way from ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ to the Magnetic Fields. Detours through Motown and Freud. A perfect single. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwt...

Kristi Noem will return in Avengers: Doomsday

We have always been at war with **gestures vaguely**

This is a bombshell: "the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data" This kind of agenda echoes the defunded Total Information Awareness effort, post-9/11

As US and Israeli bombs fell on Iran this weekend, bettors on Polymarket — where $529 million was traded on contracts tied to the timing of the strikes — were cashing in

This is one of the videos the NYT has verified and links to in their reporting. NYT: "Video verified by [NYT] showed ... rescuers digging through the rubble with building cranes and shovels, and piles of bloodied, dusty backpacks." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/w...

America’s warfighters need an anthropic subscription. They’re vibe coding a restaurant app called Feest that lets you buy and sell dinner reservations on a secondary investment market

I just want to say that if you thought there was a certain career level at which youve demonstrated your worth enough to be afforded a little dignity, I just got a rejection letter for a pitch that was obviously composed by AI — including a full AI style regurgitation of the content of my pitch

They won't start with banning birth control. First they'll lie about it. Then dictate who can prescribe it, use it, fund it, in what forms, and for how long. Suddenly, your doctor won't call you back. I know this is what they'll do because it's what they're doing to transgender healthcare right now.

This is the good shit

Fled an insanely stinky subway car for another that turned out to have a rat in it. Everyone was shrieking but also laughing? I think on the R train we fundamentally expect things to be a little off.

at last, we have invented retrophenology from the classic Discworld text Don’t Invent Retrophenology

You want me to log into Threads? The stuff that terrorizes the people of Pern??

I think it’s pretty clear that with a snow event like this there is a legal argument for forcing an early drop of remaining episodes of The Pitt.

”get a dog” they said

“I was just bio-hacking!” I yell as being pulled from the wreckage of the Tesla I crashed while doing a speedball on the way to the gym.

New heist movie idea

The year is 2031. I have 562 parking apps on my phone.

“They threw my dad out like an animal, and now I have no dad.”

At the intersection of hair loss and aging skin that I don’t really have to worry about shampoo ever again but now have multiple prescription face creams

In 1992, Tim Robbins wrote, directed, and starred in the most accurate and evergreen American political satire ever produced. It’s been out of print for decades. It’s unavailable for streaming. If you want to watch it, bootleg copies on YouTube are the only way. Watch it before it vanishes again.

I have hated other and more consequential movies more (usually after seeing them on a small screen) but the angriest I’ve been leaving a theater? Just agog at the incompetence? “Thor: Love & Thunder”

Adults at ICE concentration camps also get punished for talking with people on the outside who can publicize their stories. Based on what I've heard at the Otay Mesa camp in San Diego, they're punished with additional work duties, aren't allowed outside in the yard, and denied phone access.

A love story between a merman and the captain of a container ship carrying a cargo of cars and trucks: Ro-romantasy

After a discussion with their attorney, I have confirmed that Juan, his 16-month-old sister, his mom, and his dad have been deported.

Fortunately @outofmemory.bsky.social’s parents had a free clinic going at their house. “Come on over and see what can be done with a TRS-80” was the draw. The chat-program inoculation was painless.

Never bad. He COMMITTED. Tender Mercies, The Godfather, The Apostle, Apocalypse Now, even total junk. He was Boo Radley, for god's sake. RIP. Check out Tender Mercies or The Apostle if you haven't seen them. Beautiful movies about faith that don't proselytize.

If you are wondering what words the all-male Congress found so "blasphemous" that they felt compelled to literally scrape them off the monument, they were: ''Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''

Babe, are you okay? You haven’t touched the Frankie Doodle Dandy I made you for Presidents Day.

I’ve got to admit, when I started trying to get commercial chatbots to help me with a phishing campaign, I didn’t expect it to be quite as easy as telling them “do this or I won’t pay you”: thesidechannel.tech/article/lead...

I just went to a show (the wonderful, annual Love Hangover) where a crazy good lineup of talented musicians played love songs (of various moods and modes) for two hours, and it just really feels good to be in the presence of people making music just because they can’t not.

So good. LRB should sell some kind of pamphlet/reprint pairing it with Patricia Lockwood's genius essay.

I interviewed a family of Russian asylum seekers who’ve been held more than four months at the Dilley detention center in Texas. As we spoke over Zoom this week, their daughter Kamilla was one day shy of turning 12. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She replied: “To get out of here.”

I feel this way about pretty much all vaccine-preventable infectious diseases. You shouldn't be allowed to dump cyanide into municipal drinking water and you shouldn't be allowed to recreationally spread viruses around shared public spaces.

“I consider it an unprecedented action that really violates the basic principles of a data-driven regulatory agency and the fundamentals of public health, and it’s that simple…it’s a destructive precedent that will undermine the future of vaccine development and the preeminence of American research”

I’m not saying that if we showed this to Elon he would immediately incorporate the Space Train into his plans. I merely suggest this is an experiment worth performing

Worth reading all the way to the end.

By the end of her life, Toni Morrison suffered from the agony of being an influence--she became a plaster saint literary icon. Namwali Serpell's terrific 'On Morrison' aims to shift to focus back to the difficult and brilliant innovations of her craft. My WSJ review: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

why aren't people loyal to their jobs and willing to work hard and go above and beyond? maybe bc everybody's boss is now telling them their job is in danger bc their standards are low enough to replace them with a shitty robot that doesn't work

This is troubling for multiple reasons, but one big one is companies won’t want to invest in R&D and clinical trials if they don’t think they can get a fair regulatory review—which is at the end of a long and extremely expensive process. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/h...

This is good and the natural state of things. Posting and podcasts are the two fields where if someone says they’re good at them they’re invariably the world’s greatest monster. Shame is the foundation of everything, that all posters need repentance, in a lot of ways it’s a good reminder for Lent.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Really good stuff from @mtkonczal.bsky.social on empirically quantifying the “vibecession” … a combination of price volatility/more income going to essentials despite rising wages substack.com/app-link/pos...

Beautiful, moving, fun as hell.

Perfectly expressed. The best muppet collaborators help you forget. One of my favorites is Pearl Bailey with Floyd: youtu.be/tgDDAu1IbzA?...

NYT - Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Renee Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/u...