One of the only welcome things about this current period in the U.S. is that the "this is not who WE are" stuff might finally be over.

every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”

You simply have to read this @juliannemcshane.bsky.social and @kieraevebutler.bsky.social joint and not just because there's way more levitation in it than you would think possible. The Archangel Michael is also somehow involved www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

if i’m trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and i’m struggling with that transition, what i like to do is think about it until i figure out what to do. controversial stuff i know

Finally started this book tonight and it's definitely living up to the hype

Remember how if a kid choked on a little plastic toy they used to stop selling the toy

I saw Clipse perform last night and it was so good it almost restored my faith in humanity

I took a native plant conservation class through the State Botanical Garden of Georgia last weekend, and our instructor threaded a lot of memes throughout her lessons. This one was my favorite 🌱 🌺 #nativeplants

This really feels like a defining post of our time

god I can't wait to leave the US

The student newspaper. This fell. To the student. Newspaper.

"I was wrong" is one of the most rare phrases you will ever see on the internet (ESPECIALLY on social media) and even then, nine times out of ten it's followed by the word "BUT" and then you get gems like this

all the other predators watching their buddy fight with Arnold on a giant TV:

it's really silly to try to pin down one single culprit for something like differences in weight between different populations, especially when it's obviously very bad for Americans that our food is much less healthy AND we move much less than other countries

One of the key strengths of MAGA is that, like Sartre's antisemite, they are sincere about nothing while being capricious and cruel about everything, so it's basically impossible to have a public debate about their positions, since they don't have any sustained positions.

Bari says her website's mission is to promote "ideological diversity" and "open debate" but this entire piece is just smearing someone for holding beliefs she disagrees with.

aa far as I can tell her entire beat is just trying to damage Zohran, I'm sure Bari is gonna have a whole team on this beat by the end of August

Hulk Hogan truly was the real America: an icon you were dutifully instructed to adore as a child and then every single piece of information about what he was, what he did, and what he thought about things made you hate him more and more, and in a way, yourself for falling for it.

The complicated joy of outliving someone you used to watch on TV who wound up helping destroy one of the best places you ever worked, and hastened the decline of the American journalism ecosystem

RIP Hulk Hogan. Thank you for Thunder in Paradise and playing your part in making professional journalism go extinct 🫡

guess their tagline was a promise

“porn is dangerous” is fascist propaganda

Donald Trump’s own strategists and advisers aren’t sure the president’s base will survive Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost. www.wired.com/story/trump-...

the new Islanders is great

incredible that Bari Weiss can extend her grievances from college to being mad at someone who DIDN'T EVEN GET INTO THE SCHOOL

"I’ve learned through faculty reviews that allowed me to compare my own workload to (senior male) colleagues’ at elite schools, I’ve paid forward a few lifetimes’ worth of service, and I have no desire to keep sacrificing myself for institutions I no longer trust or regard as sustainable."

We finally got around to discussing The Liver King, one of my all-time manosphere icons, and perhaps the most vivid example of a core dynamic of the manosphere, which is the way it peddles extreme eating disorder content with little to no pushback from anyone: open.substack.com/pub/machopod...

Because everyone deserves a shot 🎯

Me, logging onto a Teams meeting—

While writing There Is No Place for Us, what I wanted most was for readers to feel the fury I carried throughout my reporting—the outrage, the horror at what this country forces our neighbors to endure. This review by @lilysanca.bsky.social says everything I hoped the book would convey, and more:

one of the weirdest things about games culture is the intense institutional and peer pressure to remain exclusively and relentlessly fixated *only and ever* on video games, and thus interpolate all of reality and your experience through games. leaving the industry genuinely felt like leaving a cult

Lol

this is already out of date (which is kind of inevitable tbf) but @tonyhawk.bsky.social Yuri and I talked about Elon on our latest episode of MACHO POD, with a focus on his mental health and drug use, the latter of which explains a lot about his world view open.substack.com/pub/machopod...

I wonder what Elon's official biographers think, having both published their books well before the darkest, strangest, and most interesting part of his life story even began.

Here’s the bottom line for what’s going on with Grok - if the owner of the website is putting his thumb on the scale hard enough for the chatbot to turn into Goebbels, you should be deeply concerned about what he’s doing to the algorithm that you can’t so easily see, and what it’s doing to you

noticed this in a profound way since moving to Ohio; last time I went back to NYC a friend mocked me for "living in a flyover state." He defended it by saying he'd probably be killed if he moved to the midwest because he's gay, as if openly gay people only live in New York and California 🤷

I don't have much to add to the 'you voted for this haha' conversation that people haven't already said, but something I think a lot about is the real lack of solidarity I see with communities in the South after disasters and the profound lack of understanding about who actually lives there.

I love that former NYT public editor @sulliview.bsky.social is public-editing from the outside. "With this made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani. "And no lofty explanation about the mission can disguise it."

Kosher ranch soup 😋

A reminder that is is possible to live a life of kindness & integrity. You don't have to sell out just because everyone else is.

you know, they really did do this

what always kills me about this stuff is that most people won’t even know. they don’t know what happened today, and the direct line between it and their loss of healthcare or what have you. That the misery encroaching on their lives was intentional, and done by people staring them in the eye

a common saying I heard from people at Blizzard who'd come from working at Activision was that the culture there was demanding but hypercompetent because "annualized layoffs ensured high performance." wonder how that's been working out for them!

I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that this will be the end of the country we have imagined ourselves to be

“There’s a level of terror I haven’t seen before.” A psychiatrist who provides care to undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles talks about the psychological harm caused by recent ICE raids and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

horrifying to have spent so much of the past 6-7 years working to get to a point where I could have a good and rewarding job that's also in high enough demand constantly that I would finally be safe from neverending layoffs only to realize that really none of us are ever safe from economic precarity

one thing I'm never going to forget from Blizzard is Jay Allen Brack going out of his way to reassure people in his internal and external messages announcing the 2019 layoffs that nobody actually involved in game development was affected. aside from the sheer inhumanity, this was also plainly false

language like this is so insulting, imo. is it a compulsory thing for CEOs to need to brag while laying people off?

you would think that failed presidential candidates would want to keep fighting for the future they want for the country if they were actually seeking its highest office for any sort of altruistic, non-selfish reason, instead of gloating and eating popcorn. why is the latter the fantasy people have?