I'm not exaggerating when I say following @boltsmag.org rn will unlock money for our journalism. A generous reader, @russ41.bsky.social, has offered to donate $1 for every 1-person increase to our follower count. If you're not following @boltsmag.org yet, it'll directly help fund our reporting!

The USPS posting a NINE BILLION DOLLAR LOSS!!! sounds terrible. Certainly worse than if you said "USPS costs thirty dollars per person per year" even though that means the same thing and more accurately describes a government service

I wrote a bit for McSweeney's about Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus. Just a little something for the holiday season. Enjoy!

In case you're wondering what people mean when they talk about "white woman tears", here is Exhibit A

I am sorry and I will do better in 2026

“AI is clearly sticking around so you have to get used to it” wrong. I don’t have to get used to shit. I am a practiced hater and I can keep this going for decades if I am required to

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong, it is right. No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness, it is a strength. No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited, it is unlimited.

Genuinely want people to understand how deeply they undercut their own arguments, especially about wealth and inequality, when they use genAI graphics. You are feeding the machine you critique, and for what? Clicks? To save a few bucks? Please stop.

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

My elderly dog Gizmo died a couple of years after we (the royal we) stopped treating Covid as serious so that year of work from home and no social gatherings gave me lots of quality time with him. I know that it was a rough and sad time for everyone but I feel blessed I got that time with Gizmo

They'll build a statue to the first reporter who tells this old dumbass to eat shit on camera

This this this. There are a lot of people who think stealing from artists or replacing jobs are “complicated ethical questions” but if you tell them they’re burning up the planet they have no response.

Ai Slop should be reframed as pollution

Straight-up sociopath. Asked about a Guard member who’s dead because of his bullshit and it takes him 30 seconds to make it all about how great he is.

I wish it didn’t feel so unusual and inspiring to see a leader treating everyone like they matter and saying that we have a responsibility to help each other

This is the correct take. Stewing in white supremacist propaganda is bad for your thinking. And if think you are so savvy that it won’t impact you, you are the exact kind of mark they are slowly converting (I’m looking at you, centrist pundits).

People will die, and are currently dying, because RFK was granted one of the most powerful megaphones in the country. Two people who could have thrown barriers in front of his climb decided not to; there's a sex scandal here but it is not the biggest scandal.

A new kind of rapid Chotining. Please appreciate the alt-text.

It's not just "consumer smart" it reduces environmental waste, key materials are often mined in slave conditions. The whole tenor of the article is wrong - why is the economy so dependent on us engaging in mass waste?

“Frog,” said Toad, “let us eat one very last cookie, and then we will stop.”

answer is great but also it's telling that the guy who's been saying this since day 1 has to answer about whether he's an antisemite for 5 min every interview while the same people grin vacantly at the jewish space lasers lady and call her a brave warrior

Won't someone think of the real victims, men who are attracted to teenagers

Isaac Chotiner staring at a list of names right now.

Massive shoutout out to whoever handles the Royal Canadian Air Force’s social media account. They responded to every single comment on their already very solid Trans Day of Remembrance post and they responded like this…

If you like Studio Ghibli, Knives Out, The Owl House, or Frankenstein, here’s what the creators are saying about A/I. 🚫 SAY NO TO GEN A/I 🚫

MTG should have to go give scared straight lectures at high schools about looking at your phone too much

everyone who spent the 90s laboriously and lovingly making mixtapes just dissolved into ancient dust

@martinmorazzo.bsky.social @cohalloran.bsky.social Finally opened up The Ice Cream Man Mortal Coil Shuffle deck and yall are killing it. Great storytelling, design, art and pushing forward the comic/graphic novel medium

Wild

They lied about it. All of it. A thug cop shot an unarmed woman five times without justification, boasted about it to his colleagues, and then this administration tried cover it all up by arresting her and charging her with felonies.

All of my political views and policy ideas have basically collapsed to "Punish the Villains" and I mumble it to myself every time I see a news article these days

the nuzzi story is fun and all but at the center of it is the elevation of a man who has dedicated his life to making children catch preventable diseases to a position where he can enact harm at enormous scale

i think if you want to have those disgusting LED headlights on your car, you should have to do a test where they blast you point blank with your own headlights and then you have 15 seconds to successfully complete some sort of vision-based task, and if you can't do it they push your car off a cliff

wrote about the president’s flagrant and destructive corruption in a column that references street fighter, the simpsons, machiavelli, and a host of revolutionary-era americans (gift link)

nuremberg trials is no longer the moderate position. the scarecrow trials from the dark knight rises when bane takes control of gotham is now the moderate position

mr president sir theres a story coming about how you intervened to help a sex criminal. no sir, not that sex criminal you helped….no not that one either…sir, please stop guessing sex criminals that you helped. ill give you a hint sir, hes a trafficker. no sir, not that trafficker a different one

the man should not, and i cannot stress this enough, around students in any capacity.

Why am I so against generative AI in games? Because I simply do not want my initial reaction to art to be one of suspicion and scrutiny, AI slop is fundamentally damaging my relationship to art and artistry, and I am deeply resentful that it is forcing me to be guarded when I should be wowed.

Do these people have any other talking points than "Muslim=bad"? They're doing the "transing the gay away" conspiracy theory with an Islamophobic twist.

Antisemitism is a lot like Qanon child abuse conspiracies in that there’s this real and bad phenomenon and, parallel to that, what can only be described as a large scale mass psychosis about a mostly fictional version of the same phenomenon

the fun thing about actually reading books and loving the English language for its weird complexities is that the two words that make up “Vanity Fair” can also be read as “self-indulgently mediocre”

Hannibal commission :) #hannibal

THAT'S LITERALLY HOW THE SUBSIDIES & ACA EXCHANGES WORK ALREADY. CONSUMERS ARE INFORMED BY COMPARING POLICIES ON THE ACA EXCHANGES, THEN THEY PURCHASE ONE AND THE GOVERNMENT PAYS SOME OR ALL OF THE COST OF THAT POLICY. I'M TEARING THE LITTLE HAIR I HAVE ON MY HEAD OUT.

So I brought this up on other socials but this is extremely disgusting. Completely unrelated did you know that it's $40 to rent a wheelchair and $110 to rent an ECV at SeaWorld? Who knew! #SoMuchLessToSea #Accessibility

I'm not trying to be mean, but racists who believe Trump betrayed them by being a child molester are not going to embrace the Democratic Party without forcing that party to embrace racism. And the people gained would in no way make up for those lost.

"I sought and longed for something I could not quite name. But in you, I found it." ~10hr study of a shot from @realgdt.bsky.social's Frankenstein, what a beautiful film 🍁🖤

Sick to my stomach that the President being mixed up with a horrifying global network of pedophiles is considered a 'voter issue' and not something the whole world needs to know about and people need to be prosecuted for. Only reason anyone would want people to ignore Epstein is if you're involved