What if we acknowledged that hard borders are inherently artificial, and that their existence runs contrary to all the very best parts of being human What if we made that the starting point from which we approach society’s problems, instead of ceding that there must always be outsiders looking in

1. It’s cool that choose your own adventure type books are back 2. It’s hilarious that one series has such a passive-aggressive title www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/YON/s...

This is an excellent interview about a truly first-rate novel.

i love how the duffer brothers have built an entire career around "we love jacking steven spielberg's whole shit"

Stacy’s mom Brought Armageddon on Stacy’s mom Rules the ruins with aplomb

TV Microreview: The Boroughs Stellar cast, creepy monsters, but zero mysteries says @carturo222.bsky.social at the NOAF blog: www.nerds-feather.com/2026/05/tv-m...

AMAZING NEWS: the British Film Institute are adding some episodes of Philosophy Tube to their Archive of National Importance. Future generations will have the chance to see the show long after YouTube is gone. This is a HUGE honour, I can’t really think what a higher one would even be??! 😮

Long after we are all gone, at some point in the far future, when historians are looking back on this time period and the various horrors of the last decade, one of them will stop reading, take a long sip of their coffee, adjust their glasses and whisper "What the fuck is a labubu?"

In other news, the sky is blue and the sun is hot. (I know, I know: studies are important to provide data for things to change, blah blah blah) variety.com/2026/film/gl...

Bonus episode of “The Backdrop” this week at @secondwindgroup.com, looking at “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” We look at the emptiness of the film, Jon Favreau’s post-human playhouse, and how this is the purest expression of the modern multimedia franchise age. youtu.be/IlJ4UrpXJ9U?...

One of the great philosophical questions of our time is how the film Idiocracy could be so mean-spirited and wrong-headed and still be so correct about where America was headed.

Claude, summarize the pope’s AI encyclical

I wrote about the fight against data centers and how it could impact the midterms for @rollingstone.com

This is your infrequent reminder that I wrote a novel that explores the question, "What if the US had never existed?" Link in bio.

NEW: An "independent label" is publishing huge amounts of AI slop featuring AI-generated "viking" rappers and Christian rockers and blasting it across social media + streamers, where it's raking in views/listens. The guy behind the label claims the artists are real: futurism.com/artificial-i...

gonna need to declare a lot more people vexatious litigants.

my hope is that Leo will eventually drop one in the form of a concept prog rock album

Talked to @thetyee.ca about the right-wing content creators who wound up cashing out in the thousands and millions via Tenent Media — which was revealed to be a Russian influence op. In any other time, it’d be career-ending stuff. But all those folks are still going. thetyee.ca/News/2026/05...

I wrote this essay to think through something that’s been with me a long time — the way Palestine surfaces as a weight others try to set down, and what it means to carry it anyway. From Kipling to Sliman Mansour’s porter to the bombs now falling on Tehran. communispress.com/the-burden-a...

The Washington Post "is preparing to slash a significant portion of the very headquarters [Jeff] Bezos once championed as a symbol of the paper’s future," @nataliekorach.bsky.social reports. Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/washington...

"But what if the hero doesn’t want to slay the monster? What if the monster should be left alone because killing it would bring more shame upon the hero than glory?"

"the character suffers from the now all too common blockbuster philosophy that banter is a proper stand in for characterization"

I swear to god, the amount of people I see making fun of Erin Moriarty's appearance as part of insulting The Boys finale is frankly disgusting and disappointing.

every time I critique a Star Trek thing like "it's missing a story! that's bad!" somebody will go 'Star Trek is for children.' what if I told you children deserve stories? and also, lol no, Star Trek was for a adults but also children enjoyed it.

How did I miss the resemblance for so long

Less of the night sky is visible than ever before NASA's Black Marble project measures artificial lighting at night. From 2014-2022, things got 34% brighter. And now over 80% of humanity can't even see the Milky Way at night. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #nightsky #nasa

New paper just published on misinformation, including that produced by the Comet Research Group, Avi Loeb, and Graham Hancock. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) and airburst archaeology are critiqued. news.unm.edu/news/new-unm...

why do all the apps now have to act like the creepy guy who interrupts you at the library to ask you what you’re reading, who wants this

the rudest thing my committee ever does is ask me who I envision as the audience for something. sorry I don’t KNOW who is going to be willing to read my unhinged screed about karst topography and medieval literature’s engagement with place and the imagined past but that’s bc everyone else sucks

Space wasn’t infinitely small when the hot Big Bang began There's a minimum size that space could've been "compressed into" at the start of the hot Big Bang. Not a singularity, not soccer ball sized, but human hamster-ball sized. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #astro #physics #inflation

I can simultaneously feel that no one deserves to be subject to the horrors of the current administration and also have less sympathy when the people suffering said horrors literally voted for this administration. That's not actually a contradiction.

Decades in, still NO evidence this kind of genetic "personalization" and data monitoring has any benefit for healthy individuals. SAME pitch. Still hype. 23andMe offers to connect users’ DNA data with medical records www.statnews.com/2026/05/19/2... by @matthewherper.bsky.social via @statnews.com

The antivax movement has a central conspiracy theory, but there is also a central delusion behind MAHA, revealed by a blogger with the ‘nym Unbekoming, that the body is "perfect" and medicine seeks to tamper with its perfection. sciencebasedmedicine.org/how-unbekomi...

As a science fiction writer I really fucking resent tech bros for ruining the phrase "artificial intelligence." 80 years of it being all about cool androids and interesting computers destroyed by five years of "Spicy autocorrect making everything shittier for money." NEVER FORGIVE.

The lost episode

Angola has declared its highest mountain, Mount Moco, part of a new conservation area to protect its threatened Afromontane forests. The announcement builds on years of work by local villagers, who have planted over 8,000 trees and helped protect surviving forest. buff.ly/5mZiin7 #ShareGoodNewsToo

Which is to say, if one is going to say "AI is actually intelligent" but then refuse it rights and agency, then I strongly suspect one either doesn't actually believe it is "intelligent" in any meaningful sense, or one is cool with owning slaves. One of these branches is ethically less problematic.

"Robots will rise up and kill us all because they read scifi" has a lot of "slaves run away because they're mentally ill" vibes to me. It also does not inspire me with confidence that folks understand or even care about real world oppression.

Worst crossovers ever: Ocean’s 12 Monkeys

It's impossible to spoil #TheBoroughs. The show is eager to reveal everything from the start.

Yep The pick-me bootlickers think they are making themselves safe, but they've just delayed their execution by a small amount

Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz read this 600-page religious "science" book and has returned with a report from the hazard zone. sbee.link/j893btyw46

Tangential, but: if you're the slightest bit skeptical that you want kids, *do not have kids*, your kid(s) will innately know that you never wanted to be a parent

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH

In 1872, the Chicago Evening Post published an absolutely brutal editorial mocking people who objected to sharing public spaces with Black people. Still some dated language but a remarkable piece. “Hire a carriage and you can sit all alone by your own sweet self for $2 an hour.”

Amazing to think I was once interested about what new phones and laptops were coming out. Now, every new development is an intrusive and unnecessary addition of AI, in a form that gets in my way rather than helps me, and which already looks horribly outdated.

You come to me, on the day of my son's wedding, which I am not attending

Fruits are plants' way of hiring us to do sex work for them.

Ocean census reveals more than 1,100 new species

What a time to be alive.