People devote so much emotion to defending Obamacare because Republicans spent the entire 2010s trying to forcibly dismantle it using all three branches of government It's only miraculously alive today because of its ardent defenders (and a last minute switcheroo from the late John McCain)

What this gets wrong is that comparing ourselves to others, or social proof, is one of the strongest forms of persuasion, and the protests will lead more people to be against the government's actions It's why the GOP spends so much time saying protestors are paid or not representative of the people

A thing I think doesn't get internalized enough in the discourse of the European subjugation of the Americas is that there was no way for contact between Europe and those continents to not end in abject disaster for indigenous Americans because of disease burden.

Feels like the authors tried to combine critical acclaim and mass appeal that ended up making nobody happy No one (including Jepsen herself) thinks Call Me Maybe is her best song, but I guess it's on there because it was super popular at the time? But for Tyler, The Creator they chose Yonkers?

"Just 3% of flights generate 80% of the warming." An eye-opening read about how we can dramatically reduce global warming from requiring a very small detour on a super minority of flights. The proposed detours typically increases flight time by only 1%.

This U.S. region map is the most accurate one I've seen because it gets many details correct: Missouri is divided between the Midwest and South Buffalo, as a Rust Belt city, is part of the Midwest Pennsylvania is split between the Midwest, Appalachia and Northeast The South begins after the DMV

I'm increasingly convinced that the future of the GOP are people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley who are pro-welfare and anti-corporate power yet also nativist and culturally conservative It'll be interesting to see what the corporate class does when their party is taken over

The idea that One Battle After Another is the best movie of the decade is one that's going to drive me crazy because it's not even the best PTA movie this decade But anyways, here's my two cents

After reflecting on it for a week, I'm left disappointed by One Battle After Another, which is still a pretty good movie. My expectations were sky high, but nothing captivated me like the Magnolia pharmacy scene, The Master processing scene, or even Phantom Thread's toast scene boxd.it/bdNutP

My Google Pixel replacing the Google virtual assistant with AI has been a worse experience in every conceivable manner. It can't even tell me the weather right anymore

This map could end up as a great visual of why certain states vote the way they do Ohio would still be a swing state if its rural areas voted like Michigan's Pennsylvania might be a safe blue state if it had New York's rurals And Sen. Collins has been saved by Maine's voters of the vast expanse

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, to me, felt like the first hour was shoved in there to explain everything to the normies, and the rest of the film PTA got to unleash his signature style and dialogue

Visited the newly opened Calder Gardens in Philly today, or as I like to call it, hard mode of the game "Kiki or Bouba?"

Given the shocking allegations published today in the New York Times against Elon's father, the most obvious line of attack for the Dems is "Keep Musk out of kids' locker rooms" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/w...

I am somehow, contrary to my understanding at all, approaching 1,000 followers If I do reach 1,000, I promise my followers I will move back to Chicago

After reading The Interbellum Constitution (which Bougie recommended), I learned how pivotal The Fugitive Slave Act was to rallying Northeners to the anti-slavery cause. Before that Act, many were ambivalent about slavery or fine to keep it in the South, but the Act made Slavery everyone's priority

Disney is at a crossroads here. Clearly they tipped their hand in favor of Trump from government pressure and from a TV station monopoly. But traditional TV is dying, and Disney is a worldwide company. They face backlash not just from Americans but from consumers around the globe

RIP any other movie's chance of winning Best Picture The overwhelmingly glowing reactions to Paul Thomas Anderson's new film portend an Oppenheimer-level sweep for awards season Could not be more well deserved for my favorite working director

Republicans are trying to get people fired over a guy who is more unpopular than popular and who over a quarter of the country has never heard of

Another indication of the increasing wealth disparity in the U.S.

RIP to one of the greats, who was charismatic and electric up to the very end in The Old Man and the Gun

You know Mawn is authentic because they didn't tone down any of the spice for all the New York Times readers who are flocking to the restaurant now

It's going to be interesting to see if the consensus flips to Republicans being seen as the party against free speech or if the free speech movement is all one giant farce that only benefits Republicanans

There's also a deep irony that, if young Americans are as Republican as the 2024 election suggested, the edgy thing for a youth to do nowadays is to be anti-GOP It's going to be interesting to see how Republicans handle the other side of the coin

Kind of crazy how optimistic young people were during the Obama years because, in hindsight, we could have created a much more dynamic economy for them

Right now kind of feels like the world is rubbernecking as they drive by our car crash of a country instead of keeping their eyes on the road I'm sure to outsiders what's happening in our country is very entertaining, like a reality show. I promise there are more important things going on elsewhere

2016 will go down in history as the year so many legendary artists released their final albums: A Tribe Called Quest, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Frank Ocean, Radiohead (hopefully it won't always be true for the last two!)

Many environmentalists miss the tradeoffs that come from land use. For every group that protests turning green space into a solar farm, it maintains even more land under the thumb of fossil fuels And every time people fight dense urban housing, it instead multiplies the footprint in suburban sprawl

Day by day, I'm more convinced that China will become the new global hegemon Many people push back because they can't see China leading the current world order, but that's because the current order is Western focused. I think East Asian growth makes them bound to take the reins of global focus

“Charlie Kirk was a bad person but even bad people don’t deserve to be murdered” is all they have to say. It’s not hard.

I don't think the US will leave its path of self-destruction until half the country stops thinking the other half of the country is the biggest enemy in existence It may be the case that after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Americans no longer looked outwards for whom to oppose

For some reason, Spotify decided to attack me by putting in three different versions of Send in the Clowns into my Daylist for this afternoon

One interesting tidbit from this article: since 2009 when the Academy expanded the number of Best Picture nominees, the only time a distributor got more than one film nominated for Best Picture and won it was Fox Searchlight in 2017 for The Shape of Water

Even if 1) Trump bribed Adams to get out of the race by giving him a cushy administration position and 2) all of Adams's voters went to Cuomo (both of which are improbable), Mamdani would still be leading by 13 points

I don't know how a country survives when the people in power only care about keeping 3/4 of 1/3 of the people happy (that's 25% of people)

The sector that's providing the biggest lift and keeping the economy from full-fledged recession is the healthcare sector I sure hope there hasn't been some big, drastic cuts to healthcare spending that will knock the legs out from the meager job numbers the past few months

I was working on a review in the @letterboxd.social app, quickly switched to another app to respond to a message, and when I came back, Letterboxd lost 200 words of my review This app is incredibly frustrating, and the lack of drafts makes it practically unusable

We are just learning about this botched operation from the first Trump administration now, 6 years after the fact Imagine how long it's going to take to uncover the shadowy actions Trump is undertaking right now, and for the 3.5 years left of his term

I have constantly said that the worst part about watching movies is not getting my steps in. I'm glad we're finally changing that

Actual Blueskyism is people having typical differences within the left-liberal coalition getting into insane flame wars over minor stuff because there are no Republicans to get mad at here.

The beauty of living in the Great Lakes is going to the beach and not having to worry about hurricanes ruining water conditions

Incredible how Chloé Zhao is going from winning an Oscar for directing a Best Picture winner, to directing one of the most weakly received MCU films, to now premiering with a surefire Oscar contender It really drives home how the failures of the MCU are its own and not from the filmmakers

Trump is going to start a second Reformation by buying an unthinkable number of indulgences to make up for his many sins

🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯 Oscar 🕯 winner Max 🕯 Richter 🕯 🕯 🕯 🕯

The Federal Circuit is also a strong contender for the messiest appeals court because different panels are often giving different interpretations of patent law and beause they are blocking the 98 year old circuit judge from hearing any cases I'd really like to work there

What a sad tale Joni Ernst has had in just over 6 months. Originally a frontrunner for Sec. Def., she voted to let Hegseth through to keep herself on Trump's good side, hoping that someone else would scuttle his nomination. Now he's leaking state secrets, and she's leaving her position of power

Attorneys make this argument all the time about agencies, too, and it drives me insane because these entities are created by Congress. If the people are against what an agency is doing, Congress, representing the people, can change or even dismantle the agency

When I was a kid, my family took me to Disney World/Land every year, but it's so expensive now that it's nearly impossible for a middle-class family to go just for one year. And even if you can afford to go, the entire experience is geared towards the rich who pay to cut the lines

Kanopy is such a funny streaming service. It has such a wide selection of movies such that the top 10 most popular right now include two best picture winners, a blockbuster, and other critically acclaimed films The most popular shows, however, are all BBC programs

Even GrubHub is trying to cash in on the engagement new cycle, and it hasn't even been 3 hours!