apparently this has been a thing in Asheville for some years?? www.citizen-times.com/story/news/2...

Sauron was not only evil, he got distracted and his defenses failed

Why do none of these fuckers call their companies Gandalf or Samwise

“We are not out to…win followers on social media,” Bari Weiss said after pulling 60 Minutes' CECOT story But Status has learned that those working on Tony Dokoupil’s Evening News kickoff tour have been urged to prioritize content built for social www.status.news/p/cbs-news-b...

she's 18

So many of the scientists working in the US on the Manhattan Project were immigrants fleeing fascism and totalitarianism

Feel like the guy who tried to bomb Republican and Dem headquarters being an election denier got sort of overlooked

New, from me: The NYT reporter who specializes in profiles of beleaguered right-wingers on campus went to New College...and found out that things were going ok! So let me explain some pretty massive errors of omission: 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...

New College is a DeSantis pet project, a Potemkin Campus that must be made real at any cost. While the NY Times notes it is the most expensive in the state, it does not tell readers what an extraordinary outlier it is. Freedom isn’t free, and a right-wing campus makeover is very expensive it seems.

What began as an errand for his elderly mother in March devolved into an attempted kidnapping accusation, forcing the 57-year-old father to abandon his real estate business and leaving his family desperate to find a way to clear his name. https://cnn.it/4jdDTTQ

INBOX: @jkbjournalist.bsky.social, an investigative reporter at @miamiherald.com who has covered Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking story for nearly a decade, accuses the Trump Department of Justice for tracking her flight history in 2019 and releasing them partially unredacted in the Epstein files

Bizarre. I can think of so many reasons you’d stay in a hotel in your hometown.

It’s kind of crazy to see a company like Amazon advertise its new thing by directly calling out its old thing for being shit.

Worth saying, I think this too doesn’t withstand basic scrutiny. Make a shortlist in your mind of the countries where you think you’re most likely to get scammed. How many are multicultural and how many are homogeneous? Make the opposite list and ask the same question.

So much of what people say they yearn for is things you get from a high-trust society; trusting neighbors and strangers not to harm you, trusting the govt and business not to be crooked, etc. But worldwide there’s no good correlation between that and how religious/traditional a country is.

Americans moving in search of "traditional values" and finding that those values are not affiliated with moral virtue but instead with socially acceptable theft and fraud within a hierarchy is so on the nose it feels like a 1970s satirical novel, and that's before the guy got DRAFTED

Having a great time controlling the city of Kupiansk. The city is just out of frame having a great time too.

Adam Raine’s life hurtled toward tragedy soon after he began talking with ChatGPT about homework. Analysis of his ChatGPT account shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life.

Welp. It was bound to happen. If you’re a WIRED subscriber, your personal data was likely exposed in a September breach from Condé Nast. Time to change your password.

Guys who claim to be "free speech absolutists" suing for defamation. Keeps happening. Read the complaint. It's ridiculously weak. Doesn't even attempt to show actual malice. Repeatedly cites opinion statements as if they're factual. Censorial bullshit from Taibbi.

DOJ official Todd Blanche promised to dump his crypto holdings no later than 90 days after his Senate confirmation in March. But about a month into the job — before divesting — he ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies. By @coreygjohnson.bsky.social @shaw.al

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

The amount of things that happen in the first episode of Alias would take up a full Apple show’s first season now.

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, soundgarden, pearl jam, or alice in chains.

deadass?

Super low hanging safety fruit. US regulators have had a decade plus to get manufacturers to make safe door handles and still they haven’t. www.autoblog.com/news/china-i...

Does the Post think that when you leave an apartment you get to set the rent for the next tenant?

This is the farce of modern censorship. The people doing the things targeted by censorship all speak in euphemisms. But if a commentator or journalist speaks plainly about what’s actually going on, that’s what gets censored.

The piss tank on the ISS is now 69% full.

Trump's dismantling of USAID has triggered an acute shortage of HIV medication in Zimbabwe: Only Sex workers could afford lifesaving treatment. “Our suppliers are greedy nurses and related staff at Parirenyatwa Hospital, who sell us the drugs for $5 a packet,” a sex worker says. (Published July)

First I read that new YouTube users are served up material that is 20% AI slop. And now, multiple cases of legitimate YouTube creators having their content stolen and being accused themselves of copyright theft. Like this poor guy. YouTube is destroying itself. youtube.com/shorts/QtXHn...

And yet federal spending is higher than it’s ever been. Not a single cent has been saved all-told.

To recap: *The Trump administration illegally renamed the Kennedy Center. They broke the law. *Now they are suing a guy who refused to perform because of the name change for $1 million.

The unchecked potential for corruption in these apps is going to make insider trading and sports betting scandals look like child’s play

New reporting says Don Jr. directly facilitated the pardon of a crypto whale who had promoted the Trump's family crypto. Jr. brought the pardon lawyer to the White House, and introduced him directly to his Dad. Pardon occurred right after. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/pardon-the...

This has been the autocrat’s playbook for a decade or two: have friendly oligarchs buy up independent media and then they impose government-friendly editorial policies so the autocrat doesn’t have to get their hand directly dirty killing the free press.

Nice line by Jonathan Chait in describing the essence of anti-anti-Trumpism. "The Free Press, which she [Bari Weiss] continues to edit while running CBS News, publishes obsessively and unremittingly negative coverage of New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, but holds symposia on Donald Trump."

Trump’s First Year Back, in 10 of Rattner's Charts - The New York Times /1 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

hivemind: ‘helen is kill’ carol: ‘no’

You know Mark Sanford. Yes, That Mark Sanford. Probably his biggest (non sex scandal related) legacy in SC is modernizing the DMV in the 2000s.

I think I understand the cynical take that inherently distrusts politicians who claim to be the real deal and is more trusting of “professional” campaigns. But the problem with that worldview is you don’t allow for the real deal to ever exist, even if it is rare.

I’m at home for Christmas so I’m watching more network TV at my parents house than usual and I don’t understand why every ad is like “if you have the flu, take NyQuil and see Wicked For Good, now in theaters. Also the NyQuil is now pink and green.”

It is a matter of objective fact that, in her entire career, Bari Weiss has never had experience remotely like running an organization with the scale or scope of CBS News. Her entire career has focused on opinion writing and never on the kind of journalism CBS does.

It is hilarious to me when guys like this are like “I’m moving to Texas” but then the only part of Texas even remotely palatable to them is Austin

I would love to see a California tech-enhanced billionaire try to live somewhere else. I would watch the reality show about that.

tbh every time I see the MA state capitol dome I think about that scene at the end of The Departed with the rat. And I think “the rat is a metaphor”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Congratulations to the new editor of the NYT’s style guide, Pete Hegseth

"The rest of the staff went home hours ago. It’s just me, one dying laptop, and a countdown clock to my urgent end-of-year deadline" is maybe the most unintentionally hilarious thing a Trump fundraising email has said. Except that it'll definitely work on some folks.