Isaac Chotiner: You say the two cats who live in your house are "Jerks" and you don't care for them Me: Absolutely. They are the burdens of my life Chotiner: It seems you spent an hour searching for special food for them and paid more for it than you do even for your own food. Me: That's--Hold on,

I made a little Instagram reel about this image because it’s just so frickin’ cool

Busker playing "Golden" at Yonge and Bloor getting all of the Biped's loose change, heck yeah

Just truly some of the stupidest, most vicious people on Earth. Denmark had to send armed forces to Greenland to head off a US threat in *January of this year*. And now they're pissy because NATO isn't eager to wade into an entirely optional quagmire. www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

🎙️ On #onpoli with @spaikin.bsky.social and @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social: • Budget critics on who’s not “protected” • Housing moves beyond the HST exemption • The legacy of Stephen Lewis • The man behind Nathan Phillips Square 🎧 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

New from me at TVO, on watching high-speed rail history repeat itself. www.tvo.org/article/anal...

What didn’t make the front page of Ontario’s 2026 budget? From province‑wide ride‑share rules to SkyDome law history and falling LCBO revenue, @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social breaks it down with @jeyantvo.bsky.social.

Adamantly insisting on global freedom of navigation has been the defining American foreign policy and national security position for as long as we've been a country. It is vastly more fundamental than any of our other issues with Iran. And now they've thrown it away with a shrug as not our problem.

That he can't get one of the most quoted lines of the graphic novel right — he must literally not have bothered to check, because he inverts the words — is mystifying

One of my favorite stories about the 1969 Moon landing was from an archaeologist at Gault. He was a grad student and listened to the landing on his transistor radio while he excavated a Neanderthal site.

Left my phone in the other room while three generations of McGrath watched this.

the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets a vote the enemy gets

Yes we defecated in the bed but now it's your job to un-defecate it (my policy of not using profanity on social media is clunky sometimes)

The Trump administration finds every aspect of Canada a trade irritant. Our existence is a trade irritant. I wish more news coverage reflected that reality.

hahahahaha sickos_yes.gif

13 minutes 🤡 @nytimes.com

Another Brooklyn rental project that the developer broke into 99-unit segments at great expense to avoid the wage requirements that the New York State legislature set in order to get the tax break to avoid the high taxes that the New York State legislature set newyorkyimby.com/2026/04/exca...

I do think that those lawyers and law professors who tried to fabricate a historical or legal case against birthright citizenship should be socially and professionally ostracized for their shocking cynicism and intellectual dishonesty as well as for their bald hostility to pluralist American values.

If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

ok wasn't trying to be cryptic but: Moretti's argument in New Geography of Jobs is that two-income households need to find job markets deep enough that both high-income earners can find work; that biases housing choices towards the largest, wealthiest cities

Sidenote: undermining the material basis for patriarchy (two-income households) is also a pillar of the housing theory of everything.

reiterating my take that Twitter, Bluesky, hell probably Threads too all designed to make us into joyless monsters

On a purely personal level you've got to get some satisfaction that the father lived long enough to see his son's win. RIP.

genuinely one of the only virtues to Rob Ford's time as mayor (in a "stopped clock is right twice a day" fasion) was that he often refused to accept excuses like this from city services

Annoying TTC thing: the city wrapped up their construction work at Queen & Broadview weeks early (yay) but the 504 and 501 streetcars aren’t going to return to their normal routing until May 3, because that’s the start of the next “board period.” Why run an unnecessary diversion for a month?

My latest at TVO, on how the bigger housing announcement yesterday was the one the Premier wasn't at.

Trump can pardon crimes but a Democratic House and Senate can still impeach and disqualify all of these cretins from any "Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" ever again.

Canadian politics are driven by a complex set of inputs both domestic and

yeah the missing bit here is "Donald Trump keeps threatening Canada's existence as a country and in the last election the Conservatives somehow couldn't find a viable answer to that if you gave them a pack of bloodhounds" so applying it to US politics isn't actually obvious

hahahahahahaha as far as geopolitical grand strategy goes Trump and Putin really deserve each other

IMO one of the most useful ways to think about LLM use-cases is "Would someone in Star Trek use the ship's computer to do this? If they did, would the episode be about how that's a lame thing to do?"

I keep seeing people implying that if we just had full communism then LLMs would never take off and I can’t stress how much actually previously existing communist regimes would have loved LLMs. What did you think would be automated in fully automated luxury communism?

EVERY CITY COUNCIL HEARING: More* affordable** housing***! *: No more anywhere near anything **: Always rapidly increasing in value ***: Of the kinds I personally like already

Really, really like @aragusea.bsky.social's link here between retrofuturist nostalgia and the Lost Cause mythology. You never lost it because you never had it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEcZ...

Links for March 29th, 2026: johnmcgrath.substack.com/p/links-for-...

in the running for the dumbest English language paragraph for 2026

For the Star Trek fans: philosophy professor (and excellent friend) Kerah Gordon-Solmon gets into AI psychopathy via "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." It's her first piece for the Toronto Star, and it's good, so get reading:

Looks like Operation Stupider Gallipoli is go

This gets to the bigger problem with the idea of a “Joe Rogan of the Left”. Joe Rogan created low trust voters and you can’t really make those people Democrats, because the Democratic coalition and governance project requires people who are willing to trust each other and the government.

1/ The world is facing a 'ticking time bomb' from its supply of oil, according to a briefing note from JP Morgan. Physical scarcity of oil is about to unfold across the globe, spreading sequentially through April from east to west, causing major economic disruption worldwide. ⬇️

The Ukraine War Has Cost Russia Everything — and Putin Still Thinks Stopping Would Cost More - www.19fortyfive.com/2026/03/the-...

Reuters: Pope Leo said on ‌Sunday that God rejects the prayers of leaders who start wars and have "hands full of blood", in unusually forceful remarks as the Iran war entered its second month. www.reuters.com/world/pope-l...

Easy to miss, but I think the problem here is the back part of the plane is supposed to be attached to the front part.

Lovely that we’ve reached the stage of American conservatism where they are positively cheering the black helicopters that are spying on and intimidating American citizens exercising their rights, but only if the black helicopters are targeting “the wrong type of citizen.”

Must re-read the Wages of Destruction but one of the key points Tooze makes is basically this

Reached out to Pentagon officials today for official comment for this story at 12:51 p.m. and again at 6:20. No response. We published the story at 8:22 p.m. Still no response. I'll incorporate Pentagon reaction should it come.

People forget how quickly ground troops become green again. Kabul airport was almost 5 years ago. The youngest enlisted of that have either become NCOs or returned to civilian life. Most frontline combat troops have never seen maneuver warfare. We don't have to do this. We can let them be young.

They're setting up Vance to run as the anti-war candidate in 2028 and the stupidest people you know are all going to fall for it.

I cannot stress enough how these are PTA moms and soccer coach dads and I can best describe the vibe as “festively bloodthirsty”