and now he's a gd pro fisherman! andscape.com/features/ben...

Well, everyone knows there’s a Crisis of Masculinity. What this essay presupposes is: who gives a shit? Join Mon Mothma, Michelle Williams, Betty Draper and me for @newrepublic.com's 2025 Year in Television! newrepublic.com/article/2033...

Heading to Penzey's to stock up on Abolish ICE Spice, No Kings Cardamom, Herbes de Proletariat, Civil DisoBay Leaves, and dried Parsley (French 75).

This is just a trailer, of course, and the leaked trailer from earlier in the year had a lot more juice. But, just asking: shouldn't Odysseus have been Ben Affleck?

One explanation for Bari killing the story is that she did so as a public act of fealty to the administration. But another is that, as an inexperienced journalist, she doesn’t understand that a refusal to go on the record is a kind of comment in and of itself

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Very sad. I *hated* Ziggy during my first go-round of S2, because like a lot of people I hated the shift in focus to the docks. Each rewatch made me grow to actually like and fully appreciate that season more, and Ransone’s character arc and performance was a huge reason why.

The women in this 1964 photo of Beatles fans (yes, that's what they used) could not get a credit card at Bank of America without their husband or father cosigning. So, no. The answer, CBS and Bank of America, is no.

We're shooting all of the kitchen island sequences in VistaVision.

Main takeaway from rewatching A CHRISTMAS STORY is that those kids were assigned to read the entirety of SILAS MARNER in the fourth grade! cc: @annieabrams.bsky.social

Excited to announce my upcoming appearance on CBS/the FP. (I'll be taking the "no" position.)

Yglesias is basically Ball Don’t Stop for politics at this point.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

I told my son that the Atlantic reported that the “six seven” phenomenon was over and my kid rolled his eyes and said, “respectfully, no kid is reading that magazine.”

Universities are increasingly jumping on the "one price course materials" scam in which students all pay the same fee and have access to digital versions of their reading. Maybe this is a good idea in a world where the biochem text is $250. I hate it for specific reasons. >

Hot take: One Battle After Another is a Christmas movie.

Oh my god I was right

For the Friday 5 o'clock news dump crowd: I didn't like PLURIBUS.

I found it. The Bari Weiss/CBS News town hall promo for feminism does indeed use a 1964 photo of Beatles fans.

I felt seen by PLURIBUS, which is a complete and insightful allegory about what it's like to be a TV critic who doesn't like PLURIBUS.

Happy interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS closest approach day to everyone except avi loeb

"Has feminism failed women brought to you by bank of america" is my MKULTRA sleeper agent activation phrase

This is a scandal.

I've been talking about both doctoral study (with academic jobs as the goal) AND tenure for YEARS in terms of RISK MANAGEMENT. It is a very calculated, and increasingly speculative, risk. You have to treat it that way. Faculty hate it when I do this. Especially about tenure.

PLURIBUS is the most finely crafted piece of television art I've ever fallen asleep watching three times. My review, for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2042...

and tiny tim, who was NOT in the epstein files,

I'm here at a diner in rural Ohio with the one Trump voter whose last straw was the Kennedy Center thing.

Look a lot of people were at the Lucifer Foundation's annual Billionaire Vision Brunch in 2011. I didn't talk to all of them. Some of us just find the work the Lucifer Foundation does to be interesting.

[Mike Birbiglia voice]: And what I *should* have said was nothing.

Any parents out there have kids in school who, all of a sudden, have an "Hour of AI" activity unit they have to do?

Susan Faludi changing all the 1980s references to 2020s references and resubmitting the manuscript of BACKLASH to publishers right now.

The medical community has not advanced children's amoxicilin flavor technology one single step since 1983.

This is the hardest I’ve laughed in a long time.

Once you see it it becomes impossible not to notice the media consent-manufacutring machine that responds to literally every social crisis with the diagnosis that "women too free."

"It is eminently possible to write a great book about being driven sexually insane by a man who sucks. Nordic women do it particularly well." I could quote every line of this @brandyjensen.bsky.social review. defector.com/american-can...

Kristen Bell's character on NOBODY WANTS THIS knows an implausibly small amount about Judaism. It's impossible that that character would know that little. Even just ambiently from, like, watching movies. The premise is that a rabbi starts dating a space alien from outer space.

There's something so hilarious to me about writing so much shit about Obama that they needed to make two plaques.

It's not quiet quitting if you tell everybody.

Gavin Newsom is Mitt Romney for the Democrats, a department store mannequin who will lose in a general election

lmao

I bet Francis Fukuyama's wife loves this post. I bet it's her fave. I bet she read it and thought: "what a good job." I bet she's like, "i'm glad francis spends hours online interacting with an search engine he's gendered as a woman who never expresses negative or critical emotions towards him."

I remember writing years ago about a then-new initiative by Amazon to disrupt local government procurement of things like office and school supplies. Turns out Amazon's become very popular with school districts, and it's using dynamic pricing to rip those schools off. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

This NBA Cup court looks like somebody peed all over it.

Teens turn to a variety of online platforms, but YouTube continues to stand out. Roughly nine-in-ten teens report ever using it. TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are the next most widely used platforms.

We talk a lot about how race and gender grievance are offered to white men to distract them from exploitative working conditions that are in fact universal, and this piece is a beautiful example of how the work of that distraction gets done.

A scuzzy essay like this can't exist without a legion of scuzzy anonymous sources willing to give sour grapes quotes about how their lack of professional success is the fault of ladies and people of color. Some of these quotes are just people WITH jobs shit-talking their minority co-workers!

AI aside, I feel like we live in a universe where people are constantly making giant preposterously unprovable claims — people have fewer ideas than they used to! — using a handful of line graphs. If I wasn't already a goner, he would have lost me when "birth rate decline" entered the chat.