Probably the worst staff writer with The Atlantic - which is a competitive niche - for exemplifying the magazine’s worst tendencies. He has two topics - wokeness and himself - that are incredibly worn out.

first ballot Dunning-Kruger hall of fame

The people who profited most from the cancel culture/free speech panic were less interested in actual freedom of speech than establishing their own control over public discourse. You don't even have to take my word for it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

With a big assist from Yglesias and Barro and every other reactionary centrist who added a veneer of respectability to the attacks on disinformation research

A Minnesota legislator introduced a similar bill earlier this year and was busted shortly thereafter for soliciting a minor

Hans von Spakovsky has gone woke

i always look back on this email as predictive of where she was heading

people always laugh when bears run away from housecats because they're so much bigger but like. imagine you were in the woods & you ran into a weird little guy that looks kinda like you but like 1/5th the size & his head is shaped weird & he is running toward you full tilt yelling. what would you do

The Olivia Nuzzi story and the Bari Weiss at CBS story are the same story, which is that the upper echelons of legacy media are absolutely rife with people who worship power and don't feel burdened by any sense of responsibility to their profession or the public.

yes. she investigated the case of why everyone at the new york times hated her and discovered that it was because she was too smart and too brave.

Me: would you mind saying this thing on the record that you probably shouldn't? DHS: Buddy, we would love to say the thing.

This is very much a bullshit excuse: big newsrooms follow each others' stories *all the time.* Just last week we watched Vanity Fair publish an interview, followed by every big newsroom in the country running a "Vanity Fair published an interview" story

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Deeply unserious

Republicans control literally every lever of federal power right now.

I think it’s pretty likely Bari Weiss quits far sooner than anyone expects because if there’s anything we learned from her tenure at the New York Times it’s that this lady hates working, absolutely despises it, and she probably had to send like four emails today

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

LOL "Bari killed this meticulous story because it was unfavorable to the Trump administration" is literally the story they're giving to their stenographer

World is going to shit but we saw a mink running around on the frozen swamp today so it's not all bad

Look I get that bad faith actors have us hesitant to talk abt tech's influence on neurology but can we take a minute to admit that this is blatantly and unapologetically designed to break your dopamine system and reduce you to a gambling addict with some ADHD as collateral damage?

Faith leaders in upstate New York absolutely cooking local sheriffs for working with ICE

personally getting very irritated by the unbelievable arrogance of the data boys

Harvard's conservative student magazine was running Nazi propaganda before the board of directors suspended it in October. Author of the piece referenced in the screenshot is still a student there, and per his LinkedIn is also active with the Institute of Politics www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Between White House stories like this and on-the-street coverage of ICE atrocities the Independent is going about 10 times harder than most big domestic newsrooms. Why is that?

A Lord of the Rings cover band called Flock of Smeagols

He knows giraffe and elephant and u still don’t think he’s playing 4-D chess?

They came to me and they said "Sir it's time for your weekly cognitive test, something we make all healthy presidents do" and I said thank you. That's very nice

We had a foot plus on the ground in upstate New York three days ago and then temps hit 60 yesterday morning, my kids are world-historically mad about it

HHS rolling out new "no fap" guidelines to replace vaccine schedule

white people will take off their shoes before stepping on a picnic blanket but start a podcast if asked to remove them inside someone else’s house

james cameron makes seventeen billion dollars a movie because he has median american voter politics like no one else on earth and commits to them fully despite them being the most incoherent ideas on earth

this is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member

A man in Austria was charged in the death of his girlfriend after leaving her behind while hiking, in a case testing ideas of freedom and responsibility in the mountains.

responding to “what do you think of Adolph Hitler?” with “I’m in favor of a strong executive” is advanced conservatism. these kids have perfected the craft.

Thank you autocomplete

Very cool!

I love my two blackout drunk Minnesota sons

Holy CRAP. Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle. Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it. And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

Well, I mean, he would know

Please Do Not Release Any More Epstein Files, They Are Not Important, by A Guy In The Epstein Files

weiss does not know how to run a news organization, and so she's doing what she does best: hosting fatuous "debates" involving the people in her group chats www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

Oh wow this is basically snake oil supplement-level nonsense. The evidence that CBD is useful in a real clinical cancer setting is literally nonexistent

Finally, a platform to debate the least suppressed ideas in American life

NYT: “In a newly obtained recording of a phone call from late 2020, President Trump can be heard pressing the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives to hold a special legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

The Onion, 23 years ago. theonion.com/no-blood-for...

Per @garretthaake.bsky.social, the extremely tacky "presidential wall of fame" that lines the colonnade to the West Wing now has obviously-Trump-penned plaques insulting or praising the presidents.

Gonna start saying this in meetings