I've been using the No AI version of DuckDuckGo and am impressed with the results. It seems to favor reliable sites and has a clean interface: noai.duckduckgo.com

Sometimes I'm feeling good about my cooking abilities and try to make potstickers -- not fancy, not from scratch, just frozen fucking potstickers -- and am instantly humbled. What a mess.

“Separating the message from the messenger” or laundering information from its source is such a huge, huge problem

Have you perus’d the letters from the Pope

Wait for it ...

If you don’t follow Wrestling, and I know a lot of you don’t, there’s a great story going on now in Triple AAA, a Mexican promotion that was bought by WWE a year ago. It involves these 2 guys, Ludwig Kaiser and Chad Gable

Thinking about the extraordinary legacy of David Rosner- historian, public health scholar, and one of the most important voices on how corporate power, industrial pollution, and structural inequality shaped American health and lives. 🧵

Have you noticed Merlin getting fooled? It thinks there's an Acadian Flycatcher in my yard, but it's just a Gray Catbird doing a good Acadian imbirdination. (Merlin is an app that identifies bird calls & songs; catbirds are "mimic thrushes," like mockingbirds & thrashers, that mimic other birds)

No it the fuck was not.

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

This is a common and difficult workplace problem: Someone is in having a hard time and not doing their job, and their colleagues are covering for them. But they can't keep it up forever (second question in this week's column). slate.com/advice/2026/...

One reason I hate death penalty cases is that capital punishment is incredibly stupid and irrational. It's cruel, expensive, and serves no deterrent effect. It's rarely imposed, except against a tiny minority of unlucky defendants—and in those cases, racism almost always plays a role. Just end it.

I love @merriam-webster.com, but they've started adding automated examples of words in sentences and it's not going well.

Scientific research is the most international endeavor in human history. These escalating restrictions on who U.S. scientists can collaborate with are just xenophobia (plus nationalism, plus fascism, plus hatred of knowledge and people who know things).

There are four main strategies for any workplace conflict: Ignore it, win it, revel in it, or fix it. The third item in my advice column this week is about how to fix it. slate.com/advice/2026/...

Sounds like a great time to switch your browser’s default search to DuckDuckGo, gang.

It is not legal. What I every journalist start with is: it is not legal.

In 2025, HHS issued stop work order for federal research lab that studies Ebola virus and other deadly pathogens and fired its director. This lab was a world leader in accelerating development therapies and vaccines for Ebola and other viruses. 1/ www.wired.com/story/hhs-ni...

"Would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre."

Geologists in movies have a one-in-three mortality rate.

Our entire government is comprised of the people who used to leave me Jack Chick tracts instead of a tip.

🧪 gossip! Apparently NIH director Jay bhattacharya was invited to give the commencement address at a fancy high school in Bethesda. The parents complained so much that he was disinvited 🤭

I’m testing out backpacking gear ahead of a trip this summer & the irregular Therm-a-rest I bought at a steep discount at an REI co-op in 1991 still holds air.

this is such a great encapsulation of what the various factions of the reactionary right want. i might add that they envision themselves as slave masters and the rest of us, in one way or another, as their slaves. betterdonkey.substack.com/p/the-vra-wa...

Apparently some more gutter dwellers are weighing in with anger about Achilles being bisexual in the Nolan Odyssey or something and look I'm no scholar of Greek history but I have Seen Some Things on ancient Greek pottery in museums that make me think it's not a stretch.

He’s offended because The Odyssey is about something near and dear to him: being an absent father while chasing vanity for 20 years

I got mad at all the hyper-gendered, white-supremacist beauty propaganda cluttering up pop culture. We can reject that nonsense. What do you find truly beautiful? lastwordonnothing.com/2026/05/15/w...

Oh my but I needed this: you don't have to be young or thin or plastic-surgerized to be beautiful. "You’re alive and that’s beautiful, you gorgeous old thing." lastwordonnothing.com/2026/05/15/w...

There’s no graceful way to get into or out of a kayak.

Fascist-faced marionettes are not beautiful. Courage, attentiveness, enthusiasm, kindness? Beautiful. You are beautiful. You are! We're being pelted with hyper-gendered propaganda but can resist. lastwordonnothing.com/2026/05/15/w...

Disinformation is deadly.

This is one of the hardest questions I've gotten for my advice column. Someone found out the man who abused her decades ago, when she was a teenager, is now a hypnotherapist. Should she report him? If so, how? There's no simple answer, but here are things to consider: slate.com/advice/2026/...

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

None of us alive will experience climate better than what we have now. How much worse it gets is up to us.

In the spirit of Julia Ward Howe's original moral imperative for Mothers’ Day, thank you to everyone who does anything to sustain the world community instead of exploiting it for the vainglory of the patriarchy.

of whatever gender because who cares

Happy Mother's Day to all the people out there who are not biologically mothers but who are aunts, stepmothers, cousins, and just basically trustworthy advisors and supporters.

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

In case you weren’t already thinking about the Roman Empire.

“Huck shows great disrespect for the Court’s precedent in Dred Scott when aiding the fugitive Jim, presumably due to liberal indoctrination by the Widow Douglas.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/exc...

I finally figured out what these Mar-a-Lago faces remind me of. It's marionettes. They look like marionettes. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

There is not enough discussion of the EEOC's lawsuit against @nytimes.com for discriminating against a white man. Here's a gift link. Let's get into it.🧵 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/b...

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

What is especially galling is that this saved zero dollars, since the cruise ships pay for the inspections. And now their industry is less trusted because of perceived health risks. Amazing lose-lose policymaking.

A reminder that this is why we make fun of The Odyssey. The book would not exist if Odysseus was not such a complete chaos goblin who was busy causing problems for himself by arguing with Gods and being a shit navigator. There is no way to make an extremely serious movie out of this material.

Does anybody have favorite mushroom recipes?

Today in people are good, actually

Also in this week's advice column: How to help an organization recover from a terrible leader ... when the former leader's hand-picked successor thinks they were great. Plus advice for a non-traditional student who is overwhelmed, which doesn't mean they're weak, it means they're paying attention.

Here's some practical advice for dealing with a common work situation: Someone who is not the boss of you tries to be the boss of you. slate.com/advice/2026/...

Every tourist town in West Virginia has a gift shop, cafe, or bar called Almost Heaven.