New — I spoke to eight trans people in Kansas about the new state law that invalidated their driver’s licenses overnight, what’s it’s like to live there right now, plus details of two DMV emails exclusively obtained by The Handbasket that shed light on the law’s chaotic and cruel rollout:

……. Deep cut

Oh wow, I hadn't even realized that they made an arrest in this case. I'm no expert in Brazilian politics, but it really seems like Lula is pulling the country back from the brink.

“Stateside” is now PinkPantheress’ highest peaking single on Global Spotify (#2). It surpasses “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” (#3).

Every stage of this process - his arrest, spending a year in jail, being dumped on the streets to die - would be deeply shameful in a society that actually valued human life.

claude levi strauss code

there's this tension between "you need to take popular positions on salient issues" and "you should build tech infrastructure" when the average person *hates* that infrastructure and thinks it's causing their bills to go up at triple digit rates

the thing is that the pro israel coalition against "islamoleftism" misses that the islamoleftist myth is just the (profoundly antisemitic) great replacement theory with a post oct 7 rebrand

Newsletter: Bitcoin is down 50%, several prominent industry figures have been uncovered in the Epstein files, Trump’s facing a probe into his family’s $500M deal with the UAE, and crypto super PACs spend their first $6 million in the midterms. www.citationneeded.news/issue-101/

I'll be honest with you. I see stuff like Platner QTing a holocaust denier and Ana aggressively posting "goyim are waking up," and I try to spin it into something satirical and humorous, but I think of the lovely and vulnerable, completely innocent Jews of this country, and I'm filled with terror.

the real risk of the paramount merger isn't that they use the studio to be an effective propaganda tool for reactionary politics. we're all too familiar with the smashing success of whiskey fridays on that front. it's what happens when they realize they can't tell people what to believe

Looking at a woman's instagram posts like they're the entrails of a goat to divine how much she gets around is breaking new grounds in incel shit

I was just talking with my mom about why Anne Frank's diary is so important. They agree

Something to remember is this instance of disenchantment is a test run and exists in the context of the President stating in plain terms that everyone who does not support his and his party's agenda is an un-American traitor who is not a legitimate part of the polity.

I like how Shen Yun is China before Communism and now the CCP has put up their own version of it that's dancing robots

sadly this also means that the most important qualification for speaking in public is "being attractive"

greenwald be like

It's kind of insane how his radicalziing moment was that stupid boomer controversy about John Kerry's military record

GET HIS ASS

ICYMI, FT Alphaville now has a Substack, which doesn’t cost a thing. Yes, there are a LOT of newsletters these days. But if you appreciate stupidly detailed explorations of finance and economics, judicious shitposting and killer charts, then please sign up? ftav.substack.com

I'm not certain how British media managed to find such an absolutely corrosive bunch of columnists, but it really is a particularly vile crop nowadays.

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

This is the core idea of Richard Hanania's book

Honestly I *do* thing the surrogacy industry is very sinister and is reducing women to their body parts in service of a dehumanizing fascist project. It's just that using this to abide the TERF project ("the sacred bond between mummy and baby")... also serves fascism and they don't realize it

The line about “the reduction of reproduction to body parts” is sending me, if anyone’s doing that it’s Cates by insisting only women who’ve given birth from wombs they were born with can be considered mothers!

There really wasn't much of substance to engage with in Trump's SOTU, but the childish, 1950s-vintage vision of US History it ended with is notable for its ultra-nationalist and eliminationist logic. David Neiwert gets at it here. open.substack.com/pub/davidnei...

The lesson, as many of us have been shouting for years, is that white supremacists hate us all— and any member of a minoritized group that thinks they’re the exception is utterly delusional.

We could say this is just about money, or incompetence, but there's no denying what it is in practice: Bezos effectively siding with Russia.

Today on Shift Key: HOW THE DATA CENTER BOOM IS CHANGING IN 2026 I’m joined by Peter Freed, former head of energy strategy at Meta, to discuss the challenge of financing the data center boom & how data center developers are pairing two unlikely energy sources together: heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

"If any moderately tech-literate user can bypass a law, its primary function shifts from protection to signaling and surveillance. The law restricts speech not by preventing access, but by imposing friction, risk, and data collection on those who comply." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-far-righ...

watching a guy with 8.8M subscribers put out this propaganda: there's a transnational far-right power grab and you're not ready for it

Techie blowhards betting on things they have no idea about versus normie econ types have already lost a 1,000,000 dollar bet about inflation and now got cleaned out on Kalshi

A tax economist put his entire life savings into a prediction market bet that DOGE wouldn’t cut spending. His wife read the Kalshi comments from the people on the other side and grew *more* confident because “they didn’t seem to understand what they were buying.” He made a 37% return

I mean that would require them to know of any American political thinkers beyond Fukuyama, Huntington, and the New York Times antiwoke beat

He wrote a book about how to dismantle the Civil Rights Act in 2023 and cowrote Project 2025 as well, it's not like he had a cringe phase ten years ago he's regretful over. His *recent* blog posts about trans people are that they're disgusting and pitiable, and his stuff on race is still abhorrent

caring about literal white supremacist hate is woke and cringe so, you know

from figurative blood libel to *literal* blood libel

very important video please watch

A deeply humane and, I found, moving piece from @jvl.bsky.social here

Haven't seen it on Bluesky yet: a nice paper is making the rounds, estimating that the cost of housing permits in LA can explain 1/3 of the gap between construction costs and housing prices. That is: LA's terribly slow housing permitting is extremely costly!

the citrini thing is slop but unfortunately so is most ai commentary (except my own, obviously)

Ed Zitron must be absolutely seething that “guy who wrote a blog post so good it wiped out hundreds of billions of dollars of growth stock market cap in a day” is in fact a real job you can do but it turns out it’s not him.

at Alphaville, I point out that the G20 has no agenda (as in, I am not just saying it's a bit rudderless, there is literally a placeholder website where its program usually lives) and this may be a problem www.ft.com/content/84ad...

what's the word for like an oyster catcher? an oystermonger? i haven't seen any consistent options

A Knight of Seven Boroughs

The piece I wrote for Liberal Currents on Musk's USAID cuts and how we can respond to them is out, take a look if you get the chance.