A whole lot of misconceptions about the vibes of the classical world would be cleared up if they would just repaint the damn statues

Honestly, if you want to turn 'normal' people like your educated reliable-D-voting parents against the NYT, "they plagiarize stories from smaller outlets" is probably a better starting point than Ezra Klein being terrible or whatever

Endymion Wilkinson, the sinologist and former diplomat, walks us through his teak-wood bookshelves on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, and recommends five books out of 4,500. Read our latest bookshelf column: chinabooksreview.com/2026/05/12/e...

One thing I would say about testing is that now having had one kid go through upper elementary in Connecticut and the other do it in New York, in NY they place *way* more emphasis on writing because the annual state test here includes it (no doubt at sizable expense) and the one in CT doesn’t.

One of the more shameful acts ever committed by a Mike Love

Seems like Mamdani may have managed to thread the needle here in the first big crisis of his mayoralty?

I'm actually OK with abolishing the gas tax - which was too low to make much difference and which we were going to have to phase out anyway once EVs became more popular - as long as we replace it with a new system where roads and highways are expected to mostly pay for themselves with tolls and fees

This hit me so hard this week.

Yeah, you either need actual people for a job or you don't need actual people for a job, but one thing you definitely don't need to do is pay human wages for machine-quality work, which is the fundamental flaw in teaching "AI" in schools or whatever

Civilization VII: we finally fixed that thing you all hated.

I'm just glad this is happening in countries with competent public health systems, rather in the US where various quacks would get up and say that the people who died from hantavirus were half-dead anyway and that everybody should try to get healthy natural immunity by being infected with hantavirus

Last July, the pope called his bank in South Chicago. He wanted to update the phone number on his account. The teller told him that any changes had to be made in person with an ID. Knowing that was impossible, he asked: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” She hung up on him.

This is literally Apple going to the Supreme Court because there don't want the district judge to *hold a hearing* about what an actually fair commission level for external purchases would be. (presumably because they worry it'll then be applied worldwide)

“A roof that pays for itself” is probably going to turn out to have a whole lot of interesting applications we haven’t even thought of yet

On reflection I think that US Supreme Court justices should be elected. 3 every 2 years 6 year terms, national popular vote, maybe a rule that there can be no more than 2 from the same party in any cycle. It’s a political role and as such needs to be accountable to the people.

Tried to make me go to rehab, I said "bokk bokk bokk"

Slightly diminish a book A Lord of a Ring

I feel like there’s an opportunity here to goad him into taking like an AP Calculus exam or something

This has the same “grasping at straws” energy as the people who were saying we would put childcare on the blockchain

“US freezes cryptocurrency” wait isn’t the whole point that governments can’t mess with it?

This looks extremely annoying because it has a weirdly squat screen that will ruin - if nothing else - any UI that expects to squeeze a decent amount of content above the keyboard. (I continue to feel like 'allow developers to opt out of supporting specific models' ought to be a legal requirement)

Basically everything wrong with American politics now can be traced back to some variation on “people not facing consequences for things”

I suspect this is what a lot of Democrats were thinking when they made these posts, but I appreciate Lander making it explicit that it’s strictly about the principle of the thing

"Written homework is optional; your grade will be based solely on participation, in-class assignments, and exams. I don't want to waste time grading AI crap. However, the homework will address similar themes to the exams, and the feedback I give you will be similar to what I would give on an exam."

a) Wow b) Thank God this is a state case and hence not easily fixed by Bald Testosterone Goblin throwing money around

This is insane, though TBF my daughter's middle school is switching ELA curriculums next year and "everybody reads the same novel" was presented to us as an exciting unorthodox feature of the new curriculum (and I associate the decline of that with Calkins' 'just right book' BS)

Watching Back To The Future with kids for whom the 1950s and 1980s are more-or-less indistinguishably old is a humbling experience

Good riddance. He wiped away most of the soul and whimsy of the Jobs era, launched a succession of meh / disastrous new products, and took the company to bold new heights of “treating developers like shit” even to the point of making other senior leadership uncomfortable; also toadied up to Trump.

Gee it must be difficult to negotiate with a government that changes its position every 48 hours

Unintended consequence of the day: an ambulance couldn’t get cars to get out of its way because the only place they could pull into is the bus lane and everybody is freaked out about bus lane violation tickets

2 weeks into Claude Code and the main thing I think I'll be using it for is writing crappy little scripts; I do write a *lot* of crappy little scripts, since I'm in the Data File Manipulation business, so it's well worth the money to have somebody toil away on them for me, but not production code.

Honestly "every long-running franchise is creatively bankrupt now" is one of the best arguments for 28-year copyrights; if anybody could make a Star Wars movie, the 3rd best Star Wars movie of all time would be something somebody made with mostly practical effects on a $2M budget

Film pitch: The Santa Con

*LIVE NATION ILLEGALLY MONOPOLIZED TICKETING MARKET, JURY FINDS

My quick take on this is that: a) The world would be better off with 100 million humans b) What happens to humanity after that is a decision that we'll all be long dead before anybody has to think about c) The focus for now should be how to navigate declines rather than how to reverse them

The next administration needs to make it a priority to revive + deploy this - it’s going to be impossible to kill once people are actually used to it, they just launched it too late

30 years ago today, Principal Skinner purchased fast food to disguise as his own cooking at an unforgettable luncheon with Superintendent Chalmers. #TheSimpsons episode “22 Short Films About Springfield” first aired April 14, 1996.

Saw an ad for an AI bedtime story generator and a) gross b) why would you pay for that instead of just using an LLM directly but also c) this fundamentally fails to recognize the interactive nature of bedtime stories

The index of consumer sentiment isn't broken; models that try to predict it just don't have the right input variables. I fix that and find that, yes, high nominal price levels explain why the vibes are so off. It's the prices, stupid www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04-14...

Henry VIII would never

If you feel like celebrating today's events through baking, here's Susan Derecksey's recipe for Dobos Torta, which helped seal the deal with my wife a few months into our relationship Notes: * 2x batter for backup layers * 1 1/3x filling + add lots of cocoa powder * add lemon juice to caramel

It occurs to me that one way we could get some of the benefits of a parliamentary system in the US without a brand new constitution would be to change the Senate to 2-year terms like the House; a sufficiently unpopular president could easily lose 60 seats in the midterms and be promptly impeached.

Election results

An important thing to understand about Hungary - at least according to several of my Hungarian in-laws - is that they still operate on a spoils system for a lot of government jobs; when the party in power shifts, a ton of “apolitical” people associated with one side or the other get hired/fired

Honestly a lot of the “learn to code” stuff was a mirage anyway, possibly one that was propped up by tech companies to help lower their labor costs - the *good* coding jobs did (and still do) tend to require an uncommon natural aptitude for it

Honestly after having spent a few weeks playing around with a foldable the main mass-market use case I can see for them is older people wanting the option to switch to a larger screen to read on; that's not nothing, but I'm not sure how many of those people are willing to pay $2k for it.

The US auto industry has been complicit in everything from killing transit to ruining cities to white flight to climate change, it deserves to die slowly and painfully