You will be visited by three spirits.

Trying to download the latest issue of the New Yorker onto my tablet for a long haul flight and the app is just spectacularly nonfunctional. It wasn't always like this.

The Redwood City Christmas massacre of 2025.

Checking to see if my expensive airline credit card lets me skip the pull-ups.

This is a great read. But also, as someone who grew up in and around the tech industry, this stuff is so embarrassing.

Totally unrelated to the civil war and all, but I think I have the same kitchen cabinets as this guy.

Speaking as someone older and not so cool who literally listened to all of "Frampton Comes Alive" yesterday, this has me pegged.

Nothing says deeply personalized outreach like the LinkedIn invite that reads, "Hey, William! I see you also went to [university I did not go to]...etc."

The sadists who run our office have put a huge jar of M&Ms in our pantry and they must know I cannot resist temptation!

BRB. Mailing my British passport back.

This process was hard enough in the before times. My wife and had been married a decade, had a 5 yr old, and a lawyer when we got her green card in 2013. And we came within a typo of disaster at our interview.

"We followed everything we were supposed to do" Legitimate green card applicants with US spouses are being arrested by armed, masked men at scheduled immigration interviews, taken away from their children, sent to prison www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/u...

Classic China Thanksgiving blunder.

Wrote about my dad (an epidemiologist) and me (a kid) growing up in San Francisco's Castro district together during the AIDS epidemic, in the early 80s. By way of plugging my dad's very good memoir about that era. williammoss.substack.com/p/ward-86-gr...

That’s made me think about those days, the experience of being a kid in the Castro, and how opaque a parents fears can be to children.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I lived with my dad, an epidemiologist, in San Francisco’s Castro district. When AIDS tore through the neighborhood, I was oblivious, but my dad was in the thick of it. Now he’s writing a memoir about those days. williammoss.substack.com/p/ward-86-gr...

A friend of mine was on the other end of that situation www.imdb.com/title/tt2060.... Trying to find a time to get out and see it.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I lived with my dad, an epidemiologist, in San Francisco’s Castro district. When AIDS tore through the neighborhood, I was oblivious, but my dad was in the thick of it. Now he’s writing a memoir about those days. williammoss.substack.com/p/ward-86-gr...

All sea slugs are festive. And this is 💯.

Potentially divisive in the sense of dividing the Nazis from the non-Nazis?

IMO, some journalists really benefit from aggressive editing.

“Network Neighborhood”

Evergreen. As a crisis PR guy I always tell people to ask themselves, "How will this email sound when it's read back to me by lawyers?"

Apropos of this, do not approach the sheep! williammoss.substack.com/p/in-space-n...

Alien is coming back to Earth for a second season

Honestly, I should not be left unsupervised. open.substack.com/pub/williamm...

(I was sitting in a hotel room in Hsinchu, Taiwan, most of the day on Sunday. This is what happens when I am idle.)

I also wrote the PR apology post that would have appeared on the Weyland-Yutani corporate blog after the Nostromo blew up because I obviously have nothing better to do with my time. williammoss.substack.com/p/in-space-n...

I enjoyed Alien: Earth, but the cyberpunk megacorporations and their supervillain bosses were boring. I have more fun imagining what the Alien story would be like if Weyland-Yutani were a realistic corporation, screwed up in all the normal corporate ways. williammoss.substack.com/p/in-space-n...

As I am in Taiwan again, something I will never stop loving about the Chinese speaking world is that there will be some guy whose whole operation is a cart and a wok and his shingle will be, like, 鸭胗皇帝, “emperor of duck gizzard.”

Well, the political news is bad, the Niners got their asses handed to them on a plate by *the Rams* and it's a stormy Monday morning where I am, so I feel like I am entitled to go back to bed.

Dune, Part 3

I enjoyed Alien: Earth, but the cyberpunk megacorporations and their supervillain bosses were boring. I have more fun imagining what the Alien story would be like if Weyland-Yutani were a realistic corporation, screwed up in all the normal corporate ways. williammoss.substack.com/p/in-space-n...

Imagine 22 hours nonstop in steerage. I fly to Singapore 16 hours nonstop from SF once a year or so and that already feels like flying to the moon.

New Rhyming Chaos podcast in which I interview CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward on reporting from a capital city as a horde of religious extremists take over—and I'm not talking about Washington D.C.!

Bless this man. If not for him, I surely would have starved in my early 20s.

Burned that I had to spend last night on a plane and instead of falling back and getting an extra hour of sleep I had to spring forward 16 hours and will be a turnip all day.

Literally the only baseball game I’ve watched this year and I’m getting the whole season.

He is definitely not allowed on the dining table. But the sunlight falls where it falls.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

When we were kids if you had given us a potato we would have burned your house down. But the ‘70s were like that.

Now & Haters

Always enjoy when there is a "click to expand story" button a few grafs down in an article and it reveals like two more sentences.

Good idea. No one with a college degree ever said anything dumb.

Apropos of The News, a thing I learned when living in Singapore and trying to navigate my wife's giant extended family was that "auntie" and "uncle" were approved all-purpose labels for any family members more than a few years older than us.

In the ‘80s, when I was learning to play bass, I remember being absolutely hypnotized by Anthony Jackson’s bassline on Donald Fagen’s version of ”Ruby Baby.” RIP

NEWS: Candidate for Senator of US province of Maine, Graham Platner, reveals new tattoo.

In my misspent youth I did technical scuba diving and we were trained that CO2 buildup from exertion could lead to anxiety attacks, which is a bad scene when you're inside a shipwreck with no direct path to surface, surrounded by silty surfaces and rapidly incurring deco obligation.

New work computer and all the ports are on the wrong side and this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Well, I have one suggestion…