3. This would create just a unending flow of zero-value paperwork, amidst a culture of fear. Just all the best aspects of the USSR in one neat package.

President Donald Trump Calling People Retarded Raises An Important Question: In These Confusing Times Should We Be Getting Back To Simpler, More Straightforward Language? Today in the @nytimes.com

Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology seems surprisingly flimsy

Department of Defense Law of War Manual, Sec. 18.3.2.1 states the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders. What’s its key example? Wait for it . . . It’s "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

I have refined The uranium That was in The centrifuge And which You were probably Saving For power generation Forgive me It was so powerful I am Become death

The most precious commodity you have is your attention. You don’t have to waste it on poor-faith debates or arguments with strangers if you don’t think they’ll be productive. You can prioritize the things that matter to you and make your life richer.

Have seen a few people passing around this story by Tom Stoppard from just last year, talking about how he learned he was Jewish and also much about his family history, and it's quite a read. He really knew how to write. www.huntingtontheatre.org/2024/09/11/t...

Introduce yourself with five concerts you’ve seen: David Bowie The Grateful Dead Violent Femmes Mission of Burma Doc Watson

I love this so much I can hardly stand it! Ripley FTW!

My public service announcement for today is that America’s Test Kitchen, which is infinitely better then NYTimes Cooking, has introduced a new gift link option that has no limit on how many you can share and each link lasts 30 days.

"'Good luck with your blog,' she wrote at the end of her 2nd email, in a note dripping, like the 1st one, with derision. I think I speak for many rdrs of Record during her editorship when I say: We’d be grateful if you brought some of that same spirit + fight to, you know, covering architecture" 😏

Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today! …Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :) Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen. blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...

People are holding administrative burden parties to collectively take on tasks www.wsj.com/lifestyle/re...

We truly live in a golden age of neologisms, and I think “fuckmuppetry“ will be one of my favorites. So perfectly descriptive!

The @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social has been on fire lately, and this is oped is no exception. (And worth noting as an aside that no LLM could produce an article of this power and precision). www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

If I were in Berkeley, I would go see this www.instagram.com/p/DRPvRRlkmtf/

herein lies my account of a weekend getting over-involved with 24-hour-long Lovecraft-inspired immersive theatre show The Key of Dreams www.timeout.com/uk/theatre/i...

Next semester’s syllabus practically writing itself…

I finally wrote about the big Minecraft ARG that's been making the rounds! If it was just a King in Yellow adaptation, I probably wouldn't have spent the weekend diving in. But I'm a sucker for a story that's a matryoshka doll of unreliable narrators, with an "ARG explainer" video as top layer.

Pope Leo absolutely cooking

"Well guys, you're gonna have to learn his f*cking name now." I went on a rant at the Zohran Mamdani event last night, against billionaires who spent millions to try and stop a guy whose name they refuse to correctly pronounce. Watch/share/subscribe to Zeteo: zeteo.com/subscribe

The first feature of the evening was the French film La Belle Époque (2019, dir. Nicolas Bedos). Now, usually we don’t watch films that are actually good at this club. It is even rarer to watch films that are great. Le Belle Époque is genuinely awesome.

Hey Lewis, a new post touring career opportunity!!! Grumpy Museum Tour Guide! you're welcome... @thelewisblack.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

someone invited people magazine to the kitchen and they brought their own knives

Call for papers: Mapping the Borders of Larp Research -The Academic seminar of the Nordic Larp Research Network.

Boston

Feeling very proud of my Wikipedian-in-Residence colleagues who tackled an armed suicidal man. Andrew Lih, Wikimedia Laureate 2022, prised a loaded gun from his hand. Richard and Andrew are bookish computer guys who work in libraries. That takes some guts.

George Wallace on the 1963 civil rights March on Washington: It’s all a bunch of communists trying to destroy America. Mike Johnson on the 2025 No Kings rally: It’s all a bunch of marxists/socialists/Antifa trying to destroy America. The GOP playbook: Same as it ever was

I love how the big news on Trump’s tariff announcement is how moments before he made it a bunch of people made insanely profitable shorts on crypto, a thing that Bitcoin Bros are all astounded to see happening in a completely unregulated market of a fake currency primarily used by criminals.

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach: Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone. … America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

It's not lost on me that the majority of the folks doing ICE watch stuff in my area of Massachusetts are women, two of whom stopped an abduction with their presence over the weekend. In spite of all the risks, people *are* fighting to protect their neighbors and that should give us hope.

before and after hegseth's directive

This is great work. But this article in particular should be raising eyebrows and a LOT of questions www.thenerve.news/p/tony-blair...

Stress-Free Eric Adams Spends Day Bribing Pigeons In Central Park

i love this part and i think it very much shows the difference in depth of thinking between someone like Klein, desperately fighting in the here-and-now and arguing to win a battle with compromise, versus Coates' position that he is a soldier in a long war.

Still can't quite believe that this is a real thing but @alexwinter.com and Keanu were great

I can’t believe Kaleb Horton is gone… His life wasn’t long enough. Not even close. But in the time he was here, in all the countless hours he spent writing — for which he was criminally under-compensated — he never typed a single line of bullshit. You did it, my friend.

Kimmelist forces seize control of communications infrastructure.

This is EXCELLENT. 1) this is spot-on analysis of the problem & a great immediate 1st thing a city can do to improve outcome. 2) as a 2 min clip? He's giving history, hope & change. Speaking to women, to Jewish & Black NYers, saying "abortion." & also naming eugenics in feminism. 100/10 no notes.

"The style guide warns on its first page that "Many citations in this guide are fictitious," meaning they are made-up examples used only to demonstrate proper formatting. Yet someone (or some AI chatbot) copied the fake example directly into the Education Accord report as if it were a real source."

My kids don’t care about Taylor but they care about fandom and they loathe AI. Spot on.

i challenge you to find cooler news today than “despite all odds against American scientific research rn, a CO researcher developed a temperature-stable, single dose rabies vaccine that works bc of particles coated in CANDY & SAPPHIRE, & it could help reduce rabies deaths in places w/o electricity”