A really crank galaxy brain idea I have is to give Congress direct control over its own CIA-type agency so it’s not infinitely beholden to the executive for expertise on natsec stuff.

Might get ‘yelled at for saying it’ because before the GI Bill college was the domain of the wealthy who could afford to study humanities

I'm in the lobby bar of a Boston area hotel and they're playing dance covers of 70s and 80s songs, and it's making me want to murder somebody.

new version of the leo pointing meme just dropped for when you recognize a thing but you hate it

We've noticed a significant uptick in corpse outlines at places believed to haunted. It's hard to tell if these ghost-markers are warning or warding. They often seem to memorialise the dead as appeasement. – Sophie Morley of Woden College's Graffiti Research and Formalisation Team (GRAFT), 1981

This is the hardest "fuck, marry, kill" I've seen in a while.

The good news: We've found a data-storage medium that can outlast clay tablets! The bad news: Future humans will need a microscope and a good working knowledge of optical physics to read whatever we write there. I suppose it's not *that* much more difficult than deciphering cuneiform... 🧪⚛️

I don't want to know what calls for quantum plumbing, but I guess I'm glad it's available if someone needs it.

Paternal: Foreman in a shoe factory. Maternal: WWII vet (something involving photo processing for the Army in Italy), worked for a printer in NYC after the war.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Any time you see someone argue that their opponents are wrong, instead of arguing that they are right, the conclusion should be a negative update about *both sides*. (And before you try to interpret this as a subtweet, it is about at least three different things I've been annoyed about recently.)

I hereby posit Manheim's Law of Positive-Sum Badness: In polarized disputes, evidence that one side is stupid, malicious, or evil increases the probability that the opposing side is too.

Yep. Ford represented a very specific kind of Being Cool By Being A Dipshit that used to be right at the heart of American pop-culture depictions of masculinity. Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart both excelled at it.

Never underestimate Dave

I’m in the US military and I’m about to make a fortune betting against me surviving a drone strike. The other gamblers don’t know how slow I run

all-timer sports graphic dropped

There is literally no profession that could team up with Kalshi where my reaction wouldn't be "Wow, this is beneath them."

I have discovered a planet. A wombat-like creature lives there and nibbles infinity. We could travel there through the void. Would you like to teach love there?

Consumption levels in the 1820s and 1830s were just unbelievably high, especially when you consider that the averages imply that a lot of people were drinking quite a bit more than those numbers. www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcoho...

The National Academies are now accepting award nominations for Science Communication: www.nationalacademies.org/programs/NAE...

I had hoped we might be done with dog walks in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, but no...

Congratulations to the nominees to be the next supreme leader of Iran: Jonathan Isaac, Michael Porter Jr. and Kyle Kuzma

Fellas you gotta dress like Rihanna and get your own rain machine for the musical number, it works

i am 100% not cool enough to be in situations where the coke gets busted out but i'm going to posit that its resurgence in popularity from the '10s on explains more about how politics works across the left-right and insider-outsider spectrum more than most ppl would suspect

Oof. I just read your post in the most uncharitable, pedantic way possible, and I gotta tell ya: it's not looking good for you.

The New York Times really needs to stop adding new crossword variants that I have to scroll past to get to the Wordle.

Overturned ball/strike calls so far: Fielders → 160 (55% success) Hitters → 119 (49% success) All of the pitches on the left turned into strikes. All of the pitches on the right turned into balls.

Me: I'm kind of worn down, maybe this weekend I'll just hang out at home and not ski umpteen miles [looks at the news] Me: On second thought...

I do not avoid Ivy League Professors, Mandrake. But I deny them my essays.

The replacement for the Wonderlich intelligence test just dropped

Like everyone else in higher ed, I worry about my ability to distinguish LLM sludge from artisanal human-written sludge: open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

the funniest thing about this poll is that white britons apparently hate every single political party

The photo with this has me picturing the negotiation ending with an anvil falling on the CEO of the company with the losing bid.

The Big XII food items available at the Big XII Basketball Tournament. I’m scared to know what the Majerus Special is

Part of what is great about college for a lot of people (and I know this is not something everybody wants to do or is able to do) is that not every class you take is taken for your major, or because it’s a requirement.

"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.

I can't be the only one who is made /uncomfortable/ by the way that razor clams burrow into sand, right? The final moments of this video by Kate Crump on the Oregon coastline are sort of the crowning glory of horror. 😬 But how does this even work? Let's talk about bivalve mobility (if we must).

Oh, is there a politcsball happening tonight? 🙄

I think if you had an entire institution focused on it (like a legit university that only did remote, not university of Phoenix) and took it really seriously could probably minimize the difference between it and in person, but yeah that’s just not the case most of the time.

This is Milow. He knows beauty comes from the inside, but he also happens to have it on the outside. 14/10 rare as h*ck (IG: aussiemilow_)

Never a big Narnia guy but this 6 seconds typifies everything I love about British television.

One of the many small irritations of the rise of direct-to-camera vertical video as a mode is that so many are shot with the video mirrored, so I'm distracted by "What does that shirt say?" and "Is that a British car?" and miss whatever the actual point was supposed to be.

Wemby didn't have a good shooting night, but when you look at the highlights you can see how much of an impact he made on the defensive end

"Ski Mountaineering: High up in the majestic Dolomites, our throat is ripped out by a Eurasian Eagle-Owl." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

America's Pastimes: Baseball, and clogging your coronary arteries.

It seems to me that the foundational 'wrong turn' in education was the increasing rhetoric from universities themselves and their supporters that the primary value of a university education was increased earning power. That leads pretty directly to this place we're in now.

how can you not be romantic about baseball?

They're going to denounce snowplows as Woke and officially ban them from DC, and it won't make the slightest difference to the streets of the District.

For the morning crowd: I watched one of this year's Big Awards Movies and have Thoughts about why it doesn't quite stick the landing. Spoilers abound. chadorzel.substack.com/p/marty-supr...

Few phrases prompt more despair in parents of school-age children than "Schools will operate on a two-hour delay."