This is a great story, and yet another reminder that -- for something that felt like a fun goofy feature when it launched -- as we lose more and more actors, the AV Club's "Random Roles" has turned out to be an amazing oral history project.

ostensibly liberal or left transphobes generally manage to handwave away the deeply Illiberal and reactionary consequences of their campaign, since they assume that being trans is mostly or wholly a fad - but what happens when trans people do not just go away because they're inconvenient?

In a new Journalism 2050, @jayrosen.bsky.social recounts how the internet, once thought to hail a new age of democratization in journalism, became a tool for corporate surveillance and the centralization of wealth. With @emilybell.bsky.social and Heather Chaplin. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

the past is a foreign country, and they want to put the walls up around it, too

the cat is being very affectionate but also yelling, which is Grubbling behaviour. she has been fed! ridiculous creature!

pretty alarming datapoint around ethnonationalist thinking in the UK, with Reform clearly leading the way in giving this kind of racist nonsense social sanction.

the trebles all round puffery Quilliam got for Robinson "deradicalising" was ridiculous and based purely on wishful thinking, and moreso when he turned round and went "I'm still a massive racist, and only did that because they paid me"

The more I think about it, the more notable it becomes that so many of the "don't mention climate; just focus on affordability" guys really don't seem to be suggesting that we focus on whether or not we can afford fossil fuels, and are kind of hoping no one's going to notice or ask them about it

As I noted at the time, Benny Morris even admits that there are more cases of Arab officials barring Palestinians from leaving their villages than there are of them demanding evacuation.

Reminded of how constant the complaint was that Ilhan Omar didn't care about the KSA or Rashida Tlaib didn't care about Assad when both of these women were at the forefront of demanding action against these regimes.

Not to continue to harp on my own points ad infinitum but I continue to only see a handful of Congresspeople, all Democrats, criticize the UAE openly for its role in facilitating the atrocities in Sudan, and those Congresspeople are all uniformly at the forefront of criticism of Israel as well.

that's right

"we are starting to learn that eliminating sales of the horse-drawn carriage was never attainable. A more mature phase of street cleanliness action would be learning to live with horseshit."

I cannot stress this enough: going and doing something like this is a far better use of your time than arguing online about a primary campaign in a state/district where you don't even live. I'll be doing it again myself soon!

I am beginning to wonder exactly what the editorial process for "In Covid's Wake" was

going viral in the sense that ebola is a virus, I guess

pretty sure my parents' cat is an actual muppet

One of the biggest myths in the United States which I think genuinely causes so many of our problems is the belief that executives of large companies/financial institutions need a good or accurate understanding of the macroeconomy to consistently make money. Its just not true.

God Rest You! Merry Gentlemen

Macedo and Lee misrepresent what actually happened during the pandemic and are unable to confront Covid's actual toll, presumably because it undermines their premise. A longer take here w/my colleague Greg Gibson: joshuasweitz.substack.com/p/revisionis...

you would still have people who are transphobic without this kind of grift economy, but the incentives both to be able to commit to the grift full-time, and having the infrastructure in place for society to take it seriously are just wild.

He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

Some of the biggest "winners" of congestion pricing are drivers, who enjoy much faster commutes because there is less congestion. Part of the reason these schemes become popular after being implemented is many drivers realize paying the fee is a great exchange for less traffic!

From @parkermolloy.com at New Republic. newrepublic.com/article/2047... I'd go a bit further. The system needs no conspiracy to function. It just needs everyone to understand the direction things are going in. Bari Weiss was put there not to protect a legacy, but to align its politics differently.

It turns out that "The Free Press" was shortened from the original title "The Free Press, For Everyone Who Owns One"

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Simply astonishing that a Labour MP would post this the same year Keir Starmer said immigration had caused "incalculable damage" to the UK and a Home Office Minister committed *this month* to identifying "any links between ethnicity, religion and culture – and child rape."

Labour Together is concerned about the Factory Acts sapping the dynamism of the UK economy; instead, they suggest a tariff on corn

Please join Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and many others in signing this call for an academic and cultural boycott of the UAE, in relation to its complicity in genocide in Sudan. spectrejournal.com/for-a-cultur...

Nope. Sex Matters have long been banging the drum of "you can't change sex therefore transition can't work as a treatment and we should stop offering it to trans people" it's what Helen Joyce's whole "huge problem to a sane world" shit was about. They are 100% going for banning all transitions.

We don't need an elf on the shelf because we've got a

"Winning" of course is an awful concept to measure the success of party strategies and to construct meaningful counterfactuals. But even vote shares are tricky as in fragmenting party systems vote shares have very different consequences.

What should our quantity of interest be when we compare election success? It's a surprisingly complicated question and especially people in politics do not seem to scrutinize this. The category often is "winning" and strategies are ex post rationalized as successful when elections have been won.

also, is there a good reason should I take this more seriously than any other article that uses a couple of social media posts to illustrate a supposed widespread trend? are we going to formulate disability policy by anecdote alone?

other folk have noted that being aware of disabilities that may but not always require a wheelchair is a good thing, but I do also want to note that taking social media posts' advice on "life hacks" at face value or as an indicator of prevalence is a fool's errand

Disability History Month 2025

I walk past Thomson's statue in Kelvingrove Park fairly regularly - it's interesting to see him as ithers see him, through the lens of the transatlantic telegraph cable

I will hoist the black flag if this guy ever, somehow, gets his mitts on Calvin and Hobbes. Bad enough to not take as read that Watterson will never be interested.

honestly I think I was only playing old games in 2022, but Pentiment is just... brilliant and beautiful, a great meditation on life, loss, and what we choose to remember

I was interviewed about my research and my experience with the viral response to my DPhil viva! Video here 👇 youtu.be/v_46GqZDZCk?...

yeah, really would like a savvy peer behind the curtain explanation of this operation.

this is like that fitness forum bro argument about the number of days in a week, but on cable news

It's even worse than I thought. The BLS calculates health insurance inflation through retained earnings. So it misses the subsidies entirely and doesn't correspond to the increase in the premium you pay, as long as total insurance payouts are in the same ratio! www.bls.gov/cpi/addition...

It's quaint to talk about inflation reports and surprising softness on the margins when in 13 days the out-of-pocket cost of health insurance is going to rise for 26 million households by an average of 75%

In 34 paragraphs total, Dan Shapiro devotes exactly one (1) of them to what Israel's responsibilities are in order to keep Democrats from becoming more pro-Palestine. Here's his suggestions:

tired: hyperloop wired: hypercoaster

"monetised the dysfunction" is a good way to put it and I can think of obvious ways that's happened in the UK (immigration and visa applications)