Have to admit it’s weird that a lot of this site’s users lose their minds every other day over anodyne Times stories just because every other line isn’t “To be clear, the now-vanished Manhattan power elite of elderly sex predators who reeked of Ben-Gay and lube and ate in bad restaurants was Bad.”

I’m going to have to push my glasses up on my nose here and point out that Fugazi released their first album in 1990. Prior to that they released EPs and a compilation, but zero albums

I think the most annoying thing about “The Catholic League” may just be that we don’t need some guy to speak for us. We absolutely have that covered!

This is disgusting but "The Catholic League" is one insane guy and has been since its inception.

As shutdown ends, dubious CDC panel gets back to dismantling vaccine schedule arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

One of the clearest signs of our stagnation as a society is how stale our conspiracy theories are. MKULTRA was shut down over 50 years ago and the CIA uses a totally different code name for its mind-controlled assassin program now.

NEW: DOJ issued warrant to Starlink over systems allegedly used in wire fraud and money laundering operations aimed at Americans; @lhn.bsky.social and @mattburgess1.bsky.social have the scoop

A cool story about the coolest jacket of all time:

NEW: A US trial will test whether the anti-inflammatory properties of Zepbound can help people living with long covid. This is from @emilymullin.bsky.social:

One of the interesting things here is that aside from some pulp novels, everything here seems to have been new editions except for out of print editions of Nabokov's short stories, which are usually sold in a single collected edition.

A cache of 18,000 emails offers another window into Epstein’s mind. Bloomberg parsed Amazon receipts from that inbox—filtering, verifying, and cataloging book orders—to build this timeline.

NEW: As recently as spring, MAGA was united around the idea that the release of the non-existent "Epstein files" was a national priority. Now that thousands of, well, Epstein files raise serious questions about Donald Trump, it turns out they were no big deal at all. From @davidgilbert.bsky.social:

THE OATH KEEPERS ARE BACK!!!!!! But my investigation suggests that no one seems to care....not even former members www.wired.com/story/stewar...

I really hate giving competitors any insight into what I'm looking at but I'm also genuinely, truly baffled here and believe in the power of crowdsourcing—is anyone aware of a person named "Peril" who may have ties to Larry Summers? Thanks in advance!

Excited to announce I’m joining @wired.com as a senior writer covering the business of AI! I’ve long been a fan of WIRED, but its recent coverage has felt especially impactful. I'm thrilled to work with this talented team, and continue reporting on AI as it reshapes Silicon Valley and the world.

Going to hugely embarrass Leah here by saying that she is the absolute best. She and I have worked together for five years across two companies and if I have reported, written, or posted anything in that time you liked, she probably looked at it first and made it better.

Bill Gates adviser to Epstein in 2017: "He wants to talk to you but his wife won’t let him...He loves you.”

NEW: In text exchanges with a Bill Gates adviser from early in the first Trump presidency, Jeffrey Epstein presented himself as intimately familiar with Trump's then-current views, and even capable of passing messages from the White House to Gates through an intermediary. w/ @leahfeiger.bsky.social

NEW: DHS ingested a trove of highly unreliable Chicago police records on people accused of having gang ties to feed an FBI watchlist and then just ... didn't delete it for seven months after being told to do so because no one noticed. Scoop from @dell.bsky.social, and is outside our paywall.

ICE making community inroads

Google is suing 25 people it claims are associated with a massive scam text operation using a phishing-as-a-service platform called Lighthouse. @mattburgess1.bsky.social has the details on how all this works and ends up with you getting annoying texts from fraudsters:

Wait, I'm supposed to believe that the convicted child sex trafficker who was inexplicably moved to a minimum security prison after an interview with the president's personal lawyer and who the president's allies have been portraying as a victim has blackmail material on the president?

New Epstein emails just dropped, and they involve Trump. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...

NEW: Chuck Borges blew the whistle on DOGE uploading incredibly sensitive Social Security data to an unsecured cloud environment. Now he's running for state senate in Maryland, and gave his first interview to @makenakelly.bsky.social

"We put someone with no experience in broadcast journalism in charge of a network news operation and you'll never believe what happened next" www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Having avidly followed the deepening controversy over the problematic descriptions of Fair Isle-related knitting techniques on ”Game of Wool,“ I was delighted to find it on Youtube and even more delighted to find that despite the Shetland knitting community’s objections, it’s great

Of all the things this year that could have done it, it was actually seeing a poster arguing, seemingly seriously, that not liking Jar Jar Binks is racist that convinced me we're done as a civilization.

The only performative reading I know about is that I used to be neighbors with Ethan Hawke and he would pace up and down the street in jeans and a t-shirt, smoking and running his hands through his hair, while reading Allen Ginsberg aloud, clearly wanting people to be impressed with his fervor.

In this video version of my Alex Karp interview, I get some words in edgewise--barely. But we do have a clash of viewpoints wherein he says tangling with me is like talking to his (progressive) parents. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWxW...

The context here is that these two are, weirdly, unable to look up their own salaries on baseball-reference.com and thus unaware how trivial these sums are relative to their income; there is no reason to consider the possibility that the rate was low because they were doing this a lot

Forty years ago this month, The Smiths were busy finishing The Queen Is Dead, meaning that for forty years people have been wondering what the fuck Morrissey was whining about on that record.

You think that everything has been done and then you go to the farmer’s market and see a Lancaster County bakery is hawking chocolate chip waffle whoopie pies, which turn out to be even better than they look.

The show goes on open.substack.com/pub/straight...

Look, it will be a tough pill for many to swallow, but for the good of the country Democrats must work in a spirit of bipartisanship to advance the president’s policy priorities of making private insurance illegal and eliminating the filibuster.

Really excited for the new era* of Penn men's basketball that begins tonight! *We got a coach people have heard of and a guy who once played at Duke

SSA employees grilled management during a tense meeting about the government shutdown yesterday. “People are coming to me saying they cannot put gas in their car and they cannot afford to come to work anymore," one employee said. Scoop w/ @leahfeiger.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/social...

I am absolutely certain that Jake is going to have a great job lined up before too long (a good reason to reach out to him now if you're hiring), but a job tomorrow doesn't pay the bills today.

Five yrs ago today in my role as head of Voter Protection for Biden-Harris in Phila, at right about this moment, I was reaching out to our team to figure out who could sneak into a hastily-called press conference by Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons Hotel ... and then, what, it's going to be where??

Across Philadelphia tonight, whether it's a Fu Wah tofu banh mi, a DiNic's roast pork, a Rocco's sausage and peppers, or a Saad's chicken maroosh, sandwich enthusiasts will be digging in with extra zeal.

But if you have some spare income, give what you can here or sign up for one of the paid tiers. I think the founding member thing lets you put in whatever you want straightfromthehut.substack.com

This is a really hard day and I want to just add as WIRED's politics editor -- WIRED's politics reporting isn't going anywhere. We are very much here and won't stop. Please continue to read and support us - canceling your subscription to WIRED is not standing in solidarity with our journalists.

Jake did tremendous work at WIRED and I'm really going to miss working with him every day.