I’m just never going to sign on to an idea for fixing [insert here: higher ed, your field, classroom, university, library] that adds more labor. *Reduce* labor. Supplant labor. Waste it. What would happen if you had more time to [insert here: think, read, stare, cook, sleep, muse, exercise]?

"Sure, our plagiarism machine ingests enormous amounts of copyrighted material without anyone's permission, but it's the users of the machine who are the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 criminals, your honor." 🙄🙄 Just unbelievable levels of chutzpah. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I think the belief by the powerful that "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing in terms of understanding How We Got Here

Altman has been quite clear about his strategy. From the 2008 crash he learned that if you bind enough of the economy to your business you can do whatever you like; government will decide the rules no longer apply. What he's selling is unaccountabilty.

Fucking close down Schools of Management

increasingly toying with the idea that this is the root of all "rule of law" issues. A democratic theory of the rule of law should begin with the idea that the rule of law emerges from the average citizen's lived experience. And that experience today is being ruthlessly ripped off at all times.

Firstly, billionaires are not physically made of stocks, if a billionaire falls down a hole and expires his stock portfolio persists and continues to have value, secondarily, this is why one diversifies one's investment portfolio outside of the stock market, thirdly, okay, let's test this hypothesis

As the single most important news story this year, I can't wait to see the detailed and central coverage this will get in every media outlet we have

OpenAI put out a press release today addressing mental health concerns. I have many issues with it, but something super troubling: They estimate a WEEKLY prevalence of 560,000 users displaying signs of psychosis or mania and 1.2 MILLION users indicating suicidal plan/intent.

The only truly ethical response that a self-described artist can make. Anything else is a betrayal of one's colleagues.

The blast radius of how much this is going to suck is going to be huge. Best practice for creatives in Hollywood, for crude self interested reasons alone, is to stay as far away from whatever the fuck is going on at Paramount as possible

You can tell people who’ve never created anything themselves by how important they think ideas are in and of themselves. Creation isn’t just some fiddly impediment between conception and execution. It’s what makes the thing what it is.

Bari Weiss launched her own path to stardom with the argument "it is oppression to dislike me for being bad" and now we will get to see what an entire media ecosystem built with that philosophy looks like

My favorite interviews are inevitably with guys like Tighe who put in the work for decades outside the spotlight and make everything better. And with a loved one who has Parkinson's, this was extra affecting. Lovely.

RIP Drew Struzan - a man whose talent and imagination etched onto so many minds throughout the last 40+ years. His art & posters are some of the first visuals I think of when I think about cinema - an invitation to watch these stories and worlds. A massive loss 💔

postmodern finance theory

don't worry, Sam Altman is confident that his efforts to eliminate vast numbers of jobs will all just sort of work out for the unemployed, eventually, possibly after they starve to death, which is technically a form of having it work out futurism.com/artificial-i...

One of the signature actresses of her or any era, and a woman who paved a path most Hollywood actresses -haven't- followed: dressing to express joy and a sense of self. On Diane Keaton: time.com/7325208/dian...

There are so many Diane Keaton performances to remember, but a lot of people haven't seen Reds, and A) my God, see it, it is a masterpiece and B) her performance as Louise Bryant is one of the bravest, toughest, least sympathy-courting pieces of work by an American actress in the last 50 years.

Well this is just terribly, terribly sad. And shocking, tbh. people.com/diane-keaton...

imagine getting an email from your boss, Bari Weiss, asking you to justify *your* job

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

The most genuinely punk rock movie ever made. By, ironically, someone who didn't much like the culture. Broke my brain when I first saw it as a teenager.

I think it probably varies from person to person how much money it takes to drive you completely insane but everybody’s got a number and it’s never as high as you’d like to believe

Thank you @gonebabygone.bsky.social for making me aware of this extended version of Connor O'Malley and Tim Robinson riffing in FRIENDSHIP. I get why they cut most of this, but I honestly think they should have left it in. Lifted my anhedonically foul mental state for 12 minutes.

This was, ultimately, the point of substack: throw money at reactionary bloggers, claim that this is a new media and not just fissioning off the clicky bits from legacy publications, then let the price of media giants drop enough for all the worst people to buy them up and install their media pets.

"Weiss [is] someone blissfully captured by the richest people alive, and invested in smashing the last vestiges of liberal power in this country: universities, civil servants, and the media. She has a cop's heart and a tadpole's brain."

a heartwarming story of how being an unethical and talentless hack is no barrier to success when you are willing to endlessly flatter the wretched views of rich dipshits

can’t wait to hear her say she’s being silenced as head of a broadcast news network

I think this brain is more Silicon Valley poisoned specifically. This is a milder version of the "efficiency" techbro brainrot that makes CEOs say things like "no book should be longer than a blog poster" and "podcasts on 3x speed are more efficient than reading"

This whole section really.

Discworld QOTD, from Going Postal

Loving THE LOWDOWN. For some mysterious reason, much of my favorite art this year involved eccentric types building makeshift community in the face of beady-eyed evil. No exception here. Steeped in Harjo’s clearly complex relationship with home and love for all the same American genre stuff I like.

I’m pretty much constantly angry about how the global media ecosystem supercharged the current wave of fascism and of course I can’t help but think of Al Swearengen talking about the telegraph coming to Deadwood

“In every industry, AI is being used to replace all the creative things that bring us joy instead of the boring, tedious tasks we hate doing,” she says.

We are producing a generation unable and (somewhat) unwilling to think, read and write without relying on tech controlled by some of the most evil people on the planet to tell them what to think, read and write and they don’t seem to see the dangers of this dependency even if we point it out

Was waiting for this essay about this movie. And am pretty damn excited for the movie itself too.

Could not possibly recommend ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER enough. Don't let the runtime put you off because this thing is a sustained panic attack and moves like an episode of Frasier. Take your pals with you cos it's unclear they'll be giving people this much $ to make movies like this for much longer.

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

The uniting theme of the supposed age of AI and the M&A/private equity apocalypse is that the world is controlled by people who literally cannot imagine ever deriving joy or meaning or satisfaction from any activity or pursuit for its own sake if it doesn't make money.

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

OK, not even getting into the ethics or the existential issues around AI: Have some goddamn self-respect. If you're a writer and you do this I don't know how you look at yourself, but I know exactly how I look at you.

“My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing." Peter Falk #BOTD

Can only pray it does nuke usership.

Robert Redford playing a gentle incarnation of death, coming for a frightened old woman in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" (1962). An extraordinary performance then, terribly bittersweet today

Been trying to think of something to say about Redford but this pretty much covers it. We won't see his kind of megastar again, the system doesn't allow for it.

Robert Redford is pretty much the textbook example of a life well lived. A star whose looks and methods would have made him one in any era, and however much I like to clown on Sundance clichés there’s no denying it’s one of the great paying it forward acts in the history of the business.

A giant has left us. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...