In writing about London Fashion Week, I ended up writing about, well, gestures at everything.

YES every word I wrote about Wikipedia 14 years ago at The Awl is still true. p.s. omg Marshall McLuhan what would you think of this moment. www.theawl.com/2011/05/wiki...

weirdos on the internet: “I couldn’t possibly afford so many newsletters!!” meanwhile sending a free note with a “nice one, jd” is worth like $1000 dollars and, as Lex makes clear here, is free and did I remind you that supporting writers can also be free as in it costs no money and it is in fact 🆓

This was the actual End of History, we just missed it at the time.

Flash 5 (2000). I used to make so many terrible animations with this tool. I still have them backed up.

seeing a lot of climate week stuff about "AI" like "AI to solve climate change" or related BS in my LinkedIn feed and here's basically how "AI" can help us: humanity: 'oh hey chatbot, how can we solve climate change?' chatbot: 'idk reduce emissions but i increase them' humanity: 'ok we unplug u'

Ok my cis friends, we are going to need a lot of you to step the fuck up and fight hard for us www.them.us/story/trump-...

LinkedIn is not the new Twitter. There is no new Twitter. I’m bored with this take already.

NEW: ChatGPT is causing chaos in marriages, as one spouse becomes deeply fixated on AI therapy/advice/spiritual wisdom — alienating the other spouse and, often, resulting in divorce. In some cases, ChatGPT-enmeshed spouses are using the tech to bully their partners. futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

i highly doubt that but ok

it's a really gross time to be a "head of content" or "head of editorial" or "editor" or "writer" or "journalist" — every job description is like "drive innovation in AI and content automation!!" like the hype has so disrupted the world of "content" (a gross word, but i digress) — it's slop strategy

I guarantee you are unprepared for this harrowing and deeply reported story about ChatGPT tearing apart countless marriages futurism.com/chatgpt-marr...

The CEO of a Big Tech company admitting to using a chatbot to decide what to wear to a state banquet is literally the best metaphor for the cultural and intellectual decay of this hideous “AI” hype era lmfao

neurozeitgeisty

I was at a PTA meeting earlier this year and someone from the community had come forward wanting to pay off "lunch debt" for the school and I learned that it was essentially impossible. 1/2

THIS ⬇️ relatedly … one time, i walked to an airport with my suitcase just for the “fascinating experience” sure, internet editors, commission me to write a first person essay like it’s 2015

Hard to think of a more on-the-nose encapsulation of how far the online speech wars have swung in the year of our lord 2025 than major U.S. corporations racing to fire people whose tweets offended Milo Yiannopoulos

I asked @alexhanna.bsky.social of @dairinstitute.bsky.social if she'd join me for Power Lunch, a "fake" lunch where we remotely "dine out" and solve all our problems I asked her where she wanted to "go" Her response: "a very cursed place" Read w/ a SENSE OF URGENCY: www.esckey.co/ridicule-as-...

This kind of “journalism” is a huge part of the reason we’re “here” www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc....

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Windows laptop / tablet hybrids in 2012:

This is what I want from my reps or I don't want them at all, tbh

OpenAI's "what is ChatGPT, anyway?" study is a little weird, sort of funny, but actually illuminating nymag.com/intelligence...

i had a dream where my writer nemesis spoke to me. "yeah, but you like chewing gum" "no i don't i never chew gum that's rude and factually incorrect" "yeah you do. you chew gum while you write trash" i was inflamed. then, in my dream, my bubble popped mid-blow.

Time to take this out for another spin. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

"Billionaires shouldn't own the news. Support independent local media!" - @coyotemedia.org www.coyotemedia.org/hello-from-c...

Come for the snark about over-priced dining and/or the derby fun ... stay for @alexhanna.bsky.social 's wisdom about how to handle & deflate the 'AI' bubble www.esckey.co/ridicule-as-...

I don't know, can an AI doula massage your back during transition? Hold your hand? Hold your cup when you take a drink? Hold your hand to balance in yoga poses? Walk down the street to pick up dinner for you after delivery? Physically position your baby for breastfeeding? I thought not.

"@alexhanna.bsky.social spends an incredible amount of her time working with sharp objects, metaphorically speaking. On Monday September 15, she will commemorate three years of wielding them on the anniversary episode of Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000, ... www.esckey.co/ridicule-as-...

I had a fantastic time chatting with @jdshadel.com over at ESCKEY. CO about "AI", roller derby, and the overpriced dining at our virtual Power Lunch at French Laundry. www.esckey.co/ridicule-as-...

things like this really drive home that the primary function of the “EDM” movement was an extraction and mass-commercialization of Black dance music to be widely palatable to the monied white Chad demographic

EDM fans are really dropping the mask these days. this is what happens when your music “community” is a bunch of white bros who just wanna kill time after their fake email job at JP Morgan

Who possibly could’ve predicted that

Oh what a great piece to pull out from the archives, I needed to be reminded of this anxiety I’d almost forgotten about amid all the other anxieties competing for my panic attacks 👼🏻

The last 48 hours have shown why people have stopped relying on legacy journalism and have migrated to independent journalists in droves. The benefit of legacy journalism is supposed to be “editors” and “factchecking” and they can’t even get that right in a rush to blame trans people.

sometimes we are our worst enemies for example sometimes i listen to this amy grant song from her "pop crossover" album — for absolutely no reason and yet it's a choice i make ... repeatedly www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pdd...

y'all complaining about an independent journalist's $6/month paywall meanwhile, imagine if we all had the confidence of a "premium cultural insights platform"

Every time I see a post with “CK” I’m like, “damn, what did Calvin Klein do now???”

If you work in PR, don’t just pitch indie publications, which you should be doing; get your agency to subscribe to them like you do the legacies. Don’t just get the free newsletters. Pay. It’s expense-able. It behooves you to also support a more diversified and thriving media ecosystem.

Its not funny, every journalist that uses the phrase "transgender ideology" is incredibly at risk of driving straight into a tunnel on the highway that is actually a photo-realistic painting on the side of a cliff

my linkedin strategy is mostly just trolling the videos of "AI" CEOs who dare pay to be promoted in my feed

this is what I wanted to read about the bizarre, disturbing Epstein birthday book @newyorker.com www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Hey {first_name, "there"}! The future of handwriting is, well, illegible?! What do our brains lose when we stop using pens?!! I wrote an entire long-form essay for ESC KEY .CO by hand to understand what happens to our brains when we stop *thinking* with our hands. www.esckey.co/the-future-o...

Steve Jobs (1980): "The computer is a bicycle for the mind!" JD Shadel (2025): "ESC KEY .CO is a unicycle for the mind!" Progress.

Honestly might start using “Cool, who are some AI artists you like?” in lieu of a counter argument The lack of an answer says all that’s needed.

Remember: there's no audience for AI-produced content. Nobody in the AI ecosystem is there to read or listen - only to publish their own slop.

"Across industries, the productivity discourses du jour are mostly a con, a red herring, a deceptive distraction engineered by the world’s ruling classes to avoid questions about their own management failures." Throwback to "heatwave brain" briefing on ESC: www.esckey.co/heatwave-bra...

“Oooh what fragrance are you wearing?” None. I sleep in a pile of mulch, wood chips, splinters.

I work out of the coworking space within Somerset House, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and let me say — I am not a morning person! But a group photo to mark a grand occasion? Darling, I'll be there — sure, undercaffeninated, overstimulated, neurospicy and all. But in style, OK