It's in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair's famous line that "it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass"

for an idea of how big a deal this is, my mom was in great shape when she got diagnosed and she lasted less than sixty days. six years is insane.

Trump is reported close to a "deal" with himself under which US taxpayers would pay him $10 billion. I served in multiple communist and authoritarian dictatorships, but I never witnessed corruption on this scale or this blatant.

Dude, this comes from a theatre program. It isn't a composite. Just because you couldn't find the ad doesn't mean that I must have fabricated it.

this is the zombie hello kitty piñata custom ordered by my sweet sweet 4yo daughter 🤩😅

My dad gave me one dollar bill 'Cause I'm his smartest son, And I swapped it for two shiny quarters 'Cause two is more than one! And then I took the quarters And traded them to Lou For three dimes -- I guess he don't know That three is more than two!

took friends who had never been in a congressional office building on a lunchtime walk to the House’s hipster coffee shop today, and they were so absolutely flabbergasted at what they saw that I was reminded we have to do a lot more work showing normies how WEIRD lot of reps are- but it is possible

In 2019, I defended my PhD on 'It's not X, it's Y' and similar constructions, which I call contrastive negation constructions. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that 'It's not X, it's Y' would become the topic of comment pieces in newspapers. 🧵

people just don't like to be reminded that much of what makes up the internet is funny black teenagers, and that a lot of the language they use comes directly from them (it's giving, that part, clocked it, the tea, etc etc)

Pinchy!

Sentence of the day (typo in a 2019 retelling of a famous Reddit thread edition): "Roach himself had once inadvertently killed himself, his wife and their dog after leaving the stove on in their live-aboard boat, causing deadly carbon monoxide to flood the cabin."

A good excuse to remind people this book is available (although it doesn't contain this specific story) locusmag.com/review/moon-...

Odysseus: we now set out in our Odyssey Sailor: what's an odyssey? Odysseus: a family-focused minivan known for its versatile interior

This legislation would make kids less safe, not more safe, while forcing everyone to upload their government ID or submit to a facial recognition scan in order to post online. The definition of “social media” in the bill is so wildly broad it would sweep in almost the entire Internet...

Realizing that some of my inexplicable sadness about the Artemis II stuff is that it feels like a trans-dimensional communication from an America that took a different path and chose joy instead of fear and hate.

TIL: American Science and Surplus shut down their mailorder business. (Brick-and-mortar still alive!) Heartfelt thanks to all their catalog illustrators and copyeditors over the decades; as a wannabe-tinkerer kid stuck at home in the 90s your work was a joy to read and a spark to the imagination.

I love the Talmud

Of course he did, there's that old song "The Holes of Jesus" to help remember them all. How many holes did Jesus have? How many holes had He? One for the Heav'nly Father, From which our Lord did pee. etc. for the rest of the holes

Do you like daily word puzzles? Do you like witty jokes, mistaken-identity shenanigans, or the name Ernest? The Daily Spell has begun a new phase: we're serializing Oscar Wilde's comedic play, The Importance of Being Earnest, one puzzle and hilarious snippet a day. Join us! www.the-daily-spell.com

THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017)

Repost by @nasa "...copy, Moon joy." Click to see original repost

Listening in to the live Artemis II feed. I love the way they talk about everything (jargon, acronyms, plaing English) . Like a bit ago, an astronaut was talking emotionally about how beautiful the views were of the approaching moon, and Houston's CapCom person responded plainly “Copy. Moon joy.”

yes to everything in this thread. and man, I had real mixed feelings on Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (it was not the book for an era of no media literacy) but Sunrise on the Reaping was so exquisitely brutal in the context of this thread.

What Google has pulled out as the preview of this Reddit thread (for my search on whether anyone keeps this particular enormous spider as a pet) suggests something that starts at "misleading" and ends at "a historically bad idea".

I'm always saying

This is the NSF program that funds all of linguistics (and which funded my graduate study). Because of course knowing about how language works is woke nonsense that couldn't possible be in anyone's national interest 🫠

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

yes you fucking morons free preschool for everyone or it becomes just "free preschool for the poors" and then you call them leeches and ask for tax breaks when really we want free preschool for everyone because we want smart well adjusted kids why is this so hard? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/n...

it gives me great pleasure to see the Tobin Unit bsky.app/profile/vtob... deployed in such pure form not only by someone whose work I admire, but who is also a Tobin (no relation)

A good essay. I particularly appreciated this observation, re: Matthew Schwartz's recent "vibe physics" post: "...Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision *is* the physics"

New pic of Jonathan the Tortoise alive and well at ~193 years old 🐢 He’s sitting next to an open BBC tab — an outlet that fell for the hoax (via The Guardian)

moby-dick, his eyes enormous: from hell's heart you STAB at moby? for hate's sake you spit your last BREATH at moby? oh! oh! the great shroud of the sea for ahab! the great shroud of the sea rolling on as it rolled five thousand years ago!!!!

This would not be "upending expectations and precedent" it would be throwing out the Constitution, which is totally unambiguous on this point

I knew France had a petite souris (little mouse) for their tooth fairy but it was only today I learned that Spain’s tooth-collecting mouse is this guy. Is that a cigarillo he's holding?

Absolute Martian Manhunter #1 with some all time illustrations

This point is easy to lose sight of any time we talk about automation. Historians of the industrial revolution know! In the domestic sphere (for instance), "labor-saving" devices can be liberating (when they free us from drudgery) and the opposite (when they generate new tasks and expectations).

you might reasonably wonder why software engineers have so quickly embraced tooling that threatens to replace them. maybe programmers have good intuitions about task creation bc they see the tools in action and immediately think of 10 things to do that were too tedious to bother with before

It is in keeping with the NYT’s ideological approach to journalism on trans issues that medical associations that support trans rights must not be trusted to offer an accurate account of their own policies. Only an unbiased authority can determine the AMA’s true orientation on trans healthcare.

This one is really making me lose my mind. jfc!

This is genuinely a bombshell. All courthouse arrests should cease immediately. There should be a Congressional investigation & civil rights actions for every illegal abduction of immigrants trying to follow the rules and appear in court. (2/2)

I think we're going win, but I want to win hard enough that we start paying artists to paint murals in post offices again. (This time the post offices are also banks.)

Yeah, this one really squares my boobs as a sociologist. Arlie Russell Hochschild made one of the most important contributions to the sociology of labour ever, updating the Marxist concept of alienation for the late 20th century and it got sludged into "I don't want to call my mom."

Sentence of the day: "They have shiny golden coats of dense fur and a streamlined, formless appearance."

Like all the other things they bring up, shoveling snow in NYC is not covered in the 24th amendment, the right to vote without cost is.

The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi. To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...

I would like to personally award Afroman the Bluesky Medal of Valor for Exemplary Service in Bringing Back Shame

finally, some great news