My unrelatable pet peeve is the internet meme of “this is a Renaissance painting” when, more often than not, they refer to a photo of intertwined figures at the climax of the action, illuminated by dramatic lighting, and what they really mean is “this is a Baroque painting.”

@mmasnick.bsky.social: "The US government is blocking people from entering the country because those people advocated for content moderation policies the government doesn’t like....it’s doing this in the name of protecting free speech" www.ms.now/opinion/marc...

A case where the quote is even worse in context than out of context. JD is scaremongering about “Islamists” winning elections in the UK/France and then somehow militarily threatening the US. Saying we should hold Europeans and Africans to different moral standards but anti-wokely.

"One Word Describes Trump" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv... I missed this on its first trip around, then saw it on the "most popular with readers" list for 2025. Recommended, despite the cheesy headline. Especially valuable if you have ever compared him to a mob boss. [Gift link]

Good interview in the paper, this. I think Sadiq is right: London 'needs' to be less successful than it is for a bunch of political arguments here in the UK to work, hence the fictions being invented about it:

I’ve been saying this for years. A successful multicultural multiethnic London is an offensive idea to some right wing world views so they make up bollocks to try to knock London down

Make a Bond movie academic ‘Casino Royale: can Montecarlo theory help select less predictable plot lines?

The Right used to contain the staunchest monarchists, but their more recent burn-it-all-down creed pauses for nothing. These people have a very corrupted view of Britishness and should not be allowed to 'own' patriotism.

Musk Signals Willingness To Bid More Than $97 Billion To Acquire Respect https://theonion.com/musk-signals-willingness-to-bid-more-than-97-billion-to-acquire-respect/

I always thought Plato was pretty pollyannaish on this point, but this is decent evidence for the view that a man of bad character will therefore be unhappy even with every external trapping of success and good fortune.

Tenet Media founder Lauren Chen, who secretly took money from two people with ties to Russian state media to involve conservative influencers in an unwitting propaganda scheme, is back in the US after being deported to Canada under President Biden. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the British researcher’s lawyer said. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

UN’s Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese: “I truly hope that people will stay calm, will not panic, and will remember that the international community is made of 193 states, and this is the time to give the US what it has been looking for – isolation!”

There are only two offenses the Constitution goes out of its way to specifically say merit impeachment, and this is one of them.

TV Network Refuses To Air ‘Miracle On 34th Street’ For Outdated Depictions Of Hope, Joy https://theonion.com/tv-network-refuses-to-air-miracle-on-34th-street-for-1848159248/

lmfao "Soboto" AFRICOM posting from Germany about airstrikes in Africa while misspelling the name of the place they bombed is *chef's kiss*

Donald Trump, basically acknowledging that so far at least he’s losing the fight over Epstein.

real cool how he calls his domestic political enemies scum this morning and now he‘s announcing deadly strikes on other people he calls scum on the very same day! really neat!

This is literally a holiday-themed missile strike. It is as insane as it sounds and should be front-page news.

Kind of wild how the take that some of Trump's supporters were "deplorable" was some huge scandal, but regularly screaming about "radical left scum" is just a thing he'll say with no media backlash.

"The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back." @adamserwer.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

I’ll just note that the US didn’t do this to China, which outright bans US social media websites

A transatlantic showdown over tech policy (as opposed to, say, net zero) could actually have a unifying & galvanising political effect within the EU. The union’s digital regulations are broadly popular and many voters actually want more, not fewer, controls on Big Tech. yougov.co.uk/technology/a...

Les peuples de l'Europe sont libres et souverains et ne sauraient se faire imposer par d'autres les règles s'appliquant à leur espace numérique. 3/3

Le règlement sur les services numériques (DSA) a été démocratiquement adopté en Europe pour que ce qui est illégal hors ligne le soit aussi en ligne. Il n'a absolument aucune portée extraterritoriale et ne concerne en aucun cas les Etats-Unis. 2/3

La France dénonce avec la plus grande fermeté la restriction de visa prise par les Etats-Unis à l'encontre de Thierry Breton, ancien ministre et Commissaire européen, et quatre autres personnalités européennes. 1/3

we ask the question: why are Labour MPs and ministers still using X when its owner has vowed to destroy them? www.ft.com/content/5b0e...

"It would also take a few years to convince me that we were already enjoying an A.I.-fueled productivity boom and not just a volatile, temporary blip." - Jason Furman NYT

Most definitively ruled myself out of contention of visiting the US in the next three years by saying what trade folk and I suspect most in UK government know, that any trade deal with Trump could be renounced by him tomorrow. Worry that some are still naive. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

There seems to be some sort of logical fallacy at work here. I'm going to call it "transcriptionism"... it's as if some people think all the knowledge is already out there in some sort of grand transcript and all that's needed is better indexing and reading tools to look it all up.

Right, this line Vance used was a very common line used by segregationists. Here's Rep. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) reacting to the Brown decision, which he said "would bring mongrelization of the Caucasian race. He added that he for one won't apologize for being a white man."

In the summer of 1950 most US newspapers ran an AP story about how race had become the main issue in the upcoming Georgia governor's race. Segregationist Herman Tallmadge, governor from '47 to '55 and then a Senator until 1981 made a name for himself by refusing to "apologize for being a white man."

🤡There's never been a time in US history where people expect you to apologize *for being white*. People expect you to apologize*for being pro-racism*. Worldwide, fewer than half of all white people are pro-racism.♥️ In the US it takes an active disinfo campaign to keep the pro-racism group > 50%.

This could work. The KGB solution to any problem is to jail it.

I think this is useful to read the whole way through to see just how Internet-poisoned right wing billionaires are. This guy is insane nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/john-catsi...

I’ve missed Christmas Eve and New Year’s and the Fourth of July holidays for newsletters a lot smaller than this. This is as good as it gets for newsletter writers. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

‘Why Vanity Fair’: Aides and allies wonder what Wiles, West Wing were thinking

A Reuters investigation has found Meta accepted widespread fraudulent ads from China on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to minimise “revenue impact” www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Just hours after the Bondi shooting, we saw a near-instant generation of closed loop of AI misinformation: It appears that AI was used to generate a lie, which was then absorbed by AI, then regurgitated to others in a breaking news situation. www.crikey.com.au/20...

For this week’s DOOMSDAY MACHINES, I interviewed my good friend @cherylrofer.bsky.social about her +30 year career at Los Alamos — topics discussed include gender, lasers, and much more — doomsdaymachines.net/p/working-at...

These Indiana Republicans are civic heroes. Shocking and inspiring to see after the collapse of resistance to illiberalism among so many of their counterparts over the last decade.

lol

New research on Twitter (right before rebranding to X) shows right leaning accounts got outsized visibility from the algorithm & suggests this bias stemmed from different content production techniques (more sensational, outrage-bait) and from direct interaction w/ the new king of the platform: Musk.

What if they constantly want culture war because policy war is complicated and hard and culture war is stupid and easy

if you were operating this robot, i'd like to talk to you!

"Incidentally, in the 1960s and 1970s, when net migration was running at minus 50,000 a year, more than 85% of Britons still thought immigration was too high." Last week's New World column ocncerned immigration to the UK.

Provocative, thoughtful and forward looking piece how Europe needs to take control of its own destiny in a hard power world - and does have the economic means to do so.