we remain shackled to the corpse of progressive era reform where to counter corrupt spoils we made everything elected but now all the mediating institutions that kept those offices bound together in something like order are dead or dying and we're just left with the rot

they 100% have no idea AI is hated. they're surprised every time. When I've told them, they think I'm lying, joking, making it up, or delusional.

Who indeed

Zillow is ground zero for AI token psychosis, spending over $1m on tokens in the first quarter and burning 70%+ of its annual Cursor budget in four months as part of a grand vision of never opening a coding editor again. Its engineers aren't happy. www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expensive/

If you're not familiar with the charmingly rude and greedy Russian incarnation of Winnie the Pooh, Vinni Puh, you are missing out. If Winnie the Pooh is a dry beggar, Vinni is a findom.

The current API revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI are driven predominantly by AI companies subsidizing their users' compute by 300% to 1000%. Once the industry moves away from that, API revenues may face a horrifying collapse. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-what...

The non-naiveté of historians about political patterns is refreshing! And also hella depressing, because whatever you think is newly bad is, they make very clear, oldly bad as well.

oh lordy defector.com/the-saddest-...

Hungary’s new prime minister removes fences and opens Viktor Orbán’s former offices to the public The Karmelita, a former Catholic monastery on Budapest's Castle Hill, had become a potent symbol of Mr Orbán’s rule after being controversially cordoned off in 2021.

not good. currently no vaccine for this species or even a candidate being trialed.

The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is associated with measurable increases in Africa, especially in areas most dependent on the agency’s support.

I repeat: THE PITT is saving television. And not in the flippant, "I just really like it" way. THE PITT has a full writers room, full crew, full seasons and is wildly popular. It's the type of TV that execs thought was dead, and, most importantly, it's the type of TV viewers will always crave.

One of America’s least remarked upon villains, we really gotta do more to shore up Comstock proximate shame and embarassment

There are so many Black self-liberation stories like this - just the coolest shit anyone’s done & I truly believe that if America liked stories of revolutionaries or rebels defeating elites as much as we used to act like we do we would have mined these types of stories more for film & television.

BREAKING: SCOTUS acts immediately on Alabama redistricting, vacating earlier decisions blocking the 2023 map and sending cases back to the district court — over the objection of Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

removing this guy from his position is the single most important errand facing American politics at present. the amount of damage he's doing is almost incalculable.

There's so much bad stuff going on that we don't even have time to worry about an entire new industry built around placing internet bets on pandemics, political assassinations and wars. Like, if this happened in 1997, it would be immediately outlawed.

The AI-driven hard drive shortage is making it more expensive for the Internet Archive to operate, causing problems for Wikimedia, causing delays in academic and hobby archiving projects. Normal people and non AI companies simply can't find reasonably priced drives: www.404media.co/the-ai-hard-...

"Developers plan to build six sprawling data center campuses in Archbald, Pennsylvania, covering about 14 percent of the town’s land. Residents are fighting back."

This is partisanship at its rawest. SCOTUS has clamped down on lower courts for rulings that could alter maps many *months* before an election—even when those maps have been judged illegal. Here, it's rushing to let the Louisiana GOP change a map *while an election is underway.*

"The incident was one of at least 780 in which staff members at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities used physical force or chemical agents to control immigrant detainees during the first year of the Trump administration." Gift link: wapo.st/4tdgBRA

Jill Lepore has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History.

NEW from me for @contrariannews.org: Thousands of local newspapers are gone; your local TV newscast could be next. In Indianapolis last month, 50+ news staffers were fired & their newsroom basically shutdown after a station merger. This is only the beginning. open.substack.com/pub/contrari...

The story:

you don't need a study to know this is bad for kids. that's why school admins have zero excuses for signing these deals

1. ICE has not paid for detainee medical care for 7 MONTHS The termination of payments to providers has coincided with a MASSIVE SPIKE in detainee deaths. This is a health crisis and a moral crisis. Follow along for details. 🧵

Thx to @andreapitzer.bsky.social for joining Andrea has argued, convincingly, that ICE detention centers meet the definition of concentration camps (e.g., see www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/o...) Andrea & the other 3 panelists gave forward-looking advice on what we can ALL do to address this crisis

“Casual traders are bleeding cash while a small number of sophisticated pros—including trading firms with access to vast streams of data—eat their lunch, according to a Journal analysis of platform data and interviews with traders.” A platform only sharks and White House staffers can love.

Crimson is bringing the institutional reporting receipts. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Diesel pain heat map- a color coded map of where diesel prices have surged compared to a week ago- this time its not the coasts that are the hotspot but inland areas including Great Lakes states.

‘S&P’s suggestion is particularly egregious. It wants to ditch its profit requirement for IPOs big enough to make the top 100 by value, while retaining it for other companies. In essence: Size shouldn’t buy special treatment, but it does.’ www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

hot take: women are less likely to use AI because we’re quick to clock flattery as a tool of manipulation

What if the whole Soros conspiracy turned out to be projection, because the far right was being propped up by its own secret Hungarian finance

This week, the Supreme Court finally killed off the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I've spent the past decade studying the VRA and the attacks on it, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective, and where I think we're headed. This will be a long thread; buckle up.

Too often, someone suffering is blamed - by themselves and others - for that suffering. It's a character flaw, it's bad genes, bullshit like that. THIS show would say no. It's not you. It's them. Here's what we can do about it. Experts. Strategy. A how-to. I don't think other shows offer that...

“A Cuban immigrant died ‌in US immigration custody in Georgia in what authorities suspect was a suicide…Deaths of immigrants in ICE custody reached a two-decade high last year and are on pace to climb higher this year, with 18 deaths through ​the first four months of the year.”

The national debt now exceeds 100% of gross domestic product, crossing a once-unthinkable threshold on the way toward breaking the post-World War II record. As of March 31, public debt was $31.265 trillion, topping GDP of $31.216 trillion. @richardrubindc.bsky.social www.wsj.com/economy/u-s-...

No, the cast of Saturday Night Live were not the first to re-enact news events and impersonate public figures. Radio did this for years, and seriously! Great guest post from @cynthiameyers.bsky.social over at the newsletter: continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/when-actor...

BREAKING: Israel and Max Makoka, the brothers ICE arrested on April 21 while they were getting on their school bus, are free after their community rallied to their defense. Mississippi's Republican U.S. senators, Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker, helped secure their release. Nick Judin reports:

Used lawnmower classified ads turned out to be a load bearing part of civil society.

I would be decomposing because I would have died in childbirth

Russian media report that the leaders of only four countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Slovakia - have agreed to attend the parade in Moscow. This is a sharp contrast to last year, when leaders from 27 countries, including China, Serbia, and Brazil, took part in the event.

This is a counterintelligence problem: Half of ‘long shot’ Polymarket bets on military action are successful www.ft.com/content/989d...

I can't stop thinking about Justin and Cerina Fairfax, and how her death could have been prevented. I wrote about colleges and sexual assault, family courts forcing divorcing women to live with their abusers, and the entitlement of men who are cancelled by #MeToo www.vanityfair.com/news/story/j...

I don’t think a lot of people are prepared to consider the creepy, abusive, and invasive implications of this. There is no camera that only sees what you want it to see.

Good story by @bartona104.bsky.social on fake news that wasn’t intended to be fake. CBS did something like this. The “You Are There” series featured recreations of historical events. The tricky part is that real CBS reporters were acting as —reporters: www.historyonthenet.com/authentichis...

"Damning findings suggest AI models cheat by diving into the data they were given—and coming up with the rest based on probability, even if it’s almost entirely conjecture." "AI models are able to use their super-human memory and language skills to hide their weaknesses" by pretending they reason.

Suspending elections where people have already started voting so you can gerrymander their voting power away. Very democracy.

My latest is up! open.substack.com/pub/sherrily...