New Wave as in New Worlds, New Wave as in Nouvelle Vague

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In 1985, you explained CompuServe chatrooms by saying they were "what amounts to a computer version of CB radio"; in 2026, you call them "the social internet before there was a social internet."

"there was a crucial transformation in Muslim identity: from locally-based syncretism to state-attempted secular modernization to a reinvigoration of a transnational Muslim identity..."

Another ICE-protest case collapses

Last night my wife said she grew up thinking the song "Mellow Yellow" was about the soft drink. I told her I'd always heard that it was about getting high by smoking banana peels. We checked Wikipedia, and...

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A.I. among the Amish

James Ellroy on Nixon: "...he would lose himself and walk into the inner city. Not looking for women, not looking for anything in particular. Having a few belts with people in bars. Some people honestly didn't recognize him. Some did..."

"On almost every foreign policy question asked in the poll, the 18-to-44-year-old segment of the Republican coalition takes a dissenting view"

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On the bright side, Massie can now spend more time inventing machines, which tend to be more useful than bills & can proceed without 218 narcissists voting for them.

RIP Barry Blaustein, who co-wrote some of Eddie Murphy's best sketches. "I don't know why other people didn't write for him. They'd go, 'You write for him a lot,' and we'd say, 'Yeah, well, he's the best guy there, why not write for him?'"

The growing Venn intersection between "issues ponderous pronouncements about what A.I. will do to 'truth'" and "gets his facts wrong because he misuses A.I."

I mentioned this exhibit last week, but I'll reup the recommendation—the photos are definitely worth checking out. It's at UMBC through Friday.

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"what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers"

sword-wielding semi-legal anti-squatter security companies

"The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief's decision. Voters' job isn’t to evaluate; it's to trust the officials who have."

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"The LaRouche section of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy reads like a Thomas Pynchon novel, and had me laughing out loud at several points..."

"For all of his combustible combination of tough guy swagger, sepia-tinged nostalgia, crushing vulnerability, and unabashed working-class pride Merle Haggard is the closest American peer to Ray Davies."

Joan Didion meets the Grateful Dead

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I love a good personalized plate

Today is (by some measures) the 60th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, so I wrote about the Western anarchists and libertarians who persuaded themselves that Mao was on their side.

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"Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."

death of a prolific filmmaker whose work was endlessly quoted

How Taiwan's president snuck into Africa

"When it comes to reducing the corruption of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon recently took one step forward and two steps back..."

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I went into this knowing nothing about the band, and I came out a fan.

RIP Clarence Carter, who gave us the greatest sermon in the history of recorded sound

I dug up one of my ridiculous old Twitter threads & preserved it on Letterboxd, because why not?

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"Symptom-based categories have been convenient for professional communication, insurance billing and conducting clinical trials, but they have given the false impression that each mental disorder is a relatively distinct problem with clear boundaries and an essence"

"Animism is the old, nearly universal human habit of treating objects as if they have spirits—and Nelson's whole point is that we never actually stopped doing it, we were just in denial of it."

"Next, they published a full list of everyone who signed the pledge, making it very easy to identify those who did not."

Repressive powers can be pointed in more than one direction, chapter two trillion

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"It should have been clear at the time that any 'peace plan' premised on sales of arms and repressive technology to authoritarian regimes was bound to fail."

"The macaques steal belongings to use as currency to trade with humans for food. Some monkeys can distinguish between objects we highly value (smartphones, prescription glasses, wallets) and those we don't...and will barter accordingly."

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Let's check in on the Strait of Hormuz...

I'm not usually one for this sort of formal designation, but it wouldn't be a bad thing if every star on the American banner had its own official state cryptid.

Some interesting data here on how many people believe the Trump assassination attempts were staged. Contrary to Brill's overwrought commentary at the end, it is not historically unusual for a conspiracy theory to pull these kinds of numbers.

"Ever the indefatigable entrepreneur, Flower launched a magazine called The Yogi while incarcerated and edited eleven issues from his jail cell in Carson City, Nevada..."

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Mother's Day trip to UMBC to see Mary Ellen Mark's photos of an Oregon insane asylum