Help me adjudicate a mild domestic dispute regarding the patty melt. Would you consider it: A) A first-order sandwich, worthy of its own righteous station or B) A desperation substitute made or ordered when buns are absent, and obviously worse than a burger, club sandwich, or similar ?

The case against AI music feels, to many, intuitive—but the implications of its popularity are much bigger than a few more cringe songs. Spencer Kornhaber explores:

For my last Buying Power of the year, I wrote about one way to think about the divergence in consumer sentiment (bad) and behavior (free-spending) this year: It’s the YOLO economy, typified by the expanding popularity of services like Klarna and Affirm. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Moody shot of the Elixir.

"The crisis of democracy is a crisis of information—citizens make bad decisions, in part, because they are starved of the facts. And it can get worse." The world is not outraged enough that Trump is using his power to force CBS and CNN to mold to his views. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Good morning.

Maybe I'll get in trouble for saying this, but: If I saw as many bespoke, human-authored, moving/funny/insightful posts on here as I do irate ones about AI ending bespoke, moving/funny/insightful human authorship, it would be kind of neat.

These harpist girls at the St. Louis Irish Arts Christmas concert played “Zombie” by The Cranberries and all the Gen X moms held their hearts and it was kind of beautiful.

Some basic-bitch boss battle shit right here.

Three shopping days left…

It’s finally happening.

Oh

Mmmm.

I was in a high-end boutique and the salesman asked what I do for work. “I’m a writer,” I said (easier than explaining whatever it is I do). “Oh what kind?” He asks. “I write non-fiction books and for a magazine, The Atlantic.” A beat, then, “I don’t think I’ve read a book since college.”

PLURIBUS is the most finely crafted piece of television art I've ever fallen asleep watching three times. My review, for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2042...

An interesting feature of the Trump presidency is how he just does stuff. Yes, it's often illegal, but the fact of the outcomes—their visible, rapid appearance—is undeniable. Contrast this with the inability of the opposition party to demonstrate tangible results, even when results are achieved.

I've been talking about both doctoral study (with academic jobs as the goal) AND tenure for YEARS in terms of RISK MANAGEMENT. It is a very calculated, and increasingly speculative, risk. You have to treat it that way. Faculty hate it when I do this. Especially about tenure.

I am sad that we have fully given up on "gift" being a noun and "give" being a verb. You give a gift. The descriptivist extremist dictionary, @merriam-webster.com, attempts to justify this by casting gift (tv) as "to make a gift of" or to "present," i.e. as if a gift, but this is desperation.

The difference between nominal and actual measurements—this 4" x 4" post cap is 3 5/8" square, because 4x4 is nominal, aka "just its name"—was always trouble. But it's a lot worse now that you have to buy everything online. Good luck Googling "4x4 true cedar post cap" or 4x4 actual cedar post cap."

I have asked this before, but I am asking again: How do you actually get Exchange calendars to synchronize elsewhere, such as in Apple Calendar? According to my IT org, Microsoft's position on this seems to be "We do not give a fuck." Is that the official answer?

All I am gonna say about this is "whooboy."

Instead of posting today, you could pre-order my new book, out summer 2026. It's about the sensory enchantment of everyday life—aka touching grass (and everything else).

That time we bought this light fixture.

The New Yorker has declared Twitter dead for media. The further truth appears to be that all short-text social-media platforms, Twitalikes let’s call them, are also thusly dead. Media people (I am not exempting myself) simply cannot let go of this cursed habit.

Imagine if, after picking up and then putting down an item in a retail store, its personnel then chased you down outside the store, following you around for hours or days, badgering you about how you had "left something behind."

Blake’s Latkeburger

Medicine in 2025 be like: We can probably cure all disease pretty soon but we are going to kill you instead.

30 years into the mass internet era, no effort to deliberately study computing as a cultural practice—a scholarly field with local community, degrees, etc.—have succeeded at scale. Few ever started! Instead, scattered individuals in traditional disciplines and computational methods for old work.

Why Choose Us

You will perhaps not be shocked to learn that our dear and treasured readers, whom I truly do adore, are also writing to me to explain the purportedly simple and clear origins of childlore examples I argued in the article should not be understood by seeking explanation for their origins.

One of my hobbies this year is culturing aggressive indifference toward F1. I think it's cool that people like it, I grasp the reasons for its rise, I have no interest in sneering at it. But I am profoundly enjoying feeling absolutely nothing whatsoever toward F1. A pure, clean dispassion.

The Last Hardees in Charleston sounds like some brand-baked AI rendition of a Truman Capote story.

Coda: > Successfully place order despite discount not applying Days pass; Vendor email: Everything is 40% off!

My feature on Jollibee is out today!!! Read on for a tale about fried chicken, sweet spaghetti, and postcolonial revenge 🇵🇭 www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

I have written an elegy to Six-Seven, which is dead, or at least dying. It is not a meme—memes are the purview of greedy adulthood attention thirst—but a case of Childlore. Though irritating, it should have been left alone.

100-year moratorium on “Save It for Later” as a television or film montage song.

Computers have like two USB-C ports and you’re supposed to use hubs (in your monitor for example) but then accessories don’t work reliably with the hubs, and the manufacturers rejoin you to plug the devices directly into the computer instead, which you’d absolutely do if it had more than two ports.

I don’t want to alarm you, but this album is 32 years old.

A couple years ago Liftmaster made myQ, its smart garage door feature, inaccessible to standard home automation hubs such as Apple Home. (Lots of workarounds exist, but you need to be quite a nerd to do them.) Now myQ is trying to sell this capacity back to you as a service.

Gamblers Sometimes Win Dek: Not always tho

Questions: 1) Do we need a 'fetish of the year?' 2) Does it have to be 'gooning?' 3) Do we need gooning at all? 4) Really, aren't we just talking about symbolic exchange and the relative value of ideas in the marketplace of their exchange, and not gooning, or fetishes, anyway?

Warning: I am going to wear a color to architecture final critique today.

Not my most important story of the year, but one of my favorites, I think. I remember, if vaguely, when we used music to amplify emotions, probably to the extreme of wallowing in them. Now—and well before AI—music became anesthetizing, a canvas for the void.

Real “don’t put your hotel-room key card in your pocket” vibes here.

Sometimes I think about the modest sorrow of Corn Pops. Sort of the lost child of the sugar cereals. Nobody would take the Corn Pops first from the Fun Pack, over the Cocoa Krispies or the Fruit Loops.

Ah yes.

I finished “All Her Fault” and I am not sure if there should be novels or television shows.

We really must stop posting.

Quick question