A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/why-were-spo...

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

Sometimes the old ways are the best

One problem with billionaires is that they're so rich they no longer have rational incentives. To someone like Bezos, the financial performance of WaPo is wholly irrelevant, and so the only "incentive" is to satisfy emotional urges, such as breaking something just to show he can.

bad day!

Bezos has the resources to make WaPo into the BEST sports outlet and BEST science outlet and BEST place to get trusted news without feeling any sort of negative financial impact but is happy to turn it into Quillette because he’s lost whatever creative spark he had and turned into a vapid dullard

remember the time Bezos personally took a single action and it cost the post well over 200k subscribers www.npr.org/2024/10/28/n...

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

the owner just spent 75 million on a film that opened with a 7 million take

it goes without saying but I don't think the 3rd richest person on the planet is destroying the prestige newspaper he bought because of the finances of the newspaper business

Spitballing/bargaining stage of grief: A “Washington Banner” outlet, spun off the successful Baltimore Banner and taking advantage of its backend, built out of laid off Washington Post Metro and Sports staffers and funded via a mixed nonprofit and subscription model…

... and naturally, the guy they gave it to is a straight-up Nazi (2/2)

So over on Twitter, they did a "$1 million article contest." This is the guy who won the million dollar prize: (1/2)

Funny how hard these guys are for Return To Office, but when it’s time for the mass firings we have to be absolutely sure there are no possible gatherings

What's wild is that, in that movie, she very much does look like the kid she was at the time.

I think my most embarrassingly vulgar marxist belief is that I think, on some level, "in order to keep capitalism steady, we need more people to be more evil" is at the root of why actual cosplaying nazis are everywhere now and anti-wokeness is establishment policy

that vance and trump are both married to the kinds of wives their movement wants to remove from the country is one of those facts no one quite knows what to do with, but will really leap out to historians in our communist utopian future when they study the period

birthdays really do get depressing as you get older, don't they

"society as a whole is reallocating food spending toward cooking at home, not away from it. DoorDash Discourse gets the direction wrong."

Judge Ana Cecilia Reyes is absolutely woke as hell, let's make her the new chief justice after the current supreme court is peacefully and with due process sent to re-education camps en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_C._...

"Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely."

🚨 Documents leaked to me reveal a federal watchlist of American protesters suspected of being Antifa - including its supposed leader. One Department of Homeland Security document says a 29-year-old resident of Portland "is the leader of Antifa": www.kenklippenstein.com/p/feds-ident...

"I have been wondering if there is something we might call againism that is related to, but distinct from, nostalgia. Againism is not longing for a past state—whether real or imagined. It does not want to return. Instead, it wants to repeat." keguro.substack.com/p/notes-from...

ICE was stealing equipment from the Islip Long Island fire department and a Islip Forward member documented it. ICE tried to arrest the community member but the firemen said “I don’t think so” www.islipforward.org

In defense of...just saying things that are on your mind. You're not a press secretary. You're not responsible for Messaging for a billion-dollar political operation. You are a normal-ass powerless person trying to hold it together and if you need to vent some doom shit, go for it.

I love you Adam Tooze, but "home cooking is borderline vanity project" is a real all-time "skills issue"

this country will collapse under the weight of its sins and soon the groundhog will be free

weird how the groundhog came out with a sign around his neck that reads "winter will never end, the winter of your soul, I mean: man is wedded to the misfortune of being"

For context, Meta just threw $77 billion in the trash for the "Metaverse." There's a lot of capital allocation mistakes being made by these capitalists.

why is my jetlag getting WORSE

“The kind of culture work that the vampires want, and cannot have, is about and derived from loss, death, and individuality because those are good things.”

Some jawdropping CBP crime statistics here...

This is why everyone in the Bay Area should be reading the weekly events calendar on the @oaklandreviewofbooks.org website. We checked everyone's instagram so you don't have to!

If you are a Californian who doesn’t think throwing more money at OpenAI is a good use of state resources (or a useful intervention for learners in a teaching focused university system), add your voice.

it is still a little weird how, even if you were comfortable calling MAGA fascists and nazis before, it was sort of a... if not a stretch, at least a bit of an extension. Now it's just, no, they are those things in very direct and clear ways.

Me, looking at Cala's pictures of the various people she's drawing and inventing: "where is gongers?" (a name I've literally just made up) Cala, laughing: "Gongers is not here!" Me: "where is Gongers?" Cala, a little frustrated with me: "She is my cat that I dreamed about, remember I told you."

One way to think through the victory in Tarrant County, given that Rehmet ran in labor issues, is that the voters were offered two competing theories of solidarity and chose collective bargaining over white supremacy as their mode This shift is possible and important to aim for

it's not the point, but "granting political rights and welfare" *to citizens* hasn't been a thing for all that long either. This kind of argument works to the extent that the typical 18th century despotism is your model society.

absolute nazi shit. these are people who came here legally and are to be rendered criminals to populate concentration camps because of lies.

Haiti accepted Jewish refugees during WWII before the US would.

Interestingly, it's now 30% Latino

Happy to report that Cala is also jetlogged and having the grandest time singing and playing and rolling on top of her exhausted parents

Jetlagged and reading Richard Evans books about nazis like it's 2016

back from chile and you guys, it's winter here? wtf

Remember: to reveal the names of these masked secret police would be doxing!

So, a quick note on Oakland Review of Books, or ORB: a handful of us are working to will it into existence, and--aside from a big boost to get started from our friends at @ebbooksellers.bsky.social--it's a self-funded operation whose goal is to exist and enable writing like this.

So, a quick note on Oakland Review of Books, or ORB: a handful of us are working to will it into existence, and--aside from a big boost to get started from our friends at @ebbooksellers.bsky.social--it's a self-funded operation whose goal is to exist and enable writing like this.