Are you in a show???

Through a window, a terrace, with green grass (possibly artificial) and stools like little chess pieces but not as pointy.

At the Amsterdam airport I heard a couple of travelers asking how they could get outside, to the terrace. “Outside?” scoffed the airport employee they were talking to. “There’s no ‘outside’ at the airport.” Twenty minutes later I found the terrace.

Just for one glorious second I believed that sometime in the past Venus de Mars was elected to municipal office.

If you didn't already know, Dr. Schwartz works for UnitedHealthcare and also was very involved in the Trump administration's shit response to the pandemic. So.

“the secretary and I are having to figure out ways to temporarily fund people’s paychecks so we don’t have people quit and embark on new careers”

meanwhile regular folks in Minneapolis are having to figure out ways to temporarily pay their neighbors’ rent so their kids aren’t homeless

I don’t, though, so I can only be grateful to her for writing it for me. Maybe it’s for you, too.

If I had kids and I wanted them to understand what’s happening in our country and how we might pull out of it, without overexposing them to the specific concrete horrors, I think I’d be very grateful to Kelly Barnhill for writing this book.

we really thought that rabid flesh-eating murder wolf with blood dripping from its gaping maw was our friend because it was wearing a little sweater

Here’s hoping

Also, every time I fly KLM I get that “KLF” vocal hook stuck in my head

Every time I fly through Amsterdam I think at some point that maybe THIS time I won’t have to go through passport control

Even though I’m only ever here to go from Glasgow to Europe or vice versa

Maybe next time, though!

Online hostility is predicted by economic & political inequality

Inequality breeds online hostility because people crave status in unequal societies and status-seekers constitute the main perpetrators of hostility in political settings, whether online or offline.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Opinion | The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened? This is how cars got so ridiculously, forbiddingly expensive.

"Today, Detroit doesn’t need the average American to buy a car; better to sell affluent households their second S.U.V."

Kind of makes you wish there were a commandment or two about this kind of thing

It's not just Iran whose surrender is being demanded. It's yours. Your hope. Your belief in yourself and our collective potential. Your empathy. They want to crush those things. They want you to believe their will is inevitable.

They want you to surrender.

We also had a builder that no longer exists, and it’s definitely because their corner-cutting caught up with them.

Our exterior assessment was about $10k per unit IIRC and luckily we were able to help with financing, so for owners who couldn’t cover a lump sum it was just a temporary HOA fee bump.

I don’t know but I’m up for just yelling “trolley problem!” as a general practice

Then of course there’s the rapist-in-chief, who’s demonstrated that literally everyone can know and you can still win an election. I’d like to believe he’s a one-off, a fluke. I’d like that a lot. I’d like that a lot.

That’s not all bad. “Innocent until guilty” is a noble principle of law, if widely misapplied. But it’s frustrating to learn over and over that “everybody knew” something that should have been disqualifying (and incarcerating, if you lean that way).

I’m pretty sure most of the answer rape culture. (That might even be my point, if I were here to make a point.) People who know have disincentives to talk, and people who hear are predisposed not to believe. The spread slows and stops.

Do congressional staffers never tell their less connected friends, “I don’t like that guy, I heard he’s a rapist”? Why does that word not get around?

Dayen says “If I knew, everyone knew.” But I didn’t know. I suspect not all of the voters in his district knew. So where are the lines between the “everyone” who knew and everyone else?

Something I’m thinking about is that the whisper network never seems wide enough to take these people down.

Like, I’m not asking reporters to publish slander. I’m not expecting party insiders to wield secret levers for the force of good (although, hey, if you’ve got the levers anyway…).

Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social Al folks have now discovered "thinking" Steph Smith @stephsmithio Sometimes in the process of writing a good enough prompt for ChatGPT, I end up solving my own problem, without even needing to submit it.

Reclaim thinking.

Not that I have any sympathy for anyone “working” within 200 feet of him, but

I wonder how many of them are dumb enough to still believe a Trump “promise.”

I have seen Everybody to Kenmure Street and can confirm, it sounds VERY FAMILIAR

Patterson, CA, east of San Jose.

I’m a British TV crank now

BBC weather guy just said Reading has literally never been this warm this early, “but I hate to be the bearer of bad news, this warm weather won’t last” my friend did you notice you already delivered the bad news

No one can convince me that Noma was ever real