Alright, I’m home now so here’s the Norm update. Yesterday at 4pm, I got a text from a family I’ve been helping who had a loved one abducted a couple of days after Renée Good’s murder. This was the family that Norm Nation kept from being evicted (and you delivered). ICE had released their loved one.
there's a japanese antidiarrheal whose packaging proudly claims to have won the russo-japanese war because it was so effective in addressing dysentery
The Iranian diaspora in California numbers somewhere in the vicinity of half a million people, and when given an even remotely affordable price of entry, that population is buying tickets.
There's undoubtedly many more US and US-curious fans in SoCal, but exploitative prices exclude/repel them.
Sam says he presented Gemini with a few possible options to help his model stand out, and the chatbot selected one in particular: the "MAGA/conservative niche," referring to it as a "cheat code." Plus, it said, “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal." (A representative for Gemini said, "Gemini is designed not to give a particular opinion unless you tell it to. Instead, it is designed to offer neutral responses that don't favor any political ideology or viewpoint.")
Incredible detail in this story of a med student who had a side hustle running the instagram account of an AI-generated MAGA bikini babe: he says Gemini gave him the idea.
www.wired.com/story/ai-gen...
the fatal flaw in his art
belatedly realized that brian david gilbert’s perfect pokérap is the logical successor to tom lehrer’s periodic table song
Photograph of a programmable sign spanning Interstate Highway 65 which reads “Respect the Zone so we all get home.”
Dawg, Google Maps is routing us through Roadside Picnic
we've got computers
we're tapping phone lines
I know that that ain't allowed.
He would have loved it
In some ways it’s very funny that CONTACT was basically wrong: we can save the poetry for reflection on earth; responding emotionally to the majesty of the universe in the moment with own vernacular still hits extremely hard
Holy. Shit. This is Reid Wiseman's video he took with his iPhone while at the moon 🌙
If I'm not mistaken, Son makes more than the entire Quakes team?
San Jose, officially the best team in the league, started 8 domestic products tonight.
Orlando and Houston, two of the worst, combined to start zero last night.
Quakes now four-for-four in away games.
Did the LAFC president crash out to the top of the stadium or something?
Bruce Arena's Quakes aren't perfect - he's right in his repeated message that they've got a long way to go - but damn, do they press & defend like dogs.🐕
The buy-in from his overwhelmingly domestic-based, unsexy-in-modern-MLS squad is so palpable as they go toe-to-toe with star-spangled LAFC.
when i was 14, I assumed he was one of the most important actors in the world, because he had made two of what I considered to be the most important movies in history: CLUE and The Hunt for Red October. (also, 14 year-old me was correct.)
if you are aware of a “judicial band”, that is, the house band of some court system in the US, please let me know. I am aware of two, both of which i’ve seen perform, and I want to know if there are more.
Tellingly, though, Gladwell provides no direct quotes from Hansell or the Bomber Mafia suggesting that they thought their approach was moral; it's all a retrospective appraisal from contemporary historians. After all, here is what their so-called "moral" approach looked like at the time: In a wargame that proposed a conflict between Canada and the United States, the Bomber Mafia gamed out what it would take for a hypothetical airstrike launched from Toronto to take out New York City. Bomber Mafia associate Muir Fairchild instead theorized that you could bring the city to its knees by striking 17 targets: the bridges, the aqueducts that brought fresh water to the city, and the power grid. As military historian Robert Pape explains, "They basically want to create a situation where there's almost no potable water for the population to drink." This would avoid "wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks" or reducing the city to rubble, while still incapacitating the city. This, somehow, is the moral option: cutting off a city of millions to die slowly of thirst. We are back to Billy Beane's question: Would you rather get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?
5 years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about how destroying civilian infrastructure—specifically bridges and water plants—was a neato, disrupty, outliery, blinky, tipping pointy way to fight wars.
Just thinking about that for some reason.
From my review at TNR:
newrepublic.com/article/1626...
TBH Becerra has a real record in public service, this feels pretty insulting to that.
domino meme, with small domino labeled “US elects trump” and big domino labeled “year of linux on the desktop”
techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/f...
SAN ANTONIO FC FROM WAY PAST THE HALFWAY LINE 🥾 🚀
Dr. Maturin's love of drugs is a trait that the movie had no interest in exploring (although, to their credit, they do hint at his catholicism)
the actual plot of "The Far Side of the World" would break the casual M&C:TFSOTW enjoyer's brain
just belated discovered the post-credits scene of THE PITT s2 finale
Screenshotted excerpt from linked article reading as follows: "In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately."
OOP
New York Times got receipts on John Roberts being like, 'I know this isn't how anything works, but a Democratic president is about to implement a policy!!'
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
this pass was siiiiiiick
It's cold, man
