Screenshot of temperature map ranging from 49 degrees near Lake Michigan to 71 in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Gotta respect Chicago weatherfolx when they say “cooler near the lake.”

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation?

Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed

Here are the key take-aways 🧵

Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

Paul Westerberg sang it best in 1989 “shocking how nothing shocks anymore…”

Decidedly not a unicorn

Chrome’s got a big box.

The latest Chrome app has an enormous blank space where you used to enter a URL like, say, fark or digg[dot]com. Google expects contextual searching and is now training users to prompt big. AI mode poses as an option for top results, for now.

a man is sitting at a table with a sign that says `` change my mind '' on it . Alt: a man is sitting at a table with a sign that says `` change my mind '' on it .

Skepticism is dead. Convince me otherwise.

Discovering Prince, Ten Years Later - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Tomorrow marks 10 years since Prince passed. For the first time, I gathered nearly two decadesq of my writing, podcasts, talks & more into one curated resource, including playlists, rarities, a review of every video he ever made, and collaborations I did with his estate. anildash.com/2026/04/20/p...

Well know they’re really comfortable when they nod to their roots like Huey Lewis, Billy Joel (sorry Kylie and Kate).

We live in a _______ society

The branding does a lot of heavy lifting. Can’t “Build Your Dreams” in America.

Damn. Shots fired on or near the ped mall in Iowa City.

Pretty frustrating that the New York Times is crediting AP with uncovering the existence of Aadam’s archive when I reported on it 15 months prior. chicagoreader.com/music/gossip...

I gave away cassingles at my bar mitzvah party

There were a lot of skeptical responses to FIFA appealing to its peace prize winner to declare an ICE raid moratorium — after all, Trump violated the Olympic truce by starting a new war — but if the pressure is also coming from the unions that staff the venues, that's a very different story

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

Obsessed with this collection, the hit shows keep coming. Fun Devo cover inside

New boards set me free for a few minutes. youtu.be/6bghDcbzfEU

I mean, she is definitely super!

I knew Geese and their fans were fake when they covered Justin Bieber at Coachella and everyone on the rail gleefully sang along to every word.

The Chats - 6L GTR - Live at Coachella 2026 YouTube video by Coachella

The Chats at Sahara Tent will be way more packed weekend 2 Coachella youtu.be/aDFBM28meG8?...

Parquet Courts’ Starbucks commercial doesn’t make me any more likely to voluntarily go there. But it did remind me that I haven’t listened them then in years.

BREAKING: A marketing company that sells a virality secret sauce claims this band's success is due to their secret sauce in order to sell more secret sauce.

The article itself is a psyop. A cesspool of marketing buzzwords that all basically describe modern day marketing.

“I really don’t have an opinion on that” is the best take. Pretending to have an opinion about everything just makes people insufferable, if not miserable.

Now hitting the 2013 Coachella memory hole. Which begs the question “where oh where is Ian Svenonius and the Make Up?”

Astronaut art at Coachella 2014 with hot hazy skies and lots of people

Thinking back to Coachella a dozen years ago. Remember this?

The Strokes are an autotune band now.
Another sign of impending doom.

King Tuff - Moo Album cover block background white outlined text and guitar under the M

Is the Claypool Lennon Delirium album be the best of the year? The early track drops suggest maaaaybe!

But let’s not sleep on King Tuff.

In fifty years when people look back at the past decade or so, the big world-changing technological innovation won't be the chatbot slop machines, it'll be mRNA.

My New Band Believe album on Spotify

“Don’t cry, you deserve this” is a fantastic lyric. Having fun with this My New Band Believe album so far.