New York City remains undefeated

we all know I have no life, so:

Nothing has killed more soldiers in the history of humanity than disease. While worst is a more complicated question Hegseth is absolutely the dumbest secretary of defense the United States has ever had. bsky.app/profile/ones...

And as we build new institutions in the coming years, as we must, we can prioritize blurring the distinction that academia built up like a plaque between learning and the world. And then you won’t be outside at all.

To Fight Heat, NYC Sets 2040 Tree Canopy Deadline, With Riskiest Areas First How the plan will be funded is unclear. The Mamdani administration has not earmarked money for its tree-expansion initiative.

trees as cooling infrastructure! this is a fascinating story from @smaldo.bsky.social:

There's actually a fun story behind this: the guy who was NYC superintendent of school buildings from 1891 to 1923 was an architect who believed in holistic learning, and wanted to inspire kids to rise out of poverty by giving them a sense of the possibility of granduer through construction.

We Need to Prepare for the Mammoth Task of De-Trumpification The damage he and his cronies have wrought could take decades to repair, particularly when it comes to science and public health.

The task of de-Trumpification of science and public health will take a generation and a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild. Without a bold, expansive vision to guide us, there is no coming back. Small-bore, poll-tested versions of the future will not help us. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Yay, my district is included!

Beyond it being exciting to see an important policy being made real in NYC, the other groundbreaking thing about Mamdani loudly and doggedly supporting universal childcare is that it's not coming from a woman or even a parent. It's being championed by a childless man.

I learned this one from Vince Gilligan on the Breaking Bad Insider podcast, and it’s good advice. I use it for UX ideation too — what’s the stupidest way we could solve this problem?

Louis Napoleon is a parallel for Trump 2 — elected because his name made people think of more prosperous times and forget how bad things got, became a dictator, not very smart, fought a dumb war

David Byrne - Life During Wartime - Live at Coachella 2026 YouTube video by Coachella

we've got computers
we're tapping phone lines
I know that that ain't allowed.

Naomi Alderman (@naomialderman) Today’s post, on the main challenge for any creative person who DOES want to play around with AI stuff.

I wrote today about the big thing I think any creative person needs to bear in mind if trying to use AI. it’s not even the errors or the terrible writing style. it’s the temptation to make your work more average:

substack.com/@naomialderm...

Also a question I ask myself a lot about Stephen Miller

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman - Wikipedia

You never heard of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman? When I was growing up (Gen X) I feel like it was rerun every year during Black History Month. Cicely Tyson! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aut...

I would start with the other one, because there’s no reading only the first book of Dune

‘Mitzvah Night Is CANCELLED’ Inside the sex strike that has infuriated husbands and shaken the ultra-Orthodox world.

Still an issue today! There was an article in New York magazine a year or two ago about an Orthodox woman who leads pressure campaigns against husbands for agunot

without commenting on any of the new allegations about either platner or mills, i just have to say: schumer recruiting mills (and mills accepting!) was an enormous own goal for the institutional democratic party

when the margins in the senate are this tight this kind of fuckup is discrediting

anyway, if this court is going to act as little more than a partisan legislature than it ought to be treated like one by the actual legislature

I just laughed in delight and then danced a little in my seat 😂

Whatever else you can say against the NYT — and you can certainly say a lot — putting an actual high-powered investigative journalist on the Supreme Court beat was a smart move

Honest question for my legal peeps: are other appellate courts allowed to consider “we’ll probably rule against this” so explicitly in deciding a stay?

the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said.

I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort

I have loved Bowie’s “Starman” since I was a teenager, but now when I hear it I see scenes from THE MARTIAN in my mind’s eye. The power of a good needle drop!

First 100 pages or so are rough but then it's much more engaging

What’s so fine about art?

Same, except I broke a multi-year no-extension streak. Ah, well.

Screenshot from Wikipedia, reading: MacColl originally wanted to call the album Al Green Was My Valet, as a parody of the 1941 film title How Green Was My Valley, but Virgin Records were not keen on it.

If I didn’t already love Kirsty MacColl, this little factoid would guarantee her a place in my heart.

It’s official, @colsonwhitehead.com has won this day in my humble estimation.
(This is the dedication in Cool Machine, which will be published July 21.)