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A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

TRUMP: “Do everything I ask or I’ll bomb you back into the Stone Age!”

IRAN: “How about, instead, you do everything we ask and we’ll call it a day?”

TRUMP: “Deal.”

FOX NEWS: “Awesome Trump is the world’s most masterful negotiator!”

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content “In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”

NEW: Wikipedia has banned AI-generated content.

In a bold move toward sustainability and consumer protection, taken a stand against the wasteful practice of Planned obsolescence. By legally banning this approach, the country is pushing manufacturers to create products that last longer, are easier to repair, and generate less environmental waste.

subway ad that says "your idea could be live by the time you reach your stop"

as a culture we have really given "ideas" way too much credit. ideas are a dime a dozen. they happen all the time. the magic is way more in the doing, and the doing's diminished stature is linked to lack of respect for labor and, more recently, skill and expertise.

Evergreen

Chuck Norris Would Like to Revisit His Facts Chuck Norris continues to beat the sun in staring contests and that alone probably disproves climate change.

I'm sharing this piece I wrote several years to see if anything on the internet is actually satirical...

The Power of Art (To Make Me Weep) Art is the high drama and the low drama, and often, as Schama shows us, it’s the reflection of the artists’ own life, their fear, pain, joy, and frustrations, their family relationships, loves, and lo...

“Schama understands the value of art, not just as an aesthetic object, but as a transmission of the feelings and passions that lived within the life of the artist. He knows how important it is to comprehend art as a connection to the great unending project of humanity, our precious shared legacy.”

i am, effective immediately, opting out of the american century of humiliation. it will not apply to me. thank you!

This Is Actually Happening - An Origin Story How losing my mind became the gift of a lifetime

The transformative podcast This is is Actually finds its way to Substack. So another place for stories and another opportunity to cultivate empathy...
whitmissildine.substack.com/p/this-is-ac...

‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ Director: “This is about how you lose your country — through small acts of complicity: when a government murders people on the streets, when oligarchs take over the media… we all face a moral choice. But even a nobody is more powerful than you think."

Graffiti reads: IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL WANT TO BE ANONYMOUS FOR FIFTEEN OUTES

Morning Bluesky.

snowy scene, a manhole cover on an empty street with traffic lights

Times Square

Pete Turner, 1958

brucesilverstein.com/artworks/228...

THREAD: I got laid off from NYMag/Vulture after 14 years. The family lost 75% of income + medical. Now mzs.press bookstore, once a side project. is do-or-die for Judith & I. I feel weird telling you this because others are doing much worse. But if you could like or share this, we'd be so grateful!

Call for Senator John Fetterman to Resign Pennsylvanians deserve a Senator who respects their voices and listen to their concerns. We cannot wait another 3 years for the opportunity to replace Senator Fetterman. He must resign now.

Not just for Pennsylvanians... please sign this petition to call for John Fetterman's resignation from the Senate. This doesn't include his recent atrocious vote supporting this week's illegal war... sign.moveon.org/petitions/ca...

move slow and repair things

the two phases of writing: (1) writing and (2) wandering aimlessly like an unmoored ghost and complaining about not writing

Linklater // On Cinema & Time Created for Sight & Sound / BFI

A video essay from Kogonada about Richard Linklater and the Before trilogy that never doesn't hit hard, slows down your brain a little, and makes you cry in the good way

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers More citizens are replanting overseas, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries.

This is such a well done piece that reports out, with hard data and interviews, something profound about what's gone wrong in this country.

www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...

A man speaking into a recorder: Diane, 11:30 a.m., February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks.

Here we are.

This guy gets it.

A whiteboard leaned against a shelf with many trinkets. On the whiteboard, it says “When you look at a blank page, think of who you love”

In his acceptance speech for award for best screenplay, Ryan Coogler said “when you look at a blank page, think of who you love” and I dunno, that really moved me so I wrote it down and sat it on my desk to look at while I work

The tragedy of John Fetterman is that he used to dress like a slob but have an encouraging spirt, making him an Oaf of Rugged Individuality, one of America’s great oaf groups. But now he dresses like a slob and whines all the time, making him an Oaf of Misery

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

There is so much pent up demand for joy and to believe in the future.

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see.

His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert.

Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

What Mira Nair Taught Zohran Mamdani The mayor’s famous filmmaker mother reveals the origins of his ferocious ambition.

Cannot believe that I got to profile an extraordinary filmmaker, who happens to be the mother of NYC’s new mayor, and think about intersections of art and politics, and how familial love might produce a buffer against the corrosive politics and cynicism of our time. My story about Mira Nair:

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue