How do we live in a world where painting a tunnel, Looney Tunes-style, on a wall may actually work. What kind of future is this?

The line is:
In most elections, you’re not choosing your fighter. You’re choosing your enemy.

It will be very hard to trace out the damage to scientific progress because of all of the science that won't start, the trainees who won't move along in their careers, and all of the innovations we could have had that will be delayed.

Screenshot of an online opinion article by the Editorial Board. The headline reads, "The Texas gerrymander freakout," with the subheadline, "What's happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy." The publication date is August 20, 2025.

​Screenshot of an online opinion article from The Washington Post by the Editorial Board. The headline reads, "Virginia plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss," with the subheadline, "The redistricting scheme was always a power grab by Democrats. Voters went along with it."

The WaPo editorial board when Republicans gerrymander in Texas versus when Democrats gerrymander in Virginia.

Remember, Democrats have repeatedly advanced measures to ban partisan gerrymandering and Republicans have voted against them time after time.

This is the game Republicans wanted to play. OK, then.

I would submit that a gerrymander by politicians saying fuck the voters and one by voters saying fuck the politicians are two wholly different animals

haven't tapped the sign in a while: "support billionaire-free, worker-owned, independent media" when and how you are able

i think if you want to say that the VA plan is vengeful and Becoming The Monster and all of that you need to explicitly grapple with the 2031 reset to nonpartisan redistricting.

otherwise i just kind of assume you don't realize it sunsets

I'm honestly hoping we start to get more throwback and just weird designs as EV batteries improve and range becomes less of an issue.

Three images of Neil banging out the tunes on April 13, 2006. Neil is a hairless rat.

Twenty years ago, Neil banged out the tunes. Who was he? Come on a brief and fruitful quest to find out: defector.com/a-brief-and-...

I don't think non-Black people understand how much Black people calculating spaces as to whether they'd be hostile to Black people.

It's the same way I think men don't understand that women navigate spaces thinking about whether or not they'd be safe

A big part of why we're in this whole situation is a lot of people would rather fabricate entire structural frameworks of victimization than accept that some of the things they think and do are bad.

‘Simply stop giving millionaires water for literally free’ is one of the most insane sounding but actually serious policy solutions out there

to be genuine for a moment, working for the onion in this era has been one of the greatest experiences of my life so far. good things will continue to come

$1,700 is roughly the FIT burden of a household of three filing joint making 65k, to put that into tax perspective.

Yelling at someone “they have the political instincts of a goose: loud, territorial, and wrong”

Translation: they are proposing a bill that says you cannot under any circumstances use a computer for any purpose without allowing the United States government continuous monitoring and a backdoor

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social I was working my way through the backlog of premium episodes for If Books Could Kill and got to your Pundit Portrait episode for Kathleen Parker and her 2016 "It'll be fine" column, where you said "the nuking Iran one is the only one sh was right about" and 😬😬😬

A couple points on this manifesto, apart from the racial superiority subtext others noted.

Palantir is a company built on public contracts, they bill the state billions to surveil and target the state's population. The manifesto exists to justify their demand for even more.
/1

to the extent Palantir is accurate about a threat to civilization it's that the architects of surveillance and torture were not charged and tried for building a nascent unaccountable panopticon and any healthy democracy would instead drive Alex Karp to ruin rather than give him public money for harm

The desperate campaign to push AI down our throats is just what Nestlé did with baby formula, or Monsanto with patended seeds.

Manufactured Intermediation—inserting a corporate tollbooth into a process that used to be self-sustaining, using a low initial barrier to entry to destroy the alternative.

the most interesting thing about this story is not the survey itself—which is a year old and has since been retracted over huge problems with the sample—but that media outlets keep trying to push stories of a massive religious revival among the young in absence of any evidence

In thinking about what to do about the rogue Court, we maybe focus a bit too much on court packing yes or no, granted that's the most important. But some of the less sexy things can be done by more mundane statutory fixes. Congress could, and should, nuke the shadow docket.

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

This is a momentous story in a lot of ways. One incredible little detail: the Roberts clerk and the Alito clerk who wrote the key memos creating the shadow docket, Joseph Benjamin Tyson III and Barbara S. Grieco, ended up getting married two years later.

Fun fact: they passed it because a DC video store leaked Robert Bork’s video rental history to a local paper during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Orbán rode to power on resentment over the economic stagnation that developed under center-left governments. But he leaves office with Hungarians facing falling wages and higher inflation than similar countries are experiencing. Orbán’s sectarianism and intolerance have sparked neither a religious revival nor a fertility bump; Hungary’s population is shrinking and has become more irreligious, even as Orbán has demonized LGBTQ people, “Muslim invaders,” and Jews. Orbánism, in short, did not make Hungarians more rich, Christian, or free—unless you happened to be one of Orbán’s buddies, in which case you may have gotten rich. As most Hungarians felt their economic circumstances worsen, Orbán provided them with relatively powerless targets to hate.

Orban made grand appeals to “Christianity” and “Western Civilization,” but his “illiberal democracy” was just a scam, a way to make him and his buddies rich while subjecting Hungarians to stagnation and robbing them of their freedom. Sound familiar? (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Big investigation about a very secretive institution

It's hard to articulate the level of anger & rage I have about watching this happen. I first saw weev doxx people I love *TWENTY* years ago. I spoke to founders of multiple social networks about the risk of these people over 15 years ago. I wrote about it all a dozen+ years ago. They let it happen.

sixteen days later,