Reports from the front lines suggest that widespread casualties from the flu epidemic may have been one reason the German army collapsed in 1918.

sarah isgur and brett kavanaugh mugging for the camera together

Brett Kavanaugh officiated Sarah Isgur's wedding and is helping her promote her book, which is all about how good and noble the Supreme Court is. There is no reason to take seriously anything this person says about her very powerful, life-tenured friends. Seriously, have some respect for yourself.

Epstein wasn’t a financial consultant

He trafficked in young girls and used compromising information to extort money

The Jackson estate can't hide Leaving Neverland from those who've already seen it A suppressive legal battle turned the moving Sundance documentary Leaving Neverland into a ghost haunting the Michael Jackson biopic.

I will never forget the experience of seeing LEAVING NEVERLAND at its Sundance premiere. For @avclub.com I wrote about a devastating, definitive documentary about surviving sexual abuse that cannot be erased.

It’s a goddamn shame. But it’s exactly the kind of movie a corporate yes-man would make in the end.

But it’s basically fine with that in the end. It’s not even a “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” kind of ending! Ken Miles has his life’s defining achievement literally stolen from him and then he’s killed while planning to make up for it. And everyone just sort of shrugs and moves on!

FORD V. FERRARI lays bare that capitalism is (duh!) about money, not people, and that it is therefore hostile to any motivation or interest beyond money—including, specifically, individual achievement.

If it had any interest in being outraged on behalf of Carroll Shelby or Ken Miles and his family, the movie would be a brilliant takedown of the rightwing myth that capitalism promotes, incentivizes, and rewards individual achievement and merit.

FORD V. FERRARI is a great movie right up until the ending, which is so forgiving of the corporate betrayal of artists and of foundational American values of individual achievement and meritocracy that it makes my skin crawl.

No you don't, that's not how you win at politics, if it was, Democrats would be the only winners in politics. That's just not true that adopting policies that make a difference in people's lives is enough to win in politics. Its a lie

Feel like it should be a bigger story that Howard Lutnick's firm (run by his kids) created a financial product to buy up tariff refund claims at a major discount, and will now be cashing in on the higher costs passed onto consumers.

He killed over 160 young girls at a school and threatened to end their entire civilization out of respect and admiration

It would be nice if, at a moment when academia is under brutal assault from outside forces that are opposed to the very core of its mission, academics weren't so obsessed with self-flagellation.

In Article About Horrific Shooting That Killed Eight Children, Forbes Lets Readers Place Bets About Gun Control In a story about a mass shooting that left eight children dead, Forbes is encouraging readers to bet on the news with fake money.

Forbes is gamifying news about the horrific mass shooting in Shreveport, LA this weekend, encouraging readers to bet on the likelihood of gun regulation with fake money via its "ForbesPredict" feature.

Eight children were murdered in the shooting.

futurism.com/future-socie...

Looks like the prosecutors couldn’t make it stand up in court

This is a reminder that you can still ask real people for advice and recommendations. You don't have to ask the robot for everything. In fact there are some things you definitely should not be asking the robot about.

The Onion plans to turn Infowars into a comedy site with satirical echoes of the fringe conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones is known for. Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.” Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy. “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview. During a recent trip to Philadelphia, he traveled to the Liberty Bell to film a video in character as the new creative director of Infowars.

Get excited.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/b...

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

I used to be able to tell my phone "navigate to Costco" and it would pull up directions. Now an AI voice tells me the address of the two nearest Costcos and advises me to use Waze or MapQuest to get there. If I open Google Maps and type Costco, I get an ad for Safeway.

John Swartzwelder had the best answer to this question.

i support whichever candidate will vow to eradicate palantir and its owners

A lot of people are still in the denial about how much the median Democratic voter, the median Democratic volunteer, and the median Democratic activist has shifted on a variety of issues. Well here's the handpicked candidate of Chuck Schumer being booed, about Gaza, at the Dem convention.

I will absolutrly criticize people for attending. It’s a grotesque spectacle nobody who cares about press freedom should dignify with their presence.

I'm so glad this brave law enforcement officer is OK after being violently smirked at. Praying for him and his family

Top three things deodorant didn’t used to do but now does

3: be discontinued

2: stain all my shirts

1: cost $12 a stick

We cannot fix this country unless we drive these Vichy fucks out of business and out of polite society.

lucifer:

Syrian Billionaires Needed a Favor in Washington. They Invoked the Trump Name.

NYT INVESTIGATION: As the Trump administration & Congress last year moved to repeal sanctions on Syria, the Qatar-based family that most stood to benefit was privately negotiating a real-estate partnership with Jared Kushner and proposing a Trump golf course in Syria www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/u...

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

Holy SHIT someone found the test pressing of Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues and it is clear as a PIN www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

Roberts should be impeached over this. It doesn’t matter if it succeeds. It only matters that his reputation is destroyed and he goes down in history as the lying arsonist he is.