a close up of a gollum from the lord of the rings with a very angry look on his face Alt: a close up of a gollum from the lord of the rings with a very angry look on his face

Social media apps as Lord of the Rings characters, a thread:

Twitter: Twitter is Gollum. Began as a normal halfling. Overexposure to evil left it thin and stretched and bitter.

And Swedish sköldpadda

There is a path. It’s the path that Michael Vick walked. He has worked with the Humane Society for the last 17 years to educate folk about animal cruelty. He says he’ll do that work for the rest of his life.

Call me when Louis or Kanye devotes even one weekend to making reparation.

I'm going to fix Bluesky's user growth issues. I'm going to start posting about which MLB players have "George Lucas-ass names" again. Sorry about that.

COWBOY: This town ain't big enough fer the both of us.

ARCHITECT: This is just the mockup. The actual town will be human-sized.

”A worker who understands what they are doing can exercise judgment the institution cannot govern. Move that understanding into the system, and the worker has nothing left to do but follow instructions.” h/t @iwriteok.bsky.social

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

NYT on Feb. 13, 2026: The visit also demonstrated the relative foreign policy inexperience of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who has made a few overseas trips since taking office but does not sit on any House committees devoted primarily to world affairs. She struggled at times to formulate succinct answers at a nighttime panel session, during which she was asked probing and specific questions about how to respond to international crises. Questioned about whether the United States should send troops to defend Taiwan if China invaded the island, she stalled for roughly 20 seconds before offering a substantive response. “I think that, uh, this is such a, a — you know, I think that — this is a, um — this is of course, a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, before saying that the country should try to avoid reaching that point with China in the first place.

NYT on March 16, 2026: On Monday, Mr. Trump claimed that “numerous countries have told me they’re on the way,” noting that President Emmanuel Macron of France would most likely help in the Strait of Hormuz and was an eight out of 10. “Not perfect, but it’s France,” he said. Others are not demonstrating sufficient enthusiasm for his demands, he said.

Last month the NYT said AOC "struggled" to give an answer on Taiwan and quoted her with "uhs" and "ums" to make her look stupid

Yesterday talking about Hormuz Trump claimed he's heard from "numerous countries" and said "uh" four times. The NYT deleted the "uhs" and paraphrased him to look smarter:

It is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre today. I'd say that even more than most years, it's important to remember what happened.

And the role Hugh Thompson, an active serviceman, played in both stopping and publicising it. Despite enormous military, political and public pressure to stay quiet.

From the Star Tribune: “The damage to Harper's body was so severe, we were not allowed to see her, hold her, or be with her body ever again," [her mother] said. "And then, months later, as the pews were removed from that church, more of her remains were found. We had to cremate our daughter a second time. Imagine receiving that phone call. And then tell me, what is this gun for? Hunting? There are other tools. Home defense? There are other tools. What is this one for?"

Absolutely gutting story on Annunciation parents pouring their souls into enlightening legislators, knowing they’d the GOP brick wall. But the piece contains one of the most horrifying paragraphs an American parent could read; it will stay with me: www.startribune.com/in-living-ro... (gift)

We genuinely need a revival of virtue in the United States.

In my view, that’s almost as critical a project as any other structural reform project necessary in the wake of trumpism. We should become a society that actually values human life such that we would feel shame about this.

stop calling us nazis just because we are invalidating IDs and rounding people up based on their skin color and putting them in concentration camps and sending them off to foreign gulags and using all that nazi imagery and banning books and dont forget about all the pedophilia. so just stop alright

gradient.horse Draw a horse, watch it run!

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for

gradient.horse

/3 It acknowledged — subtly sometimes, but irrefutably — that we’ve done wrong and bad things but are capable of doing better. It reminded me of the Clinton inaugural line
“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

GlasscowFramera 1h I think white men should tap into their true native MN uniform - wearing shorts in winter. ICE agents from warm states wouldn't be able to do it and blend in lol Reply Vote Crazy_Fun_3455 1h That is such a great idea. I'm sick of people thinking I'm ICE.

A group of local men are tackling the male loneliness epidemic by coming together to brainstorm ways to stop being mistaken for ICE.
www.reddit.com/r/Minneapoli...

Person running for DFL vice chair of precinct 10-1 pledges to do a "C minus" job and attend "some meetings" but if literally anyone else is willing to do a C plus job, she would step aside.

Screenshot of tweet from Huberman that reads: “The other is that dog breeds w/different shaped heads are predictive of their demeanor and intelligence. And while I don’t! believe in Phrenology I now do pay some attention to how the shapes of peoples heads relates to their intellect and steadiness, or lack thereof.”

In response to announcement that he will be a new CBS contributor, Andrew Huberman tweeted “I’ve always gone issue-by-issue on health & science, spoken to experts w/a range of takes & presented where I see the center of (data) mass pointed. I’ll do the same with @CBSNews”. In Sept he posted this:

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

“Minnesota is something else.” ❤️

Delightful

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/

How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

"i just use it to generate ideas"

US farmers are saying they "just need temporary help, until things get better."

Here's the thing. US farm exports- which are mostly soy- CANNOT get better.

Other countries expanded their soy industries to fill China's demand.

We've walled ourselves out of the global market, folks. This is it.

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

I know we don't feel like there's much to celebrate this July 4th. It's been a rough several years.

So I want to talk about how we're making history right now.