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One of the most impressive things about @alexclapp.bsky.social's "Waste Wars" is his journey to document the afterlife of our garbage.
Here are some of the locations he visits in our April book of the month. Get ready, it's genuinely shocking.
newsletter.readcurious.xyz/p/photo-essa...
Feel like winning yourself some personalized limited-edition Wm. Gibson while helping Locus continue to do its wholly admirable and increasingly essential thing for sf and fantasy? Step right up!
Six months ago Sora made me feel so sick to the pit of my stomach that I wrote about it in the NYT.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...
What was it for? Just to generate slop and confuse people about what’s real and what’s fake?
Now it’s been shut down. Good riddance!
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...
Amazing to chat with @craigmod.com about his book Things Become Other Things, his friends, his mentors, the Japanese language, being an old man whisperer, AI, purpose... oh, all the stuff!
newsletter.readcurious.xyz/p/craig-mod-...
Screenshot of text saying "When his attorney appealed to a federal court, two ICE agents said that in Buffalo, Culleton had signed documents agreeing to be deported. Culleton said he did not agree and that the signatures were not his. "My whole lfie is here. I worked so hard to build my business. My wife is here."
Most concerning part of the case of Seamus Culleton, an Irish man on a green card path and legally able to work, but imprisoned by ICE for 5 months? He says agents presented docs agreeing to deportation that were "signed" by him that he'd never actually signed.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
And I'm led to understand that many of the prominent folks on Substack are given extra $ or other incentives to stick around. Or they just feel trapped and scared to leave!
But @caseynewton.bsky.social moved his NL elsewhere and wrote about the results in detail: www.platformer.news/leaving-subs...
I find it strange that the Guardian doesn't mention previous reporting on this issue, notably by Jonathan Katz in the Atlantic in 2023... but just know that there are lots of alternatives out there.
I'm happy to help anybody who doesn't know where to start. www.wired.com/story/best-s...
When I tell ppl that moving to Substack is a terrible idea, this is why. It doesn't just host Nazi newsletters, it promotes and makes bank off them.
This isn't new information—folks have been reporting on it for years—but if it's new to you, act accordingly
www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...
The funny thing about a certain type of angry conspiracy guy is that they’re literally being confronted with an elite paedophile ring and a tyrannical government at the same time right now, and because it isn't being done by the people they wanted it to be done by they’re all being pussies about it
The violent occupation of Minneapolis started with a vlog. I've wanted to find a framework to describe Nick Shirley & others like him: "Influencer" is too quaint. "Journalist" is obviously wrong.
I landed on "slopagandist."
Gift link (open in a web browser) www.theverge.com/news/869824/...
From Senator Chris McDaniel: “Lately, some folks have taken to calling ICE “the Gestapo.” It sounds fierce. It feels righteous. But it isn’t true, and it isn’t harmless. The Gestapo was a secret police force. No warrants. No courts. No lawyers. And no appeals. People vanished in the night, not because they broke the law, but because the law no longer meant anything. The knock on the door was the sentence. ICE isn’t that. Not even close. ICE is a public agency enforcing laws passed by elected officials. Its agents file reports. They seek warrants. They lose cases. Judges stop them. Lawyers challenge them. Some detainees go home. That’s not tyranny. That’s bureaucracy, for better and worse. You can hate immigration policy. You can argue enforcement is too harsh, too sloppy, or too broad. You can work to have the law changed if you wish. That’s a republic doing what it’s supposed to do. But when you call ordinary law enforcement “the Gestapo,” you cheapen real evil. You turn history into a slogan and suffering into a metaphor. And once every badge is tyranny, no tyranny is left to recognize. In Mississippi, I was raised to believe words should earn their weight. This one hasn't yet. It throws around the language of dictatorship while living under a system where courts still rule, lawyers still argue, and the government still loses. That difference matters. Because the day enforcement becomes secret, unchecked, and answerable to no one, we won’t need to borrow names from history. We’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with. And we’ll wish we’d kept our words honest.”
“ICE isn’t the Gestapo. The Gestapo was…” (proceeds to describe qualities that apply to what ICE is currently doing)
Fraud is a serious crime that merits laying siege to an entire city and collectively punishing every immigrant from Somalia.
It's also a crime for which you can be pardoned and relieved of compensating your victims, so long as some of the money you stole finds its way to the president.
I wrote a bit for @ffdweb.org looking at some of the work being done by Rick Prelinger (@footage.bsky.social) and @archive.org.
The ambition? To save the past and give it away. "That’s the highest destiny that an archive can aspire to… when you give up control."
ffdweb.org/digest/issue...
If you’re going in the right entrance, Bear Gulch is a fun hike — you go through some caves (easily navigable by kids) and then emerge into the daylight by a reservoir. Can be stunning! Oh, and it gets COLD at night.
We’ve now reached the “then they came for the middle aged suburban dudes who have to go to work in the morning” part of the poem
What they don't (or won't) get is that the 80s were "better" for them because the costs were all pushed out on other people, or future generations. Wonder why something is shit today? There's a high likelihood it traces back to some political tosswaffle in the 1980s wanting to feel like a real man.
They basically all think they're peak Arnie, or Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or Bruce Willis in Die Hard. The fantasy of exercising power gets them hard, they don't believe in consequences.
This regime is stuffed with folks who are still living in the long 1980s. They're led of course by Trump, who could revel in his gold-plated life with abandon, but also by those who fantasize about cheap goods, rampant bigotry, falling taxes, regular moral panics and Latin American interventions.
I just wish those same rich, powerful people would make the same calls on behalf of Chicago or Portland or Memphis (or the economy, or SNAP, or healthcare, or the Supreme Court etc) that they made on behalf of Silicon Valley. We know these tactics can work.
If Trump has, in fact, backed down on sending a massive ICE deployment to the SF Bay Area, it would be yet more confirmation that he nearly always backs down in the face of (a) organized resistance and (b) personal contact from the rich and powerful.
www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/art...
I haven't gone deeply into cybernetics, but Beer is definitely a thinker who comes up a lot more now than he did when I started out. I've always appreciated what is essentially his inversion of "the ends justify the means." The *actual* ends are the things you have to justify!
FWIW proceeds from this are going to the International Rescue Committee and its efforts to relieve the effects of genocide on the people of Gaza. I've sharply disagreed with the Times many times over the years, including (but not limited to) what's happening there. This was my imperfect solution.
There's a little bit of background over here, featuring nods to @karenhao.bsky.social, @adambecker.bsky.social, @anildash.com and @theoatmeal.bsky.social : bobbie.net/2025/10/19/i...
What is Sora's deepfake slop for, exactly? A little bit from me in the NYT on this awful, ghoulish invention which ultimately seems to have one purpose: to demolish the wall between the real and the unreal.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...
You absolute, bootlicking, treasonous cretins. Whatever brief surge of power you get from being gleefully cruel is not enough to outweigh your complete betrayal of everything actual humans care about. Come find me!
I had one game where we were really battling for a draw and I (GK) kicked it straight to the opposing striker, who promptly whacked it directly past me and we lost. You get to be resilient with all the screw ups you can do as a goalie, and it wasn’t an Og, but it’s the one that sticks with me.
As a British person I would suggest it’s a common theme in emotionally repressive cultures
📣 Our book of the month for August is... STRATA: STORIES FROM DEEP TIME by @laurapoppick.bsky.social
We loved this detailed, deliberate overview of geoscience—and its mixture of lyrical prose and detailed profiles of researchers and the things they study.
newsletter.readcurious.xyz/p/announcing...