:sobbing: the taxation of trade routes is in dispute ::

I believe you are referring to the TV show “For All Mankind”

Underlined portion of a screenshot: optics were a concern; officials worried that getting rid of Bondi would be viewed as jettisoning only the nost "attractive" women, while keeping the men.)

seems kinda DEI

www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Kristen Bell also did a pretty good job of predicting Trump.

The Good Place’s Janet pretty much nailed AI in 2016

Read this right now if you (like me 10 mins ago) hadn’t read this before

agh!

I used to cringe whenever I noticed the typos that typically litter my sent emails. But there's been a subtle shift lately, as I think, well, at least they know it was an email from *me* and not AI.

Purely going by the work you’ve been doing since, you’re in a better place. If it’s working for you personally and financially, I say big round of huzzahs are in order!

I once felt this way about desktops

I just heard the first Mr Softee of spring!

I like NPR or even better BBC World Service when I’m in the kitchen. I realized, though, that the whole format of “news radio” vs podcasts is radio is designed to be ignored and dipped in and out of. Podcasts want your whole attention in my experiences.

Added to my monitoring list! What else should I be tracking?

For me it’s long car rides. Same frequency.

Wired’s New Editor Doesn’t Care if the Tech Bros Are Mad

I remember scratching my head a lot when @katie-drummond.bsky.social posted a bunch of politics jobs after she was named Wired EIC in 2023. Today, I can't think of a recent editorial bet that's paid off more.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/b...

Meta cutting deep? Reuters claims that Meta is looking at cutting 20% of headcount. This would be partly for cashflow to invest in AI infrastructure (it plans to spend over 50% of revenue on capex this year and has already been out raising capital), but probably also a reset versus previous hiring (and perhaps more pruning of the Reality Labs stuff). This has already been really messy, though: Meta ended 2019 with 45k employees, hired 27k across 2021 and 2022, did an 11k layoff in 2023 but still ended the year up by net 15k, cut another 20k in 2023, added 12k back by the end of 2025 bringing it to 79k, and if it now cuts 20% (~16k) that would bring it back to mid-2020 numbers. It would also mean that Meta had laid off more people since 2019 than the company actually employed then. Everyone over-hired in the pandemic, but this seems careless. LINK

Meta's hiring and layoff whiplash numbers are crazy: per Benedict Evans, Meta has laid off 49k people in the last six years which is more than the 45k employees it had in 2019

So this weekend’s AI vibecoding project was a Podcast Listener that will listen to podcasts and then write up reports I can read. (This was loosely inspired by the NYT rigging up an AI system to monitor right-wing podcasts.) Here is how it works.

I used to! When I lived in LA, driving was the perfect time to listen to podcasts. This was so long ago, that I literally had an iPod which I would cast to my car radio.

A confession: I don’t listen to podcasts. I’ve never been able to find the right time in my day to listen to an hour or so of people talking. I do realize that in the year 2026, this makes me odd.

An Apple Stock Home Screen widget showing: BZ=F Brent Crude O... 99.96 +1.05 DOW Dow Jones I... 46,558 -119.43 NVDA NVIDIA Corpor... 180.25 -2.91

I added a widget with the price of oil to my home screen because I realized that is the best way to do a “has anything completely insane happened?” check when I pick up my phone.

The paper printed on Tuesday. At some point if you were feeling desperate, say, on Monday, the one person you always knew you could get on the phone was Donald Trump.

Peter knew that too and was wise to make sure no one was counting on that crutch.

Few of the lightning-speed exclusive interviews reporters have scored with the president this way have generated significant news, but many tell me it's hard to resist calling. "I feel like Frodo with the ring," one Washington journalist who has spoken with Trump over the years said. "I know it's dangerous, but it keeps beckoning me."

This bit in Semafro tonight reminded me that one of Peter Kaplan’s wisest decisions at The New York Observer was to ban Donald Trump quotes.

A frequent job for a young writer there was to get as many famous(ish) names to engage on whatever that week’s m cover story social trend.

random search: the time Jeffrey Epstein told Peter Thiel, on an email thread setting up a lunch, that sifting through the Panama Papers leak was "keeping me busy"

jmail.world/thread/vol00...

Justice Dept., Under Pressure From Trump, Fails to Build Autopen Case Against Biden

It's pretty remarkable that this sentence doesn't come until the end of the 14th graf of the story:

"Investigators were never quite clear what crime, if any, had been committed by the Biden administration’s use of the autopen."

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/u...

Trump’s non-endorsement in the Texas GOP Senate Primary has led to one of the bloodiest intramural GOP fights of the midterm season and a kind of natural experiment: What happens to Republican politics when Trump exits the political stage?

Deadwood re-watch report: Swearengen-Farnum scenes feel very AI chatbot to me, including (and I am paraphrasing) ‘stop repeating what I just said’ frustrations

"I see as much misery outta them movin’ to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm."

Fwiw: this 18-year-old law review article is the single best explanation I’ve read so far for the current political crises.

“Separation of Parties, Not Powers” by
Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes
(Harvard Law Review, 2006) explains this. Argues that constitutional checks and balances were pretty quickly overrun by partisanship in the U.S. experiment. www.jstor.org/stable/4093509

I will never buy a cat toy that interests my cats more than the packaging and box it comes in, will I?