The “Calvin’s dad explains two types” meme, inspired by a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Clockwise from top left: 1) Calvin’s dad walks into frame to find Calvin trying to operate a record player. The dad says: “There are only two industries left in America: gambling, and fraud.” 2) The dad shows where the record goes, and how to turn on the player, while Calvin watches. Dad says “Derivatives? Gambling. AI? Fraud. Video games? Gambling. Social media? Fraud.” Calvin says “yeah”. 3) With one hand open palm up, Calvin’s dad cheerfully explains to Calvin out of frame below him, “The stock market looks like gambling, but it’s actually fraud.” 4) In bed in a dark room, Calvin clutches at his pillow, eyes wide in existential terror. There is no text in the panel.

The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

Here’s our Guardian article (published April 2025) that set us on the path to this book.

Right?

Cloud Control | Brian J. Chen & Jai Vipra However genuine Anthropic’s commitment to safety restrictions may be, the company’s actions are a corporate end run around public governance.

As Brian J. Chen and Jai Vipra observe, trusting tech companies to protect us from our leaders only benefits the growing oligopoly.

“This continuous-improvement cycle transforms real-world disappointment into automated course updates, freeing faculty time for research (about AI), service (related to AI), and existential despair (you can guess the topic).”

Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump's announcement A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for those users.

A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new customers.

I would actually posit that @chantalalive.blacksky.app could probably promote her accomplishments somewhat more than she does, and it would be legit and fine, just bc her accomplishments are legit, regardless of how much she does anything else.
Just a theory

The Next Coup Attempt And How to Stop It

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in US history. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator.
snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-c...

being able to sit patiently with other people's thoughts, sit patiently with your own, and make both of those processes legible to someone who is not you is very valuable. if you can find a new way to do this that is fantastic news but I suspect it will at least resemble the model we've inherited

more seriously: both an adult life spent teaching and an adult life spent on message boards and sites like this one have underscored to me that reading and communicating about reading is very much not a trivial skill. the recent tech developments further underscore this for me

The Boston Globe ends its use of the AI tool Nota after Poynter reports that it plagiarizes Angela Fu of Poynter Online published a story on Thursday that’s been rocketing around media circles. Her lead: “Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizatio…

New at Media Nation: The @bostonglobe.com ends its use of the AI tool Nota after @poynterinstitute.bsky.social reports that it plagiarizes, although the Globe says it wasn't using *that* part of Nota. #journalism dankennedy.net/2026/04/03/t...

Hard agree on all of this!
"For another, calling [duties like first-pass editing and fact-checking] 'grunt work' belies a fundamental misunderstanding—and frankly, disrespect—for the many steps of the writing process."
That misunderstanding and disrespect is dismantling the world of letters.

The Great AI Deskilling has begun AI is boosting output while quietly chipping away at the skills behind it.

This article marshals evidence and expert opinion to show something that educators already know: AI makes people think they can do things that they can't in fact do. AI is billionaires trying to profit off a society-wide Dunning Kruger effect.

Purity Politics Is A One-Way Ratchet t

I wrote about how the Hasan Piker drama serves as a proxy fight between centrists and the left, and how it exposes the real priorities of Democrats like Cory Booker.

Reading this conversation made me feel less alone

ICE deployments created chaos for cities and cost them millions, NPR analysis finds Local leaders report already-strapped police departments racked up overtime bills in the millions while others report a multi-million dollar hit to business during the worst ICE surges.

New reporting from @npr.org quantifies the fiscal toll of mass ICE enforcement on American cities—and the numbers are striking: www.npr.org/2026/03/24/n...

Rapid analysis from @wwattribution.bsky.social, published yesterday, shows this heat would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change: www.worldweatherattribution.org/record-shatt...

@pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, a book written by an extremely productive human trained among humans by humans, explains just this dynamic!

March 18, 2026 Today, civil rights leader Dolores Huerta issued the following statement:

Statement from Dolores Huerta
"The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual... We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever."
medium.com/@dolores_hue...

Oof

But this is his face on Schwarzenegger’s body going up against a guy in a hot dog suit, right? Because the measles are too much for him? I don’t even understand what effect he’s going for.

Baystate Health has endured hundreds of layoffs. Its CEO just wrote a book on how to fire people. - The Boston Globe Baystate, the largest health care system in Western Massachusetts, has cut nearly 400 jobs in the past two years.

Peter Banko, who's laid off hundreds of employees as CEO of Bay State Health, has written a book on how to fire people. And, oh yeah, last year he was accused of plagiarism. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/09/b...

… In that sense, they point toward a new finance franchise whose conditions of possibility are distributed and democratic: authority gathered and renewed through rehearsal rather than granted only from above.” 2/2

Brilliant reading of the money-ness of the Mamdani campaign’s Zcavenger hunt and Zetro card: “The question is not whether these practices are really fiscal governance in disguise…They make participation legible, and they can later help make other kinds of fiscal action feel actionable… 1/

Instagram Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

Just re-upping the shoutout in this Daily Memo to the people of Chicago, L.A. and Minneapolis

www.instagram.com/reel/DVh1I2y...

wrong

Michael Penn - No Myth (Official Video) YouTube video by MichaelPennVEVO

I know the world is ending but also: remember Michael Penn’s No Myth? Please say yes (what if I was Heathcliff?!?!)

youtu.be/IxkJHX7ukKE?...

Victor Frankenstein, ABD - Public Books What happens to a young scientist whose primary mentor is an artificial intelligence?

“Between Dr. Frankenstein’s antipathy toward academia and Harlander’s obsession with transferring his consciousness from his body in pursuit of immortality, it is difficult to imagine that del Toro did not have certain tech billionaires in mind.”

AOC: This is about actual crimes happening in front of us. This is about shredding the Constitution and plunging us into war. This is about taking crypto money and money laundering… So if you’re asking me if I’d support impeachment, I do

The Uni Currency Project: Resource Page Since 2020, the Money on the Left Editorial Collective has been arguing for a new approach to university finance that we call the ‘uni’ proposal. Below are links to our essays and interviews relate…

The Uni Currency Project