Watched The Pitt finale and Hacks E2 tonight and I think Noah Wyle and Jean Smart are both going straight back to the Emmy stage. Also, I cried once per show. It's very hot in NYC right now and I am labile.
“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.
![“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:guthikarwozoldkzhueivkl6/bafkreihklvhtymho7wpemo5mj2f7xaiq6ulvfvcwnzo6hjstg3wixzgesy)
“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”
Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”
this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...
"Vance's attempt to enlighten the pontiff revealed not only his arrogance, but his lack of knowledge about the just-war tradition itself."
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
“Everybody’s using AI for everything nowadays, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square, and then resurrected virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...
even the most tenacious autocrats have a difficult time denying a landslide result against them
this is turning out to be one of the onion's all-time classics
"In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation." -- www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
This is so, so well-articulated.
$2 million per ship — to cross a Strait that was free six weeks ago.
@nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/w...
Regardless of whether it’s all talk, when the leader of our country expresses plainly genocidal intent, everyone has to do something.
For citizens of all political stripes, it means rejecting this madness. For Congress, it means taking action to rein him in. Now.
This is simply genocidal language and is a horror in itself.
A very good thread about journalists and AI, much of which also applies to writers of nonfiction books. We are being told, with increasing frequency and stridency, that we "just don't get" how AI can help us, by people who are manifestly not interested in helping us. Know your enemy. Hold the line.
I think the reason AI propagandists are so flustered by the fact that no real writer wants to use their idiotic tools is that they themselves don't enjoy writing. They see it as a boring arduous chore to be avoided, while real writers actually enjoy writing and actually care about the quality of it.
Obviously, we haven't yet heard from Cecilia Wang on behalf of the plaintiffs. But the #SCOTUS birthright citizenship argument is shaping up as a blowout against President Trump.
I count at least seven votes against the executive order just in the questions to Solicitor General Sauer. Maybe more.
I stand by my earlier prediction: 7–2, with Kavanaugh possibly concurring on narrower statutory grounds that would let Congress restrict birthright citizenship in the future.
Should be 9–0! slate.com/news-and-pol...
Adam means that she is the daughter of immigrants, but it is worth emphasizing that *every* U.S. citizen who has not been naturalized is a birthright citizen, either by the 14th Amendment or by statute.
How The Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World transformed the careers of two giants of American literature.
Via NYT Books (gift link).
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/b...
"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice."
But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs".
Am I losing my mind?
Agreed
meanwhile
A sanctioned Russian tanker loaded with liquid natural gas is drifting out of control in the Mediterranean with no crew on board and a gaping hole in one side, prompting warnings of a "serious risk of a major ecological disaster".
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.
Grammarly's AI-fueled edits -- using my name - suggested making up sources and writing vague insinuations.
In my latest for @nytopinion.nytimes.com (gift link) I describe Grammarly's terrible edits in my name -- and call for a federal right of publicity.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...
AI is increasing the intensity of work rather than reducing it, according to one of the biggest studies of AI’s effects on work habits to date.
This is already such a massive problem, from a completely anecdotal sense. Every day, something is shared in a group chat or Discord that I'm in, and the inevitable response of "Is that real?" comes through. Not sure how that is going to affect us psychologically long-term, but it can't be good.
The US has burned through over 1,000 Patriot interceptors ($4 million each) to stop an onslaught of Iranian drones ($20k to $50k each).
Using my last gift link from Bloomberg, which is doing some of the best reporting anywhere on the war.
🎁 🔗
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
A man asked me last night what publishing needs to do for literary fiction to begin appealing to men again. I said, as nicely as I could, that, with over 2,000 books published every Tuesday, of which many would appeal to men, it’s not a publishing problem, it’s a men problem.
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place”
“.. Over the past year, he has .. ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.”
@nytopinion.nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/o...
"SLOPPINESS": The Trump administration claimed that a man detained by ICE had a criminal convictions for marijuana possession in 2009.
The judge pointed out that the man was 4 years old at the time.
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Thank you!
