Watch as @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com (graciously) reads mean skeets

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announces it has found a buyer to keep the newspaper open Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said they have found a buyer who had agreed to keep the newspaper open, less than a month before it was due to shut down.

The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for.

apnews.com/article/pitt...

I know I'm a week late to this, but congrats to @ludwigstraub.bsky.social on the John Bates Clark Medal! Interesting to learn about (sincerely) aggregate demand

Oh you will never will believe where those Keebler cookies come from.

Viktor Orbán concedes!!!!!!! Orbán is out as Prime Minister! #hungary election. Historic.

If you think a technical tweak to university admissions generates a 5% swing in vote share in an actual election as opposed to a push poll I have several free transits of Hormuz to sell you.

Someone make a river city ransom mod where it’s cheers

Not directly related, but reminds me of a funny conversation with a 4 year old student today:

Her: Who are the Titans?

Me: Oh, from Greek mythology, the parents of the gods. They came before Zeus, and Hera, and Poseidon...

Her: Mm hmm. What about Robin, Starfire, Cyborg...?

Me: 😅

Will also be trivial to find examples of him giving a different gloss to this story, which undercuts claims to be a bold, progressive truthteller, unlike the dissembling, poll-tested establishment.

Middle East war live: Oil back at $100 after ships hit Several vessels struck in Gulf, including one in Iraqi port

Middle East war live: Oil back at $100 after ships hit - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

[Bungie comms]: wait, this is just the monologue from "Taken" with "my daughter" replaced with "my gamemode"?

[PVP mains]: 👍

Somewhere related, but Imogen Heap has been building/using a voice model called ai.Mogen trained on her work and controlled by her for different uses. She explains the ethical concerns and the idea behind it here: imogenheap.com/iam

Support Impacted Union Families! | Working Partnerships

"This is a verified page fundraising support for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Working Partnerships' 2026 rapid response effort to meet the needs of impacted union members, worker center members, and their families..."

workingpartnerships.betterworld.org/campaigns/su...

Instead of retreating into facile cynicism about the safety net and regulatory state, people on the left should be trying to occupy the bureaucracy at the state, local, and, after the MAGA putschists are finally expelled from power, federal level—not simply because we need good people in those jobs, but because enough good people in any given department can change its internal culture for the better. A lot depends, for example, on whether state and local transportation departments are staffed by car-brained traffic engineers or planners who are genuinely invested in walkability and developing viable mass transit networks. Just as much hinges on whether state health agencies are staffed by people with a genuine commitment to the cause of universal healthcare, even in the face of brutal federal Medicaid cuts. There’s another reason for occupying the bureaucracy, too. For a movement that wants to transform the state, there is tremendous value in understanding how policy implementation and institutional change happens on a granular level. If you spend some time working inside the bureaucracy and you keep your eyes open, you can learn a lot about the points of leverage that leftist politicians and outside advocacy groups can press to their advantage. On the flipside, you can also learn a great deal about the tradeoffs associated with certain approaches and how well-intentioned but undercooked policy initiatives can produce unintended consequences. These are all important lessons for anyone trying to push any level of government in a more humane direction. But they’re especially important lessons for leftist officials who have ambitious agendas, a finite amount of time in which to implement them, and little room for error.

The case against Graeberism and for Mamdanism dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

The Poison Always Drips Through On Renee Good and George Floyd

I wrote a post about George Floyd and Renee Good, murdered five and a half years apart and within a mile of one another. publiccomment.blog/p/the-poison...

Will Pittsburgh become America’s most important city without a newspaper? One of the country's oldest newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, says it's shutting down in May. Not going digital-only — just disappearing. But the delayed closure could also spur some long-delay...

A typically excellent @joshuabenton.com piece today, on the demise of Pittsburgh’s only daily newspaper. (I also learned that the Toledo Blade had a London bureau til 1983!)

Via @niemanlab.org

www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/will...

"Adventurism" is the weakest-tea critique and sounds like it was lifted from some late-90s foreign policy push poll.

Also, like everything else Krysten Ritter appears in, it immediately makes me want to go rewatch Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23.

what’s my biggest achilles heel? probably the left one, but only by a little bit

A tabby cat standing on hind legs to reach a Christmas tree with lights.

Sophie checks our ornament placement.

a blurry black and white photo of a dog running ALT: a blurry black and white photo of a dog running

Nick and Nora Charles are the best. It was fucking 1934 and Nick got shot by a guy and when the cops showed up he told them to go get a warrant and refused to talk about the guy who shot him. Also Asta has real Indy energy. Very unbiddable

I think they *believe* they want more housing (or to solve the problem, which some of them think will magically be fixed without more housing) it'll just be...somewhere else
..

Yeah, that's my preferred messaging and better politics overall.

Right, so instead of saying "we should be clear here the primary driver for *sheltered* homelessness was immigration" and let's build more housing, let's keep arguing about "homelessness", instead of just defining the term. Everyone just say "sheltered" next time, but then we couldn't argue online.

Then did immigration increase homelessness or not? Was it an increase in sheltered or unsheltered? I thought Matt hadn't read the paper and misstated the claims. Who cares about these word games, people can just define their terms better.

But why? When I talk to most people in my daily life about homelessness, I understand from context they mean "unsheltered"--they wouldn't use "homeless" to refer to people with shelter. Why is "sheltered and unsheltered together" the default assumption?

How does anyone reading this know if you're talking about sheltered or unsheltered homelessness? Why not just say "write sheltered homelessness next time"?

I think a lot about how Harlan Ellison said in an interview that Agatha Christie’s work would be forgotten five minutes after her death, and (by implication) his work would live on, and nearly the opposite has occurred. I’m not even sneering at Ellison. Just how we don’t understand posterity.

The bear is now one of the renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web