John Herman at nymag.com: Social media is for consuming disasters, not surviving them. Social media was once a source for lifesaving news and information during national disasters, aggregating the work of journalists and first responders alongside user-generated content. Now it’s engagement-bait.
Herman singles out Watch Duty for praise, and I agree — we watched it slavishly to see if the fires were spreading south to San Diego. They did not, thank goodness.
Clarence Thomas Brings Lifetime of Personal Experience to Complex Supreme Court Case. Thomas loves porn, and loves to talk about how much he loves porn.
McSweeney’s: A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Office Jargon. This bears a resemblance to mine and Julie’s. We’ve been together 31-plus years.
Please enjoy your Progresso chicken-noodle-soup-flavored hard candy. Sounds awful and I was disappointed they were sold out when I hit the website.
I’ve discovered a hitherto uncategorized mystery subgenre: You’ve heard of whodunnits, noir, procedurals, cozy mysteries, locked-room mysteries, etc. My new subgenre is the Ridiculously Complicated Murder Plan. Columbo and Sherlock Holmes specialized in these.
Casey Newton at Platformer: Mark blames Sheryl.
On the one hand, Zuckerberg complains that phone calls and emails urging the removal of COVID-related content represent undue government pressure. But when Trump threatens to throw Zuckerberg in jail, Zuck says OK , boss,whatever you say, and dismantles DEI programs “before the next president was even inaugurated.”
Zuck told Joe Rogan that companies need more “masculine energy.” Apparently, what Zuck means by “masculine energy” is stuff like farting and burping, and not courage. Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt, Chuck Yeager and other exemplars of actual masculine energy are spinning in their graves.
Zuckerberg blames Sheryl Sandberg for Meta’s past DEI policies. “… for women in the workplace, few forms of masculine energy are more familiar than a top executive blaming a woman for the fallout of programs and policies that he agreed to and oversaw.”
Why I’m Running for San Diego City Council at 71 Despite Many Failed Attempts. I like this guy, while also suspecting he may be a loony.
I just watched a few minutes of the Paul Lynde Halloween Special from 1976. Oh, wow. Also, I observe (not for the first time) that Florence Henderson in a sheath dress was kinda smokin'.
You don’t have to be there. @ayjay on the value of cultivating a slow news habit.
" … we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship … The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power."
Similarly, censorship is often performed by a private sector middleman.
David Brooks: We Deserve Pete Hegseth. The U.S. is not a serious country, so we should have a talk-show host as Secretary of Defense. We’ll have a reality TV host as President in four days.
Hamilton Nolan: Looting Season in America: The oligarchy blooms.
Zeynep Tufekci: Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice. Zuck supports the incumbent President who threatened to throw him into prison. But yeah sure, he’s a tough guy because he does MMA.
Jamelle Bouie: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is
Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.
…
Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was many magnitudes smaller and less prosperous than our own.
I’m questioning all my media consumption after quitting Facebook last week.
All the timelines. Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, RSS, Tumblr, newsletters. All of it.
Keeping up with the news is a colossal waste of time and source of needless stress. You can stay on top of everything you need to know in five minutes a day, most days.
This morning, I didn’t listen to any podcasts while walking. Ninety minutes of thinking, interacting with the dog, listening to the world around me, feeling my breath go in and out, and my feet walking the earth. I did not die.
There is no safe word: A long, disturbing in depth investigation into serial rape allegations against Neil Gaiman, by Lila Shapiro at New York magazine.
Gaiman responds: “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”
When your heroes fail you
Isaac Asimov was one of my heroes when I was a boy and into my 20s. Years after he died, I learned about truly awful behavior he engaged in routinely.
For many years after that, I held Asimov in contempt.
But now my respect for him is restored. I once again admire him today, for the qualities I admired in him before I knew about the other things. I admire his talent, work ethic, intelligence and nerdy charm.
Harlan Ellison was one of my heroes as well. His reprehensible behavior was always apparent — even his friends say oh yeah Ellison could be a colossal asshole. But I continue to admire his talent, intelligence, work ethic, loyalty and courage to do the right thing, publicly and loudly.
I was a Mel Gibson fan until he went publicly Nazi. I haven’t been able to watch anything with him in it since.
I never was a Harry Potter fan but I admired J.K. Rowling personally, before she became a professional transphobe.
Orson Scott Card was one of my favorite writers in the 70s and 80s. I haven’t read his work since he became a professional homophobe. I don’t miss it either — there are still about a million great works of fiction that I will never have a chance to read. Even without Card, I have no shortage of books to love.
Everybody loved Bill Cosby, me included.
Sometimes I can compartmentalize feelings about a public person I admire when horrible and credible allegations surface against them. I can still admire their good qualities and hold those qualities up as a standard to aspire to myself, while eschewing their bad qualities.
Other times I can’t compartmentalize in that fashion, and I can no longer tolerate a person I admire who reveals themselves to be personally reprehensible.
Cottage cheese is having a moment.
I’m surprised to learn it was ever out of style. I love cottage cheese. I eat it nearly every day. Have for years.
