My hotel room has no desk. It has an ironing board and iron but no closets, so once you’ve ironed your clothes, there is nowhere to hang them up.
I haven’t ironed anything since I ironed my shirt on our wedding day in 1993, but don’t you need to hang things up immediately after you iron them, if you’re not going to wear them right away?
Here’s something I saw today — this restaurant next door to my hotel. Colombian. It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I tried it anyway.
President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America.
…
[Jack] Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, “Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” What happened to antifa after that, Jack?
— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, The war against giant frog costumes
The Romantic: How Diane Keaton’s quest for beauty left an imprint on American culture — A beautiful appreciation of a beautiful spirit and woman.
The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.
New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.
Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:
Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.
Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.
Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.
If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.
The Trump government is like those episodes of MASH where Henry Blake leaves the camp and Frank Burns is in charge.
… when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” … I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. … So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…
— John Mulaney, “There’s a horse in the hospital."
I was today years old when I heard John Mulaney’s “Horse in the Hospital” routine, and it’s brilliant. “If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey… "
I am a heavy user of dictation on the iPhone — I probably dictate as much or more than I type — but don’t use it on the Mac or iPad. If I have a full-size keyboard available, it’s easier for me to type.
The online conversation community seems to gravitate toward corporate-owned silos rather than commons, and seems to like its arbitrary 300-character limits. These two trends are frustrating to me.
When I turned 50, I decided to get a tattoo, but I did not follow through because it seemed like too much of a commitment.
When I get dressed in the morning, I don’t like putting on T-shirts with messages on them because I may not agree with the message in the afternoon.
I used “harrumph” in a work chat this morning. I’m at an age now where I can “harrumph,” and I plan to take full advantage of this privilege.
The Best Apples to Eat Right Now, According to an Apple Reviewer
I love apples. I literally eat an apple a day. My go-to apple is now Cosmic Crisp.
For a few years, I loved Honeycrisps, but I now find them barely edible. I think Honeycrisps are different now.
Reviewer Brian Frange ranks SweeTango as number one. I’ve never had one but I’ll watch for it.
I work on a core team of eight people, five of them women, including the manager. We use ❤️ to acknowledge messages on Teams. But lately, I have been uncomfortable with the ❤️ and I am using a 👍 instead. On the other hand, I don’t want to send a message to my colleagues that I don’t like them — I’m just not comfortable with the ❤️.
Unrelated: I’ve been told I overthink things.
For me, the answers are:
I don’t like Discord, so I decided to drop all the Discords I participate in. If those communities go to a proper community platform, I’ll gladly rejoin.
I do LinkedIn for professional reasons.
I don’t do Instagram and Threads now, but I might go back.
C Spire overcomes AI ‘stigma’ — C Spire accelerated trustworthy AI adoption via a CEO-backed Center of Excellence, a customer-first strategy, and early tooling wins that saved time and blocked threats. My latest on Fierce Network.
Congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the publication of his new book, “Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it,” and his blockbuster profile in The New York Times.
Times writer Joseph Bernstein met with Cory over “an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner:”
Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.
Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad – even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.
“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”
Cory’s theory of enshittification in a nutshell:
First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.
Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.
Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.
In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.
“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”
Minnie does zoomies.
This is Tina and Ray’s dog Walter. Tina had about a dozen people over to her house this morning, and Walter greeted every one of them at the front door with a rope-toy in his mouth. Walter excels at tug-of-war.
What’s Wrong With Las Vegas? Prices are rising, international tourism is falling, and visits are down 11% year-over-year.
Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.
By Ben Fritz at the Wall Street Journal:
Los Angeles is full of transplants who moved here to pursue dreams of working in movies and TV. Few earned millions as stars or A-list directors. They build the sets, operate the cameras, manage the schedules and make sure everything looks and sounds perfect. The work isn’t steady, because film shoots end and TV shows get canceled. But established professionals had rarely gone more than a few months between gigs—until now.
The entertainment industry is in a downward spiral that began when the dual strikes by actors and writers ended in 2023. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.
“This is the first year since 1989 that I haven’t had a show to work on,” said Pixie Wespiser, a 62-year-old production manager and producer who has worked on 36 TV series, including the original “Night Court” and its recent revival. “I look around and I see so many people who are seriously suffering.”
At the end of 2024, some 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two years earlier, there were 142,000.
The primary reason is that Hollywood is making less stuff.
…
Thomas Curley won an Oscar recording the sound on 2014’s “Whiplash” and had more job offers than he knew what to do with as recently as 2022. The 49-year-old hasn’t worked since April of last year, save for one week on a movie that was made in Europe but needed to shoot exteriors in San Francisco.
The hardest part isn’t watching his savings wither while he does home improvement projects and hunts for jobs, Curley said. It’s missing the creative camaraderie he has enjoyed for most of his adult life on movie and TV sets.
“Feeling like you’re part of a team that’s making something that can provide joy for millions of people around the world is what drew me here in the first place,” said the native of upstate New York. “That level of purpose is a really hard thing to let go of.”
Many Germans look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Bach and Goethe succumbed to rule by Hitler and his enabling thugs. Americans may someday look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Washington and Lincoln surrendered to Trump and his enabling thugs.
Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years. By Edward Packard, writer, whose work includes the prototype Choose Your Own Adventure book and many other books in that series, and native son of Huntington, NY, where I grew up.
Rebekah Riess and Bill Kirkos at CNN:
Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”
Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.
…
…. Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.
If ICE doesn’t want to be compared to the Gestapo, they could maybe try not acting like terrorists.
One of my neighbor kids is doing trumpet practice. This is a sentence one hopes never to utter.
We had a great meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club yesterday. It was wonderful to get together with people doing the work of preserving democracy against fascism.
Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy
I discovered Crocs a few weeks ago and I love them and want to wear them 24x7 and be buried in them when I die. They are very fashionable and I look great in them.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:
If you were expecting Triumph of the Will, you were disappointed because what you got instead was fat, disoriented Elvis stumbling through his set. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was dangerous.
I promise you that the flag officers in attendance were more alarmed than amused. And you should be, too.
1. “The Enemy from Within”
President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.
He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:
The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.
His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”
American journalists: “sleazebags.”
Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”
I fit three out of four of those categories. I also support LGBTQ rights and DEI, which Trump and his supporters have declared war on.
“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— General William Tecumseh Sherman
They have declared war on 1/3 to 1/2 of the American population: Three of our largest cities plus San Francisco, the residents of America’s inner cities in particular, LGBTQ people, women, nonwhite people, the American Left and all Trump’s political opponents.
He’s 100% hero, lives by the Scout oath (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent1), loves his fellow humans and is never even tempted by evil.
I’ve never liked Batman, because he seems to me to be on the edge of being a supervillain himself. On the other hand, a friend who is a deep comics fan once said I was doing Batman a disservice. Batman, he said, has all those qualities I love in Superman, but Batman is in a bad mood about it. Superman loves humanity because of our capacity for good, while Batman sees the capacity for good and is angry that so many of us choose evil.
Maybe not the thrifty part. The Fortress of Solitude seems like it would be expensive real estate. ↩︎
Looking at online reviews of this year’s “Superman” movie, I’m surprised that many people say they’d never seen a good Superman movie before, or that this was the first good Superman movie they’d seen. I guess the Christopher Reeve Superman is lost to the mists of prehistory.
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.
And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.
How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.
I hope that living in California will provide protection.
This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.
Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.
Lately when I think of going to the movies I think of driving across town, parking and paying money to sit in a dark room and watch things on a screen. I have screens at home.
Hamilton Nolan: “The ‘imperial boomerang’ is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are.”
“Workslop: Bad study but an excellent word”, by David Gerard at Pivot To AI:
The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR]
Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time:
Workslop is a result of top-down AI mandates, Gerard says. However, the report identifying the trend is an “unlabeled advertising feature” for enterprise AI, not a real study. The report blames workers, but bad management is the real culprit.
Cory Doctorow: " … a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and … this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it…. "
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.
Cory’s advice to Cornell University, during a visit to lecture there:
I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:
https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there’s a buyer’s market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there’s a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.
There’s plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”
It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.
That’s what a big business should do. But what about individuals? That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and getting nowhere.
People today aren’t more productive than they were in 1975, despite advances in computers and the Internet.
I spent a couple of hours this weekend processing and closing browser tabs.
I’m sure these two things are completely unrelated.
‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast. “If you found history boring at school, this podcast will have you intently listening to 20 hours on the French Revolution – and that’s before even getting to the Terror.” Can confirm. I love this podcast.
Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes. By Chris Arnade. American decline is much on my mind lately. I take it very personally – I am not built to do well in a failed nation. Arnade, like me, is cautiously optimistic, seeing our current rapid decline as reversible.
What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?. “One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage.” (Via @sjvn@mastodon.social. Thanks!)
White Lotus season one: I don’t know if it would be right to say we liked it. This is a show about essentially likable characters who chronically self-sabotage due to their acute cranial-rectal inversion. The show featured brilliant, subtle performances by Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett as Armond, the put-upon resort manager. Just kidding: They weren’t subtle — they were outrageous and ridiculous and delicious. We will watch season two.
We liked Superman. But it was too long and it made me miss Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.
Krypto stole the movie.
The supporting characters were better than the main action: Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern, Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific, Drunk Party Supergirl.
Wendell Pierce was terribly underutilized. I’m going to start walking around with a big cigar in my mouth.
If this is the start of a DC Cinematic Universe, I’m there for it.
I was planning to see this in the theater — our first theater movie in at least five years. But I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. It’s more comfortable to see it at home, where we can take breaks and enjoy our own snacks.
I have only a half-dozen phone numbers in my iPhone tagged as favorites. I actually looked at all of them for the first time in a long time this week. How long? One of the numbers was for voicemail for a job I left more than five years ago.
The next items on my to-do list are filling out expense reports and dropping stool samples at the vet. Gosh — hard to choose what to do next!
What Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B agreement means for telcos. OpenAI just inked a $100B “memorandum of understanding” with NVIDIA, which could lead to a tectonic industry shift for telcos. Or it could all be vaporware — a “memorandum of understanding” is not a signed contract. By me on Fierce Network, earlier this week.
My latest on Fierce Network: Telcos tackle AI’s impact at Fierce Network Research event. At the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, a bunch of telco execs got together to figure out what the heck to do about AI.
Here’s Minnie one evening this week, letting me know it’s time to quit fooling around and put out her food. Priorities, man!
The Advocate: “The man Meta has appointed to help address ‘ideological and political bias’ in artificial intelligence is a conservative influencer who believes that pesticide turns children LGBTQ+ and that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Matthew Perry’s death.” Crazy as a hatful of snakes.
The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy. By Matt Stoller. “Americans, broadly speaking, hate both parties, because [Americans] subscribe to an entirely different vision of what it means to be free. That version means freedom from coercion and a basic equality before the law.”
Brandon Vigliorolo at The Register:
Grok’s racist, conspiracy-riddled responses led public advocacy groups last month to send a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) demanding it declare Grok unfit for government use due to its “clear ideological judgement,” which it said is in violation of Trump’s own executive order that aimed to prevent “woke AI” from infiltrating federal agencies.
It might not be woke, signatories argued, but Grok is definitely aligned with a political point of view. As the letter pointed out, Grok has called holocaust statistics into question, allowed itself to be used to generate non-consensual deepfakes, advanced unfounded claims of white genocide in South Africa, and even declared itself “MechaHitler.”
“This goes beyond disappointing - it’s reckless, a safety issue - it’s very concerning,” J.B. Branch, a Public Citizen big tech accountabilty advocate, told The Register.
… the White House’s own science advisor, Michael Kratsios, said in a Senate hearing earlier this month that Grok’s antisemitic and conspiratorial outputs are exactly the kind of behavior Trump’s EO was meant to prevent.
When asked whether antisemitism, hate speech, and conspiracy theories complied with Trump’s EO, Kratsios described such statements as exactly the type of behavior the EO was designed to avoid
“Today’s announcement is yet another example of the president’s actual AI action plan: handing the keys to the federal government to his Big Tech patrons,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress, said.
Rick Moranis is returning for the Spaceballs sequel, his first screen outing since 1997. Tangentially related: I saw a fan theory recently that the 99-year-old Mel Brooks is aware he’s got a good chance of dying before Spaceballs 2 finishes, and he has worked his death into the movie as a gag.
Dave Pell: “Trump promised to bring manufacturing back to America. And he has. The Justice Department is actively manufacturing cases against the president’s enemies…. Case in point: The targeting of James Comey.”
I use Grammarly for all my online writing, to check grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation and to find typos. I got a notification that my Grammarly annual plan expires in a month, and I started thinking about whether to renew it, and whether to ask my manager if I can expense it.
Then I reviewed the free plan, which I think turns out to have everything I use and turns off the annoying bits.
I value Grammarly’s suggestions to tighten up language, but I’m told that the free plan offers that too. And if that doesn’t work, I bet ChatGPT will do the job.
Another thing I rely on Grammarly for: Commas. I have only a vague idea of how to use commas.
Language pet peeve: Writers who say “may be” when they mean “is.”
Lucinda Price, a writer and comedian, writes about the “reply guys” who slide into her DMs, making casual conversation but never following through:
Unlike more traditional cases of being “led on”, true reply guys aren’t hanging around hoping for casual sex. This fact frustrates many of the women I spoke to – they’d actually prefer transactional intimacy over taking care of a Tamagotchi with limited conversational skills
Trump’s imperial court includes a gay evangelical Christian and a Jewish Nazi. I never thought the end times would be so ridiculous.
Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About the Antichrist. This guy is the kingmaker who lined up J.D. Vance to be the next President and he’s crazy as a soup sandwich. Meanwhile, Trump is ranting about Tylenol and antifa. But I’m sure everything will work out fine.
The answer is contained in the concept of “centaurs” and “reverse centaurs,” found in automation theory:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war
A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).
Also: AI is a bubble. When it bursts it will leave behind a wealth of useful tools and skilled workers, but at terrible cost.
“Three Days of the Condor” is a 1975 thriller starring Robert Redford as a bookish CIA analyst who stumbles on a lethal conspiracy and has to run for his life while unraveling the mystery as he goes. I admired the movie and enjoyed watching it, but I was not engaged.
Redford is cool and handsome. I loved the clothes and cars. The CIA gadgetry is delightfully retro high-tech (transistorpunk). Faye Dunaway is beautiful and warm as Redford’s love interest; she effortlessly steals a scene at a New York deli. Max Von Sydow is delicious as a weirdly friendly assassin. The movie also features Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.
The plot is complicated and confusing. Redford does thriller-movie shtick, using Dunaway as a go-between to deliver a menacing message, getting into brawls and gunfights, racing across town and hacking a phone switching office. He is infinitely resourceful and confounds experienced field agents, explaining that he learned everything from books. In the end, of course, Redford figures everything out, but I don’t know how, and I’m not 100% sure what he figured out.
Although I enjoyed the movie, it didn’t pull me in, partly because it’s been overtaken by headlines. The movie premise is that a hypercompetent conspiracy of government agents drives U.S. affairs. In reality today, the government is run by clowns. I wish “Three Days of the Condor” were an accurate depiction; instead, we’re living in “Idiocracy.”
Redford’s character’s relationship with Dunaway’s character is disturbing. She is a stranger whom he kidnaps at random so he can use her as cover to get out of Manhattan and hide out in her apartment. He holds her at gunpoint and ties her up in her own bathroom for hours while he goes out and does spy things. Nonetheless, she decides he’s a nice guy and has sex with him. Sometimes I’m shocked by how rapey pop culture was in the 20th Century.
It’s a good example of a 1970s New York movie, like “The French Connection” and “Annie Hall,” showing off the grittiness of the city.
The movie takes place just before Christmas, but it’s not a Christmas movie. It’s like “Die Hard” that way. There’s no snow on the ground. There’s almost no discussion of Christmas. You hear some Christmas carols in ambient music and see some Christmas decorations in stores, and that’s it for the Christmas angle.
Sloppy Internet research:
Cheap shots from Letterboxd:
I need to explore the new OpenGraph support in Micro.blog. I saw a truncated post show up as a screenshot of the text when viewed from Mastodon, which I quite like. Presumably, the same thing happens for BlueSky? Thanks, @manton.
Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )
I just got a notification that my Tumblr blog turned 17 years old today. Tumblr has rarely been my primary social media platform, but it has always been easy to syndicate posts from whatever my favorite is to there, and I’ve come to be quite fond of Tumblr.
The Verge staff lists books that changed their lives. My friend Barbara Krasnoff adds class to the list by naming “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. Nobody names “Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter books, which I would have expected to see on such a list. However, Harry Potter is now, as they say, problematic. Same for Neil Gaiman, another writer whose work I might have expected to see on a most-influential-books list not long ago.
If I were contributing to a list like this, and being honest, I would name “Red Planet” by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the first chapter book I read, at age 8, and awakened in me a lifelong love of reading, science fiction and Heinlein. It’s no longer one of my favorite Heinleins; I think that would be “Citizen of the Galaxy.”
If I wanted to impress people, I’d pick Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “Life on the Mississippi,” or “Roughing It.” I do love Mark Twain; I am currently reading Ron Chernow’s biography of the writer. Twain’s work has been influential in my life, but honestly, not as influential as the science fiction I read as a boy.
Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike. I am 100% ebike-curious, but I don’t feel like I can justify the expense in addition to the car, and an ebike doesn’t seem like it would be a car replacement. Also, riding an ebike seems like it would be dangerous on our local roads.
In search of Robert Redford’s most iconic jacket. It’s the herringbone tweed he wore in “Three Days of the Condor,” which we watched last night.
I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog, again. Great thing about both platforms is you can just do that, easily and without inconveniencing anybody. I may switch back in a bit because why not?
How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. By Anil Dash. “The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.”
Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. “The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:”
A short history of business cards, from the 17th Century to today. “Today, the format is functionally dead, displaced by email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and QR codes (see also: the slow decline of paper menus, postcards, and real concert tickets). Without a practical reason to make one, the business card has become something of a fetish object. If one bothers to make one at all, it’s often letterpressed within an inch of its life and on paper thick enough to fix a wobbly table.”
What’s the Difference Between a Sport Coat, a Blazer and a Suit Coat? A sport coat is meant to be worn with pants that don’t have the same fabric or pattern. A blazer is a solid jacket with contrasting buttons, often metal. A suit coat has pants made from the same pattern and fabric as the coat.
Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism. By Hamilton Nolan
The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing. “Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority. ‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don’t need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says. Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”
AI psychosis and the warped mirror. Cory Doctorow: “While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won’t generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.”
Netscape Navigator was released 30 years ago.. By Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees.
UPDATED: My initial version of this post said 20 years, and I was sure that’s what the original said.
Read Whatever the Hell You Want charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/read-wh…
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You’re not going to believe the number of headphones I think you should have jasper.tandy.is/blogging/…
I admire the spirit of this article, though I stop at one headphones, the AirPods Pro 2. I am tempted by the AirPods Pro 3 but so far am not having trouble resisting.
Construction workers in Iowa rushed into a burning house to save a family, and used a backyard trampoline to save a boy trapped on the burning third floor. wsvn.com/news/us-w…
If Trump is concerned that 97% of the coverage about him is negative, maybe he should try doing something right more than 3% of the time.
Because if 3% of the news coverage of Trump is positive, they’re going easy on him.
Ocasio-Cortez Statement on Charlie Kirk Resolution and Trump Administration’s Assault on Free Speech ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/pre…
Petulant sexual predator and convicted felon Donald Trump “reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is ‘illegal’ and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech. ‘When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,'” the orange manbaby said. www.politico.com/news/2025…
It’s so embarrassing being an American now.
Republican Ted Cruz says FCC chair’s threats about Kimmel are ‘dangerous.’ “That’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’" www.seattletimes.com/nation-wo…
