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How Congress Can Delete DOGE. “DOGE’s parent agency, the US Digital Service (USDS), was never statutorily authorized. In the grand scheme of the appropriations process, DOGE’s budget can be deleted if Congress decides to act.”

Buttondown makes it super-easy to migrate your newsletter from Substack. Plus: “Need help migrating to Buttondown? Just contact our support team and we’ll take care of it for you!” No more excuses.

I love the international cover for Omar El Akkad’s new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Bookshop, Amazon). It uses the original text of El Akkad’s tweet about the war in Gaza:

One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.

The US cover, like many American things, is somewhat less subtle & elegant.

Tags: book covers · books · design · Omar El Akkad

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Josh Marshall on corruption and legitimacy regarding the US govt’s judicial & executive branches. “We shouldn’t be thinking we’re going to wait on what any court decides. That’s only a half step from waiting to hear what Donald Trump decides.”

From poet Joseph Fasano: For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper. “I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?”

“Every time Social Security makes its way into the news is an opportunity to push for a better & more inclusive form of Social Security: one that rewards caregivers, expands benefits, and provides something like an American dream worthy of the name.”

Paris Marx writes that the US is “a rogue state that cannot be trusted” and that our former allies “must form new alliances and end their dependence on US tech in response to Trump’s trade war”.

Mark Gurman, yesterday at noon ET: It’s not an “Air” — but the new Mac Studio, codenamed J575, appears to be imminent. It could be announced as early as this week along with the new MacBook Airs. There are signs these will come with an M4 Max but that its new Ultra chip ...

The TV show Severance debuted on Apple TV+ in February 2022. It was created by writer Dan Erickson, and developed into a series by director and executive producer Ben Stiller. He directed the pilot and most of the episodes. After the first season came out, Severance was nominated for 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series, and it won two Emmys: for Main Title Design and for Musical Composition. I love this show, and the main title sequence is incredible. I was so excited to get to talk to the composer, Theodore Shapiro, about how he made the main title theme music. In this episode, you’ll hear how that theme first came into existence in a totally different form, and then, how Teddy re-imagined it to become the final version. 

For more, visit songexploder.net/severance.

Building on his walk-and-talk video from a couple of days ago, Jamelle Bouie writes about two of the easiest things to understand about Donald Trump. 1. The way in which “his every executive function exists to satisfy his ego”: One immediate response to all of this is to s...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a YouTube video of Doechii singing and rapping about anxiety over Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know from 2019 that was going viral on Insta and TikTok. Well yesterday, Doechii officially released Anxiety as a single, so you can find it on YouTube (though I prefer the original video), Spotify, Apple Music, and anywhere else you stream or buy music.

P.S. Here’s Doechii doing a CATFISH / DENIAL IS A RIVER medley at the Grammys last month:

And of course, you can check out her Tiny Desk Concert too.

Tags: Doechii · Gotye · music · remix · video

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Remember Digg? It’s back, in Pog fo— er, AI form. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers, and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community?’”

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Ron Filipkowski: Trump’s Sec of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says the solution to high egg prices for Americans is to get some chickens and raise them in your backyard. No exaggeration. She’s selling the idea of everyone raising chickens in their back yards as “awesome”,...

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac: Leitmotif, the team behind the awesome diff and merge Mac app Kaleidoscope, is expanding its portfolio of native Mac apps for developers. The company has acquired Taska, a native Mac app that serves as a frontend for web services like GitHub...

Funny piece — if your surname isn’t “Null” — by Oyin Adedoyin for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The...

Ben Stiller, in a delightful piece for The New York Times on working up the gumption to tell Gene Hackman — with whom he was working in Wes Anderson’s excellent The Royal Tenenbaums, his favorite Hackman movie: “ … but I have to say for me, there is one movie you made th...

This is a great post from Mike Masnick about why Techdirt is writing more or less full-time about the Trump regime’s attack on democracy: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not). I agree with every word of it. One of the points he makes is that medi...

“De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences has gene-edited mice to have mammoth-like features, creating what the company calls the Colossal Woolly Mouse.” (They eventually want to do the same w/ Asian elephants.)

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Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The most consequential part of the Air’s update — perhaps the only real update — is the M3 processor, which brings with it GPU-based capabilities like hardware-accelerated ray tracing and video encoding and decoding for ProRes and ProRes...