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“The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.”

From the Center for Third World Organizing, an Organizing 101 bootcamp, “a multi-day day intro to organizing training designed for organizers, activists and community leaders”.

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news or...

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news or...

Brian Steinberg and Pat Saperstein, reporting for Variety over the weekend: The White House Correspondents’ Association has canceled plans to have comedian Amber Ruffin perform at its annual dinner on April 26, a new sign of the pressures being brought to bear on news or...

My thanks to Lex Friedman for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote Lex.Games, a collection of eight daily word games. Quoting from Friedman’s own description in the sponsored RSS entry at the start of the week: I paid Gruber many thousands of dollars to run this ad...

Calfskin for $1,500, flip-foldables for $5,000, and whatever these are for a lot more. Who needs any sense (or a spelling checker) when you’ve got “elesant charisma / heroic essence”?

Or as I cited Andy Warhol back in 2012:

A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

See Also: This 2023 investigation by Andrew Williams for Wired, that more or less uncovers that today’s Vertu is just a brand snapped onto white-label phones made by ZTE: “Never before have I used a phone where I felt so unsafe, one that feels like it could be used to scam me — though, to be clear, I have no evidence that it is.”

Link: vertu.com/product-category/phones/

Interesting excerpt at the WSJ from Keach Hagey’s upcoming book The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. (Main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link.)

Link: wsj.com/tech/ai/the-real-story-behind-sam-altman-firing…

Douglas Murray is the author of On Democracies and Death Cults, The War on The West, and The Madness of Crowds. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep463-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit quest...

With season 2 of Severance complete (with a remarkable bang), Apple TV+ has slid right into a new prestige series, The Studio, starring (and co-created by) Seth Rogen as the newly-appointed chief of the fictional and dysfunctional Continental Studios in Hollywood. Two episo...

Matt Birchler:

I really thought that the screen recording notifications in macOS Sequoia would be the bane of my existence, but thankfully those have been changed quite a bit from the early betas last summer and they’re totally a non-issue in my book today. However, these god damned “turn on reactions” alerts have got to die in a fire, and they need to have done it yesterday.

I understand why Apple decided to show this once. Why though, is it seemingly designed to reappear every time I start a video call? Who is not annoyed by this?

Link: birchtree.me/blog/this-alert-must-die/

Multi-Player plays a grid of multiple copies of a single YouTube video, each with a slight additional delay. The site requires a bunch of bandwidth, but the effect is trippy when it works.

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This excerpt from Conan O’Brien’s acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is quite good.

Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, “Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.”

(thx, andy)

Tags: Conan O’Brien · Mark Twain · video

Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Ways to Spot a Fake Masterpiece. I’ve always loved this sort of thing, even before I owned a probably-fake Basquiat.

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TV Garden: stream television channels from all over the world for free.

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In a stage production that premiered last year in London, Steve Coogan played four roles (Dr. Strangelove, Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, and Major TJ Kong) in an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The play was adapted for the stage by Armando Iannucci an...

March 2025 Anti-Trans National Risk Assessment Map. “The risk level for transgender youth and adults has significantly deteriorated in the latest update. Most notably, the United States has now been designated “Do Not Travel” for foreign citizens.”

Apple has added the Lumon Terminal Pro computer to their devices lineup, right alongside the iMac and Macbook Air.

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There are so many reasons these days to covet a Swiss passport but let me give you one more: the design kicks ass. First issued in 2022, the document was designed by creative agency RETINAA. Drawing on cartographic tradition yet modern in its use of 3D modeled landscape...