“We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart,” says Hamilton Nolan. “How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.”

Amid shortages of air traffic controllers & fatal aircraft events, the Trump administration has purged several hundred FAA employees. Casual detail: the firing email came from a Microsoft email address, not a .gov one. (But her emails, etc.)

Elon Musk’s attack on key US government systems and agencies continues with the IRS: “US tax agency has received request for access to classified system containing personal financial records of US taxpayers”. Everyone’s tax records, nbd.

From Heather Cox Richardson, an overview of what the Trump administration is doing in terms of foreign policy. Their war on liberalism in the US is being matched by a war against liberal democracies.

The Evolution of Electronic Music (1929-2019). Interesting that it took so long for electronic music to creep into pop music and now you can barely find any music that doesn’t have electronic music in it.

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Cool thing that I did not notice about The Wild Robot: at first the robot was computer-generated but gets more and more hand-painted throughout the film. “She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.”

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New Evidence Suggests Humans Developed Written Language To Avoid Breaking Up In Person. “Early Mesopotamians created the first cuneiform tablets in 3200 BCE because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking their partner in the eye…”

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Hey look at this, a media diet post that’s not months and months since the last one! Phew, it’s a been a long-ass six weeks since the beginning of the year, hasn’t it? Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing to help get me through t...

Nathan Zed argues that a lack of effort and vulnerability has made art, media, design, music, and architecture boring — that everything has the “soulless, monotonous no-personality vibe”. But artists like Tyler, the Creator; Chappell Roan; Doechii; and Kendrick Lamar are making trying cool again.

It has become uncool to just try. Like, just to put in some effort. Don’t do too much, okay, it’s embarrassing — just be nonchalant, be cool, be effortless. This has made everything boring! Everyone is too scared to try because that would be vulnerable. I feel like only now are we seeing a shift back to people putting in effort and being rewarded for it.

Tags: music · Nathan Zed · video

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Ken Burns’ Criterion Closet Picks include Seven Samurai, a Fellini box set, and Wim Wenders’ Pina.

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Thought-provoking musings on AI from Robin Sloan. “The language model reads Everything, and leaves Everything untouched — yet suddenly this new thing exists, with strange and formidable powers. Is that okay?”

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This is lovely:

man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.

Tags: books · parenting

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Girls Who Code’s “Five by Five” strategic plan is “reaching 5 million girls, women, and nonbinary individuals by 2030” with their programs designed to educate girls, women, and NB folks for careers in technology.

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I love this week-by-week map of Gina Trapani’s life. “This is a map of my life, where each week I’ve been alive is a little box. Tap a box to see what I was doing where that week.”

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Allegra Goodman writes about the “life-saving power” of listing to audiobooks (Austen, Caro, Dumas, Voltaire) with her son. “We spent hundreds of hours together and had a respite from each other too.” I *love* listening to audiobooks w/ my kids.

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Wes Anderson’s next movie is called The Phoenician Scheme, an “espionage comedy-drama thriller” that will be released in US theaters in May 2025. Stars Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, ScarJo, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willen Dafoe, etc.

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Kevin Kelly is the biggest traveller I know and he recently shared some of the advice he’s learned over his 50+ years on the road. Here are a few of my favorites: If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ord...

Deadline: “Starz has acquired the rights to Miranda July’s buzzy novel All Fours to develop as a TV series.” I wonder if July herself will be starring…

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From Nolan RoYAlty (cReAtor of oNE Million chEckBOXES), A globAL CAPS LOCK. “whenever AnYONE running the CLIENt Presses caPs LOck, it PRESSEs for everyone ELsE.” (i wrote tHIS POST WItH IT.)

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Jerry Lawson was one of Silicon Valley’s first Black engineers and is known as “the father of the game cartridge”.

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Hey, everyone. This week has been a little wonky/distracted for me — I was tending to a sick kid for a couple of days and am trying not to get sick myself, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked here at KDO reporting on the coup and what we can do about ...

How to stop Trump’s power grab. “Trump isn’t inevitable. Here’s a plan to keep democracy intact.”

Professor Christina Pagel of University College London has mapped the actions of the Trump administration’s first few weeks into a Venn diagram (above) with “five broad domains that correspond to features of proto-authoritarian states”: Undermining Democratic Institution...

Really interesting essay about organizing: How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? “If we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us.”

Jessica Valenti on why there’s no room for compromise or middle ground on abortion rights. Anyone still holding out hope for a ‘compromise’ on abortion rights needs to give it up. Right now. Over the past few days, a Louisiana mother was arrested for getting abortion pill...

House GOP has reintroduced the SAVE Act, which would require voters to show a passport or birth cert. when voting as proof of citizenship. But 140M Americans don’t have a passport and 69M women don’t have a birth cert. matching their current last name.

Elie Mystal on Elon Musk’s vision of neo-apartheid. “First and most important, apartheid is a business plan. It’s a system designed to exploit cheap Black labor, without ever letting Black people reap the financial and social gains of hard work.”

Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream is a forthcoming book that’s “an exposé of private equity’s devastating impact on American lives, communities, and the economy”.

Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back. Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst a...

On a scale of +10 (full democracy) to -10 (full autocracy), the US now scores a 0, its lowest score since the Civil War. “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”