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Did not finish: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. I enjoyed the first part of the book but after setting it aside just couldn’t get back into it. 📚

The US is being run like a TV show, with predictable results.

Troy Merritt, a pilot for a major U.S. airline, returned from his 30th birthday trip in Croatia in October 2022 — sailing on a catamaran, eating great food, socializing with friends — and cried. This wasn’t back-to-work blues but collapsed-on-the-floor, full-body-shaking mis...

More details of when Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, from an upcoming book by Keach Hagey:

The board felt they couldn’t divulge that it had been Murati who had given them some of the most detailed evidence of Altman’s management failings. They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

There seems to be a timezone bug in Siri + ChatGPT. To get better answers while driving I experimented with telling Siri to “ask ChatGPT to…”, but anything that needs the time is 5 hours off. I assume Apple is including the current time in a prompt to OpenAI, in GMT. Hopefully an easy fix. 🤖

Simplify complex decisions by separating upsides from downsides, investing in upsides, vetoing with downsides, and using an appropriate decision framework.

My NCAA women’s bracket is still holding on with that Longhorns win! Great game Texas / Tennessee. 🏀

Randomly stumbled on my post from two years ago about Threads joining the fediverse. It holds up so well it could’ve been written yesterday. Still no sign of Meta completing the parts of ActivityPub like account migration that would ease up on lock-in.

Got an email today for a class action lawsuit about chicken that I thought must be a phishing scam or a joke, but it appears real. The lawyers are going to make bank on this one! I don’t remember overpaying for chicken 5 years ago… I do wonder how they got my email address.

xAI buying Twitter / X seems pretty sketchy. In practice, I guess it means the platform will live on for a while. I would not bet on xAI’s long-term success, though… OpenAI has billions of dollars of real revenue. xAI has effectively none, I think, outside of Twitter itself.

To be a blogger, you have to be okay with writing into the void. Some posts will resonate with people. Some posts will get comments. Most won’t.

Sometimes I’ll write a post and I’ll think to myself, “This is pretty good! This is the blog post that people are gonna talk about and link to. I’ve really captured something unique in this post.”

And then crickets. No one cares. 🦗

That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.

And then the post is out there on the internet, making the web a little better. And maybe one day someone will pick it up and see it, at just the right time, and it will matter to them.

This is very important. If you're on Bluesky, follow this account. "This is the official rapid response page of the Democratic Party, holding Trump and MAGA extremists accountable." I've been begging the Dems to do this since 2009, a permanent heartbeat for the Dems on social media. The team that ran the Harris campaign social media center during the campaign. They were snarky, fun, irreverent, and never apologized for representing the people, and they did it well. This is a moment. I no longer have to beg for this. It exists. So the first step has already been taken, thank goodness!!! Now it's up to us to spread the news that there is a place to find the heartbeat of the Dems. I'm going to study it, RT it, and keep the flame lit the best I can.

Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.

Clay Risen, New York Times reporter and the author of Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025), on his new book (First) | Andrew Marantz, staff writer at The New Yorker, on why young men are shifting to the Right (Starts at 31:05) | Avery Trufelman, host of the podcast Articles of Interest, delves into the last 100 years of preppies and their clothes (Starts at 59:10)

If you don't subscribe to the Brian Lehrer Show on iTunes, you can do that here.

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The former Fox News and current YouTube host on her professional evolution, conservative media and why she endorsed Trump. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and
Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here
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I’m drawn to blogging about divisive topics, but it would probably be healthier to avoid it. People can be so tribal now that everything is either good or bad. Our views have become extreme caricatures of the truth.

The pond at The Village, walking back to the mechanic to pick up my car after getting coffee.

What does Bob Woodward think of all this? Colby Itkowitz poses that question to the renowned Washington Post journalist in his first sit-down interview about President Donald Trump since Trump’s second inauguration. Over 50 years ago, Woodward’s reporting of the break-in at...

I’m cracking up at the images in this Severance + Lego post on Daring Fireball. Who is that red minifigure? 🤣

Wow, just watched the final minute of Lakers / Bulls from last night. Love basketball. 🏀

A doctoral student at Tufts University was detained in an arrest that was caught on video and shared widely and accused of supporting Hamas by the Department of Homeland Security. Lindsay Nash, associate and clinical professor of law at Cardozo Law and co-director of the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic, offers legal analysis of this and other arrests of pro-Palestinian immigrants.

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