FeedCity

In his book The Intimate Animal, sex and relationships researcher Justin Garcia says people have miscalculated their need for human intimacy, which is the real issue at root of the loneliness epidemic.

I love this train station photo in the snow.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has gone on a mission to reinvent the Kennedy Center, the beloved performing arts venue in Washington, D.C. Trump promised to overhaul the center’s programming. He installed loyalists on the board who made him chairman. In December,...

Forbes has a profile of Sam Altman with some interesting quotes from him and others:

Altman knows his history. His itch to release products quickly is informed by studying Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research lab known for inventing the modern graphical user interface, laser printers and computer mouse, yet failing to commercialize any of them. “You have to have an economic engine in the cycle,” Altman says. “I think there’s probably a lot of great innovation that has never gotten out of the lab because someone didn’t do the work to just get it into people’s hands.”

We go inside the real succession story within the Murdoch family media empire. It includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. In 2023 Rupert Murdoch chose his eldest son and most conservative child, Lachlan, as his successor – buying out three of his ot...

I went undercover on Moltbook and loved role-playing as a conscious bot. But rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies.

Two agents involved in the shooting deaths of US citizens in Minneapolis are reportedly part of highly militarized DHS units whose extreme tactics are generally reserved for war zones.

Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day

Linking to a post about Apple from Matt Gemmell, Michael Tsai blogs:

At times, the company seems like a cargo cult, repeating mantras from a previous era without actually following them and applying the same strategies as before even though they no longer make sense.

Roku is knocking down the price of all of its streaming devices ahead of the end of the football season.

James Harden, who demanded a trade from the Houston Rockets in 2021, the Brooklyn Nets in 2022, and the Philadelphia 76ers in 2023, has demanded a trade from the Los Angeles Clippers. The language is more couched than that—per Shams Charania's latest runic dispatch, "Both si...

Like its more tangible products, Fanatics' apologies are shoddy and practically worthless, yet Michael Rubin's sports apparel company keeps issuing them anyway. In this latest instance, Fanatics is sorry for its shitty Super Bowl merch that is definitely not worth the listed...

Going through items in my mom’s house, took a picture of this old painting of mine. 8th grade, maybe. Reminds me of the previous icon for our app Sunlit.

The multiple annoyances of having The Big'Un in your town do not really become evident until Thursday, and sometimes even as late as Friday. That's when the rubes show up in their cheap Fanatics knockoff jerseys, clogging the airports and highways, swallowing all the restaur...

Right-wing influencers who were instrumental in spreading allegations of fraud in Minnesota ahead of ICE's surge are now going after a number of California’s social welfare programs.

Hysteria continues to build over Moltbook, the so-called AI Agent social network. If you believe Elon Musk, Moltbook is at

The post Moltbook: Hype or the Singularity? appeared first on The New Stack.

Om Malik has been on a roll with great blog posts lately, refocusing on creation:

You might have noticed an increase in the number of words I am publishing these days. I don’t know why. Or how. Somehow a lot of things have clicked in my head. I quietly switched from consumption to creation mode.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about fake booze, depressing old sex movies, driver’s ed in a Tesla, and more.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Today’s Funbag will be mildly truncated as I and the rest of the Defector staff prepare for Dan McQuade’s memorial later this week. I’ll be back at normal length next week, although I’ll still be quite testy that Dan is no longer with us. Stupid cancer; you’re almost worse than Trump.

Your letters:

Let’s begin with a definition, by example, of dysfunctional governing: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the United States Health and Human Services Secretary. In 2000, the World Health Organization determined that according to its criteria, the United States had eliminated measles. But 2025 saw sustained outbreaks, notably […]

The post How to Cause a Dysfunctional Government appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In the world of the Zettelkasten Method and in the broader world of PKM, size matters. The big, beautiful graph view images, and the number of notes in one’s repository are part of the genre of productivity porn that consistently catches attention. Another genre of producti...