‘A fresh-voiced singer and Mick Jagger’s muse in the 1960s, she went on to experience more than her share of hard times before emerging triumphant….’ (via New York Times)
‘…[S]tep by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away. The Times eliminated the blog at the end of 2017. Here’s my last substantive blog post, which gives a good idea of the kind of thing I was no longer able to do once it was eliminated.
For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack account, as a place to put technical material I couldn’t publish in the Times. Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really, really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week), where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.
In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.
Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.
One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject….’ (– via Contrarian)
‘Google Maps, the most popular mapping software in the world, said on Monday evening that it will begin using new names for two prominent geographical features in North America, the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali. As soon as “they have been updated in official government sources,” Google said on the social media site X, it would change the names of these features to the Gulf of America and Mount McKinley.
The announcement comes a little less than a week after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to, in his words, “promote the extraordinary heritage of our Nation and ensure future generations of American citizens celebrate the legacy of our American heroes.” This included renaming the Gulf and the highest mountain in North America….’ (via Ars Technica)
‘For the past 48 hours, thousands of TikTok users have been posting and sharing videos ostensibly about “cute winter boots.”
“I see a lot of people on this app right now making plans to buy cute winter boots,” one TikToker posted on Thursday, “…but there’s a lot of things that you guys are missing.”
“Here’s some safety tips for going out in your cute winter boots,” another user posted, “you’re going to memorize your first amendment rights, because those are the rights you’re exercising when you’re out in your cute winter boots.”
The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It’s a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users talking about “cute winter boots” keeping people safe from “ice,” are referencing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Cute winter boots” is just the latest example of algospeak, coded phrases and words aimed at subverting algorithmic filters.
As the U.S. government seeks to enact stricter controls over speech online, TikTok users are adopting more coded language specifically aimed at criticizing the government and alerting others to government surveillance of online spaces. For instance, the phrase “Senator, I’m Singaporean,” a quote uttered by TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew in response to Sen. Tom Cotton’s racist line of questioning implying that Chew was a Chinese government agent, is now frequently posted in the comments of videos by users seeking to warn others about the content they’re posting. The phrase “Senator, I’m Singaporean,” has come to mean that a video is not something that the government wants, or that they’re going to show this type of video to congress, a creator explained.
The videos discussing “cute winter boots” leverage the TikTok algorithm’s preference for product-focused content to amplify their reach. “What the algorithm likes is products,” said Diana, the admin of @/citiesbydiana, a TikTok account about urban planning. “It’s a way to talk about resisting the federal government in a way that will actually reach people.”
Many “cute winter boots” videos also include links to TikTok shop, but instead of selling boots they’re selling things like Night by Elie Wiesel, a book about the Holocaust, or items that may be useful to have in a protest, like protective gear. Some are promoting the date January 29th as a day of protest….’ (via TikTok)
‘TOKYO (AP) — A solitary sunfish at an aquarium in southwestern Japan lost its appetite, began banging into the side of the fish tank and appeared unwell days after the facility closed last month for renovations. As a last-ditch measure to save the popular fish, its keepers hung their uniforms and set up human cutouts outside the tank.
‘Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered….’ (Timothy W. Ryback via The Atlantic)
Please note: For awhile now, my typographic convention has been to spell the Orange Menace’s name in all lower case, reflecting the extent to which I feel he does not warrant the respect indicated when we capitalize proper names. Henceforth, I am shifting to referring to him as “Tr*mp”, because he is quite simply an obscenity. (Thanks to Tananarive Due)
‘In light of Tr*mp II’s predictably cruel and bonkers beginning, many people are asking: “What can I do now?” Here are 10 recommendations.
1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented This is an urgent moral call to action. As Donald Tr*mp’s Ice begins roundups and deportations, many good people are endangered and understandably frightened.
One of Tr*mp’s new executive orders allows Ice to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, healthcare sites, shelters and relief centers – thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need.
If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep Ice away from schools, hospitals and shelters.
Organize and mobilize your community to support it as a sanctuary city, and to support your state as a sanctuary state. Tr*mp’s justice department is already launching investigations of cities and states that go against federal immigration orders, laying the groundwork for legal challenges to local laws and forcing compliance with the executive branch. Your voice and organizing could be helpful in fighting back.
I recommend you order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resource Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.
2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community Tr*mp may make life far more difficult for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and of other expansive identities through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws or changes in how such laws are enforced.
His election and his rhetoric might also unleash hatefulness by bigoted people in your community.
I urge you to work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.
3. Help protect officials in your community or state whom Tr*mp and his administration are targeting for vengeance Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they do not have the means to legally defend themselves, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone who seeks to harm them, immediately alert law-enforcement officials.
4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Tr*mp regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.
5. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Tr*mp Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund and Common Cause.
6. Spread the truth
Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Tr*mp propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources.
7. Urge friends, relatives and acquaintances to avoid Tr*mp propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram They are increasingly filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.
8. Push for progressive measures in your community and state Local and state governments have significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders.
9. Encourage worker action Most labor unions are on the right side – seeking to build worker power and resist repression. You can support them by joining picket lines and boycotts, and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.
10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America Remember, Tr*mp won the popular vote by only one and a half points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Tr*mp won.
America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it – or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. The forces of Tr*mpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. But we cannot allow them to.
We will never give up….’ (Robert Reich via The Guardian)
‘We’ve talked about viruses as being an outlier that strains the definition of life. Viruses do not have the ability to reproduce on their own, but must harness a host cell of another species to replicate. But now there’s a new type of life form that is even more primitive than viruses called obelisks. Obelisks consist of a viroid-like disc of RNA, but they do not have the protein shell that viruses have. Their genetic information is completely distinct from any known species, putting them into a unique phylogenic group. They reproduce by infecting another cell, like viruses do. They haven’t yet been classified into the Tree of Life because scientists aren’t really sure where they belong. But obelisks have been found in the microbiome of humans, in the digestive tract. One type of obelisks studied infects the bacteria Streptococcus sanguinis, found in human mouths. The impact of obelisks in the human biome has not been determined, but they’ve been there all this time and just haven’t been found until recently….’ (via Neatorama)
Master instrumentalist and last surviving member of The Band
’A rustic figure with an expansive forehead and sprawling beard, Hudson was a classically trained performer and self-educated Greek chorus who spoke through piano, synthesizers, horns and his favored Lowrey organ. No matter the song, Hudson summoned just the right feeling or shading, whether the tipsy clavinet and wah-wah pedal on “Up on Cripple Creek,” the galloping piano on “Rag Mama Rag” or the melancholy saxophone on “It Makes No Difference.”…’ (via Boston Globe obituary)
‘Many in Europe avoid describing Russia’s sabotage campaign outside Ukraine as war because they’d rather not have to do anything in response….’ ( Phillips Payson O’Brien via The Atlantic)
‘The US military debates possible deployment on US soil under trump. trump has said he wants to use active duty U.S. troops to quell protests and round up immigrants. Will the military comply? (via POLITICO)
‘2024 was the year in which benchmark after benchmark for AI capabilities became as saturated as thePacific Ocean. We used to test AIs against a physics, biology, and chemistry benchmark called GPQA that was so difficult that even PhD students in the corresponding fields would generally score less than 70 percent. But the AIs now perform better than humans with relevant PhDs, so it’s not a good way to measure further progress.
On the Math Olympiad qualifier, too, the models now perform among top humans. A benchmark called the MMLU was meant to measure language understanding with questions across many different domains. The best models have saturated that one, too. A benchmark called ARC-AGI was meant to be really, really difficult and measure general humanlike intelligence — but o3 (when tuned for the task) achieves a bombshell 88 percent on it.
We can always create more benchmarks. (We are doing so — ARC-AGI-2 will be announced soon, and is supposed to be much harder.) But at the rate AIs are progressing, each new benchmark only lasts a few years, at best. And perhaps more importantly for those of us who aren’t machine learning researchers, benchmarks increasingly have to measure AI performance on tasks that humans couldn’t do themselves in order to describe what they are and aren’t capable of.
Yes, AIs still make stupid and annoying mistakes. But if it’s been six months since you were paying attention, or if you’ve mostly only playing around with the free versions of language models available online, which are well behind the frontier, you are overestimating how many stupid and annoying mistakes they make, and underestimating how capable they are on hard, intellectually demanding tasks…'(Kelsey Piper via Vox)
‘Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are ditching third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes program inspired by X, according to an announcement penned by Meta’s new Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta is also moving its trust and safety teams from California to Texas…
…Zuckerberg said he was inspired by X, where Musk has championed this approach since taking over….’ (Jess Weatherbed via The Verge)
I don’t think this actually has a whole lot to do with Zuckerberg’s or Meta’s commitment to free speech. What Zuckerberg and Meta have realized is the value, demonstrated by Trump, Musk, and MAGA antagonists, of saying that you’re “protecting free speech” and using it as cover for almost anything you want to do. For Meta, that means increasing engagement, decreasing government oversight and interference, and lowering their labor costs (through cutting their workforce and strengthening their bargaining position vs labor) — all things that will make their stock price go up and increase the wealth of their shareholders.
‘Pine needle tea is made from white pine needles chopped, added to boiling water, steeped, and strained. The drink can be enjoyed hot, iced, or blended with other herbal teas, notes registered dietitian nutritionist Kate Spurgin.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources reports that the tea is rich in antioxidants, vitamin A, and vitamin C, which can boost immunity and soothe colds.
WebMD also notes that certain molecules in pine needles can bind to a specific receptor in the body that plays an important role in regulating metabolism….’ (Meredith Kile via Vice)
‘Greenland is not small. We would never disrespect Greenland by calling it small. But it’s not as big as it looks, flattened out, on the Mercator projection. It is not roughly the same size as Africa. It is my belief, however, that trump does not know this and believes that it is the size of Africa, which makes him fixated on it enough to threaten war—trade war or shooting war—with a NATO ally over its control.
The same applies to Canada, which trump also says he wants, and which also appears enormous on the Mercator projection….’ (Jim Newelll via Slate)
‘First, to keep in full view what I wrote earlier in “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?” – that trump’s candidacy was only viable because the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court: (1) disabled the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment (which should otherwise have barred him from holding office again) and (2) shielded him from standing trial before the election for trying to overturn the 2020 results or for hoarding classified documents (which would have kept his criminality in full view of the electorate, and possibly rendered his candidacy a non-starter due to a jail sentence or loss of support). In any other country, we would understand that as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.
Second, as this post will show, the results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of trump or MAGA….’ (Michael Podhorzer via Weekend Reading)
‘Shame is what keeps us in check, or at least it should. It certainly used to. Trump, devoid of shame, has gone to great lengths to eviscerate that societal check….’ (Rex Huppke via USAToday Opinion)
‘Justice Juan Merchan, in an 18-page opinion and order, rejected a number of trump’s arguments against his sentencing, including that a president-elect is entitled to the same immunity as a president. He also rejected a motion to dismiss trump’s case in the interest of justice. Among the factors the court found weighing against dismissal was trump’s character: “Defendant’s disdain for the Third Branch of government, whether state or federal, in New York or elsewhere, is a matter of public record. Indeed, Defendant has gone to great lengths to broadcast on social media and other forums his lack of respect for judges, juries, grand juries and the justice system as a whole.” In a related scathing footnote, Merchan accused trump’s lawyers of engaging in “dangerous rhetoric” in attacking the integrity of the court.
The footnote might also signal something about the peculiar timing of the ruling, so close to trump’s reascent to the presidency and with no time left for any sentence to be carried out. In it, Merchan all but accuses trump’s attorneys, led by trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, of attempting to intimidate the judge in their recent pleadings. The implication could be that Merchan is laying down a marker that he will go ahead with the sentencing at this late date to demonstrate that the judiciary will not be intimidated by the incoming president.
Merchan notes specifically that trump’s filings “accuse … this Court of engaging in ‘unlawful’ and ‘unconstitutional’ conduct,” adding that such terms are synonymous with “criminally punishable.” Merchan then cited Chief Justice John Roberts’ recent paean to the sanctity of judicial independence. “Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”…’ (Richard Hasen and Jeremy Stahl via Slate)
‘The business of measuring big waves is a tricky one. There’s multiple entities with their own calculation methods, there’s debate about where waves bottom out and where they peak, and there’s the endless stream of keyboard warriors speculating, arguing, and offering armchair analyses.
Unlike other, more objective world records, computing wave size is a byzantine science.
Nevertheless, there’s a new contender for the Guinness World Record of “Largest Wave Surfed,” as tossed into the ring by Alessandro “Alo” Slebir with his monster ride at Maverick’s from December 23rd, 2024. It’s speculated, potentially, that Alo’s wave measured 108 feet. And that would smash the current record held by Sebastian Steudtner and his 86-footer at Nazaré, Portugal in 2020….’ (via surfer.com.)
