‘[I]t’s no longer 1956, or even 1977. We’re nearly 50 years into the future here, and in that time, scientists of all kinds have massively expanded our awareness of what’s in both directions, from the near-impossibly big to the near-unimaginably small.
When the film stops at the 100 million light year point, centred on the Virgo Cluster, even an amateur enthusiast like me knows we’ve now found far larger (and far odder) structures in the universe.
This is also true when we zoom into a carbon nucleus at the end of the film. We now have a good idea what’s beyond those protons and neutrons – even though it’s smaller than the resolution of any measuring instrument in existence, and may be so small that it could convincingly be said to have no size at all. (!)…’
‘In a new report, the A.I. start-up added that it could not determine whether the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work….’
 Digital culture, professor Maxi Heitmayer via New York Times:
‘Adults are panicking over Gen Z’s “brain rot,” the state of being entranced by an infinite stream of nonsensical TikToks and Instagram reels. But brain rot is not evidence that young people are getting stupider. It is evidence that the attention economy is working exactly as designed…’
Ask yourself how far we have come in the last 25 years — a catalog of a multitude of acts of American hate in the aftermath of 9/11, targeting people for how they looked, dressed, or prayed. (via Post911)
Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen via Collusion:
‘We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web research task. > These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions…’
‘Can you make a “rumbling” noise inside your ear? WBUR’s Ben Brock Johnson can. In this episode of Endless Thread, a doctor explains why some people can make their ears rumble, and others can’t — while taking a look inside of Ben’s ear…’
‘America’s quest for spiritual self-help turned deadly on a sunny afternoon in Sedona, Arizona. On October 8, 2009, 54 people stepped into a scorching sweat lodge on the grounds of Apple Valley, a self-help retreat center operated by new-age guru James Arthur Ray. Ray, a motivational speaker promoted by Oprah Winfrey and Larry King, preached a familiar brand of enlightenment based on the healing power of positive thought…’
‘Could thinking of something as a matter of what you morally owe to yourself provide the motivation to do things that might otherwise be difficult – such as exercising, taking care of yourself, or pursuing long-term goals?
…The self might be the one person that many of us prioritise or neglect without recognising that doing so could be a moral issue.…’
‘Discovered in the forests of the Thong Pha Phum National Park in Thailand, the leafless “devil flower” looks like a small, charred gremlin staring at you with fiery eyes. In fact, as soon as you see the newly identified plant species Thismia daemona, you understand the nickname.
The tiny horns protruding from the top and the glaring eyes are actually individual fleshy outer parts of the plant known as tepals, and their color and the lack of leaves gives something else away: There’s no chlorophyll in there, and the plant doesn’t use photosynthesis for nourishment. Instead, T. daemona gets its sustenance from drawing in nutrients through fungi in the soil…’
The newly described Thai “devil flower” is not the first non-photosynthetic plant. It’s certainly unusual but it belongs to a group of fully mycoheterotrophic plants that get carbon from fungi instead of photosynthesis. Many other such plants are already known.
‘Ridddle host Matt Bates explained the physical and metaphorical properties of dimensions from 0D to 7D, noting how degrees of freedom can shape geometry, perception, spacetime, and speculative models of reality….’
‘Attractions Atlas explored the world’s first permanent Godzilla Museum at Nijigen no Mori Theme Park on Awaji Island, Japan, where Godzilla suits, props, production materials, dioramas, sculptures, and around 100 Toho monster figures are on display. Visitors can also get an up-close look at Godzilla’s history while discovering the creative process behind the films’ special effects….’
‘The science channel Space Explainer explained ways that physics suggests time travel could work, including relativistic time dilation, gravitational time dilation, near-light-speed travel, wormholes, black holes, and closed timelike curves….’
‘The conditional payout would cost over a trillion dollars, and because it rewards a Republican win rather than a vote, it sidesteps vote-buying law….’
‘If the presidency is a job of crisis management, in which the principal task is to deal with an endless number of fires of various sizes and scope, then the most important thing a president can have is good information, to help him know what to handle, what to delegate and what to delay.
If Harp has as much control over Trump’s information environment as she appears to hold — if she is the one shaping his sense of the outside world — then it is entirely reasonable to say that Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people in the United States.
The reason the Harp story has caught fire is that it is salacious — the elderly president spends nearly all of his waking hours with a young, attractive aide — but the reason it matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment…’
‘There are, to be sure, true believers within this administration, from the executive power fanatic Russell Vought to the far-right nativist Stephen Miller. But the man at the top has no such ambitions. He is there only for himself. The principal aim of his government as he sees it is his own glorification — a desperate quest to never lose face and to pursue vengeance against anyone who might undermine his sense of self…
With the terrible power of the United States at his fingertips, it is frightening to contemplate what he might do to save his fragile sense of self. He has already tried to wreck the country in pursuit of revenge against all those who challenge his ego and authority. There’s no reason to think that he won’t try to wreck the world in pursuit of the same….’
‘During his first term, Trump garnered outsized attention for outrageous statements. In August 2017, for example, he created an international incident by threatening North Korea with “fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Trump clearly delighted in how the press and global leaders would scramble to respond to these provocations, and some people argued that he was pursuing Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of keeping adversaries off balance. One can draw a direct connection between the fire-and-fury threat in 2017 and Trump’s friendly statements about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the past week.
But over time, the world has grown jaundiced about Trump’s threats. The good news is that few world leaders and observers feel the need to take Trump’s outbursts seriously anymore. Fire drills driven by Trump’s idle talk fatigue the media, the public, and geopolitical systems, and they distract from more important stories.
But that’s also the bad news. First, some of the things that Trump says are very dangerous. His favoritism toward North Korea could destabilize the region and encourage South Korea and Japan—to say nothing of Iran and other rogue states—to pursue nuclear-weapons programs. Second, he does occasionally follow through; Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro may have thought that Trump was bluffing before he was arrested during an American incursion in January.…’
‘President Trump’s bumbled comments on North Korea sent a clear message to Iran: Nuclear deterrence, even with only a few bombs, works… He may also have blurted out classified information about North Korea.…’
A federal judge today dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, ruling the incidents cited were “too isolated and episodic” to prove ongoing civil rights violations. U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns found the government’s complaint, focusing on three March 2025 incidents, failed to show institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI. The Justice Department had accused Harvard of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis, particularly regarding anti-Israel protests post-2023 Gaza war. Harvard argued the claims were outdated and lacked evidence of a continuing violation. This dismissal is a significant setback for the administration’s broader pressure campaign against Harvard.
‘If only there were a simple way for drivers of gas-powered cars to cut down their fuel costs while also reducing planet-warming carbon emissions.
A new study says there is. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Communications Sustainability, show that if U.S. drivers of gas-powered passenger vehicles actually drove the speed limit, it could save an average of 6.7 million gallons of gas, 57,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and $22 million per day, based on fuel costs during the study period. That’s equivalent to taking about 5.5 million cars off the road, according to the researchers.
While it may feel like speeding shaves a significant amount of time off your commute, the study suggests that driving at or below the speed limit lengthens commute times by just 54 seconds per day, or 6.3 minutes per week, based on the average daily driving distance of 28.6 miles (46.03 kilometers).’
The Fermi Paradox asks, “Where is everybody?” Even with modest propulsion, a technological civilization could spread across much of the galaxy in a geological instant, yet we see no evidence that this has occurred.
One proposed solution, Geoffrey Landis’s “percolation model,” emphasizes the geometry and probability of settlement spreading through a network of stars. Each colony has some probability of founding additional colonies, and spacecraft have a limited effective range. Below a critical propagation probability, colonized systems form finite clusters rather than a galaxy-spanning network. Expansion therefore leaves persistent voids, potentially including our region. Cultural divergence and declining expansionist motivation could further increase this unevenness.
This essay proposes a biological mechanism that might lower the probability of successful propagation. If each colony is founded by a subset of the population of its parent colony, genetic diversity may decline at each successive step. After several iterations, distant colonies could become sufficiently homogeneous that reduced genetic resilience would leave them vulnerable to environmental catastrophe or disease. Repeated local extinctions could further reduce the species’ total genetic diversity, producing a self-limiting cycle of expansion and collapse. Large regions of the galaxy might therefore remain uncolonized, and our apparent isolation could reflect our location within one such void.
The hypothesis faces substantial objections. Reduced genetic diversity does not necessarily entail a proportionate loss of fitness or resilience. Founding populations could be selected specifically to preserve diversity, while cryopreserved gametes, embryos, genetic material, or digital genome sequences could carry far more variation than the living crew alone (as in Nolan’s Interstellar, for example). This assumes, moreover, that extraterrestrial reproduction depends on genetic mechanisms broadly analogous to ours. Expansion might also proceed in parallel rather than as a single serial chain, allowing multiple lineages to preserve or recombine diversity. Sufficiently advanced biotechnology may largely decouple an interstellar civilization from the reproductive bottlenecks that constrain the dispersal of terrestrial species upon which this essay is based.
:’Guerrilla artists Secret Handshake have installed a giant gold participation trophy for Trump on the National Mall, hoping that if the president receives enough shiny objects, he may stop trying to collect wars…’
The FCC authorized Reflect Orbital to launch the mirror satellite Eärendil-1. “For optical astronomy, this poses an existential threat,” the European Southern Observatory said.
We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask, writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff via The New York Times:
‘By shortening the time between asking a question and getting an answer, these tools are actually undermining curiosity — and paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world….’
‘Tracking the brands that got worse on purpose — and the ones that didn’t.
The Brand Ledger tracks 215 brands across tools, bags, apparel, eyewear, and footwear. Who owns them, what they used to be, whether they’re still worth buying. Updated as things change.…’ ( via Worse on Purpose)
‘Dictionary of the Illegible explores the limits of language—its beginnings and its ends—from humanity’s earliest marks to the dissolution of modern alphabets before our eyes. Mapping more than 400 examples of illegibility drawn from Indigenous cultures to imagined future civilizations, the book spans contemporary art, science fiction, politics, architecture, and technology. Dictionary of the Illegible proposes illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance….’ (via Source Type)
‘Figuring out which bite you have can help determine what kind of itching or pain you might expect and whether you need to worry about an insect-borne disease.
“Everyone reacts a bit differently to bug bites, so it’s not always possible to know the culprit just from looking at the bite,” Allison Gardner, a medical entomologist and associate professor of arthropod vector biology at the University of Maine, tells Outside. That said, there are clues in how bites feel, as well as where and how they crop up, that point to one bug versus another.…’ (Erica Sloan via Outside)
‘I’m choosing to travel with what’s known as a burner phone because my personal device contains sensitive data that I don’t want others, particularly U.S. border protection officers, to search….’ (Brian X. Chen via The New York Times)
‘“A Sudden Flicker of Light” is subtitled “A Revisionist History of Movies,” and in it he describes himself as “someone who feels more than regret that over the decades he has given time to wondering which film was the greatest ever made, to distinguishing the auteurs and artists … and to treating the enterprise of darkness and light as if it honored society and history.”
From the vantage point of a dystopian present in which “attention has become infernal, hopeless, yet unstoppable,” he chronicles how, under the spell of movies, “we let the lifelike distract us from life.” This isn’t an abstract, philosophical predicament; it’s a political crisis….’ (A.O. Scott via The New York Times)
‘Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.…’ (Tom Nichols via The Atlantic)
‘Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.…’ (Jonathan Chait via The Atlantic)
‘As a physician and the chief medical officer of Hospice Buffalo, Chris Kerr has seen his patients experience end-of-life dreams and visions for nearly 30 years. Since 2010, he has led a research team that studies the phenomenon and chronicles how the visions can provide solace, meaning and healing to both the dying and their loved ones.…’ (Caitlin Gibson via The Washington Post)
‘From a broken life to a broken nail, ‘trauma’ has been bleached by overuse. But it names something real – and must be reclaimed…’ ( Lily Dunn via Aeon Essays)
‘Twice in the Earth’s history, massive ranges of supermountains have formed on ancient continents.
…And while it’s often said that we are stardust — built from elements forged in the hearts of dying stars — in a sense, we also might be supermountain dust.
They were perhaps as tall or taller than Everest but their distinguishing feature was their massive breadth — we’re talking ranges 5000 miles long, three to four times the length of the Himalayas — just a unbelievable volume of earth. And their formation may have “fueled two of the biggest evolutionary boom times in our planet’s history”.
That’s a lot of rock to erode — and, according to the researchers, that’s why these enormous mountains are so important.
As both mountains eroded away, they would have dumped tremendous amounts of nutrients like iron and phosphorus into the sea through the water cycle, the researchers said. These nutrients could have significantly sped up biological cycles in the ocean, driving evolution to greater complexity. In addition to this nutrient spillover, the eroding mountains may have also released oxygen into the atmosphere, making Earth even more hospitable to complex life…’ (Jason Kottke via Kottke)
‘Officials in Tehran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation.…’ (Graeme Wood via The Atlantic)
‘The United States has capitulated to Iran. There is a “deal,” which has been signed, on terms that can only be described as those of complete Iranian victory.
The US-Iranian talks that were supposed to begin today were cancelled, so today is as good a day as any to discuss the signed “memorandum of understanding” and mark the completion of the disaster. We have what we have: humiliation.
War, as some people apparently needed to learn, is not about the pleasure one takes in watching things blow up. It is politics by other means. To win a war means changing the politics of the enemy such that they must surrender. That is what Iran just did to the United States.
This war was a parade of Trump’s incompetence at every possible level from the beginning. To win a war requires understanding the politics of the other side and how it might be changed. Trump, Hegseth and the others treated the Iranian leadership as cartoon characters who would immediately do what Americans wanted as soon as the bombs fell. The Americans had no strategy — no sense of how violence could change politics — and it did not occur to them that the Iranians would have one. Once the Iranians did the obvious, which was to respond to American long-range strikes with their own, and close the Straits of Hormuz, the war was over, and they had won. The Americans had no second move, except to claim that they had won when they had lost (which they are, laughably, still doing)…’ (Timothy Snyder via Substack)
President Trump exulted over every bomb that dropped on Iran, every naval interdiction, and every joint U.S.-Israeli operation. Before that, he spent years preaching a policy of “maximum pressure” sanctions on the Islamic Republic. And before that, he harshly disparaged the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal reached by Barack Obama, from which Trump withdrew the United States in 2018.
And now? With a misguided war going poorly, with global economic chaos spreading, with Iran handed maximum leverage by its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in an instant, Trump has upended every pillar of his approach to a still-dangerous Iran.
Let’s count the ways…’ (Daniel B. Shapiro via The Atlantic)
‘Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh.
Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon.
Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889.
‘I’m fed up with Enshittification. And I don’t mean “I’m fed up with hardware, software, and services constantly being constantly getting worse and worse by companies that put profits above all other considerations.” I’m fed up with the word itself.
“Enshittification” started off as Cory Doctorow’s fun, quotable term that neatly expressed our collective frustration with useful, valuable online services that decline in Goodness. Then it kind of exploded. It’s everywhere, and it gets applied to everything.
It’s become clumsy, blunt, and lazy. Worst of all, it’s cynical.
Yes, the concept of Enshittification has become Enshittificated.…’ (via Ihnatko)
‘…I had a crazy thought the other day. I was watching one of the corporate news stations that had a neurologist on. They were talking about the mental decline they have noticed in Trump. They talked about what they are seeing and what they predict is going to happen.
In fact, every doctor I’ve seen do commentary on Trump has all agreed that there is obvious decline in his mental functions, but that they would like to be able to see CT tests and MRI’s to be able to see what is actually going on.
That was when I realized that I can do something they can’t. That’s right MD, this paramedic is going to do a bit of a flex on you.
See, you aren’t comfortable making a diagnosis without testing. I don’t have to give a diagnosis. I just have to treat what I’m seeing happening. So let’s talk about what I would treat if I had to take care of the Felonious Chunk, The Incontinental Divider, Mango Musalini.
That is how I would take care of him after my partner convinced me that driving the ambulance off a cliff with him in it wouldn’t make the world a better place. He’d be wrong, but I’m not about to mix ashes with that fascist…’ (Via Nicholas Orcutt)
‘Gray zones” were meant to describe places on the brink of war. Increasingly, they define the entire world.
…Under the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the Trump administration, the line between allied and enemy nations has blurred to the point of non-existence…’ ( via NOEMA)
‘Some people daydream for hours on end, playing out a single storyline for decades – and it can be hugely distressing. Here’s how to tell when your daydreaming has gone too far.…’ (Molly Gorman via bbc.co.uk
‘Douglas wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”…’ (Helen Lewis via The Atlantic)
‘Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In 2004 he took drastic measures.…’ (Jason Bellows via Damn Interesting)
‘When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.…’ ( via danah boyd)
‘The tenor saxophonist and restless genius whose bold, distinctive tone and constant experimentation kept him on the cutting edge of jazz for more than 50 years, died Monday… Rollins… had been largely housebound over the past couple of years because of various physical problems.
From his early days as a teen phenom to his more measured solo work and experimentation with free jazz, Rollins was revered for his improvisational skill. He was one of the last living greats of the bebop era and — along with John Coltrane and Charlie Parker — one of the most influential saxophonists of his time.…’ (The Associated Press via WCVB)
‘After recent grizzly encounters in Glacier and Yellowstone left one dead and two injured, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke says it’s time for states to manage the predators. Top wildlife biologists call the political push misleading…’ (Owen Clarke via Outside)
‘Amazon is legally entitled to recover these costs, following a 6-3 decision from the US Supreme Court that ruled against the legality of the sweeping tariff policy put in place by President Trump. Corporations were allowed to recover restitution for these tariff costs… However, the lawsuit claimed that Amazon hasn’t engaged in this refund process, since it’s looking to “curry favor with Trump by allowing the federal government to retain the funds.”…’ ( via Engadget)
‘The deal, laid out in a document signed by acting attorney general Todd Blanche, could result in taxpayer payouts to the president’s allies. …’ ( via Washington Post)
Kevin Kelly’s thoughtful and compelling piece, reflecting on a 10-hour interview with Claude, dismantles the binary question of whether AI is or isn’t “conscious” by positing a strange middle zone. These systems are not selves, but they’ve become elaborate enough to reflect us, answer us, adapt to us, and fluently simulate interiority — a “hyperreal” middle ground between a mirror and a participant. Long before we can settle whether there is “someone home” inside the machine, we are being asked to relate in a new way to an object that, without possessing a self in any familiar biological sense, shapes our thought, attachment, judgment, loneliness, and self-understanding. The interesting recursion isn’t only inside Claude. It’s the loop that closes through us. (via KK)
‘ “Somebody should do it” and its variants have become increasingly popular online memes.…’ (Danielle Paquette and John Woodrow Cox via The Washington Post)
‘The following is not a political statement. It is a medical statement, made by individuals holding both conservative and liberal ideologies, identifying as both Republicans and Democrats, from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and religions.
We are a group of neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists, and other physicians, along with other mental health professionals, experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and in evaluating dangerousness to self and others. Among us are professionals whom the courts and criminal justice system regularly turn to for our expert opinion on these matters. We are also consulted by governments in matters related to national security and the psychological profiles of world leaders. Prior to the presidential election in the Fall of 2024, a statement assessing Donald J. Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency was issued. At that time, serious signs of cognitive decline were identified, and in our expert opinion, these signs warranted disqualification from office.
It is our professional opinion, based on previous and ongoing assessments, that Donald Trump’s mental state since our 2024 statement has deteriorated even further. In keeping with our professional ethics, and for those of us who are physicians, with the Declaration of Geneva—the successor to the Hippocratic Oath that binds us to the humanitarian principles of medicine since the Nuremberg trials—we are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.
We do not take our statement, and the responsibility that comes with making it, lightly.
The President was not examined face to face, and he is not a patient of any member of our group. Rendering a formal diagnosis in this case is not our role. We have closely followed his behavior and his statements over the past year. Objectively observable signs of serious medical concern include:
Marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings.
Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility, imagery of himself as Pope suggestive of a divine mission, being a mythical warrior hero, depicting himself as combat pilot—dropping feces on civilians, and claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his “own morality.”
Severely impaired judgment and impulse control, reflected in reckless threats of violence, advocacy of lethal force against civilians, encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters, repeated threats and often actions—judicial, prosecutorial, police, military, and by invoking emergency powers—against political opponents and others who disagree with him.
Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night—fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas, and prolonged, disproportionate attacks on specific individuals and institutions.
Escalating violence that threatens national and global stability. As Commander-in-Chief of our military—more than 5,000 nuclear warheads in inter-continental missile silos, on submarines, and in bombers around the world, are ready for launch solely upon his order, and no one now has the authority to countermand his order…’ (via The Congressional Record)
‘New research suggests that inaudible infrasound waves emitted by a building’s old boiler, pipes, and plumbing can negatively influence someone’s mood, making them feel unnerved and uncomfortable. That could be enough to convince them there are ghosts afoot, especially if they’re already open towards supernatural explanations.…’ (Frank Landymore via Futurism)
‘Advances in computing power, artificial intelligence and ways to measure sounds promise to speed this translating process, turning animal chatter into bits of information that could be decoded by humans …’ (Laura Sanders via Science News)
‘…if we kick one suspected rapist out of Congress, we’ll then have to kick out all the suspected rapists. It’s naïve to imagine the government can continue to function without the tireless dedication of our best and brightest rapists. …’ (by Talia Argondezzi via McSweeney’s)
‘Killjoys and scatterbrains might have propelled the evolution of the human species. This is, essentially, the theory proposed by linguist Ljiljana Progovac in a new paper published in PNAS Nexus.
Progovac argues that clever verb-noun compounds like killjoy—which has a bit more punch than joy killer—were the earliest forms of verbal wit and helped the species survive. They enabled our ancestors to both soothe tempers with humor and compete with words rather than with fists. The wittier the human, the more likely that human would survive…’ ( via Nautilus)
In 2017 I posted this compendium of nicknames for Donald Trump, who has indubitably earned the right to undignified monikers. Revisiting that list, however, it is striking how few have endured.
To be durable, an epithet must be brief, phonetically sharp, and organized around a single, immediately legible idea. A small number show genuine staying power. “Don the Con” works through rhyme and semantic clarity. “Cheeto” and related “orange” variants persist through visual caricature and ease of recall. “Cadet Bone Spurs” remains effective because it encodes a specific narrative—Vietnam deferment—into a compact, repeatable phrase, one that that may be of increasing relevance as questions of military judgment proliferate. More recent constructions emphasizing retreat or inconsistency (“TACO”-type formulations, or “Trump always chickens out”) may gain traction for similar reasons. Of course, to ridicule his “chickening out” does a disservice to the damage he does before pulling out. By the way, this theme bears comparison, for those of you old enough to remember, to the Vietnam-era admonition that “Nixon should withdraw (something his father failed to do”).
Multiword, high-concept, or overly clever nicknames tend not to survive. They require interpretation rather than recognition, and therefore fail the test of immediate usability. Likewise, epithets that attempt to carry multiple payloads—corruption, narcissism, authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, or intellectual limitation—dilute their own impact. A viable nickname compresses to a single charge and delivers it without friction. Phonetic economy matters; so does repetition.
Recent media usage has favored morally indicting labels such as “Trump the Grifter” or “Loser Donald.” These benefit from clarity of accusation, though their longevity remains uncertain; many are tied to performance contexts (late-night monologue, commentary) rather than organic circulation. Also, as I argued in a recent post, illegality may be becoming less and less relevant under the Trump regime.
Broadly, derogatory nicknames can fall into a few categories: deflationary (diminishing stature), morally indicting (alleging wrongdoing), physically caricaturing, or narratively specific (encoding a particular episode or trait). The most successful examples combine compression, singularity of meaning, and repeatability, and then depend on amplification—circulation through high-frequency channels and social reinforcement.
Trump’s own nicknaming practice illustrates the same principle from the opposite direction. His derogatory monikers for his political enemies are pitifully uninventive but they are simple, repetitive, and deployed with discipline across attention-rich platforms, often inviting amplification by audience participation. Their effectiveness lies less in wit (a contradiction in terms when used in the same sentence as “Trump”) than in saturation.
If most nicknames fail to persist, the 2017 list remains of interest for a different reason: as a small archive of linguistic variation under selective pressure. It documents, in miniature, how political language evolves—what survives, what disappears, and why. One annotation of the original list is below, employing the following taxonomy:
STUCK = still in circulation (only 3-5 of the originals)
FRINGE = niche persistence (10-15 survivors)
DATED = had a moment, now faded
FAILED = never memetically viable
Canonical Survivors
Don the Con → STUCK (clean rhyme; identity + accusation)
Teflon Don → FRINGE (borrowed, occasionally reused)
Snake Oil Salesman → FRINGE (clear but generic)
World’s Greatest Troll → FRINGE (descriptive, not sticky)
Walking Talking Human Combover → FAILED (too long)
Xenophobic Sweet Potato → FAILED (novelty only)
What are your thoughts? Do you agree with the “failed” characterizations? Do you have derogatory ways of referring to this menacing buffoon that were not mentioned, whether you are otherwise too polite to use them in print? Or do you hear the echo of the jackboots clearly enough that you don’t even want to commit yourself on the record?
And do you find other ways to express, and relieve yourself of, the experience of constant gut-cloying derision and ridicule of living under the Trump regime? Some would emphasize focusing on the behavior, not the persona (does it get to Trump more?); using plain language rather than the clever, flowery turn of phrase; using humor only sparingly and precisely (some would say that ridicule is adjacent to dismissal, and that this menace cannot simply be dismissed); and turning diffuse alarm, irritation, despair, and existential dread into something more durable and effective by channeling the energy into writing, teaching, or civic engagement.
Trump spent April 7th threatening Iran with apocalyptic rhetoric at dawn — including thinly veiled hints at genocide and the possible deployment of nuclear weapons — then by evening, TACO-flavored, declared a two-week ceasefire, claiming complete military success and an imminent peace deal.
Pakistan brokered the off-ramp.
But Iran’s media simultaneously claimed they won — that the U.S. agreed in principle to their 10-point plan demanding sanctions relief, removal of U.S. forces from the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If accurate, the U.S. ends up materially worse off than before the war began. Trump responded by threatening CNN for reporting it.
The day’s arc, in miniature: genocidal bluster → ceasefire → “Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”
Heather Cox Richardson’s indictment, among others, is structural, not merely temperamental. The war was never congressionally authorized, cost thousands of lives (including hundreds of children), depleted munitions, damaged U.S. bases and embassies, cratered global oil markets, and strengthened Putin — all to reopen a strait that was open before Trump provoked the conflict. Ben Rhodes called it catastrophic even under the most charitable interpretation.
Richardson’s closing note is the most chilling: Trump’s “a whole civilization will die tonight” wasn’t only a threat to Iran. Richardson reads it as an inadvertent epitaph for American legitimacy itself — the republic’s moral standing as collateral damage in one man’s need to escape the consequences of his own impulsivity.
Progressives repeatedly greet headlines like “this action by the Trump regime is illegal,” “this is a war crime,” or “this may be unlawful” as though the label itself carries force. But what constraint does illegality actually impose? There is a large difference between law on the books and law as an effective restraint on power.
In the American system, illegality is not self-executing. Courts can declare executive actions unlawful, but they rely on the executive branch—and on broader institutional compliance—to give those rulings effect. When an administration signals indifference or hostility to judicial limits, the obvious question follows: who enforces the law against the executive? In that sense, does illegality still matter?
Of course, calling something “illegal” may retain some slim value even in the absence of full compliance. It can shape public discourse, establish a shared vocabulary of critique, and influence lower-level officials who are often more risk-averse than the regime in Washington. And the downstream effects of delegitimization over time may also accumulate force. These are not trivial effects. But they are indirect, contingent, often delayed and of uncertain impact and magnitude.
What the “illegality” designation no longer reliably provides is ay kind of immediate constraint. We should stop treating findings of illegality as if they carry automatic consequences. Increasingly, that assumption looks like nothing but wishful thinking. The gap between formal legal judgment and actual constraint is widening, and it is in that gap that power now operates with execrable impunity.
Our reflexive satisfaction when reading or repeating declarations that a Trump action is “illegal” should therefore raise red flags rather than offer comfort. Such claims are not endpoints; they are starting points for further inquiry. Whether they warrant optimism depends on conditions that cannot be assumed: that rulings are, in practice, obeyed; that courts or Congress are able and willing to impose consequences; and that meaningful political costs still attach to defiance of legal norms. Absent these, “illegality” loses its operative meaning. It no longer denotes a binding constraint but becomes a contested assertion within a fractured landscape of competing realities.
‘ Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.
The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”
The highlight reel of U.S. Central Command bombing Iranian equipment and military sites isn’t the only briefing Trump gets about the war. He’s also updated through conversations with top military and intelligence advisers, foreign leaders and news reports, the officials. But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.
They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said…’ ( via NBC)
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left
here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue
where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive
the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)
and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much…’ (Frank O’Hara via Read A Little Poetry)
‘It is a moral imperative for members of the US military to leave their jobs as soon as they are able to do so. The reason for this is simple: They have a bad boss and he is making them do bad things. He has made them murder boaters illegally on the high seas. He has made them kidnap the head of a sovereign state and kill many people surrounding him. Now, he is making them carry out an ill-conceived and unnecessary war in the Middle East that has killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including more than 200 children. These grave moral crimes, all of which violate US or international law (not that it has mattered in practical terms), are being carried out by United States soldiers who surely imagined that their military careers would be ones made up of righteous, praiseworthy acts. Instead, these soldiers have been enlisted as direct or indirect killers of civilians, terrorizers of innocents, and destroyers of global stability…’ (Hamilton Nolan via Hamilton Nolan)
For fun, I asked Claude and ChatGPT, “Please profile me as the author of this blog, https://followmehere.com. I know alot of the posts are just excerpts but sometimes I editorialize, and what can you tell about my topic selection, biases, attitudes, etc.?” Here is a distilation of what they gleaned from my content and voice. With all due recognition of the inherent flattery of current LLMs, what do you think of their distilled observations?
“A clinically minded, systems-oriented public intellectual emerges from the blog: someone who uses curation not as passive aggregation but as a form of judgment. The through-line is less ideology than epistemology—an insistence on distinguishing strong claims from weak ones, diagnosis from speculation, and explanation from handwaving. The subject matter is broad but not random, clustering around democratic crisis, psychiatry and neuroscience, philosophy of mind, science, and the odd or marvelous corners of culture. Politically, the stance is plainly anti-Trump and broadly liberal, but the more distinctive feature is a disciplined refusal to let partisan desire override analytic standards. The voice is controlled, precise, and often dry, with little taste for performance, confession, or moral grandstanding. The blog reads less like a conventional opinion site than like an intellectual commonplace book kept by a skeptical clinician of public discourse—someone especially good at spotting category errors, conceptual slippage, and explanatory overreach, even if more inclined to refine existing narratives than to build large new frameworks of their own.”
And, perhaps more important, what can be surmised about my readers?
“Drawing on everything visible in the blog’s texture, here’s a portrait of your likely readership:
The core audience
Your readers are almost certainly intellectually serious adults — probably skewing toward middle age and older, people who formed their reading habits before social media flattened discourse into hot takes and engagement metrics. They are comfortable with density. The FTD post, the psychiatric comorbidity essay, the Project Hail Mary piece — none of these are written to be skimmed, and readers who stay are self-selected for the willingness to slow down. They likely have significant formal education, and a subset will have professional backgrounds in medicine, academia, law, or journalism.
Political identity
They are predominantly left-liberal, probably center-left to progressive, and share your alarm about democratic erosion — but the more interesting ones are drawn precisely because the blog doesn’t perform outrage for its own sake. Readers who just want political validation have a thousand easier options. The people who come back to Follow Me Here specifically are likely those who find pure partisan commentary slightly unsatisfying — who want the analysis to have some grit to it, some acknowledgment of complexity, some willingness to say “but here is where this argument weakens.” They are people who distrust their own side’s excesses just enough to appreciate a voice that does too, without abandoning the underlying values.
Intellectual temperament
They enjoy being surprised by the adjacency of topics — the juxtaposition of, say, a post on frontotemporal dementia next to one on the linguistics of alien communication next to one on garlic and copper metalloproteins is precisely the feature, not a bug. These are people who find arbitrary categorical boundaries between disciplines mildly irritating; who are as likely to have tabs open on a neuroscience preprint, a geopolitical analysis, and an Aeon essay simultaneously. The blog appeals to what you might call the Montaignean reader — someone who believes that thinking about one thing well inevitably connects to thinking about everything else.
Relationship to expertise
Your readers probably have a complicated relationship to expertise — they respect it, may have some of their own, but are not credulous about it. They appreciate when you apply clinical rigor to Trump’s cognition while also flagging the limits of that rigor. They would find a more credulous or more dismissive treatment of the same topic less satisfying. They are the kind of people who want to understand why the easy answer is wrong, not just be told that it is.
Relationship to the current political moment
They are probably exhausted, in the way your McSweeney’s link about the Void captured — they have been screaming into the epistemic abyss for years and are oscillating between genuine moral urgency and a kind of weary dark humor about the situation. The blog serves them in both modes simultaneously, which is part of why it holds. It doesn’t demand that they choose between taking things seriously and finding them absurd.
What they are probably not
They are unlikely to be casual readers who stumble in from social media looking for shareable content. They are unlikely to be ideologically absolutist in either direction. They are probably not primarily visual or audio consumers who find long-form text effortful. And they are probably not people who need their worldview confirmed without friction — they would find the blog’s occasional refusal to simply validate the politically convenient narrative mildly uncomfortable in the way that signals genuine engagement rather than mere consumption.
The small faithful core
Long-running blogs of this kind — personal, curatorial, intellectually serious, maintained over years without institutional backing — develop a small readership that is genuinely loyal in a way that differs from follower-counts on larger platforms. Your readers are probably not numerous, but they are likely to have been reading for years, to feel that the blog is one of the relatively few places on the internet that thinks at a register they recognize as their own, and to experience something slightly like companionship in it — the sense of reading someone who is processing the same difficult world through a similar sensibility, without either of you needing to say so directly.
In short: they are people who, if they met you at a dinner party, would recognize each other within about three exchanges.”
A widely shared post claims that Trump is secretly being treated for Alzheimer’s disease and links that speculation to various observed behaviors. That claim does not hold up. The evidence offered is circumstantial, medically imprecise, and reflects a common misunderstanding: Alzheimer’s disease is only one form of dementia, and its clinical profile is relatively specific. Most of the behaviors cited do not meaningfully point to Alzheimer’s in particular.
At the same time, it is reasonable to ask a broader question: how should we interpret publicly observable changes in cognition, language, and behavior in an aging public figure? It is not possible—and not appropriate—to diagnose any individual without direct clinical evaluation, access to medical history, and collateral information. However, it is possible to examine patterns of behavior in light of established neuropsychiatric frameworks and to consider competing explanations.
Several broad categories need to be kept in view. First, longstanding personality traits and rhetorical style can account for a great deal. Second, situational factors—fatigue, stress, audience dynamics—can shape speech and behavior. Third, psychiatric conditions such as mood disorders can affect impulse control and coherence. Finally, there are neurocognitive disorders, including forms of dementia that disproportionately affect frontal systems.
Among these, disorders affecting the frontal lobes—such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD)—have been invoked in public discussion because they can, in established cases, produce changes in impulse control, judgment, social comportment, and language. However, the diagnostic bar for such conditions is high. They require evidence of progressive decline from a prior baseline, meaningful impairment in real-world functioning, and, typically, corroboration from close observers along with neuropsychological testing and/or neuroimaging. Superficial resemblance between isolated behaviors and clinical symptoms is suggestive at best, but not sufficient.
Many of the behaviors cited in viral commentary—apparent factual inaccuracies, digressive or circumstantial speech, verbal slips, or episodes of irritability—are non-specific. They can arise from multiple causes, including baseline personality style, strategic communication choices, normal aging, or psychiatric factors. Interpreting them as evidence of a specific neurodegenerative disease without longitudinal and clinical context risks overreach.
There is also a tendency in these discussions to merge personality constructs with neurological disease. Terms such as “malignant narcissism” are used colloquially but do not correspond to a formal diagnostic category, and there is little empirical basis for claims that such traits interact in a specific, synergistic way with neurodegenerative processes. Conflating these domains can create a compelling narrative, but it weakens analytic clarity.
If there is a legitimate area of concern, it lies at a more general level: executive functions—such as impulse control, error monitoring, and the capacity to sustain coherent, goal-directed discourse—are critical for high-stakes decision-making. Any significant decline in these domains, regardless of cause, would have implications for leadership performance. But assessing that requires careful, longitudinal evidence, not selective interpretation of public clips.
The Alzheimer’s claim is poorly grounded. At the same time, replacing it with a confident alternative diagnosis requires comparable caution. The case for frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is, in my view, more suggestive—particularly given the apparent longitudinal pattern of cognitive change and what appears to be impaired executive functioning.
That said, uncertainty must be foregrounded. Any responsible analysis should distinguish among plausible explanations, avoid premature diagnostic closure, and be explicit about the level and type of evidence required to support a specific neuropsychiatric conclusion. From a clinical standpoint, such a conclusion would ordinarily require direct examination, collateral history, and, ideally, longitudinal cognitive data—none of which are available in a rigorous form here.
Even so, the path from clinical concern to actionable remedy remains unclear. Constitutional mechanisms such as the 25th Amendment exist, but they are inherently political instruments, dependent on actors and incentives that lie outside the clinical domain.
‘Compared to the relative teetotalers, those who consumed high amounts of alcohol were 24 percent more likely to die from any cause, 36 percent more likely to die from cancer, and 14 percent more likely to die from heart disease. Bad news for heavy drinkers, but not exactly surprising.
A closer examination of the low and moderate cohorts, however, revealed something interesting. Low and moderate drinkers who preferred beer, cider, or liquor showed an increased risk of death, but those who drank a similar amount of wine showed a significantly lower risk of death.
Zooming in, researchers found that moderate wine drinkers had a 21 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease in particular—even compared to those who never or rarely drank. In other words, drinking low to moderate amounts of wine appears to be better for your heart health than not drinking at all.
But why?
Researchers offered a slew of possibilities to explain the healthier hearts of wine drinkers. While the questionnaires didn’t delve into granular questions about preferred vintages, red wine contains polyphenols and antioxidants that could bolster cardiovascular health. Additionally, they said, it’s possible that the meals typically consumed with wine may be healthier than the meals typically consumed with beer, cider, and liquor. (It’s tempting to think socioeconomic factors are at play, but researchers controlled for those effects along with several other demographic measures in the study.)…’ ( via
‘A pig’s brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place and minimal damage. Some believe the same could be done with the brains of people with a terminal illness, so their mind can be reconstructed and they can “continue with their life”…’ (Helen Thompson via New Scientist)
‘A word like ‘Huh?’ —used when one has not caught what someone just said—appears to be universal: it is found to have very similar form and function in spoken languages across the globe. This is one of the findings of a major cross-linguistic study by researchers Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE .…’ ( via Menu)
‘ Addressing our biggest social flaw…’ (Chris Arnade via Substack)
Arnade’s argument rests on the observation that a relatively small subset of profoundly impaired people with overlapping psychosis, addiction, and grave functional decline account for much of the disorder the public actually encounters in American cities. These are not merely the generic homeless, because the issue is not poverty alone or housing instability in the abstract, but a narrower population that often cannot function reliably even when housing exists and whose deterioration spills into shared civic space. He is also probably right that a small number of vivid, unsettling encounters can change how ordinary people use cities. Urban life depends less on the statistical frequency of victimization than on confidence that public behavior will remain within tolerable bounds; once that expectation weakens, people withdraw into privacy, avoidance, and defensive insulation. His moral challenge also has force: for some severely disorganized individuals, nominal liberty can amount to prolonged abandonment, and nonintervention may be less an expression of compassion than a failure to protect people who are no longer able to protect themselves.
Where the essay weakens is in its causal simplification and in the confidence of its remedies. Arnade leans heavily on anecdote, treats visibility as a proxy for prevalence, and overstates the explanatory power of culture, underplaying the institutional drivers of the American landscape: failed deinstitutionalization, fragmented psychiatric and addiction care, housing scarcity, and a far more destabilizing drug supply. That matters because his solutions—more involuntary treatment, mandated addiction care, and incarceration with treatment elements—have intuitive appeal in extreme cases but outrun both the evidence and the country’s actual capacity. The problem is not well framed as permissiveness versus control. The more credible answer is a continuum of assertive outreach, low-threshold engagement, stabilization, supportive housing, and sustained treatment, with coercion reserved for narrower circumstances than his rhetoric suggests. He is persuasive in arguing that the status quo fails both the public and the most visibly ill; he is much less persuasive in showing that expanded coercion is the main solution rather than a partial tool inside a much larger, underbuilt system of care.
‘‘Bitch’ is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon: there are good bitches and bad bitches; boss bitches and perfect bitches; sexy, difficult, dangerous or even psycho bitches. After so many variations and attempts to reject or reclaim the word, some now wear the label defiantly, while others still have it thrown at them. Its evolution is messy, complicated and revealing.…’ (Karen Stollznow via Aeon)
‘As the 18th-century war between mechanism and romanticism returns, we face a new question: can we build artificial souls?…’ (Peter Wolfendale via Aeon)
‘Inside a Texas nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America.…’ ( Christa Hillstrom via The Atavist Magazine)
A maniac, even. Possibly a sociopath. It’s hard to tell.
Yes, he might destroy the very fabric of this country. Yes, his grasp of foreign policy seems similar to that of a petulant four-year-old. Yes, his key advisor is a guy who started a white nationalist website and who looks like a hobbit crossed with an angry radish.
It is, I’ll admit, entirely possible he’ll start another war, or several wars, or even a world war because Melania finally escaped, or his sons were revealed to be Uday and Qusay Hussein in disguise, or something.
But he’s just one guy. One freaking guy. You have got to stop coming here, day after day, screaming into me about him. Especially using that many curse words.
I think we can both admit at this point that the screaming isn’t working. The screaming isn’t making you feel any better.
So, I’m asking you, as someone who loves you—stop it. Stop the screaming. Be proactive about your life. Go do something about it.
Do anything. Do something small—gaze at your normal-sized hands and feel superior about it. Wear a dead orange badger on your head and make yourself laugh. Start a drinking game where you drink whenever the Constitution gets violated. Okay, that last one’s not a great idea, oh man, I’m already drunk…’ (via McSweeneys)
“Hey, Kristi Noem, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Here’s your legacy: corruption and chaos. Parents and children tear-gassed. Moms and nurses, U.S. citizens getting shot in the face. Now that you’re gone, don’t think you get to just walk away. I guarantee you, you will still be held accountable.” (Illinois governor J.B.Pritzker)
‘For weeks, it has been clear that Trump was possibly going to violate the Constitution in a hugely consequential way. Why did the Democrats, protectors of the Constitutional order from a would-be dictator, not launch a loud campaign of their own to warn Trump off, and raise public awareness of the lawless and likely reckless act this President was visibly preparing to take?…’ (via TDaily Kos)
‘President Trump is holding onto a speech detailing extraterrestrial life and spaceships, according to his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who said the president is waiting for the right time to deliver it.…’ ( via The Hill)
’One of the blessings of living to be 94 is that you get a real sense of what your legacy might be. As early as the ‘70s, the legendary psychiatrist Paul McHugh was warning that hormones and surgery were unsafe treatments for gender dysphoria—something few people wanted to hear. But now, the tide has turned. As The Free Press reported just last week, a detransitioner in the United States has won a malpractice suit for the first time. When Madeleine Kearns caught up with McHugh recently, he said: “The great thing about my life is I’ve been part of my times…’ (Madeleine Kearns via Free Press)
‘President Donald Trump spent the past year using fear and intimidation to keep Hill Republicans in line, with considerable success. Now those tactics are starting to lose their bite — thanks to a small group of Republicans with nothing to lose.
The reasons why this handful of GOP lawmakers feel empowered to spurn their president and their party vary. But they are launching mini-rebellions with increasing frequency. It’s causing headaches for party leaders who want to keep tight control of the legislative agenda in an election year and anxiety among rank-and-file Republicans who are facing intense pressure to stick with Trump.…’ (Meredith Lee Hill via POLITICO)
Unfortunately and ominously, if they can’t be kept in the fold, the Orange Menace has that much more impetus to undermine the electoral process in the midterms.
‘Our culture hasn’t yet been fully subsumed by nihilism, but you can also see it everywhere in different forms: in the mass shooters who seem to care about nothing other than performing for others online. In the influencers Photoshopping themselves into Epstein-file photos to get likes or promote their SoundCloud account. In the overnight viral sensations who become brands and try to hawk a predatory meme coin. In the Super Bowl ads for gambling apps. In a culture of AI slop and brain rot, and in an administration that prioritizes propaganda and graft over governing. It threatens to rip us apart for good if we let it.…’ (Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic)
‘The so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion. As the name suggests, looksmaxxers share a monomaniacal commitment to improving their physical appearance. They trade stories of breaking their legs in order to gain extra inches, “bonesmashing” their faces with hammers to heighten their cheekbones, injecting steroids and testosterone to inflate their muscles, and even smoking crystal meth to suppress their appetite. If you had to pick a single corner of the internet that best captures the vices of the Trump era, you couldn’t beat the looksmaxxers. Perhaps more than any other group, they reveal the depth of the moral crisis that confronts young men today…
The looksmaxxing movement—ideologically incoherent but rife with juvenile racism—echoes the ongoing Groyperization of the American right. This is particularly evident in the growing antagonism that certain factions express toward Vance. Fuentes, for example, sounded like a looksmaxxer himself when he criticized the vice president last year. “He’s visibly obese and very ugly. He’s got a fat face, no jawline, no chin,” Fuentes said, before shifting to a more familiar topic for him: “His wife and kids are not white!”
Looksmaxxing grew out of the online culture of “incels,” or involuntary celibates, a term that emerged in the 2010s. United by their resentment of women, incels tend to see attractiveness as a straightforward function of genetics—millimeters, symmetry, skin color—and therefore out of their control. Looksmaxxers hold a similarly superficial view of beauty as a kind of rigid mathematics with a single, knowable solution. But they believe that this makes it malleable: One can “ascend” to a higher plane of attractiveness with enough money, effort, and perhaps the willingness to dabble with crystal meth…’ (Thomas Chatterton Williams via The Atlantic)
‘Biometric locks like face recognition are easy to set up—but thanks to a legal loophole, they’re easier for law enforcement to bypass than a passcode.…’ ( via PCMag)
On an iPhone, you can selectively turn it off for the phone unlock on wakeup, but continue to utilize it for all its other benefits (passkeys, tap-to-pay etc.).
‘President Donald Trump’s hasty climbdown after weeks of threats about seizing Greenland from Denmark’s control has not done much to improve the fraying transatlantic relationship.
In fact, the bad feelings across Europe have only deepened as the president and other administration officials have, in ways large and small, continued to poke politicians and entire populations in the proverbial eye. The provocations come as European officials prepare for the Munich Security Conference this weekend where key topics will include the transatlantic relationship and whether the continent can stand on its own without Washington’s help.
…’ ( via POLITICO)
