JD Vance says aliens are ‘demons’ — With war escalating in Iran, gas and grocery prices soaring, and U.S. airports in chaos amid a partial government shutdown, Vance thought it was a good use of his time to appear on a podcast to share his deranged UFO theories and obsession.
Market participation is exhausting
Society is optimized for people who love to haggle and think you should haggle for everything, says Cory Doctorow.
“For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like ‘revealed preferences,’ the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a ‘revealed preference’ for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook.”
‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC. “At a sparsely attended Conservative Political Action Conference, young Republicans were eager to start the post-Trump era.” By Nathan Tyler Pemberton at the New York Times
Maybe MAGA is dying — but will be replaced by something worse. These young Republicans still seem attached to nativism and LGBTQ-phobia, with resurgent anti-Semitism added to the brew.
On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse
The enshittification story, at its most powerful, describes a process by which platforms that once served users well came to exploit them. But this framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled.
— Tara Tarakiyee.
The Edmund Fitzgerald Teaches Men How to Feel
Michael Sebastian writes about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the historical event), “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (the seven-minute folk ballad that somehow climbed to the top of the charts in the disco era), his lifelong and life-changing fascination with the song and ship, and men’s love of shipwrecks.
You’re being rude. Put away your phone. “Log off, tune in, go out.” By Robinson Meyer
I sniff teabags before I make a cuppa. Take a teabag out the box, hold it up to my nose and inhale deeply - God, it smells so good. Then pop it in my mug. Harmless practice. However I have gradually become aware of colleagues giving me a funny look and maybe I have to stop.
The Escape Orbit by James White (Ace Books 1965) cover by Jack Gaughan.
Homemaking cover for McCall’s. Circa 1950.
I am adding all these to my vocabulary. I don’t know what #11 means but I will use it anyway.
I think I don’t like the new TARDIS design. (Shared privately by a friend. Thanks, friend!)
Gregory Peck and wife Véronique with his Best Actor Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
This comes up in my feeds every few years and it cracks me up every time. Not funny for the deer tho.
Commodore SX-64 (1983)
