🤖Mitch’s newsletter 3.5.2026
🤖Mitch’s newsletter 3.5.2026
Magnificent photos of “big tusker” elephants, by Johan Siggesson. Big tuskers are elephants with tusks so large they scrape the ground. There are only 25 big tuskers left in the world. ♦︎
United Airlines can now boot passengers who refuse to use headphones with their devices. Toss ’em out the door at 30,000 feet. Nobody wants to hear your shitty garage-band hip-hop. ♦︎
When prunes tried to rebrand as “dried plums.” Listening to this podcast inspired me to get a container of prunes to add to my morning oatmeal. They were tasty, healthy, and induced no undesired gastrointestinal acceleration. ♦︎
They Haven’t Even Started Spending Yet. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on buying elections represent unnoticeable amounts of money to oligarchs like Musk, writes Hamilton Nolan. For oligarchs, hundreds of millions of dollars is like a normal person spending $75. ♦︎
Psychopathy is a zombie idea. Why does it cling on?
Zombie ideas are social science theories that have been thoroughly debunked, but which are still widely believed, even by social scientists, writes Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen at Aeon. Race science is an extremely toxic example.
Psychopaths are widely believed to have no emotions or empathy, yet research shows they have both.
Doesn’t explain why some people are serial killers and otherwise monsters.
People want to believe that psychopaths are broken people — not like us — but they are just people who made bad choices. ♦︎
‘The Epstein files won’t knock him out’: what Anthony Scaramucci learned in Trump’s inner circle
Like Trump, Scaramucci was from the outer boroughs of New York and found himself among the privileged elites of Manhattan. That makes their backgrounds similar, even though Trump was born to wealth and Scaramucci’s parents were working class.
Early on, it seems, Scaramucci realised that the privileged elites were really no smarter than he was. “You have to get comfortable with being an outsider. Trump is an outsider, but he’s an uncomfortable outsider, and so he has a chip on his shoulder. He’s angry that he can’t get into the salons of the uber-wealthy, the establishment. So now he’s trying to lord over them. He couldn’t get into certain golf clubs that the blue bloods were members of, so he built himself golf courses.”
♦︎
A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish
Jason Lee threatened a national publication that planned to publish a profile of him that included his involvement in Scientology, even though the profile was highly complimentary, the bits about Scientology didn’t make him look bad, and he cooperated in the whole interview process, including talking at some length about Scientology.
The national publication spiked the article, which now appears on Defector.com: A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish
But why does writer Nate Rogers suppress the names of the national publication and the editor who spiked the story? That seems tribal — journalists protecting each other — and maybe like Rogers doesn’t want to threaten future paychecks.
Also, it’s tempting to think what Lee did is an example of the Streisand effect, but it could work to Lee’s benefit by intimidating future publications from bringing up his Scientology connections. And also intimidate publications from bringing up Scientology in profiles of other celebrities linked with the church. So a win for Lee and for Scientology. ♦︎
America isn’t exceptional — it’s the exception
America does worse than other developed countries for quality-of-life metrics, Amanda Shendruk writes: We spend more on health but don’t live as long, we put the most people in prison — by far (land of the free?! Ha!), we’re alone in not giving paid time off to new parents (family values?! Ha!). ♦︎
