Chris Brockett

Australia's man did the flowerbeds. New Zealand had sent a chappie to labor in the gardens too. Their American accents were vaguely southern, and they tended to avoid officials from below the Mason-Dixon line. Aussie Jack was a lady-killer, though, and was sleeping his way through every Republican wife who still had a beating heart under her twinset and pearls, and skimming quite a bit of information on the side. He called himself a "martyr to his duty." He and New Zealand Craig were drowning their sorrows by working steadily through all of Florida's craft beers, one microbrewery at a time. Their relationship was significantly more harmonious than that of the clandestine representatives of Argentina and the Mossad, who had inadvertently dated for several weeks before mutually discovering one another's identities, and now existed (as bartender and assistant golf green superintendent respectively) in mutually icy disdain, lending further stress to cocktail hour. She'd heard Brazil's guy in an unwisely loud Portuguese phone call describing the fiasco as "Eichmann, on the rocks." buttondown.com

in which i imagine the life of a spy at mar a lago, in a short story

buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Depleted oil reserve leaves US exposed as Iran war pushes up prices Donald Trump has not fulfilled a vow to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that was drained by Joe Biden

TIL Trump didn't bother to refill the strategic petroleum reserve last year when oil was dirt cheap. what can you even say www.ft.com/content/d546...

Photo of a cuneiform tablet fragment shaped a bit like an irregular diamond. It preserves nearly 20 incomplete lines of text separated by a horizontal ruling

There's a broken cuneiform tablet from the Old Babylonian period, nearly 4,000 years ago, which preserves a tiny portion of a dialogue between two friends.

It feels a bit like the conversations I've been having for the past week, so I wanted to share it.

These are not ripple effects. More like a tsunami.

I think people who say things like this, especially prominent people with power, should be shamed and shunned and reviled — cancelled, if you will.

“Free speech culture” disapproves of that sentiment — says that it’s worse than what Ogles said.

Judge it thus.

Article 25 material.

See @histoftech.bsky.social for more groaners than you will be able to handle. bsky.app/profile/hist...

From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction In the future of work discourse, AI is touted as the ultimate productivity amplifier. Yet, beneath the efficiency gains lie subtle erosions of human expertise and agency. This paper shifts focus from ...

Congrats to @upolehsan.bsky.social and team. Their CHI'26 paper won an Honorable Mention award!

"From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing
Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction" (arxiv.org/abs/2601.21920) dives into the AI-as-Amplifier paradox, explained in comic form.

Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it The company tells Platformer it will let experts opt out of the controversial feature — but how different is it than what every other AI company is doing?

Wait, what?! Grammarly made an AI persona of me and all these other journalists?!!!!!

Thank you @caseynewton.bsky.social for shaming them into at least offering a paltry optout— although obviously that is not enough.

www.platformer.news/grammarly-ex...

re-upping this one. a depressing thread for depressing times.

Psychopath.

The scary part is we are all prepared to believe it.

Conspiracy theory: They have tracking devices in them. Wearers know they can't go anywhere, or dump them for that matter, without Trump knowing.😀

I honestly think the majority of my income from being an author comes from handselling my books at conventions. I make far more from that then advances and royalties.

For some publishers, I may be their biggest customer for my books.

Lost page of the Archimedes Palimpsest identified in Blois, central France A page long believed to have been lost from the Archimedes Palimpsest, one of the most important surviving manuscripts of antiquity, has been identified at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, central F...

Lost page of the Archimedes Palimpsest identified in Blois, central France.
phys.org/news/2026-03...

FBI subpoenas election records in Arizona, expanding 2020 inquiry The Republican leader of Arizona's state Senate said he shared election-related records with the FBI last week.

“What the Trump administration appears to be pursuing now is not a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. It is the weaponization of federal law enforcement in service of crackpots and lies."

*Raises hand* I wrote an article about this very thing happening in the 1920s.

Antonovich, Jacqueline. “White Coats, White Hoods: The Medical Politics of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 439-469.

somebody i know met the fascist NEH head McDonald at a DC event not long ago &, knowing nothing abt academia or how it works (I do not at all fault for that!), told him about me & my wife’s work and then texted me this. “30k grants for interesting projects” are the gifts he could bestow at parties

My name is used as "expert" reviewer on Grammarly, so I uploaded an unpublished paper and asked "myself" for feedback. I got generic writing advice.

The feedback from their fake version of @katestarbird.bsky.social and *colleagues* also gave generic advice about using examples.

I'm insulted.

Nearly 6 hours since a GOP congressman said “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” not a single member of Republican leadership in the House will weigh in.

Animals in Premodern Japan This Open Access book is presented with an outlook on current developments in Japanese Animal Ethics and how Andō Shōeki's depictions of non-human animals.

🔓
Melissa Ann Kaul: Animals in Premodern Japan. The Encyclopaedia of Andô Shôeki 安藤昌益 (1703-1762), 2026

doi.org/10.1007/978-...

"Jews don't belong in American society."

Imagine a sitting member of Congress tweeting that. You can't. Thankfully, it'd never happen. And *if* it did, it'd be the end of their career and the biggest story in America.

But Ogles can say this about Muslims without any censure.

In the meantime no candidate is seated on the grounds that the election is in dispute. The resulting lawsuits drag through the courts for the next 2 years before being mooted by a new election. Rinse and repeat. 2/2

This is a harbinger of what might happen during the 2026 elections. Claiming precedent that the FBI can do this, the regime seizes ballots in selected districts before they can be counted on the grounds of investigating fraud. 1/2

Lindsey’s diplomacy working wonders in UAE.

During the 1973 oil crisis, I got to see middle-class Japanese women discard all pretense at civility to fight over sugar and toilet paper in an Aoyama supermarket. I wonder what bizarre scenes the coming supply chain disruptions will throw on our cave walls this time round.

I suspect that the DOJ is afraid that if they prosecute anyone, the defense team will demand the release of all the Epstein files.

Did anybody else have to memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales? I was annoyed at the time, but darn if I don't think about it every springtime.
For anybody who hasn't read it, it basically says that when sweet spring showers come and the birds start singing, people want to travel (1/2)

Jomon pottery sitting on a black turntable with a black background setup behind it. A camera and flash are connected to a studio stand and a laptop is showing a live view from the camera.

Got a chance to do a bit of #photogrammetry work with some Final Jomon period pottery 🏺 (~2000yrs ago) from the Sugisawa site in Shiga Prefecture using the big turntable last week. Was a nice refresher on how all the bits a pieces of the system connect together. #Japan #archaeology #Jomon #3D

maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing here but this is the wildest shit I've ever heard a white South African say and I study racism for a living