Bill

as i have always said, the two most controversial public figures alive today are Timothee Chalamet and Bam Adebayo

Punishing student protestors only to get mad at them for not protesting anymore reminds me of how survivors are sued and harassed for coming forward only to then be blamed for not wanting to name and report their perpetrators anymore

(I am taking breakfast sandwich to mean some combination of egg, cheese, and breakfast meat. If lox (or smoked trout!) and cream cheese counts, then a bagel is best, but only for those ingredients.)

Biscuit or tortilla if you're somewhere where they're good. A bagel is one of the perfect meals for me, but every breakfast sandwich bagel I've had was worse than either a cream cheese bagel or the same breakfast ingredients on any other form of bread. The pizza burgers of bagels.

Halfway through the season, Mr. Garrison's Trump appeared as a standup comic. As the crowd chants "Douche! Douche! Douche!" he struts onstage with a microphone, as cocky as Dane Cook. "So I'm standing in line at the airport, waitin' in security because of all the freakin' Muslims," he begins, and then, when his fans hoot in joy, he tries for something nastier. "And the T.S.A. security people all look like black thugs from the inner city, and I'm thinking, Oh, good, you're gonna protect us?" When racist jokes get only bigger laughs, he switches to gags about sticking his fingers into women's butts and their "clams." Finally, some white women walk out. "Where did I lose you, honey?" he taunts them from the stage. "You've been O.K. with the 'Fuck 'Em All to Death' and all the Mexican and Muslim shit, but fingers in the ass did it for you. Cool. Just wanted to see where your line was."

The piece also reminded me of how South Park— itself a big part of the edgy-nihilism, feminism-scorning wave!— managed to nail this particular phenomenon. (This is from my 2017 piece How Jokes Won the Election www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...:

This is a good & infuriating piece about a putrid phenomenon — one intensified by all the punditry of the last decade that rolled its eyes at feminist analysis. There’s ALWAYS been a living available to women who vibed as “not like other girls,” in every decade, especially in the media

This is double decker, actually: I met Caitlin online (LiveJournal originally); but the reason I was in New England when she moved here is because I moved here after breaking up with an ex I had met through a previous ex I had met online.

Got married.

AI Used to Promote Non-Existent Evacuation Flights From the Middle East - bellingcat A Dutch newspaper published a story about private evacuation flights from Dubai, but the photo shows signs of AI generation and the flights appear never to have existed.

De Telegraaf, the Netherlands’ largest newspaper, recently published an interview with a woman promoting €1,600 seats on private evacuation flights from Dubai. Bellingcat found that her image was likely AI-generated, and flight data suggests no such plane took off. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

Blue I

Blue I https://www.wikiart.org/en/joan-miro/blue-i-1961

i bet this shit sounds magical if you're fucking stupid

ooooh temu figured out it's now shorthand for "cheap off-brand garbage" and is not happy about it

Kostanski should be the go-to director for all genre remakes, including but not limited to Waxwork, Super Mario Brothers, and the Lord of the Rings.

(Definitely related to a larger problem, the insistence that the characters we like are The Best At Stuff. I hate "Tony Stark is a genius futurist," and I'm not crazy about the "this superguy is smart, so must be The Smartest." Wonder Man wouldn't be cooler if he was Brando.)

I get that after decades of superguys flying around, we had to scrawl in the margins "oh, I guess he's immune to friction, and so are his clothes and people he carries," but this "extrapolate the power to its ~logical conclusion~" stuff is so cringey and reminds me of DMing exasperating players.

A thought about comics: "what if this guy was even more powerful" is usually not a fun story, but I am super tired of it in the following form:

Bob can talk to butterflies. 50 years into Bob comics, new writer reads about the butterfly effect and decides Bob can control future events.

there was also a Stanford study that found that a surge in AI slop by lazy people actually created significantly more work for others who had to decipher and correct it

this "I'm being efficient" (but not really) vibes well with the American obsession with artifice and appearing productive

I'll tell you, if a woman who cared about sports had written this, it would have been taken as evidence that she didn't understand sports.

Oh interesting, how so?

(This is a subset of a larger problem—definitions that will not actually help the student understand the word as it's used in the text—but it's the subset that should be immediately recognizable as useless. Some books have them in every chapter.)

One of the things I never get used to in editing lower-grade textbooks is how often the writers have written vocab definitions that are *descriptions* instead of *definitions*, like (these are made up for anonymity) defining "dog" as "loud and furry" or "cloud" as "white and fluffy."

Probably one of those things where it only looks funny in print, but it's actually pronounced completely differently. Like "cah PAY town."

Jim Cramer suggests on CNBC that Trump could “bomb Tehran into the Stone Age” until Iran reopens the strait, citing U.S. bombings of North Vietnam in the 1970s. Carl Quintanilla points out to him that Hanoi won that war.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis by Aidan Quinn YouTube video by 𝕺𝖕𝖍𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖆 𝖉𝖊 𝕰𝖑𝖘𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖗𝖊

I'd totally forgotten about learning about Kafka from Aidan Quinn. (Seriously, I got a couple books out of the library after the umpteenth time this played on MTV. I was 16! Perfect age for it.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Gj...

Probably jjigae soon, and I want to do like a pho grilled cheese/French dip/thingmajig, like braised beef/cilantro/mint/chile in a grilled cheese sandwich with some pho to dip it in.

(I've been trying to do less takeout without having to cook every day, which I didn't used to mind doing. Caitlin made her meat sauce a couple weeks ago, then I made a shepherd's pie with lamb shoulder and pearl onions, now this, and of course, soon the corned beeves. Just ordered the fancy butter.)

Naturally the warmest day in five months is the one when I need to first roast, then simmer for 24 hours, two roosters and an old hen.

(I'm making chicken pot pie. Or I will be.)

The Singularity is upon us: Apple's AI summarized a text message that read "I'm still down to clown if you are" to.... "clown event still possible."

bsky.app/profile/fant...

Insurrectionist Brunch: Trumpists plotted to deploy military on U.S. soil Before the 2024 election, a cadre of MAGA loyalists met over brunch to plot ways for Trump to use the military domestically.

This is just astonishingly great reporting.

All of the crises the White House has claimed over the last 14 months were planned in advance. All of them.

And however much contempt you have for media outlets who reverently relayed Trump's claim to have no relation to Project 2025, it isn't enough.