Kevin Roose @kevin@theforkiverse.com asked: “tell me the last thing you bought for under $50 that radically improved your life.”
I replied: “This $5 dog poop bag holder. After the dog does her business and you scoop it up, tie a knot in the top of the full bag, hang the knotted bag from the handle of the leash, continue the walk without having to hold the poop bag in your hands.”
The thread is fun to read.
Kevin is tech columnist for the New York Times and podcasts on Hard Fork.
Feeling like you have a target number looming over you discourages you from abandoning books if you’re not enjoying them. How can you abandon a book when you’ve already read 100 pages?! You’ll fall behind on your goal! Starting a new book feels like a commitment, so you’re careful about which books you start.
Whereas if you feel free to quit reading, then you’re more likely to try new authors, genres and themes. Expanding your reading is more important than hitting an arbitrary number.
Another reason I don’t hold with setting a target number for books to read each year is that it discourages you from tackling a big giant enormous book. I read Ron Chernow’s massive, 1,200-page biography of Mark Twain last year and loved it. I would not have been so eager to jump into that book it if I felt like it would put me behind on a target goal.
I try to set myself a target of reading a certain number of pages every day. And if I miss my goal, I try not to sweat it too much. Last week I barely read any books at all, just from adjusting to being back at work after the holiday break. But I picked it up this weekend.
You can see how fragile and pathetic these men are. They are so desperate to subjugate and suppress people who disagree with them politically. They seemed to think that once they were in power, the public would love and admire them for their power. Instead, the vast majority of Americans see them for what they are: pathetic, insecure man-babies in way over their heads.
I loved the novel “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley, which is a lighthearted workplace comedy and paranormal romance about colonialism and multigenerational trauma. You would not think those things go together but they do, splendidly well. 📚
Greg Morris: “The weird part isn’t that the indie web exists. It’s that we ever thought centralised platforms were a better idea.” I’d like for this to be right. But people still like their centralized platforms — their Facebook, Threads, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The indie web is, unfortunately, still a rounding error compared with the numbers and influence of centralized platform users.
I finished reading “Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell,” an anthology of several novels and short stories. I read two of the novels: “Wasp” and “Sinister Barrier.” A few months ago I read one more by Russell: “Men, Martians and Machines.” Classic sci-fi from the 1930s-50s.
I’ve watched the rise of dictation tools for the Mac with some interest. I dictate more than half of what I write into the iPhone — which is a lot — email, text messages, notes to myself — but if I have a full-size keyboard, it’s easier for me to type than dictate.
Heather Cox Richardson compares the murders of Renee Good and Ahmad Arbery, the jogger gunned down by white supremacists in 2021. In both cases, defenders of the shooters released video of the incident which those defenders claimed would exonerate the shooters. But in fact the videos showed the killings for what they were — murder.
In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “Fucking btch” after he killed her.
The thread that runs through both is the assumption that an American exercising their constitutional rights must submit, without question, to a white man holding a gun.
A team of experts evicted a 550-pound bear that was squatting in the basement of an Altadena, Calif., home for more than a month. A member of the team crawled into the basement and fired paintballs filled with vegetable oil at the bear’s butt. Watch this Facebook reel of the bear making its exit.
The Rewatchables podcast has never done Clerks or Mallrats. Shocking!
Republicans somehow managed to sprint from “we’re trying to protect women in sports” straight to defending a woman being shot in the head three times at point blank range for trying to drive away from a masked thug.
Mitchellaneous did not go out at the usual time yesterday morning. When I noticed this, I poked around for a few minutes looking for a technical reason for the problem. Eventually, I figured it out — I had scheduled it for 2025. D’oh! 🤦♂️It’s coming up in a few minutes.
Chris Arnade walks 45 miles in three days through New Jersey and Staten Island. “New Jersey has pockets of Manhattan’s density, but with LA’s reliance on cars… For people who like it, that reality contains the best of both (Manhattan’s localized variety with LA’s space and freedom), and for those who don’t, it contains the worst (Manhattan’s crowding, with LA’s traffic).”
Billy Crystal’s apartment in When Harry Met Sally is over the top even by NY movie apartment standards. That’s a billionaire apartment. Billy is clearly money-laundering. As is Hugh Grant in Notting Hill — no way he affords a flat in Notting Hill based on income from a failing travel bookstore.
In the 80s, VHS video dating services were the future.
At a bar downstairs at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, I recently found myself next to a 67-year-old man who had come to town to get a tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo in question was of Yosemite Falls, in California. As best I could understand it, he was getting branded with the landmark because he was enmeshed in a situationship that wasn’t working out. He and this woman had apparently taken a memorable trip to Yosemite earlier this year, and he hoped that—after he showed her the tattoo—a tarnished spark would be rekindled. I wished him all the luck in the world as he took his leave of me, and for a few minutes, I was alone among the chirping slot machines, nursing a gin and soda and pondering how no place on Earth can make you believe the impossible quite like Las Vegas.
I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.
A well-reported, well written article.
Let’s Call a Murder a Murder. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
Arista’s Ullal: Ethernet is the ‘eventual winner’ for AI networking. Ethernet is overtaking InfiniBand in AI data centers as inference and automation reshape infrastructure, says Jayshree Ullal, Arista CEO and chairperson. My latest on Fierce Network.
Video shows ICE agent in Minneapolis fired at driver as vehicle veered past him. The video shows that the ICE agent was next to the vehicle, not in its path. He was in no danger.
The news is depressing and stressful and many people avoid it. But these news avoiders get their news secondhand, writes Mary Retta at Columbia Journalism Review:
This can involve hearing about the news from friends or family, or “seeing discussions of things that happened in the news on Facebook describing ‘that thing that Trump said’”—that is, indirect exposure, [says Benjamin Toff—an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and the author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.] “After all, you need to be exposed to news often to be able to actively avoid it.” …. So-called news avoiders are, he argued, for the most part still regularly consuming information: “What makes them news avoiders is having this experience of regularly avoiding it, but that isn’t the same thing as screening out news altogether from their lives.
One of the strangest moments to emerge from the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was the flurry of images posted by President Trump on Truth Social. It felt a bit like a student who can’t decide which spring break photos look cutest, so they just upload them all…. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands.
A primary motive of this administration is boosting their clout on social media. It’s simultaneously pathetic and terrifying. “… standing out online often demands being awful—channeling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories.”
What I’m arguing is that the Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. Many of its members are deeply addicted to it. We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.
Overexposure to online engagement has cooked the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world. This is not exclusively an American phenomenon…. But in the US government, poster brain feels endemic. The Trump administration is made up of a cabinet of posters. For many, that’s how they won Trump’s attention. The head of the FBI, for example, is a podcaster—that’s his main qualifier for the job.
Parker Molloy, a trans woman journalist, received death threats and suspended her BlueSky account for a day after she made a post that it was weird that somebody modified an Animal Crossing cartoon mascot to give it boobs.
Why Young Men Are Souring on Trump.
The disaffected young men who helped elect Trump are fed up with high prices, worried about A.I., and frustrated by the president’s neocon turn. And, according to exclusive new polling data, they’re souring on Trump just as they turned on Joe Biden.
Encouraging news — not just about waning support for the bumbling crime boss, but also that young men have good reasons for opposing him.
Now the Democrats have to get their thumbs out of their asses and start supporting the people instead of oligarchs.
I discovered this separately myself and am pleased to see validation. Articles on how to beat insomnia tell you that if you’re having trouble sleeping, you should get up out of bed and do something else. That is 100% not true.
John Scalzi:
No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a meditation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?
Maybe I’d enjoy the movie more if I saw it again today. Maybe I’d find it too painful to watch.
The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Eighteen: Starship Troopers
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on how to build institutional trust. These insights will be important to rebuilding United States institutions (whose decline was well underway before Trump occupied the White House, though Trump accelerated the process drastically).
Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity. I read this article to scoff at this as yet another example of toxic hustle culture. But how are nicotine pouches different from my own coffee habit?
The rise of the troll state. Maduro Was Offered Up To The Algorithm. By Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.
Grok creates non-consensual porn as regulators circle. According to the Financial Times, X is now “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.”
A list of predictions made in 1926 about 2026. Marriages will be easy to cancel, beef will disappear, there will be so many cars none of them will be able to move, people will work to age 100, breakfast will be summonable by the touch of a button (hello, Doordash) and Americans will get rid of politicians and enjoy having less money. “… the American is going to learn that it is better an easier to enjoy a little money than to turn a lot of money into more money still.” Oh, 1926, you had such high hopes for us.
Data centers manifest their destiny in middle America. Data center developers are heading west to find land and power for their projects. Companies like Meta have launched PR campaigns in an apparent attempt to get ahead of local opposition. They’re running ads to pitch data centers as great for local communities. Job growth is a key part of the pitch — thousands of contractors are needed to build a facility. But those jobs may not last long-term once the data center is operational.
The Clicks Communicator is a BlackBerry for your phone The Clicks Communicator is a simplified phone that’s a reminder of an old-school BlackBerry. It has a physical thumb keyboard, and it’s designed for communications. It’s expensive, though — $499. I am skeptical that people are willing to spend that much money for a phone that does less.
Brown Stage Capitalism. Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ describes how tech platforms (and everything else) went down the sewer.
Telcos brace for coming AI storm. Operators like Orange Business and AT&T are bullish on AI, despite talk of a bubble. Successful operators focus on a disciplined approach based on prioritizing ROI, business value and controlling data. AI “Pacesetters” that maintain business discipline “outperform their peers across every measure of AI value,” according to a Cisco report. My latest on Fierce Network.
Hacked humanoid robots are an emerging security threat. A Recorded Future research report warns that compromised robots could be used for industrial espionage — or even physical attacks. China is rapidly scaling its humanoid robotics sector, with projections suggesting up to 300 million units could eventually be deployed to offset population decline. Telcos have a responsibility and opportunity to secure these IoT assets. By Mitch Wagner (that’s me!)
if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow their orders, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don’t have to keep following their orders. So…Happy Liberation Day?
— The Post-American Internet, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Returning to work after a 16-day holiday break.
The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators.. Tim Wu’s ‘The Age of Extraction’ chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users.
We Are the Bad Guys. “The swaggering threat to global stability is us.” — Hamilton Nolan
the myth of merit in the managerial class. Merit doesn’t get you hired or promoted for professional and managerial jobs.
The U.S. invasion of Venezuela is going to be a disaster from which we may never recover. Venezuela may prove to be the downfall of the U.S., the way Afghanistan was for the U.S.S.R. (and could have been for the US — having dodged a bullet on that one, just barely, we have now put the barrel of the gun in our mouths and pulled the trigger again).
The only winners of this war will be Trump and his kleptocracy.
Russia will take Ukraine, China will take Taiwan, and Trump will just wave them through.
Congress needs to act to stop this illegal war and impeach Trump. But Congress will do nothing. Congress is as impotent as the Roman Senate under the Caesars.
Trump’s Risky War in Venezuela.. By going around Congress, the president is showing contempt for the will of the public.
Trump’s Cuts Are About to Make Health Care Even Worse. Medicaid cuts will make all of America look more like Mississippi, with a shorter life expectancy than Bangladesh.
The words “trust” and “Meta” don’t belong in the same sentence unless that sentence also includes the word “don’t.”
I don’t mean to brag but I just read one page of tvtropes.org for about a minute, and now I’m just going to walk away from the computer.
RIP Isiah Whitlock, Jr., 71, a prolific and talented character actor whose roles include ultra-corrupt State Sen. Clay Davis on “The Wire.” Davis’s catchphrase was a unique interpretation of the word “shit” — “sheeeeeeeit”
Here’s a YouTube supercut of Whitlock dialogue on “The Wire."
One of my favorite roles of his was a supporting character in the 2011 dark comedy “Cedar Rapids,” which starred Ed Helms. Davis played a nerdy midwestern insurance agent who’s obsessed with “The Wire.”
I’m re-reading the first volume of the Aubrey-Maturin series, “Master and Commander.” I think I read the first three volumes 25-30 years ago, and then stopped for some reason. I barely remember any of it.
I’m enjoying the book but I also find it overwhelming. The author, Patrick O’Brian, throws out a lot of nautical terms and rarely explains any of it.
So I did a web search on “how to read Patrick O’Brian,” and saw this advice:
First read-through just enjoy the ride and feel the ambience. You can enjoy the story without understanding all details. Looking up everything just makes reading too slow for a first pass.
Next circumnavigation you can start looking up things and understand the subtle jokes. After the tenth round there are still some that you missed.
And that’s what I’m doing.
I don’t know whether I’ll read the series again — let alone ten times!
Manton Reece makes observations and prescriptions for the future of open social networks and the fediverse, which I wholeheartedly agree with. We need to break out of silos. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are silos, but so are Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, other ActivityPub platforms and Tumblr.
Physics operates on the reductionist principle that the universe can be entirely explained by the interactions of particles and forces. But that principle breaks down for living things, writes Adam Frank at The Atlantic:
Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.
This is an interesting article, but I fear it might also be junk science.
Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025. By Cal Newport.
Neal Stephenson explores the fascinating science behind bullwhips. Bullwhips relate to a medical mystery in post World War II Germany, where multiple men went to doctors reporting “floaters” in their eyes that turned out to be nearly microscopic copper filament. P
I don’t get why a person would want to buy an AI recording gadget, for $179. Why not just use your phone?
Now you can read an excerpt of from “Winds of Wycaro," the book-within-a-TV-series whose author, Carol Sturka, is the main character of “Plur1bus.” “She would know that voice anywhere. As smooth as wyld bourbon and deep as the Robrionian Trench.”
My fortune cookie was smashed and missing a fortune. This seems ominous.
Here’s where you can watch the censored “60 Minutes” report about CECOT, the brutal El Salvadoran prison where the United States is sending migrants to be tortured and abused. Trump supporter Bari Weiss, who now heads CBS News, killed the report, even though it had been approved by strict editorial and legal review. However, the report aired in Canada, and is now all over the Internet.
“There’s a sort of pride around the poor conditions, and around the suffering.”
“It’s the year 2025 and Americans have to watch a bootlegged international version of a news program because it was censored here in our country to protect a criminal president.” — @jojofromjerz
J. D. Vance Fails a Simple Moral Test. The vice president welcomes anti-Semites into the Republican coalition.
Anyone with links to the livestreams could view them — no credentials required, as reported by 404 Media.
“I watched a man leave his house in the morning in New York…. watched a woman jogging alone on a forest trail in Georgia. This trail had multiple cameras, and I could watch a man rollerblade and then take a break to watch rollerblading videos on his phone. How? Because the camera’s AI automatically zoomed in on it — just like it zoomed in on a couple arguing at a street market in Atlanta.”
On reddit.com/r/Judaism, I asked what folks are doing for Christmas, and the thread is interesting
I’ve converted my shikse wife to the all-American Jewish tradition of going out for Chinese food. But the restaurant has been packed the past few years. I’m sure they’re not all Jews — the goyim must be catching on.
I love podcasts. I listen to about two hours of podcasts a day. Most of that is while walking the dog, and I add a few more minutes while driving (which I don’t do a lot of — just a couple of short hops a week) and doing chores.
I’ve been hearing over the past few weeks that podcasts are moving to video and YouTube. It seems alien and unnatural to me. Podcasting is, to me, a listening medium. I guess people have it on as video wallpaper in the background when they do things around the house, or in some kinds of jobs at work, the way stereotypical housewives used to do with daytime TV.
So many of my interests are and always have been niche interests. Science fiction. Books. Blogging. Maybe now audio podcasts are joining that list.
I listened to some Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner 2000-Year-Old Man routines this morning and now I’m going to be talking in a Mel Brooks Old Jewish Man voice the rest of the day.
“On December 24, 2025, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, will celebrate seventy years of tracking Santa’s sleigh.” – Heather Cox Richardson
I’ve decided to take a break from posting memes, historical photos and other found images on mitchwagner.com and in Mitch’s newsletter. You can find them on mitchipedia.tumblr.com and @mitch@hachyderm.io and mitchwagner.bsky.social and facebook.com/mitch.wagner.
Here’s something I saw while I was walking the dog: This fairy village, which we pass by every few days. They’ve arranged it nicely since the last time I stopped to take a close look.
Natasha Dangoor at The Wall Street Jourrnal:
When Carlos Gomez’s recent flight from Guadalajara was delayed, he asked a gate attendant why. It wasn’t weather or crew shortages. There were 25 wheelchair passengers holding up boarding.
There were no such delays when Gomez’s flight landed. Most of the same passengers stood up without assistance and bounded off toward the baggage claim.
Social media has credited a divine intervention for this sudden return to mobility. An enigmatic “Jetway Jesus” is curing these passengers by the time they land, and the remarkable recovery acts have been dubbed “miracle flights.”
This year I traveled with someone who legitimately used a cane to walk, and it occurred to me that if I simply carried a foldable cane with me in my travel kit, I could get VIP treatment. But I only gave it a second’s thought and decided that would be a terrible idea, because I am not a psycho.
For this multimedia report, The New York Times joined a Ukrainian drone team at the front to understand how cheap drones have changed combat as we know it. The equipment is hacked together — the explosive looks like it’s contained in a plastic soda bottle. By Mauricio Lima, Andrew E. Kramer and Josh Holder.
This drone team, part of the 34th marine brigade, works in two rooms. One is cluttered with wires, antennas, zip ties, duct tape and soldering irons to modify the drones. The other holds the explosives. A wood stove provides comfort in cold weather.
The ingenuity is wonderful and the butcher’s bill (to use an old-fashioned phrase) is horrible.
Gwilym Mumford at The Guardian::
Bohemian Rhapsody is a deeply weird mega hit, a song that explodes all the usual rules of success. Everywhere you look there are contradictions. It’s a multimillion seller that has no chorus, numerous tempo and key changes, ambiguous and difficult-to-parse lyrics and a long running time. Musically, with its Gilbert and Sullivan operetta leanings, it has more in common with the 19th century than the 20th, let alone the 21st, but it’s also the most streamed 20th-century song this century, a musical throwback that nevertheless dragged pop into the music-video age. It’s both celebrated as a queer anthem or an extended metaphor for coming out, and is the British armed forces’ favourite song. It’s an extremely silly, borderline novelty hit that is also sort of deeply serious: “If I’m not back again this time tomorrow/ Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters.”
The phrase “this ain’t my first rodeo” goes back at least as far as the 1981 movie “Mommie Dearest,” where Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford proclaims, “Don’t fuck with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to a room of high-powered male executives trying to get the better of her in a business deal. A Way With Words: “Earlier forms of this expression involve such activities as a goat roping, a goat race, pumpkin picking, or a frog race.” “This Ain’t My First Rodeo” was also the title of a 1990 country song.
Fresh Air rebroadcasts its September interview with Rob Reiner, which includes a previously-unaired segment where Reiner talks about “Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences. Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.”
I clicked on this linkbait headline: “5 Forgotten ’90s Sci-Fi Movies That Still Hold Up Today” and was pleased to see the list includes “Robot Jox,” with a screenplay co-written by our friend Joe Haldeman.
The premise is that nations have replaced war with one-on-one combat between champions piloting five-story weaponized robot suits. “It’s a silly conceit, of course, but it’s no less absurd than the current war model. Why bomb out cities and murder thousands when you can build a giant robot with a chainsaw penis?”
