Why I’m Running for San Diego City Council at 71 Despite Many Failed Attempts. I like this guy, while also suspecting he may be a loony.
I just watched a few minutes of the Paul Lynde Halloween Special from 1976. Oh, wow. Also, I observe (not for the first time) that Florence Henderson in a sheath dress was kinda smokin'.
You don’t have to be there. @ayjay on the value of cultivating a slow news habit.
" … we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship … The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power."
Similarly, censorship is often performed by a private sector middleman.
David Brooks: We Deserve Pete Hegseth. The U.S. is not a serious country, so we should have a talk-show host as Secretary of Defense. We’ll have a reality TV host as President in four days.
Hamilton Nolan: Looting Season in America: The oligarchy blooms.
Zeynep Tufekci: Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice. Zuck supports the incumbent President who threatened to throw him into prison. But yeah sure, he’s a tough guy because he does MMA.
Jamelle Bouie: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is
Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.
…
Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was many magnitudes smaller and less prosperous than our own.
I’m questioning all my media consumption after quitting Facebook last week.
All the timelines. Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, RSS, Tumblr, newsletters. All of it.
Keeping up with the news is a colossal waste of time and source of needless stress. You can stay on top of everything you need to know in five minutes a day, most days.
This morning, I didn’t listen to any podcasts while walking. Ninety minutes of thinking, interacting with the dog, listening to the world around me, feeling my breath go in and out, and my feet walking the earth. I did not die.
There is no safe word: A long, disturbing in depth investigation into serial rape allegations against Neil Gaiman, by Lila Shapiro at New York magazine.
Gaiman responds: “I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”