Harvard is laying off young researchers and shelving years and decades of work after the U.S. government’s stupid decision to cut funding for research into cures for multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases, opioid addiction, cancer, and other afflictions. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…
But the White House is getting a $200 million ballroom to celebrate glorious Dear Leader.
‘Personality engineering’ puts a human face on telco AI agents. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/per…
My latest on Fierce Network. Amdocs is working with Nvidia on customizing AI customer service agents with human-like characteristics — they have faces and talk — to ensure they effectively represent telco brands. Trials delivered a remarkable 63% reduction in call handling time and a 50% uplift in first-call resolution and customer satisfaction. But AI agents may be facing backlash from consumers.
Which jobs can be replaced with AI? Jobs that have already been degraded to the point of uselessness. pluralistic.net/2025/08/0…
If you oppose the State of Israel, this post is not for you. coreyrobin.com/2025/08/0…
This quote in particular strikes close to home for me: “The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this.”
Links and ephemera Wednesday 8.6.2025
✪ Americans say no as terrified ICE agents flee from angry citizens. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…
✪ The Camp Snap CS-8 is a $149 digital video camera that looks and works like a Super-8 movie camera from 1970 or so. My Dad had one like this one and I used it like crazy on a family vacation. I loved it. www.theverge.com/news/7191…
✪ As BEAD becomes uncertain, the fiber industry is pivoting to AI, providing connectivity between hyperscaler data centers. My colleague Linda Hardesty reports at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/broadband…
✪ A Denmark zoo asks people to donate small pets as food for captive predators. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/0…
✪ The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away. By Thomas L. Friedman. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/0…
✪ Is progress humanity’s greatest myth? www.theguardian.com/books/202…
Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents’ generation – and this in the world’s richest society.
Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless “pseudo-bread” – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.
What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The “progress narratives” of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters.
Reviewer Pratinav Anil argues that McDonald fails to make his case.
✪ The homes of “working class Romans” from the early empire were found during a dig for a new metro station in Rome. www.theguardian.com/world/202…
✪ AGNTCY is the next big AI platform you’ve never heard of. My colleague Diana Goovaerts explains for Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/cloud/agn…
✪ The MCP factor: Telco vendors risk being left behind. MCP is a standardized protocol for applications to provide context to LLMs, introduced by Anthropic in November. It may already be too late for telco vendors to get into the game. My colleagues Dan Jones and Elizabeth Coyne provide analysis at Fierce Network. www.fierce-network.com/wireless/…
✪ The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mot…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil–that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
Journalist Adam Bonica argues that a single company, Mothership, is behind all those spams, raising $678 million from individual donors. The company only sends about 1.6% of funds raised to candidates.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.
Megumi Odaka behind the scenes of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)
My sartorial and journalistic idol
Tim Curry photographed for After Dark Magazine, March 1975
Do I need a permit?
Neuromancer by William Gibson, 1986. Cover art by Barclay Shaw. www.tumblr.com/mostlysig…
Minnie is a medium-sized dog, which means even though she isn’t that great on the leash, it’s OK because I can muscle her into line if she engages in undesirable behavior. I am sure this is not an option when you are a normal-sized woman walking two weimeraners. Even if one of the weimeraners only has three legs.
Our next-door neighbor adopted a three-legged dog, and I saw her walking both of her dogs this morning, and that’s nine legs total. 15 if you count me and Minnie. Both neighbor dogs are Weimeraners, and our neighbor is a normal-sized woman.
Links and ephemera Tuesday 8.5.2025
✪ LinkedIn Joins The Parade Of Cowards: Quietly Strips Anti-Trans Protections To Appease MAGA Mob www.techdirt.com/2025/08/0…
✪ The cult of the ‘Spoons’: Inside the spartan, cavernous pubs that divide Britain www.cnn.com/travel/we…
Wetherspoon pubs are an institution in the UK. They enjoy cult-like status both among admirers, lured in by real ale and “pub grub” sold at astoundingly low prices, and detractors, who see them as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern Britain.
More than 800 Wetherspoon chain pubs freckle the country – from The Muckle Cross in Scotland to The Tremenheere in Cornwall. In just a few decades, “Spoons” have become so ingrained into British daily life that they probably now deserve to be up there with Stonehenge on the list of UK cultural institutions.
✪ Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible. Too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being. aeon.co/essays/ou…
✪ A History of Crisps. Or, as we say here, potato chips. deserter.co.uk/2022/05/a…
✪ British pubs have their own set of rules. Here’s what you need to know www.cnn.com/travel/br…
✪ “What few realize is that the KKK of that decade was not like the 1870s terrorist group, it was actually a pyramid scheme based on selling robes, membership fees, and life insurance to racists. It had a PR agency. It was big business. And it fell apart in 1925 when the key leader, the “Grand Dragon” of Indiana fell in a sexual assault scandal.”
— www.tumblr.com/jimstares…
Making a giant ice treat for polar bears
For me, like hundreds of millions of men around the world, every other morning I look in the mirror and say to myself, “shit I have to shave again today.”
We gave the cats flea treatments. The doctors say that I will now have to undergo many rounds of surgery and painful physical therapy, but I have a good chance of regaining the use of my shredded arms.
Links and ephemera Monday 8.4.2025
✪ Ninety laptops, millions of dollars: US woman jailed over North Korea remote-work scam. theguardian.com. Christina Chapman helped North Koreans pose as Americans living in the U.S. to get remote jobs.
✪ The Count of Monte Cristo review – you’ll have to pause every 45 seconds to shake your head at its daftness.theguardian.com
✪ ‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity. theguardian.com
✪ Brendan Carr declares victory over the First Amendment. theverge.com
✪ This Is the News From TikTok. When people use TikTok for news, what kind of information are they getting? theatlantic.com
Every night
John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn. “Fill your hand you sonofabitch!”
“After Hours” and “Barton Fink” are two movies where the trailers promised lighthearted comedy and I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d been punched in the face.
Links and ephemera Sunday 8.3.2025
✪ ‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse theguardian.com
Damian Carrington:
“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality.
I am both seduced by and skeptical of these kinds of grand unified theories that use known information to derive new and counterintuitive conclusions that explain great swathes of history.
✪ Pregnant mother in Tennessee denied medical care for being unmarried tumblr.com
✪ What Working as a Mailman in Appalachia Revealed About Public Service - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.
At the same time, Grant’s project is immediately recognizable as “Hollywood material.” A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a rural blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor–silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.
This tension isn’t lost on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who’s suddenly laid off from a marketing agency and gets a job as a rural carrier associate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. He second-guesses his qualifications–and his motivations–but doesn’t let either concern stop him.
✪ Thirty-Two short stories about death in prison. theatlantic.com. Prisoners are brutally abused and die of neglect in American prisons, often while guards laugh.
✪ You Went to a Drag Show—Now the State of Florida Wants Your Name. “Just like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and other bills with misleading names, this isn’t about protecting children. It’s about using the power of the state to intimidate people government officials disagree with, and to censor speech that is both lawful and fundamental to American democracy.” eff.org
✪ The freedom to fuck off. mat.tl
✪ Marc Maron Has Some Thoughts About That. theatlantic.com
✪ Making America Epstein Again. Trump’s transactional ethics are making the U.S. a refuge for criminals. This mirrors something Israel has done for years. prospect.org
✪ How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail. theatlantic.com
✪ We’re Officially in Donald Trump’s Mad King Era. motherjones.com
✪ Micro.blog is now free for teachers and nurses. manton.org I host mitchw.blog on micro.blog. Bravo, Manton!
✪ How Cosby’s ‘Pound Cake’ Speech Helped Lead to His Downfall. theatlantic.com
Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws in 1974
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, 1942. photographs: John Vachon
Habitat 67 in Montreal, designed by Moshe Safdie.
I’ve been trying out a couple of new web browsers and moving my newsletter subscriptions to different email addresses. The I-am-not-a-robot gauntlet has been brutal.
Link and ephemera Friday 8.1.2025
✪ “I’m reading the scriptwriters' guide for [Star Trek] TOS and it’s cracking me up in many places. It’s so obvious that, from the very beginning, they were already aware of so many of the issues people complain about today.” tumblr.com
✪ “Sanitation and custodial workers deserve far more money and respect than they generally get.” tumblr.com
✪ “Things you will see on a road trip across america…. if anyone ever wonders why i love america so much despite its many political and cultural flaws, this is why. this post explains it perfectly.” tumblr.com
✪ The TSA likes facial recognition at airports. Passengers and politicians, not so much. theregister.com. A facial database of millions of citizens is a terrible weapon for an autocratic regime, which is what the U.S. is now for many people and fast on its way to becoming for everyone.
✪ Slave camps used to run online scams are tied up in the Cambodia-Thailand border conflict. “… the scam center industry in Cambodia is estimated to generate over $12.5 billion annually – in other words, around half the country’s GDP,” says Angela Suriyasenee, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank. theregister.com
✪ Not the Onion: ICE arrested a carpenter named Jesus. Jesus Teran is here in this country legally, and he was arrested after checking in for an ICE appointment. “‘He’s been faithfully appearing at ICE appointments for more than four years, he was following the protocols of ICE, he was complying with everything he’s supposed to do. All of a sudden, he’s detained,’ said the Rev. Jay Donahue, senior parochial vicar at St. Oscar Romero Parish.” jwz.org
✪ Atomic Keyboard is doing a Kickstarter to replicate the Macrodata Refinement Keyboard from Severance. “For Work That’s Mysterious and Important.” kickstarter.com. Via jwz.org.
✪ “if i had a william dollars, i would make a game where you play a courier in a pre-industrial setting, carrying parcels to various places on a route. and the game would start with your first day on the job, getting your map and your camping supplies and your first day’s advance pay, and then your boss goes okay let’s get you your mule. and you go to the stables and you meet your mule. and it’s like, okay, standard video game mount, you know how this works. you press a to pet the mule. the mule does not allow you to pet it. the mule attempts to bite you.” tumblr.com
✪ American Nazification: ICE put a double-amputee in solitary confinement after he refused to get into his cell because it had an inch of water and he couldn’t get his prosthetic legs wet. Rodney Taylor, born in Liberia, is in the U.S. legally. theguardian.com
✪ Hamas Wants Gaza to Starve. theatlantic.com. Hamas and Israel are partners in genocide.
✪ Curate your own newspaper with RSS. By Molly White. citationneeded.news. I love RSS. I have used RSS readers multiple time daily for more than 20 years. One of the first things I do when I get to my desk, while I’m eating breakfast and even before coffee, is check my RSS reader.
Stocking up on fireworks for the 4th of July. (Nat Farbman. 1954)
Woman with spotted dress and elaborate curled hair, Jersey (UK), 1864
Links and ephemera Thursday 7.31.2025
Do These Genes Make My Ad Look Racist? nytimes.com. When, if ever, do terms that have been associated with racism lose their racist connotations? By John McWhorter.
“It’s spring, which means it’s ruffed grouse season, which means I wake up every morning to a tiny feathered Harley Davidson revving up outside” tumblr.com
Veronica is sick and tired of Archie quoting Jordan Peterson
One day when I was in the third grade, our music teacher, Mrs. Lafayette, had the class compose a song together. Words and music. It was only about 10 seconds and it went like this:
“Early in the morning
Standing by the road
I jumped when I saw a little toad.”
(Then two more lines here with the same beats as the first two. I don’t remember those lines now.)
“Then I caught him nibbling at my sock.”
55 years later, sometimes I catch myself singing that stupid song, inaudibly, under my breath.
I use an app called Lose It to track calories, and I have cottage cheese with lunch nearly every day. I bought a different brand than usual recently, and Lose It lists it as “cootage cheese.” This amuses me to an unreasonable degree.
Cootage cheese.
Link and ephemera Wednesday 7.30.2025
FCC To Install A ‘Bias Monitor’ At New CBS To Ensure Network Kisses Trump’s Ass. techdirt.com. Stealing a page from the USSR playbook by installing a political officer to ensure that nothing is published or aired that offends the ruling party.
Princess Diana shakes hands with an AIDS patient without gloves, 1991
Not everyone enjoys firecrackers on the 4th of July. (Nat Farbman. 1954).
Automobile and foot traffic come to a complete halt in rainy Times Square as President Roosevelt delivers a speech, July 4, 1941. The president spoke via radio from the library at his home in Hyde Park, N.Y. Photo: Tom Sande for the AP. Via
