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‘I’ll Hear About It Eventually.’ So-called news avoiders aren’t really skipping out on the news

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.

Life under a clicktatorship

Don Moynihan:

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.

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

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.

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!)

Venezuela

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.

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 Isah Whitlock — Senator Clay Davis on "The Wire." Sheeeeit!

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.”

How to read Patrick O'Brian

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.

The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore

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.

My fortune cookie was smashed and missing a fortune. This seems ominous.

"The torture was never ending"

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

Dozens of Flock AI camera feeds were just out there

Anyone with links to the livestreams could view them — no credentials required, as reported by 404 Media.

Emma Roth at The Verge:

“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.”

Jewish Christmas

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.

The big podcast shift to video

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.

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.

They Get Wheeled on Flights and Miraculously Walk Off. Praise ‘Jetway Jesus.’

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.

What It Takes to Pilot a War Drone in Ukraine

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.

Why we can’t get enough of Bohemian Rhapsody

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.”

"Don't fuck with me fellas! This ain't my first time at the rodeo"

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.

Rob Reiner said he was 'never, ever too busy' for his son

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.”

"... a giant robot with a chainsaw penis"

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?”

Spotify Wrapped has proven hugely popular, and now everybody is doing it. I’m getting year-in-review notifications from many of the apps and services I use. I hope my urologist doesn’t want to get in on the action.

The only thing better than Walton Goggins is noseless Walton Goggins.

Rob Reiner, RIP

John Scalzi:

… very few people, much less filmmakers, had the sort of career run that he had as a director between 1984 and 1992: This is Spinal Tap. The Sure Thing. Stand by Me. The Princess Bride. When Harry Met Sally. Misery. A Few Good Men.

I mean, come on. With the exception of The Sure Thing, every single one of those is a stone classic, and The Sure Thing is still pretty good! It made a star out of John Cusack! There are things we still say because Rob Reiner directed the film those words were in: “This one goes to 11.” “As you wish.” “You can’t handle the truth,” and so on. You could go a whole day talking to people by only quoting Rob Reiner films and you could absolutely get away with it.

“[Rob Reiner’s] films have a certain comedy style … a sweetness and toughness…. Stand by Me is not just about four kids coming of age before junior high school — they’re going to see a corpse. If John Hughes had made Stand by Me — and I’m not knocking Hughes — they would have been searching for a convertible.”

— Rob Reiner, ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Stand by Me’ Director and ‘All in the Family’ Actor, Dies at 78 in Apparent Homicide (Report)

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out the summer before I was a senior in high school, which meant when I watched it I was very much oh, here’s a role model. Not for the skipping of school precisely; I went to a boarding school and lived in a dorm, skipping days was a rather more complicated affair than it would have been in a public school. But the anarchic style, the not taking school more seriously than it should be taken, the willingness to risk a little trouble for a little freedom — well, that appealed to me a lot.

Before you ask, no, I did not, become a True Acolyte of Ferris. I lived in the real world and wanted to get into college, and while at the time I could not personally articulate the fact that inherent in Ferris’ ability to flout the system was a frankly immense amount of privilege, I understood it well enough. Ferris gets his day off because he’s screenwriter/director John Hughes’ special boy. The rest of us don’t have that luck. Nevertheless, if one could not be Ferris all the time, would it still be wrong to have a Ferris moment or two, when the opportunity presented itself? I thought not. I had my small share of Ferris moments and didn’t regret them.

…

There has been the observation among Gen-Xers that you know you’re old when you stop identifying less with Ferris and more with Principal Rooney (this is also true when applied to the students of The Breakfast Club and Vice-Principal Vernon).

— John Scalzi, “The December Comfort Watches 2025, Day Twelve: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”

I liked but did not love “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I loved “The Breakfast Club,” and am a little abashed at that because I saw it when I was 25 years old — well older than the target demo. Y

es, I did come to sympathize with Principal Rooney over time; yes, he’s a loser, but he’s also a civil servant, almost certainly underpaid, trying to do his job, and undermined by a privileged teenage punk. And, as Scalzi alludes to in a comment, Jeffrey Jones, who played Principal Rooney, is a registered sex offender, which colors my view of Principal Rooney and his other roles. Notwithstanding Jones’s personal choices, he’s a talented character actor.

Principal Vernon, on the other hand, is a petty little bully. No sympathy. What kind of loser threatens a high school kid with, “You mess with the bull, you get the horns?” On the other hand, Paul Gleason, the talented character actor who played Vernon, seems to have been an all right guy, who praised his teenaged “Breakfast Club” costars.

Look, I’m not trying to say that new technologies never raise gnarly new legal questions, but what I am saying is that a lot of the time, the “new legal challenges” raised by technology are somewhere between 95-100% bullshit, ginned up by none-too-bright tech bros and their investors, and then swallowed by regulators and lawmakers who are either so credulous they’d lose a game of peek-a-boo, or (likely) in on the scam.

— Federal Wallet Inspectors, by Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His “Eight Worlds” stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like “In the Hall of the Martian Kings,” which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or “Air Raid,” which made air travel terrifying again.

His novel Titan looked to be the opening of a classic trilogy.

Briefly–for almost a decade–John Varley seemed to be the new Robert Heinlein.

And then, alas, he went to Hollywood.

— Flogging Babel: John Varley, 1947-2025

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. “I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile,” Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.

— National Smiles, The New York Times

Question for my micro.blog chums: How do you find old posts about a topic? Imagine you are a fan of the TV show “Severance,” and you write about it occasionally over a few years. One day you want to find all your “Severance” posts — how? Search?

Stop Hacklore is a website to help fight myths about digital security, with advice on using public WiFi (it isn’t dangerous), QR codes (also not dangerous — it’s essentally the same as clicking a link), changing passwords every 90 days (unnecessary — and can actually be dangerous) and more.

My love/hate relationship with Plur1bus

ME, WATCHING THE TRAILER OF “PLURIBUS:” “This looks dreadful. Pass.”
WATCHING EPISODES 1-3: “This is depressing and a little boring. In this show, the world has undergone a miraculous, wonderful and terrible transition and the show focuses on an unpleasant middle-aged woman day-drinking and binge-watching ‘Golden Girls.’ Why are we watching this?”
EPISODE FOUR: “Enjoying this now.”
EPISODES 6-7: “I LOVE THIS SHOW SO SO MUCH!!! CAROL IS AWSUM AND SO IS THE PARAGUAYAN GUY!!! I CAN’T STAND TO WAIT A WEEK FOR THE NEXT EPISODE!!!!”

But I do wish we could see more of the world the Plurbs are creating.

I’m checking to see how Reddit and Tumblr embeds look on the blog and in the newsletter. They look good on the blog. We’ll see in the morning how they look in the newsletter.

The Articles of Interest podcast with Avery Trufelman is doing a series on U.S. military uniforms and gear, and its cross-influence with civlian style, mostly men’s. Most of the series focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries, but it reaches back to the 1700s and 1800s. Start here with Chapter 1: The American military uniform.

Military gear and civilian outdoor gear are closely linked, and in the late 1700s and 1800s, being a manly U.S. man meant going out and killing an animal, skinning it and making it into an outdoor suit yourself. That was the theory. In reailty, you’d hire a Native American woman to do that.

A woman in the UK who suffers from schizophrenia thought her refrigerator was trying to communicate with her and she hospitalized herself. Turns out the message was an ad for the TV show “Plur1bus.” The message read “WE’RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU CAROL,” in creepy black letters on a yellow background.

The schizophrenic woman is named Carol, which is also the name of the main character of “Pluribus.”

Even a person without mental illness would be alarmed if that person was named Carol and their refrigerator sent them a creepy message using their name. This was a bad decision for an ad.

UPDATE: The only evidence I’ve been able to find for this is a single Reddit post. I’m going to hypothesize that this is a hoax, unless I see some other evidence.