The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave
By D. T. Max at The New Yorker:
I asked her what she’d missed down below, and she told me roast chicken with French fries—“the kind where you can soak the bread and the potatoes in the sauce.” The caterer had sent down decent food, but never that. Over all, she insisted, the time had passed quickly: “For me, it was just a moment—a single night. I didn’t have time to miss anyone.” In a vibrant, emotive voice, she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.
RIP "Uncle Floyd" Vivino, who hosted the cult "Uncle Floyd Show" starting in the 1970s
Fans included David Bowie, who said in 2002:
“Back in the late 70’s, everyone that I knew would rush home at a certain point in the afternoon to catch the Uncle Floyd show,” Bowie said. “He was on UHF Channel 68 and the show looked like it was done out of his living room in New Jersey. All his pals were involved and it was a hoot.
“It had that Soupy Sales kind of appeal and though ostensibly aimed at kids, I knew so many people of my age who just wouldn’t miss it. We would be on the floor it was so funny. I just loved that show.”
Vivino was 74
I bought a new strap for my computer bag the other day and now I’m on the luggage company’s mailing list. This could be one expensive luggage strap.
DHS memo declares the Fourth Amendment optional. “The DHS is acting as if the US Constitution, a document conservative wingnuts used to demand we revere in its original form, does not apply to them.”
I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. “Conscious consumption” is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to “vote with your wallet” is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that’s not you)
— The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit, by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is."
AI vs. AI is the new security battleground. AI-enabled attacks at machine speed are forcing organizations to deploy their own AI defenses or risk being overwhelmed. My latest on Fierce Network.
This afternoon, Rebecca Santana of the Associated Press reported that ICE has been breaking into homes under the authority provided by a secret memo of May 12, 2025, signed by the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, saying that federal agents do not need a judge’s warrant to force their way into people’s homes.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, one of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
As Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse notes, courts have always interpreted that amendment to mean that a judge must sign a warrant to allow law enforcement to break into a home. Now the Department of Homeland Security says it does not need such a judicial warrant, but can simply use an administrative warrant signed by an official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or ICE if immigrants believed to be inside a home have a final order of removal.
The legal training manual for DHS itself quotes a 1984 Supreme Court decision that “the ‘physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”
Immigration law specialist Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that this memo is a big deal: it is “the federal government conspiring in secret to subvert the Fourth Amendment.”
“Every American should be terrified by this secret ICE policy authorizing its agents to kick down your door & storm into your home,” [Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)], wrote on social media.
…
Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who at the beginning of 2025 was considered a moderate on immigration, wrote: “Yeah I am not voting to give whatever ICE has become more taxpayer money. It’s no longer an immigration enforcement arm of the US government.”
ICE agents are hanging around schools, threatening children. Reg Chapman of CBS News in Minnesota reported today that ICE has detained a five-year-old preschooler after using him as bait to get someone in his house to open their door. Then ICE transferred him and his father from Minnesota to detention in Texas. His family has an active asylum case and it does not have an order of deportation, meaning they are in the U.S. legally.
Video footage from Minneapolis also shows a federal agent spraying chemical irritants directly into the face of a man agents had pinned and held to the ground. Other video shows Customs and Border Protection leader Greg Bovino throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters.