Hilary Mason

18 Photographs to Rekindle Your Love of Massive NYC Snowstorms Snow is blanketing the city streets. And the streets beneath are fast asleep.

18 Photographs to Rekindle Your Love of Massive NYC Snowstorms

Wanting to understand why any of this horror is happening; what is their justification, and what’s really going on.

Here’s one point of view.

Magic foodies are eating good with the new TMNT set "Pizza dude's got 30 seconds."

In deals like the TMNT/MTG crossover, who is paying who? I really want to know those deal terms and how that came to be!

Context: www.polygon.com/mtg-tmnt-bes...

Ilium and Olympos are books I have been thinking about since I first read them, probably 20? years ago.

RIP, he connected so many beautiful ideas so creatively.

In a statement to The Crimson, Summers wrote that the decision to leave was “difficult” and that he remained “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago.” “Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” he added.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

AI Death Machines. No Human Oversight. What Could Go Wrong? Pete Hegseth is trying to bully Anthropic out of objecting to “lethal autonomous weapons systems” and mass surveillance.

"It’s insane that “how much killing will we let the killer robots do on their own” is being hashed out as back-room handshakes between the military and its AI contractors. This seems like a matter of public policy if ever there was one. Have we got a legislature?"

open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Really valuable piece. It opens up a set of questions about the potential effects of AI on science that I have not seen widely discussed. And without pretending to determine whether those effects will be net-good or net-bad, it explains why metascientific *judgment* may become more important.

I love New York

Our @hiddendoor.co office is in Boerum Hill, and I commented a couple of months ago about discovering the original ExLax factory nearby: bsky.app/profile/hmas...

And now the Neighborhoods newsletter has an even better telling of the story: theneighborhoods.substack.com/p/boerum-hil...

Smth people need to understand is there’s literally no way at the whole-systems level to run a social media site w/out incurring harm as a side-effect of the sociotechnical infrastructures required to moderate user generated content. For the harms of AI, the harm to people by not using it is worse.

Everyone should read this -- @anildash.com explains the very human why of how so much of this horror has come to be.

None of it is inevitable. We can choose something better.

Public Health valentine's day card

Spicy Valentine's Day cards from Seattle/King County Public Health this year:

publichealthinsider.com/2026/02/13/l...

As a nerd aside, a friend of mine with a special interest in spacial audio told me how incredible the system they built there is, including how they can position audio so it follows you up the escalators.

NYC-area officials raise Pride flag at Stonewall after Trump admin takes another down Local leaders hoisted a Pride flag at Stonewall National Monument on Thursday, defying a federal directive that led to its removal earlier this week.

Proud of my city: gothamist.com/news/nyc-are...

I sat next to an older lady, also at the film alone, who told me how much this movie meant to her when she first saw it, and how incredible it all seemed. She LOVED the show.

I did catch a few artifacts of the adaptation, a munchkin guard who didn't blink for two solid minutes and cycled facial expressions, some inconsistent angles in backgrounds, etc. None of this really detracted from the joy of the film.

A photo of Dorothy and the Lion reacting in fear as flying monkeys come towards them, while a flying monkey drone flies in front of the screen.

Here's a really not very good photo of one of my favorite effects, the actual flying monkeys that flew around the theater. I think they're balloon drones?

The photo is also not good because the seats vibrate, the air moves, it's really cool.

A statue of Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, between the escalators at The Sphere.

I was also delighted and surprised to run into Gort there. Why is Gort at The Sphere? I don't know!

A picture of the ending screen of The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere; it looks like a promo image, but I promise, it's a picture of the screen. The picture shows the title alongside an image of Dorothy, the Lion, The Tin Man, and the Scarecrow walking down the yellow brick road to the Emerland City.

I went to The Sphere this morning to see The Wizard of Oz!

It was a beautiful tribute to the original, a spectacular show of immersive theater, and evoked some questions of how to extend and care for a beloved film as it becomes a BIG experience; there were a few rough bits, and lots of wonder.

😮

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

I’ve found that people with experience sewing are often _excellent_ at dataviz.

Ask your nearest CEO what they’re favorite food is and see what they say. If they are all about Soylent and supplements as a way to fuel their productivity but have no interest in the beautiful sensation of food itself, BE WARY!!

Aww, these are so beautiful!

Can you share an example of what you mean? I am kind of a fashion dummy

Thank you! And ooh, I do love that particular gown. Very Evil Queen.

🙏

I may be a small niche here, but which clothing brands sell beautiful gala gowns that are packable in a carryon, very comfortable, and give glamorous CEO vibes (vs just sexy vibes but not matronly vibes), and can be worn with flats?

I think one of the best things about Bad Bunny’s performance is that it was so *specific*. It so clearly had a point of view coming from real lived experience and actual emotion, actual heart, not cynical calculation. Just beautiful.