Matt Rothstein

His fate line swinging like a pendulum between two futures, one of McConnell aging and the other is Transcendence-flavored

Kash Patel and the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team Deserve Each Other These Olympics were joyful and uplifting. Then the FBI director showed up.

Kash Patel got his Make-a-Wish. You paid hundreds of thousands of dollars so he could cosplay as a gold medal winner with his hockey heroes. Dream weekend, very happy he could live out this fantasy @slate.com slate.com/culture/2026...

“Put another way, M/M romance is a genre solution to the problem of heterosexual men” is a sentence that is going to live rent-free in my head for a while

Former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank: “I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is again flooding the airwaves and social media with snappy videos of himself in a custom Carhartt jacket, warning New Yorkers to stay safe. He is again holding news conferences at the city’s emergency operations headquarters, surrounded by top aides in outerwear bearing agency emblems. And he is again at the helm of a government operation that, by virtue of its complexity and general unwieldiness, can lend itself to people falling through the cracks.

The tone of contempt here, in a news update, is disgraceful. "How dare Mamdani and his team...uh...wear those clothes and use social media to try to prevent bad things from happening when...um...bad things could still happen in a situation like this!" GTFO.

“aNd yOu’rE sUrpRisEd wHy” first off I’m mad, that’s not the same thing

Saw a man at the hotel breakfast station ask an employee for something.

She emerged from the kitchen moments later and handed him a bag full of sausages. He put them in his pocket and walked out the front door.

We forget that anything is possible.

Just a reminder as Trump spews complete lies about voter fraud that he put the full weight of his first administration into proving some of this bullshit and they came up completely empty.

This is Neal Katyal. He argued for Nestlé's right to profit from child slavery without consequence before the Supreme Court—and won! Thank you, Neal.
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A panel from dungeon meshi that changed my life

Folks he's saying this shit out loud and into camera you cannot be surprised when you finally realize what he is

This is non-fiction but lands as visceral (as per author's point) social horror. Only it's entirely real. And that some, even many, won't understand, intuit, or feel any sense of the horror at all, will only see cause to celebrate and wonder what the big deal is, is part of the horror itself.

Just came under a MASSIVE PSYCHIC ASSAULT at the grocery store

so it was written. so it will be

Remember when Tottenham could’ve had Eze lol

#alysaliu
WOKE IS BACK BABY
MAKE OAKLAND CALIFORNIA THE US CAPITOL NOW!

i've decided not to listen to the audio of a teacher reporting a kindergartender because frankly I don't want to become the person that that event would turn me into. but one thing I hope we are collectively coming to grips with is what it meant that we have lived among such people this whole time

anyway time for me to re-up my view that when you make claims like that as a journalist you should be able to answer the simple question “who said this and why do they matter?”

A fake ICE tip line reveals neighbors reporting neighbors A Nashville comedian’s deportation hotline, set up as a joke, has gone viral among viewers who say it shows the “banality of evil personified” in the U.S. immigration crackdown.

New: A comedian set up a fake ICE tip line as a joke. Then 100 calls flooded in: neighbors ratting on neighbors, a teacher reporting a kindergartener. Fans say the viral TikToks revealed deportation's "banality of evil." Conservatives say he should be in prison wapo.st/4kM4qbF

The Blogs: The Tucker Carlson effect Almost half of young Republicans surveyed see Jews as a threat to the American way of life. That’s not the biggest problem facing pro-Israel candidates

“Almost half of young Republicans surveyed see Jews as a threat to the American way of life.”

Yep, antisemitism is totally a both-sides issue. Right? Right??

Seems like a useful opportunity for professors teaching Intro to Sociology to explain what state indoctrination looks like

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature. This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or w

Ever wondered how your grant got cancelled? No we know. Some college dropout asked ChatGPT "is it DEI/woke"?

www.techdirt.com/202...

i think this is an important story. not enough being written about american outsourcing of indefinite detention

what id say is that consensus reality is a public good and it takes public policy to create. by the same token it can be insanely profitable for shitheads to pollute the commons if nobody stops them

AXIOS: “The Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize. It could begin very soon.”

Is Iran in the Epstein files?

www.axios.com/2026/02/18/i...

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

Tl;dr I could have been excited about the thing if I hadn't seen it enter the world as a smug assault on human creativity, hadn't been relentlessly lied to about its capabilities, hadn't watched it fill the internet with misinformation, hadn't had so many products I use made worse by it, etc etc etc