Pamela M

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

The celebration continues! Pick up a 65th anniversary paper crown at our Customer Service Center, while supplies last! 👑

Visit us at 1600 Franklin Street, Downtown Oakland.
Open Monday–Friday, 8 am–5 pm.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

➡️"Instead of downloading the standalone app on your device, use the browser versions of popular social media apps."

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

I just saw someone use the abbreviation “AI;DR” and I’ll be laughing for a while.

This is a breathtaking abuse of the law and power by the President of the United States.

America is on the brink of martial law.

Do not be silent.

Sung to the tune of "My Song Is Love Unknown"

What a wild week in AI and copyright. Just three days after launching its new Sora 2 AI video app with a brazen policy that let users create videos featuring copyrighted characters unless rightsholders explicitly opted out, OpenAI has slammed the brakes.

If Ian McEwan was starting out now he would be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Pic of Patricia Routledge being used to inform people who ask that the recording is on Audible although why they can’t find out that information for themselves I really don’t know.

If you’d like to spend 11 hours in the company of Patricia Routledge #RIP may I suggest her peerless reading of Wuthering Heights. Because it’s such an ungovernable text everyone who reads it interprets it differently. Behold PT’s awe at Heathcliff, her disgust at Linton, her contempt for Cathy…

John Gierach, Fly Fishing Author With Wit and Wisdom, Dies at 77

Here too short and gone too long. One year ago today.
"Fly-fishing is ... scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point." - John Gierach www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/b...

As some of you know, for 4 years I've been working on a book about the last 80 years of popular culture as a flashpoint for the gay rights struggle. Sometimes I've wondered who it's for. Then yesterday a young gay man, maybe 23, asked me if Stonewall happened because everyone was in NYC for Pride. >

Why can't people just be smart and their glasses dumb.

Book cover in cream with symmetrical design of stylised plants with orange flowers and green leaves as well as ornate text

Book cover art, c.1910 by Margaret Neilson Armstrong, US designer, illustrator, author known for her Art Nouveau style #WomensArt

The People Who Chuckled Themselves to Death 🎶

It’s incredible how much of modern life is people denying they broke the law, then slowly admitting they broke the law, but by then no one cares and we just move on, letting them break the law with no consequences.

Belva Davis Showed Me I Belong in Journalism | KQED Meaghan Mitchell reflects on the fearless legacy of the West Coast’s first Black woman television reporter.

"It was Belva Davis — the woman who became the first Black female television reporter on the West Coast — who showed me that growth in this field meant courage," Meaghan Mitchell writes in her tribute to the late Bay Area journalist.

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

Setting the table for vibe paychecks

www.theverge.com/news/787076/...

"i just use it to generate ideas"

A Bullet Crashed the Internet in Texas A ‘stray bullet’ 25,000 people offline near Dallas.

america, baby: someone shot the internet

www.404media.co/a-bullet-cra...

Big cat and little cat read together. The caption reads ‘all animals love to read books’

Important information from the Richard Scarry book I picked up at the charity shop

"CAMEL: Has two humps and the dromedary has only one. Or the camel has one hump and the dromedary two (we get confused)".

- Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas, 1870s

If you've done in-person research at any of the following presidential libraries in the last 8 months, can you please follow me/contact me—soon—for a story I'm working on (can be off the record)?

Hoover
FDR
Truman
Eisenhower
JFK
LBJ
Ford
Carter

And either way, can you please share this request? 🙏

In light of today’s absolutely fucking deranged “I’m in a war movie” speeches by Trump and Hegseth, I give you the plaque at West Point.

Reminder that one of the first things this guy did was install a TV makeup studio at the Pentagon

"AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations" is such a good sentence.

"The poor publisher stays behind." Theodore von Eltz bemoans the lot of the downtrodden publisher with only a penthouse apartment and a house in the Hamptons to keep him warm. From Up Pops the Devil (1931) with Carole Lombard and Norman Foster.

1978

(unions inventing sunday evening) we need a dedicated time to worry about the workweek