Amanda Kolson Hurley

I lived there a long time ago and assumed they’d gotten enough shit for this that they’d changed their ways, but guess not lol

Trump hires new White House ballroom architect Although the president and the original architect had clashed over the size of the project, the decisive factor was the small firm’s limited capacity to handle such an enormous project.

Did not see Shalom Baranes coming…https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/04/trump-ballroom-architect-east-wing/

That’s so cool. I love this album in particular, and I read a making-of interview with Jenn and she said the process kind of sucked, which made me feel bad. I hope they know it’s appreciated!

You were in a band with them? Or…you were in Wye Oak??

Instead of my Wrapped, here are some albums I listen to while writing/editing. No or whispery vocals only.

Mogwai/As the Love Continues
Wye Oak/Civilian
Boards of Canada/Music Has the Right to Children
Serge Gainsbourg/Histoire de Melody Nelson (not whispery but I don’t understand French so np)

"The sun really do be like that"--Ernest Hemingway

I wonder if A-listers' enthusiasm for these aids is partly due to them being new, tech-y and reserved for the 1 percent (for now). That overcomes some of the stigma of needing to wear hearing aids. As Steve Martin says, normal aids work fine actually, even if these might be better

Then again 1/I have "cookie bite" rather than more common age-related hearing loss. Has Fortell optimized its aids/settings for this condition? Unclear. And 2/the biggest problem with other hearing aids is not that they're garbage. It's that people resist wearing them, or can't afford them

Want This Hearing Aid? Well, Who Do You Know? AI-powered startup Fortell has become a secret handshake for the privileged hearing-impaired crowd who swear by the product. Now, it wants to be in your ears.

A lot of thoughts about this story, first and foremost that I am going to get on the waiting list if I can. 19x higher odds of understanding speech is a compelling result, even if Fortell designed the study www.wired.com/story/hearin...

Leans on “some economists think” in a number of places. Not that that means it’s wrong necessarily

Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Cava Stocks Lag As Eaters Shun Bowls Diners have bowl fatigue, with some deriding them as ‘slop.’ Even Chipotle’s founder has moved on by starting a sandwich chain.

The slop-bowl backlash is here www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Trump "going to rebuild Dulles airport"

Oh no

“The anaesthetic from which none come round”

i spent a little while going through the AIDS quilt and picked out a few panels that stuck out to me for one reason or another. may the memories of all these beautiful, far too young souls be a blessing.

Every well-appointed home has a Coat Bath

I like how the "Main Foyer" is just the junction between two bathrooms and a closet

How ‘Super Roofs’ Reward Insurers, Cat Bond Investors and Homeowners Investors snapped up a catastrophe bond tied to North Carolina homeowners and their insurer for installing super roofs.

A really interesting climate resiliency model from NC: a catastrophe bond that funds the installation of "super roofs" on homes in storm-prone places. Gift link:

🤢

I didn’t miss my son that much after he went to college in September — he was 19 and needed to go — but now he has been home for 4 days, gone away again and I am bereft 😭

We talked about this in my class. People (& lenders!) need to have credible information about climate risk to their homes. However the way it is done right now, if at all, has lots of uncertainty. A home could be categorized as low-risk when it’s high risk, & vice versa! NOAA should do this service.

Partial to the pretzel-shaped ones

Here’s our story from last year about just how much two models purporting to measure the same risk can disagree. TL;DR, quite a lot: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Is it better for homebuyers to get no info about a property’s climate risk or to get some, but from a black box model and with uncertainty that isn’t fully conveyed? Any info seems important, but it’s not ideal.

Loved seeing Barry Lyndon at the AFI tonight. But Ryan O’Neal playing a teenager in the early scenes is ridiculous, he was like 35 at the time and looked it

Ah no, a huge loss. He was impossibly, exuberantly gifted

I don’t get it, why does making art become unsatisfying when you remove the part where your brain works and is rewarded with a sense of accomplishment

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman review – a cerebral eco-thriller This grief-stricken yet very funny tale about the search for an endangered fish speaks to our age of mass extinctions

VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER is a banger www.theguardian.com/books/2022/j...

That seems very high for DC, and my understanding was that tourism has declined since the federal takeover so IDK

Buttermilk-Brined Turkey Breast (Published 2020)

Not sure what if anything I did different, but my second time making this Samin Nosrat recipe, it surpassed expectations cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021...

Please stop sending LinkedIn invites on major holidays! #sickos