John Hendrickson

Here's a jaw-dropping story from @barryyeoman.com and @jocelynzuck.bsky.social on how dollar-stores are quietly overcharging customers who can ill-afford it. Not on just occasional items, either: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Brittany rules and anyone would be very lucky to work with her

I thought this was a joke. It’s real.

Doughnuts and Bullets: The Absurdity of Working for RFK Jr. What happens when your new boss thinks you’re a child killer?

I wrote about the private, intimate, often ridiculous agonies of working for a man who think you’re a monster nymag.com/intelligence...

A Battle with My Blood When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.

Devastating essay about living with a terminal cancer diagnosis at 35, made more devastating by the author's relation to the health and human services secretary who's spent the past year cutting cancer research.

Jeffrey, Who? A Plane Ride with Donald Trump From the daily newsletter: remembering a trip to Mar-a-Lago.

This is a pretty remarkable recollection by Mark Singer about a plane ride he took in 1997 with Trump and Ghislaine to Palm Beach. When they were about to land, they got on the phone w/ their mutual friend, "Jeffrey." www.newyorker.com/newsletter/t...

Cindy Lee performing live at Brooklyn Paramount

Cindy Lee last night

‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’
—Alice Wong

Max Read notes that these companies are posting in a familiar style. "If you still spend time on X.com, you will recognize here precisely the same clipped, decontextualized, link-free, moronically breathless style of tweeting deployed by 'financial news for low-trust illiterates' accounts like Unusual Whales or ZeroHedge (or, for that matter, in a slightly different arena, PopCrave)," he writes. To be slightly more generous about it, accounts like this have, on a platform where outside links barely exist, mainstream media brands are no longer visible, and commentary crowds out timely updates, stepped in to fill a market need, as strange and distorted as it may be. As Read points out, Kalshi and Polymarket are also speaking the language of their most devoted users - "epistemically captured right-wing hobbyist gamblers and speculators — and meeting them where they are, on X, which is another way of saying it's just good marketing. But, in the spirit of prediction, I think material like this will soon be more than a sideshow and already sketches an outline of a new, betting-centric political media. Gambling took over sports coverage, after all. Why won't it take over everything else?

If more people put more money into markets like Kalshi, it's easy enough to imagine how a sportslike media transformation might unfold through sponsorships, normalization in existing media, constant metacoverage of prediction odds, and content produced by the prediction platforms themselves. Aside from its posting habits, Polymarket already has a podcast; on the websites of shrinking newspapers around the country, you can already find aggregated articles sharing the current betting odds for the 2028 election. (J.D. Vance +225, Gavin Newsom +350, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez +900 in case you were curious and know what that means.) Why wouldn't fast-growing companies in a wildly lucrative but competitive industry hire or sponsor some influencers to make some content, draw some attention, and convert some customers? Why shouldn't they convene, say, a Jubilee in which participants argue about their bets on polities rather than politics as such? I've got $5,000 on J.D. Vance 2028. Change my mind.

not too hard to imagine a comprehensively gambling-obsessed political media, maybe soon nymag.com/intelligence...

Some gems at the Indianapolis airport

An Antidote to Shamelessness Zohran Mamdani ran an online campaign based on real people and a real message. It worked.

a little late, but i wrote about it

There’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect happening where people who read widely, consider various perspectives, and put in effort to understand views they disagree with worry that they don’t do that enough, while people who don’t do any of that accuse others of being in a bubble and call it a day.

Pierre Robert, Philadelphia’s ‘Citizen’ D.J., Dies at 70

RIP to a legend www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/a...

YouTube video by Flock of Dimes Flock of Dimes - Price of Blue [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

It's this kind of weather www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWRj...

Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way Our election system is reaching a breaking point.

How many ways could Trump try to subvert the 2026 elections? More than you can probably imagine, and many of them might work. My deep dive in @theatlantic.com, posted today: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

CBS News Loses ‘Evening News’ Co-Anchor John Dickerson as Bari Weiss Charts New Course for Network Dickerson said on Monday he was “extremely grateful” for his 16 years at the network

DICKERSON: ".. I am extremely grateful for all that CBS gave me — the work, the audience’s attention and the honor of being a part of the network’s history .."

@thewrap.com @jdickerson.bsky.social
www.thewrap.com/cbs-news-joh...

YouTube video by ProPublica Russell Vought: The Shadow President

I obtained ~dozens of hours~ of previously unreported recordings of Russ Vought's briefings from 2021 to 2024.

Want to hear the recordings yourself? Watch @propublica.org's
new mini-documentary about Vought 👇

THE SHADOW PRESIDENT www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Lu...

Hakeem Jeffries Gives Mamdani Last-Minute Endorsement for N.Y.C. Mayor

“Zohran Mamdani has relentlessly focused on addressing the affordability crisis and explicitly committed to being a mayor for all New Yorkers, including those who do not support his candidacy,” Mr. Jeffries wrote in a statement to @nytimes.com

“It’s important to make people feel like they have agency, that they have choice within the set of parameters you give them,” Mr. Pearlman writes. He promises to teach you how to enter “magic mode” to deal with rejection, and, even better, “how to let the haters fuel you.”

Magician Oz Pearlman also known as Oz the Mentalist in a portrait for The New York Times

Oz Pearlman aka Oz the Mentalist guessing Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN code

A description of Oz Pearlman aka Oz the Mentalist performing a magic trick

How does Oz Pearlman — a.k.a. Oz the Mentalist — know so much about his audience? This was a fun one: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/s...

YouTube video by Lady80z Soft Cell - Say Hello Wave Goodbye

RIP Dave Ball

Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat's Terry Rozier among 31 arrested in federal gambling-related investigation U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr., said the suspects allegedly used high-tech cheating technology to steal millions of dollars from secretly rigged underground poker games.

Despite Kash Patel's rhetoric this morning, a source familiar with the bust tells @nbcnews.com that the NBA gambling bust predated the Trump administration and that politics had nothing to do with it. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Magician Oz Pearlman also known as Oz the Mentalist in a portrait for The New York Times

Oz Pearlman aka Oz the Mentalist guessing Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN code

A description of Oz Pearlman aka Oz the Mentalist performing a magic trick

How does Oz Pearlman — a.k.a. Oz the Mentalist — know so much about his audience? This was a fun one: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/s...

Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball Russell Vought is using the White House budget office to lay waste to the federal bureaucracy—firing workers, decimating agencies, and testing the rule of law.

🚨NEW: After we revealed Russ Vought's "put them in trauma" video, I spent the next year reporting on him, his influence, and his vision for America.

Yes, I got *new* recordings & videos of Vought.

Here is the story.

A @propublica.org + @newyorker.com collab: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I was lucky enough to read an in-progress draft of this over the summer. @isaacfitzgerald.bsky.social, as is his nature, will make you laugh/cry/long/wonder/feel it all in equal measure. Preorder!

NYT Adams professional obit

Perfect, 10/10

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/n...

It seems that Kaleb Horton has passed away. A devastating loss. One of the best writers of this generation. Kaleb was a friend for ten years and in all our conversations I was trying to convince him how good he was, something he seemed to know but also never fully believe. I am going to go cry now.

How Jeff Tweedy Made a New Magnum Opus

“Whether we feel like we have to transcend it or not, we do,” Tweedy said. “We keep moving. We keep putting one foot in front of the other and wanting to be here..." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/a...

This was the closest we got to the rapture