Amanda Mull

Former Fukushima worker devotes life to abandoned pets.

Not far from the Fukushima nuclear disaster site, former plant worker Toru Akama tends to dozens of pets abandoned after the catastrophe 15 years ago, work he sees as part of his quest for redemption
u.afp.com/SuCM

This is literally almost word for word how the escalation trap is described

Yeah at least one other person mentioned something like this to me—talking themselves out of a right answer because it seemed too obvious

Honestly I think a lot of people are just not good at reading and a slightly dumbed down version is more palatable!

Taste is tricky for some people!

Like it would probably be trickier to peg 4 of the 5 as LLM product without the context that comparison provides (one of them was extremely obvious even without it) but that’s because you might just assume they were written by someone who is kind of middling

I didn’t find this particularly difficult because the LLMs were just kind of flat? Like versions of these authors if they wrote for people without taste

I think Adam Silver did the right thing, a valuable institution like Magic City shouldn’t have to deal with the cultural baggage of the Hawks

I want to know why they didn’t mention the investment income when everyone else had at least a like for every type of income included!

Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats, too, want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what it was in 1992.

Moderate Democrats with columns in newspapers are constantly saying the Democratic Party is way too liberal on "social" issues. Moderate Democratic voters in real life do not feel this way. With some polling data from @gelliottmorris.com and @dataforprogress.org. newrepublic.com/article/2074...

No, effeminate boys aren’t being ‘transed’ | Xtra Magazine Hiding my transness nearly killed me. Let’s work to build a world where trans people’s lives aren’t quite so hard

A recent Atlantic column claimed society is allegedly "transing" effeminate boys. For my @xtramagazine.com column this month, I wrote a rebuttal using my own experience as a young, closeted trans girl. xtramagazine.com/power/identi...

ngl, thinking that the issue here is just that "US is rational and stable" is a load-bearing assumption for a lot of things so people default to it. because house of cards collapses entirely if assumption is put into severe doubt

I’m briefly in India. This is a facile observation, but Americans have barely scratched the surface in understanding how the rest of the world is reacting to this war. It’s already an Iraq War-style disaster in the global imagination, underscored by the thuggishness and caprice of the Trump approach

Yup. So open, in fact, that it can and should be acknowledged in some way in coverage!

By now there’s enough independent, third-party data analysis of AI’s impact (or apparent lack thereof) on the current job market that there’s no reason not to include some skepticism about the executive claim when you write it up.

Opinion | They Feel Bugs Inside Them. Doctors Don’t Know Why.

this is a good piece. I'm interested as to why it doesn't explicitly reference "Morgellons" by name, which is the most common umbrella term used by sufferers of these delusions. Maybe to avoid reifying it?

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/o...

Was similarly curious!!

Going to be a big summer for middle aged men with heat pumps and solar panels.

someone at the pentagon frantically typing “Claude, open the strait of Hormuz for me, quickest possible strategy, make no mistakes.”

I sometimes wonder if we just named "soft power" something like "tall turgid thrusting power" would these guys have been more in favour of it and thereby less self undermining.

The delta between how complicated and esoteric the chart is and how close to just "dawg 💀" the econ-knowers response to it is called the terror vector

I love Econ-positng. Dan Habsmith of Guttermeyer Associates posts the most confusing chart you've ever seen and says "Quite surprising VARG numbers, SPLG index showing movement" and you get the context by one of his mutuals quoting it with "Buy a fucking gun and head for the hills. Right now."

The terminal has an absurd amount of data, I used the ship tracker to keep an eye on the bookcases we ordered in January making their way here from the factory in England

HORMUZ TRACKER: Iran-Linked Ships Are the Only Ones to Transit Strait of Hormuz transit remains near a standstill for a seventh day, with Iran-linked ships the only commercial vessels making the crossing in the past 24 hours.

Bloomberg’s built a ship tracker and absolutely nothing is moving in the Persian Gulf rn — www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

As this was happening you were told shoplifting and home invasions were grave threats you needed to abandon any pretense of sympathy to address.

The Man Who Broke Into Jail In Nashville, a criminal-justice activist commits a baffling crime.

Are people reading/talking about this story? It's one of the best in the New Yorker in a long time, in my opinion. Absolutely wild. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

They Fought for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. In America, They’re Living in Fear.

Since 2022, Matthieu Aikins and I have been investigating the CIA’s Afghan surrogate commandos, known in Afg as the Zero Units but officially called the CTPTs by the CIA. These units’ existence has been publicly known since 2010, but their relationship with the CIA is still an official secret...

a lot of discussion about how "cosmopolitan" urban dwellers are, but a really underdiscussed trend is the homogenization of culture across *rural* areas of the USA - replacement of once-distinct regional cultures with generic "redneck" accent and culture, regional religions with evanglicalism etc

CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen says black, oil-contaminated rain is falling over Tehran after strikes on oil facilities by U.S./Israeli airstrikes.