Amanda Mull

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.

‘A very dangerous person’: alarm as Pete Hegseth revels in carnage of Iran war Critics say brash, bombastic Fox News host out of his depth to guide US military through murky new Middle East conflict

This is a grim read www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

It is absolutely insane that the US appears to have targeted desalination plants first – putting them onto the board. Iran seems to have already retaliated against one in Bahrain. This is one of the most obvious ways this could spiral.

The South ending Reconstruction and plunging their populations into a backward looking culture and economy until it was forced to modernize by the Civil Rights movement is imo a very clean parallel.

Yeah I get it you don’t like the NYT I’m like super crystal clear on that, I’m just trying to explain how this actually works

If you’re familiar with how this kind of sourcing works then it’s extremely obvious that they did this on purpose, likely because the man in question insisted upon some very stupid identification parameters he hadn’t thought through that allowed them to do it, and they do not like him.

Now you’re the one quibbling.

Feel free to read a link before you send it

NYT is a union shop, they’re not using AI this way

This woman, US citizen living in Skokie, was detained at Ohare yesterday, taken to Broadview, then transferred to a detention facility in Wisconsin, now released. We know all this not because of DHS, who repeatedly denied that they even had her, but because her phone was pinging in those locations.

You shouldn’t laugh, journalists only do this when they are extremely sick of you

tapping the "people underestimate how many of our society's elites are motivated not by self-interest, but by sadism" sign