Michael Moyer

I realize that Bob Iger does not personally read the explanations people give when they cancel Disney+, but still, it was cathartic.

Headline from the New York Times, 1939: “Goebbels ends careers of five “Aryan“ actors who made witticisms about the Nazi regime.”

www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

How We Came To Know Earth | Quanta Magazine Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from...

My colleagues just posted an incredibly ambitious series about the science of climate science. I hope you'll check it out: www.quantamagazine.org/how-we-came-...

Seeking science journalists: @quantamagazine.bsky.social is hiring a physics editor!

A rare opportunity to join this great team and lead coverage of this foundational vertical. Please reach out with any questions and share widely

simonsfoundation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/simons...

I've subscribed to Defector since week 1 and it is great, long live blogs.

Saw my first Waymo in NYC (w/ driver).

Same spot, 30 seconds earlier, a Jeep with monster-truck tires made an illegal U-turn across two double-yellow lines and nearly hit a cyclist.

This is very odd - we've found loads of articles attempting to discredit these scientists, all anonymously published. It's still unclear who is producing these articles, and why

What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers.

One thing we’re going to see a *lot* of: Pieces that appear to explore an intellectually provocative question inspired by AI, but that assume a premise (in this case “friendship with a chatbot is possible”) that’s a) nonsensical and b) perfectly aligned with the aims of AI marketing

Humans are excellent at smelling things! Better than dogs, sometimes.

The reason why we're told otherwise is due to a mistranslation of a 19th-century French theory of what makes humans special.

And Freud. He didn't help, either.

Data: People who eat 1 hot dog a day (!!!)

Expert conclusion: Maybe eat less

Headline: NO SAFE AMOUNT

www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/h...

NEW: NSF will be kicked out of their building. Announcement will be made tomorrow by HUD Sec. and Governor of VA. HUD will take over the NSF building over the next two years.

NSF staffer: "There is no planning for NSF, no identified future location, appropriation for a new building or a move."

William Langewiesche, the ‘Steve McQueen of Journalism,’ Dies at 70

RIP William Langewiesche, the master of illuminating difficult subjects (engineering, airplanes, etc.) with riveting narratives www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/b...

My annotated screenshot of the linked headline that attempts to edit out the offending phrase “Trump’s top general”

I know the reporters generally don’t write the headlines; when they’re this bad someone should come out and own it to take the heat off the reporter. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

The Washington Post Plans an Influx of Outside Opinion Writers

Mortgaging your brand to publish lots of mediocre work in the service of editorial volume used to be called a "blog network." www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/b...

Herr Doktor von Braun would like a word

Singularities in Space-Time Prove Hard to Kill | Quanta Magazine Black hole and Big Bang singularities break our best theory of gravity. A trilogy of theorems hints that physicists will need to go to the ends of space and time to find a fix.

Do singularities exist? I'd always thought they were purely mathematical artifacts, but recent work in mathematical physics work from @bousso.bsky.social and others hint otherwise (for sufficiently broad definitions of "singularities" and "exist").

www.quantamagazine.org/singularitie...

The comment period for this ends in 3 DAYS. Please leave a comment telling them EVERYONE should be able to get covid boosters.
www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

this fucking psychopath has no business leading the agency responsible for the nation’s health. it’s ridiculous!

AI Has Upended the Search Game. Marketers Are Scrambling to Catch Up. Websites will soon serve primarily as data sources for AI platforms, not destinations for humans, Mailchimp predicts.

The internet as an ouroboros of machine-generated slop optimized to serve other machines. "Websites in general will evolve to serve primarily as data sources for bots that feed LLMs, rather than destinations for consumers, she said." www.wsj.com/articles/ai-...

Just a few days after Columbia announces the Pulitzers, the university goes and suspends its own student journalists.

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

Very interesting oral history -- interviews with some top NLP folks on the effects of GenAI on their field:

www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

AI Changes Science and Math Forever | Quanta Magazine An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

Out today: a new special series from @quantamagazine.bsky.social about science in the age of AI! It explores the roots of AI in fundamental science, how researchers are trying to make sense of AI today, and the ways they’re grappling with an uncertain future.

www.quantamagazine.org/series/scien...

AI Changes Science and Math Forever | Quanta Magazine An exploration of how artificial intelligence is changing what it means to do science and math, and what it means to be a scientist.

Thrilled to share a giant project, many months in the making, from the entire team at Quanta Magazine:

Science, Progress and Peril in the Age of AI

www.quantamagazine.org/series/scien...

One of the many things we do before assigning a story at @quantamagazine.bsky.social is to call up some experts and ask if it's a good story—if people in the field take the issues at stake seriously. If they say "this is ridiculous," we drop the story.

Of course, there can be other approaches.

Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away Managing those AI identities will require companies to completely reassess their cybersecurity strategies.

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements"

www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...

super excited to fly out of JFK with my family tomorrow