James Fallows Tierney

I hope you aren’t drunk and took your staff’s advice, Rashida and I don’t know this man and feel confident he didn’t care about us. Please restrain from drinking too much as you have been warned from your staff and stay off social media when you are drunk. I pray in his holy month you find peace and respect for your self,

uhhh oh my god

The thing that’s most remarkable to me about these betting sites with respect to political issues is that anybody is willing to be a counterparty without also being an insider. Pure adverse selection.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Two categories of analysts who might take a step back, away from the microphone or keyboard, this weekend:

—Those who assured us that Trump was the real anti-war candidate.

—Those who assured us that invading Iraq was necessary and would work out great.

In Iran, air power alone will not reshape the regime. Since WWI, dozens of U.S., Israeli & allied air campaigns have tried to force political change — none installed friendly governments. None! They strengthen nationalism and intensify resistance.

the guy who wrote the literal book on this stuff is dunking on the admin:

Did you caramelize those onions yourself

under submission to the law reviews finally, to the editors that are on here!

Surely it’s the whales excreting it, which explains why they were so critically important to the ACK economy

Cocaine levels in Nantucket's wastewater are growing exponentially. No one is sure exactly why. After measuring 50% above national levels in September, the island saw even steeper increases later in the year.

no one is sure exactly why

The people who run these AI projects are so deeply unimpressive as thinkers.

It’s funny that there was a very popular movie made about this in the 80s. Except the premise was that AI would figure out that this was bad, actually

"It's a living."
"Not a very good one."

Also thank you for your service here, this is what I would’ve scoured too

35k nominal in 1991, 85k real in 2026, etc

I thought the check was 100k?

The entire “I wanted to avenge Nixon and Reagan, and it ended up being for this fucking guy” arc—you can read it on his face

Oh no doubt, it will be scraped!

Look forward to reading!!

If you all don’t post your briefs publicly to a repo, like to GitHub, I would encourage you to do so!

snoopy is sitting at a table with his eyes closed and his hand in his mouth . ALT: snoopy is sitting at a table with his eyes closed and his hand in his mouth .

Also bruh wtf are you talking about Uranus has 29 known moons

Good luck!

See you get it.

Yeah but we also discussed how the fifth amendment privilege is nonjusticiable in the parent child relationship, so like, sauce for the gander

He looks terrible (non derogatory)

Back to back questions from my kid at bedtime:

How does the privilege against self incrimination work

Why are there no moons on Uranus

Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu & Anupam B. Jena X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 34866 DOI 10.3386/w34866 Issue Date February 2026 Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study. One way to causally assess the impact of smartphones on road safety is to identify arbitrarily timed events during which smartphone-related distraction may exogenously increase – i.e., a situation that relies not on plausibly random variation in who uses smartphones while driving, but when smartphones are used. We investigated the impact of smartphones on road safety by examining traffic fatalities on days when smartphone use likely surges: the release of major music albums. Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days. Mobile device use while driving is a known safety issue, but today’s smartphones present new and greater opportunities for driver distraction. Our study indicates how features of these phones may have important impacts on distracted driving and traffic fatalities.

On days when major albums are released, people use music streaming services on their smartphone 40% more, and U.S. traffic fatalities increase by 15% www.nber.org/papers/w3486...

LLMs break our ability to conclude when there is proof of effort. We make high schoolers write essays and do math assignments not because we care about essay or because we don’t know the problem set answers, but because the effort trains them in a certain way. We read customized cover letters as an important signal of interest, because it has traditionally been hard to make a good one, and you could only do it for so many jobs you applied for. Gatekeeping is inevitable, and when the old mechanisms stop working, other measures will step in, like relying on the prestige of the candidate’s institution or their connections to decide who to hire, or what papers to cite or publish.

I think about this a lot with LLMs and education and also publishing. The hope that by undermining failing or unfair systems, LLMs will destroy the hierarchies and unfairness seems... naive. The result will likely be the opposite. jessicahullman.substack.com/p/zeynep-tuf...

US appeals court says law firm's size doesn't limit legal fees A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that a trial judge in California improperly slashed the hourly rates sought by a small law firm after it won an antitrust case, saying that a law firm’s size cannot be used to justify awarding lower fees.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that a trial judge in California improperly slashed the hourly rates sought by a small law firm after it won an antitrust case, saying that a law firm’s size cannot be used to justify awarding lower fees.