Jessica Winter

"While the most narrow definition of alliteration is that it refers to the repeating initial letters, here, at Stone Soup, I want you to always be thinking bigger. Or, we can say, at Stone Soup, think bigger, bolder, broader. Think pattern. What does alliteration do for you writing? What use it? I want you to think about noise. I want you to go outside and listen to traffic, to sound of wind the trees, to anything that is repetitive. Busy restaurants with their chatter. Noise. Nothing to make one minute different from another minutes."

A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!

"This Weeks project. Every language has a quality that is played up in poetry that plays to each language’s strength. In English, one of the qualities of our language that has been used in poetry and in literary prose for over five-hundred years is a literary technique called “alliteration.” We are all aware of alliteration. It is a common technique used by corporation when they name products, or their companies. Stone Soup, Coco-cola. Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Costco. What you see here is the repetition in close proximity of a strong sounding consonant, usually at the start of each word. As “Costco” shows, repeating sounds can also be inside of words. You see that also in the name of the largest river in North America, the Mississippi."

This week's A.I.-generated writing prompt is very Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar

"Friends — Well, ironically, it turns out that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I had the power within me all along to modernize the Stone Soup website. In this instance, I didn’t have to click my heals, what I needed to do was ask Anthropic’s Claude, the AI model I use everyday in my own research to come to my aid. As it turns out, just as we read that AI is replacing programmers, so, indeed Claude can design websites. As some of you will recall from earlier in the year, my goal was to create a home page that had static navigation — you could see what was in the website just by reading the home page. I also wanted a home page that was different — and graphically striki Finally, in the end, I am making the Stone Soup website myself, with technical assistance provided by a website developer. I am designing using Anthropic Claude’s Opus 4 Large Language AI model. This model is able to both design web pages and"

Just got the latest newsletter from Stone Soup, the journal of creative writing and art by kids ages 6-13, and I didn't even have to "click my heals"

Watching the “King of the Hill” Revival from Texas In the age of MAGA, the show’s small-town values are both a relief and slightly outdated. In the end, will we and the animated characters all live like city people?

What a lovely piece by @rachelmonroe.bsky.social about King of the Hill, small-town life, and the meaning of the twilight sky above Arlen.

Older kid has been home sick all week bingeing Nathan For You and hands-down the best walk-on characters were the two older women at “Smokers Allowed" who 100% clocked what was up and compared the play to the work of Sam Shepard 😍😍

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

The WaPa headline says: 60,000 Gazans were killed. 18,500 of them were children. These are some of their names. Then follows an enormous list of small print names

Thousands of small print names interspersed with some photos of some of the child victims

NEW: 18,500 children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

The Washington Post has just published every single known name.

A seminal moment.

3 mysteries:

Hank—can't vote for Trump, can't vote Dem, can't not vote, probably goes third party
Dale—probably Antifa's most ineffectual elder, but maybe QAnon
Luanne—probably QAnon

Haven't done this since the old site:

Bill, Nancy, Minh, Kahn—MAGA
Buck—MAGA, in the Epstein files
Bobby, Connie—Bernie/DSA
Peggy—NeverTrumper
Boomhauer—Obama-Trump-Bernie-Trump
Joseph—libertarian-to-Charlie Kirk spectrum
Chane—clerked for Kavanagh
Dooley—J6er
Clark—undersecretary of defense

they are stealing from us and from our children even though they have unfathomable wealth. they openly tell you that they're building gibberish machines to put us all out of work. it's a fucking scandal and everyone knows it and everyone hates it

I’d accept that Google owes publishers a fee for every time an AI result offers a user a link, but that’s just a disincentive to credit the source. I think it should just not be legal to scrape the whole web and then produce it on your own domain next to your own ads.

Adil Ray recounts the testimony of a doctor who explains IDF soldiers play a game where each day they decide to shoot Palestinian boys in a different part of their body

Flint: "Israel is a functioning democracy. It is understandable when you have Hamas in control.." #GMB

Headline from NY Post: NYC kids banned from using phones, smartwatches, tablets in public schools starting this fall

Nearly two decades after my principal said we couldn't do anything about kids' phones, so we had to figure out how to use them in our lessons, and after two decades of schools failing to "teach kids how to use them responsibly," phones are being banned and we're getting the same message about AI.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

"What is being done to Palestinians in Gaza is barbaric and entirely preventable...the world is watching as the people of Gaza are forced to endure starvation and gunfire, all while food and medical aid sits across the border just miles away."

"In recent days, I operated on two women who were shot by quadcopters while sheltering in their tents...One was breastfeeding her child when she was hit; the second was pregnant."

"My colleagues in the emergency department have also reported a disturbing pattern: injuries concentrated on specific body parts on different days – heads, legs, genitals – suggesting deliberate targeting of those body parts."

I’m witnessing the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s children – why is the world letting it happen? | Nick Maynard A permanent ceasefire, the free and safe flow of aid, and the lifting of the blockade are needed now – all could be achieved with political will, says UK surgeon Nick Maynard

"Children are being given...sugar water, which has no nutritional value, and often their mothers are too malnourished to breastfeed. When an international colleague tried to bring baby formula into Gaza, Israeli authorities confiscated it."

The comments on Bret Stephens’ latest NYT column, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” are really something.

Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion. Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. "Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says. "Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."

It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...

No it's the perfume counter at Horne's Department Store

FEMA search and rescue chief resigns after frustration with Texas flood response | CNN Politics The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue branch, which runs a network of teams stationed across the country that can swiftly respond to natural disasters, resigned on Monday.

Head of FEMA Urban Search and Rescue branch resigns.
He told colleagues that TX delay was tipping point after months of admin efforts to dismantle the agency. DHS Sec Noem took 72 hours after TX flooding to authorize the deployment of FEMA’s search and rescue network
www.cnn.com/2025/07/21/p...

yes

You are right and yet it's also 100% something Jerry would say to Blackie as a backhanded compliment

Just imagine that whole card as read aloud by our king Richard Beymer

Leland Palmer is SEVERAL PEOPLE

Ghislaine is Blackie from One-Eyed Jacks

"May every day be a wonderful secret" is Ben Horne incarnate

I realize that for me everything comes back to Twin Peaks but my god the Epstein saga is Twin Peaks through and through

Big day for guys in my inbox explaining stuff