Foster Kamer

From my perspective, Woodworking has done far more to get readers to understand trans people than all of the journalism I did on the topic. But "getting someone to empathize" is a different thing from "explaining the facts of a situation," and one fiction is uniquely calibrated to do well.

There was an NY Mag piece from early in the pandemic about how badly a Covid-19 infection could turn out, which was way more effective in getting me to lock down, wear masks, etc., because of how my brain works. But that was clearly labeled as an invented scenario, based on a lot of research.

If Elizabeth Bruenig weren’t Elizabeth Bruenig but instead were Michael Pollan or Ed Yong, the reaction to her Atlantic story would be vastly different. It’s a unique take on a well-established narrative that could cut across lines reported stories don’t reach. Also, you all gotta chill.

Lol that Pepperdine - no doubt a MAGA SoCal stronghold - is on there. Classic Hegseth incompetence at play

Crying. You must see what this is in response to.

"'I have nothing to lose' said the bronze medalist" is a COLD line

we're all going through something

america bring 1 percent of this energy challenge

SHOCKING FEDERAL COURT MOMENT: DOJ attorney Julie Le, "The system sucks, this job sucks" to Judge Jerry Blackwell who pressed her on why so many court orders are being ignored by ICE/Trump admin. She asked to be held in contempt just so she could get 24 hours of sleep. @FOX9

This is unreal. An AUSA talking like that in open court is about as close as you can come to a total breakdown. Never heard of anything like it.

Watching the Grammys and what is this megachurch ass bullshit

It's funny how the culture change in Silicon Valley and the decline of exciting, actually disruptive products being produced by Silicon Valley, happened at the same time.

Good idea to turnaround The Washington Post: Start by firing Will Lewis, who hasn’t made anything profitable

Bunch of people mad about fascism who thought not voting was a good way to fight fascism and genocide by showing how big mad you are, ‘fuck outta here

This shit famously slaps

Oh wow things are that bad over there huh?

Might be Ridgewood

Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.

Maduro’s arrest is connected to a new kind of politics I’ve spent the last year struggling to describe. A profoundly embarrassing collision of violent nationalism, illiterate social chatter, and memetic fascism that’s been spreading across the globe since the pandemic. We’ve seen hints for years now that the elites of the world are just as addicted to — and dependent on — the same social platforms that we are. Ignoring the near-constant public embarrassments of our shitposter ruling class that play out on platforms like X every day, our leaders are also digitally networking with each other behind closed doors. There’s Chatham House, the group chat that fried the minds of Silicon Valley’s most reactionary CEOs like Marc Andreessen, that’s been running since COVID started. Which is adjacent to the text message network of powerful men that convinced Elon Musk to buy Twitter in 2022. Last year, the Trump administration was caught planning out airstrikes in a Signal group. And days before the campaign in Venezuela, Republican operatives secretly teamed up with a far-right YouTuber to storm daycares in Minnesota. You take all of that and throw in last year’s Discord-based election in Nepal, the international white nationalist incel terror cells spreading across Telegram, and the fact Charlie Kirk’s killer allegedly carried out the attack for the members of his Discord channel and the picture couldn’t be clearer: Politics — and political violence — is now something performed, first and foremost, for an online audience. It almost doesn’t matter what happens irl if it makes noise online.

The US has transformed from a (sorta) functioning democracy into a poster regime, a rogue troll state, fueled by internet clout. And the abduction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is likely just the beginning.
www.garbageday.email/p/the-rise-o...

Oh, okay

Great, more traffic on the FDR tonight

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

GET YOUR FLU SHOT

That bitchy doorman at the Bowery two NYWFs ago who told some West Village TikTok influencer having a meltdown that she couldn’t get in: “fuck me? Oh honey the last time you got fucked it was by genetics”

What the fuck man

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Things are going great over at X, The Everything App

CBS News/Free Press program "Has feminism failed women" brought to you by bank of america and hosted by Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey

"Has feminism failed women brought to you by bank of america" is my MKULTRA sleeper agent activation phrase

A month ago, NYT columnist David Brooks wrote a column decrying the media and political fixation on the Epstein story.

This afternoon, House Democrats released a new tranche of photos of an event that Brooks attended with Epstein.

How a ‘Habeas Machine’ Reunited One Family That Was Pulled Apart by ICE The agents were on the hunt, but as they staked out the...

These people challenged ICE's New York director of "enforcement and removal operations" in court.

They won and the federal judge declared, "Thank you for your advocacy today." talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-a-h...

tweet by Connie Guglielmo: "AI slop: low- to mid-quality video, images, audio, text or a mix, created with AI tools, often w/little regard for accuracy. It’s fast, easy & inexpensive to make and put on social media to exploit the economics of attention on the internet, displacing higher-quality material."

interesting about-face -- this was the editor-in-chief of CNET who championed its AI-generated articles even as they had to be extensively corrected for huge numbers of errors back in 2023