Clare Corbould

Vanity Fair: What scares Guillermo del Toro?
Guillermo del Toro: People with nice suits and horrible souls.

the video must have jumped to TikTok, aka teen crack.

by the time i read the news this morning, about 7:50am, both kids were already well aware of the assassination of Kirk. the elder one advised immediately i probably wouldn't want to watch the video 😲. their lives are so saturated with US culture and politics.

Covfefe, revealed. Finally!

I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus

The Gilded Rage

Look, if we are doing authoritarianism then doing Kremlinology comes with it for free. I don’t make the rules.

Facebook: it could rain tomorrow. Here’s three ads about umbrellas.

Mastodon: here’s 14 Linux distros that anyone can install in less than a week.

Bluesky: IS HE DEAD YET? IS HE DEAD? I HEARD THAT HE’S DEAD, IS HE DEAD?

I’m not kidding when I say I love a formal synthesis. This one is spot-on. Some of what’s happening is people are trying to have a historical gaze for events that are still happening. Is it definitionally authoritarian? Cannot know until bodies stop dropping. But you can know it feels authoritarian

“The Wolves Came”: Richard Steigmann-Gall on Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’s *Did it Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America* | Society for US Intellectual History Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins has edited a book which he hoped would finally put to bed the hotly contested Fascism Debate that arose from Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and which has found itself renewed intermi...

From 2016 onwards, I had to mute so many dudebro historians over at that other site as they debated this question. You've probably seen this review but if not, it's a beauty.
s-usih.org/2025/05/the-...

Smashed this year’s Miles Franklin book award winner. It’s full of heart, so sharp, and lol funny.
“Four hours of meandering footage of the swelling seas… ‘Don’t Encourage Him’ is the Director’s retelling of Moby Dick, only from the whale’s point of view.” Siang Lu, Ghost Cities.

even I'm blocked!

So much of my own job interpreting Trumpism for the public is just reciting elementary second wave insights about masculine domination very slowly and loudly for people who have never been exposed to them before.

and even a few first-wave ones!

they do share a certain number of, checks notes, youthful interests

Nice find. But 10 bucks says the young ppl this was aimed at thought it was tryhard. Just like young ppl do today when most politicians etc get on TikTok or whatever.

And India for packages over a certain weight. And Australia.

evergreen skeet

There’s something to be said for billionaire governor hey.

Universities have lost their way, but cost-cutting and consultants are not the answer Last week in Sydney, we saw a melodrama acted out that could stand in for the state of Australian universities more generally.

Big ups to The Conversation (aunz.theconversation.com‬), which is largely funded by universities, for publishing this piece. Well worth a read. theconversation.com/universities...67

YouTube video by Scrummy TV Easy way to line a 2-Pound (2lb) Loaf Tin

baking hack that made me actually lol. Then I thought—I bet this person could change my life if I knew ALL her other tricks.

youtube.com/shorts/hJghs...

Wanna lean over to say they’ve got Buckleys…

Melb cafe, Sat morning: 4 ppl in their 80s racing to do the NYT Spelling Bee & considering whether the maker will respond positively to an entreaty to accept Australian words. Sole woman is adamant Sam Ezersky will make amendments. A companion declares he’s too arrogant to reply. It’s quite…lively.

Just thinking about the round-the-clock outrage that Fox News and other MAGA media have devoted to Mamdani's proposal to open a handful of city-run grocery stores.

Meanwhile, the president literally just nationalized Intel.

Hell I’d settle for 25 hours

La. regulators approve Entergy power plants for Meta’s AI data center Louisiana Public Service Commissioners voted four to one to approve Entergy’s three new gas plants to power Meta’s largest-ever data center.

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use *Three Times* as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the *Entire City Of New Orleans*, every year.

Y'all this isn't sustainable.

Wow! Gun sales down. I guess with a fasc*st strongman in charge, a whole lotta MAGA no longer feel the need to start or augment their personal arsenal.

You cannot program an AI to make woman f*ck you.

You CAN prop up a reality show Manchurian candidate to consolidate the power of a 40-year plan to make a white nation state that has been updated & amended to also make punitive childbirth that it pushes women out of the labor market & civic life

Elon on Twitter says: AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system. That said, I predict – counter-intuitively – that it will *increase* the birth rate! Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way.

Everyone who runs an LLM loves that they get to be the architect of entire human realities, but they love it secretly because they know how dystopian it is.

Except Elon, he loves it loudly because his audience is super into how dystopian it is.

Alt text: Screenshot of a White House webpage. The first bullet point describes the American History Museum’s “LGBTQ+ History” exhibit, which aims to understand evolving and overlapping identities including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, transsexual, transvestite, mahu, homosexual, fluid, invert, urnring, third sex, two sex, gender-bender, sapphist, hijra, friend of Dorothy, drag queen/king, and more. It also includes articles on “LGBTQ+ inclusion and skateboarding” and “the rise of drag ball culture in the 1920s.” The second bullet point highlights the National Museum of the American Latino’s programming featuring “animated Latinos and Latinas with disabilities.” It includes content from “a disabled, plus-sized actress” and an “ambulatory wheelchair user” who educates on being Latinx, LGBTQ+, and disabled.

The White House listed an exhibit on LGBTQ history at the Smithsonian as objectionable and something to be removed.