In a world in which people with too much power and influence desperately need to be told and to understand when they are wrong, we are suddenly all inescapably drowning in sycophancy machines.

Stack of blocks labeled, all modern digital infrastructure. A ratchet tipping over the entire stack is labeled AI. A load bearing pillar is labeled unpaid open source development. Another label is AWS, and Cloudflare and Unpaid Open Source Developers.

Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Esptein's journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press.

New — I wrote about the myriad ways journalism’s moral rot manifests, and how our crumbling institutions have created the conditions for it to fester:

I swear to god. The problem with Trump isn’t his weight or whether he had a gay encounter. The problem is that he’s a fascist, corrupt criminal.

Get it together, people. If you’re going to protect people and form coalitions you have to do better and show you are an ally.

Things like this will become increasingly common as billionaires increasingly treat low earth orbit like their personal playground and garbage dump

We lived with asbestos for decades - it was too hard and big to tackle - but now we take it seriously - which is good and as it should be.
But we already know, conclusively, that Covid is bad. Bad for kids, bad for everyone. Potentially fatal. Just like asbestos. But we do nothing.
It’s criminal.

So many vulnerable people were hurt, harassed and raped by these ghouls and now—I’m worried—it’s gonna become hehe haha lurid internet circus instead of a long overdue moral reckoning. I’m scared of who we all are becoming. That man has brought us ALL low.

emailing in a semi-literate manner isn’t a sign of stupidity, it’s another form of rich asshole arrogance because you don’t think you owe anyone coherent thoughts

It’s been a pleasure working with Lex and everyone in the politics vertical at Teen Vogue. I’m heartbroken that my column, Disability Visibility, is gone. Teen Vogue was one of the few places that published disabled journalists regularly. I just spent the last 2 months working on my next column

Me cheering with one hand up. Holding jacket eyes closed smiling screaming

Me finding out @zohrankmamdani won. Captured by the great Faraz Ansari

I hope all nonwhite Americans are taking note of the vile racism coming out of mainstream conservative mouths in the wake of the Mamdani victory. The masks have fallen.

Throughout the pandemic, our COVID guidelines and protocols were based on Health Canada and local public health guidelines at any given time, including return to work protocols. These were our minimum standards and at times we went above them. Quirks & Quarks is editorially independent from CBC management and has covered COVID in a number of different ways over the past few years, including the story you heard in March.

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after the broadcast, my partner emailed a group of CBC managers and union reps to ask—in light of the quirks & quarks coverage—why it was OK to force us back to the office with no mitigations, especially when our son was too young to be vaccinated.

several months later, she received this reply:

FUCK WHY DID YOU GUYS LET ME TRY THIS IVE NEVER BEEN SO STRESSED IN MY FUCKING LIFE

An Air Canada flight right now

Meme showing six logical operators illustrated with jack-o'-lantern images. trick OR treat trick AND treat trick XOR treat trick NOR treat trick NAND treat trick XNOR treat

I’ve read somewhere that climate is a political loser and we should pivot to abundance so

“Let them go a month without meals. Maybe they will get a job”

First, many SNAP recipients have jobs. They’re just living below the poverty line because of tremendous wealth inequality.

Second, many are disabled and children and can’t work.

Third, no one should starve to death.

It's not lost on me that the part of the White House we are destroying is the part that has to do with women's history in the White House.

The government shutdown feels a bit like a decapitation strike aimed at the entire legislative branch.

The administration can’t keep the government shutdown forever, but I could easily see them using the plenary executive theory to circumvent congressional appropriations authority, for example.

Two cats sitting on top of cages and looking at the ceiling

Two cars on the floor staring up at the ceiling

Two young kittens in a cage taking notice

A cat standing on her hind legs to reach for a moth

A moth got into the shelter tonight and it was the event of the season.

Picture of the East Wing demolition of the White House taken on my flight out of DCA.

Dear Journalists,

You seriously don’t have to always be like, “2 + 2, said by some experts in math to equal four.” You can just say the thing. It doesn’t make you biased. Really. It’s okay.

XOXO,
Simeon

I just have to say that @sarahkendzior.bsky.social has been our Cassandra on this for YEARS connecting the dots using publicly available reliably sourced reporting and more people should read her books, likely available at your local public library 💜

Inventing Antifa In 2005, the Uzbek government invented a group called “Akromiya” to justify massacring protesters. Now I worry the US government will do the same.

In 2005, I wrote an article called "Inventing Akromiya" about how the government of Uzbekistan made up a group called Akromiya to justify a massacre of civilian protesters.

Twenty years later, the US is more like Uzbekistan, and I wrote "Inventing Antifa": sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/inventing-...

George Stephanopolous did what every anchor and host should have been doing since Bush 2000: Rejecting the bullshit, gaslighting, and rude, evasive filibustering the GOP has perfected to hide their lies.

NO MORE BULLSHIT.

Violating the copyright of a single piece of art is a crime. Violating the copyright of every piece of art in existence is a business model apparently.

The Sora AI thing is proof of something very important: The technology itself is useless without the ability to use the likenesses of real, living, unpredictable people, and the art they create. And the only way to get those likenesses or that art is to summarily steal it.

AIO (AI optimization) is the new SEO.

This is one more reason why treating GenAIs as oracles of truth is insane. They only regurgitate what they've been trained on and if someone can influence the training, they can control what answers you get.

The end of an era. Social media is people's RSS reader now.

This is a classic authoritarian tactic to cast the victims as the true enemy and the fight to protect ourselves from their fascist violence as terrorism.

They are trying to invert reality to suit their violent goals