Freelance writing about the wild, old and dead. (Plus comics.) Bylines in The New York Times, SciAm, Undark, Texas Monthly, and lots of other places. Repped by @desir.ee at Looking Glass Literary.
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Energy from the sun won’t solve every crisis we face — by itself, it won’t solve any of them. But it’s the one light flashing green, not red, the one wild card poking out of a rigged deck and begging to be played. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
This is genuinely shitty on the part of Brevoort, and again, the tone here -- "I guess I'm being naughty 😏" is so typical of people announcing something they know will make people mad but unwilling either not to do it or just to keep quiet about it
This is a thread poking at something I've been thinking about a lot, given the increasing prominence of openly reskinned fan fiction
Yes! You can't have it both ways here, man!
This is genuinely shitty on the part of Brevoort, and again, the tone here -- "I guess I'm being naughty 😏" is so typical of people announcing something they know will make people mad but unwilling either not to do it or just to keep quiet about it
NEW: Belgium has decided to recognize Palestine as well take multiple measures against Israel, including -The ban of all settler goods from being imported -Sanctions on Smotrich and Ben Gvir -Restrictions on imports from Israeli businesses -No consular services to Israelis in the oPt
Honestly imagine being so transphobic that you think the _United Kingdom_ is too trans friendly for you
I think the enviromental causes in particular are a graveyard everyone's been whistling past
I'm pretty open to the former point, but if the societal desires are the main issue, it's very odd that the slide is seemingly happening everywhere!
We need an extremely robust social safety net that makes it much, much easier (and safer) to have children. But we have to do that for its own sake, not as part of an intervention to produce more people
There is something genuinely really interesting happening with the general slide in birthrates, and it's equally interesting that none of the theories about how to address it (on the right or the left) seem to work
Xi-Putin-Modi backslapping, along with easing global condemnation for Russia's aggressive war of territorial conquest, gives a sense of what the post-American world looks like. Not some sort of peaceful utopia, but a playground for authoritarians, with aggression abroad and repression at home.
There's a strong argument to be made that literally anything that shakes left/liberals specifically and the country generally out of our "TRUMP ETERNAL" lassitude, even a joke meme death craze, does us a great deal of good
What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
People complaining about an ongoing competitive-pay very part time freelancing gig offered by company whose staff is two people: they have managed your expectations as much as is humanly possible, and at this point maybe you should apply to be a wealthy trust fund heir to a family fortune instead.
lol we did it, fam. We made them prove he’s alive
yeah “giving a shit about real problems that are actually occurring” being made into a political liability is just an extraordinarily grim development. you’re incentivized to avoid trying to actually address real things because there’s no upside at all politically.
Dating non-monogamously can be tricky no matter what -- lots of people aren't into it, which is fine -- but I remember what the app experience used to be like even just pre-pandemic, and it's kind of astounding how much worse it is now. And I think a lot of that is down to the apps themselves!
you have absolutely gotta be kidding me
The right is pushing this narrative because it’s the only place they can blame liberals — their actual goal — and gain purchase among elites. The *actual* mistakes during the pandemic all originate on the right: lax lockdowns, weak mitigations and low vaccine uptake
Like sorry but if your solution to any problem on here is that everyone needs to be nicer to New York Times people and not that we need more music recommendations and sports clips and general talking about random shit you are just living in a fantasy world, I disregard you.
A very happy Labor Day to everyone except the goons, the ginks, the company finks, the deputy sheriffs, the company boys, the company spies, the company stools, and the National Guard.
Fucking incredible
As much as I wouldn't mind the other thing, him being alive but largely diabled is probably the better outcome at the moment in terms of making things difficult for everybody in the administration
Is this the first time we've seen him without makeup?
Sean I can't believe how *bad* he looks
I *have* to know more. How did he get in in the first place? What led to him getting kicked out?
May the odds be ever in your favor
*Jesus* he looks bad
It's sort of a perfect slot machine, too, because the question of payout (starting a conversation, going on a date, to say nothing of finding Love) is a total black box
One last thing: I was reminded of this funny interaction I had with OkCupid back in 2021
One other thought about TInder, Bumble, Hinge, Feeld and others of that form: they are, functionally, gambling apps and I think should be understood as such
Large swaths of Africa speak French because they sat down and soberly decided to pick up a European language as an elective. They just happened to settle on the one that lets them go "hon hon hon"
Screaming
But I'd be interested to go back and try and trace that change over a bit more, because I'm not totally sure when it happens
Well, Poison Ivy's an interesting example because she started out as someone who didn't care about plants particularly beyond a theme and was just a general plant-themed femme fatale criminal. I think the eco-extremist version of her only really got going in the 80s or 90s
And we're all the poorer for it
Which Magneto was right
Obviously I have written about this At Some Length
People love to post this one around, it always does numbers when they do, and the choice to have the cited character be Magneto (as opposed to, say, Poison Ivy) never ceases to fascinate me
Pope Leo XIV met with one of the most prominent advocates for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church. The Rev. James Martin said Leo told him that he intended to continue Pope Francis’ policy of LGBTQ+ acceptance in the church and encouraged him to keep up his advocacy.
"chatGPT 5 is like having a bunch of phds in your pocket" here's ten trillion dollars "bluesky is having an *actual* bunch of phds in your pocket" dying platform. it disgusts me
The Roadless Rule does a huge amount to protect wild areas against wildfires, the vast majority of which begin near roads. It's super easy to leave a comment urging them to keep the Roadless Rule and protect against fires. Comments like this make a big impact! www.regulations.gov/commenton/FS...
I like Ghost a lot. Buttondown and beehiv are supposed to be pretty good. Hell, start a blog and put up a Ko-Fi. Do not let any newsletter site — especially a Nazi sucking one — control your ability to get paid for your own independent project
Enclosure of the commons, baybee
I understand people’s reticence to move when the fear is that their paying audience won’t follow them. The thing is, Substack is increasingly trying to engineer it so that your paying audience *can’t* easily follow you, because they’re locked into Substack, not you!
Substack wants — even more than its general friendliness to Nazi accounts — to lock you into its ecosystem. The longer you linger, the harder they are going to make it for you to leave and take your mailing lists/payment relationships with you. They’re actively fucking with your money
This enormously pernicious and no one should still be on Substack - not just because of the Nazis, but for sheer practical business reasons.
This is a real danger but to jamelle's point in this thread, folks often don't appreciate the scale of American elections: how many polling places, election workers, and decentralized redundancies, and how little of it is under any federal control. It far outstrips federal manpower in its vastness.
How dare you
Happy Labor Day 🙂
And as others have pointed out it’s all whistling past the graveyard anyway, because “text-based social media” isn’t where the growth is regardless
Good morning, and Happy Labor Day, but please keep the President in your thoughts as he is very ill and probably suffering a great deal
Restricting comment settings has *absolutely* helped
The other thing about Bluesky’s scold issue is that the strong community culture (not at all a bad thing necessarily!) makes us easy marks for people who want to kick the hornet nest and then run elsewhere to complain about it, and I don’t know how you fix that issue either
And it’s very hard to deal with the scold problem when everyone who’s on here has been exposed to years of right wingers claiming that Twitter/X wasn’t sufficiently welcoming, got it turned into their cesspool, and then immediately tried to come over here to start the process again
The site culture (as prickly and nasty as it could sometimes be) was better before the last major spikes, not just because it was smaller, but because many of the people who came over with the big Resist Accounts were and are completely feral
I think Bluesky does have an endemic scold problem, but the larger one is the (understandable) focus on politics, and the attendant infestation of ResistLib/BlueMAGA types
I don't get how people don't realize that a technology that replaces junior and entry level positions in a field destroys that field. There's no skipping steps. You have to be a junior before you can be a senior, and if you don't have senior people, you don't have a field.
If you’re looking for endlessly supportive sycophancy, ChatGPT is right there buddy
it is actually so damaging for them that "when it happens" is such a meme all over the internet now though I just feel like "grassroots conviction that you're about to fucking die any day now" isn't really conducive to projecting an aura of fascist inevitability
No, not at all. Parker isn't a big introspective thinker but he's got a predator's intelligence and there should always be a sense that he's constantly doing the geometry of any situation he finds himself in. Wahlberg simply can't play that
@rosfalianti.bsky.social suggested Henry Cavill or Daniel Kaluuya and honestly I could see either of them doing a pretty killer Richard Stark-version of Parker. Daniel Craig kind of already did it in Casino Royale
I’m wracking my brains for *good* Parker casting (because Wahlberg extremely is not) and it’s surprisingly difficult
This movie might be fun! I like Shane Black! This still — somehow — feels less like a Parker movie than a bunch of the ones made calling the character by other names
Like this movie might be fun but it absolutely will not be a Richard Stark movie. The tone is *all* wrong
Mark Wahlberg is somehow worse casting than Jason Statham!?!
Oh yikes
Not yet, which is a little odd (and frankly, concerning) because it's coming out so soon
Just discovered that the newest Park Chan-wook film, No Other Choice, is actually based on a Westlake novel (The Ax, which feels like a good fit for his sensibilities) and getting rave reviews, so even if this Parker film sucks at least we'll have that
Ooh! Where is this?
Frankly, yes, because Feeld has not (yet!) actively destroyed the core engine that makes it work
I genuinely believe this
You’d think it could only be so over and at every turn, you would be wrong
Hinge, Bumble and Tinder have all — to varying degrees — made it possible to list/filter for it, but Feeld is the only one explicitly for it and also the only one that doesn’t rely on swiping to see a full potential range of matches
I don’t think this is wholly wrong!
They've gotten noticeably worse since 2019, and they weren't great then, either
It'd be sort of interesting to look at this in the context of, say, the evolution of youtube thumbnails, which are similarly a pretty specialized graphic form designed to get and grab attention as quickly as possible
Photo personals have always had a bias toward people who can take good pictures of themselves -- famously so -- but I also think that there's been something of an arms race with the advent of Tinder and its imitators, in large part because it structurally forces people to make "hot or not" decisions
Buddy you genuinely would not believe. It went from being a website where I met a number of friends and dates to now being not just a twitter clone, but a cut-rate one that's stripped away most of the existing features and is visibly fraying at the seams
I would absolutely love to see an(anonymized, obviously) Ashley Madison-style leak of Match's servers, just to get a sense of what the actual engagement numbers and data looks like, because it feels like they're trying to cover for the fact that folks are abandoning their products in droves
Dating non-monogamously can be tricky no matter what -- lots of people aren't into it, which is fine -- but I remember what the app experience used to be like even just pre-pandemic, and it's kind of astounding how much worse it is now. And I think a lot of that is down to the apps themselves!
It helped make the matching aspect a lot more organic. Feels like a complete lost technology now
It's gotten worse than even that!
I noticed that now they no longer show any of the extra context you could add to your questions answers, or indeed the extra information about what was an important answer or not
These people are absolutely not house-trained and trying correct them makes them worse
Kind of a perfect case study, honestly!
I increasingly think it's a poster child for online service enshittification
Also, it bodes extremely poorly for the future of a dating website when you log on and it *immediately* serves you ads for other dating websites under the same corporate umbrella
It seems like the main development that website's had over the past few years is "rolling back features"
Boy, OkCupid's really gone to the dogs, huh
Congress's, mostly
The Earth is the common heritage of mankind and no corner of it should be denied to anyone merely on the basis of race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, or place of birth.
It's got to be, yeah
""For the love of God, Trick House Man!" "Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"
Deeply sinister energy to this video. Feels like it might become "The Cask of Amontillado" at any moment
They're fucking with the money, man!
I think the sooner you do it, the better, because Substack is going to do everything short of physical violence to stop people from making that transition easily