“Apple Has a New Daddy” is the weirdly horny headline that CNET decided to go with for Corinne Reichert’s otherwise straightforward story on John Temu replacing Tim Apple as CEO of America’s last computer hardware company. Tim Apple is best remembered for the gaudy gold brick he presented to Apple’s old daddy, Donald Trump, last summer. New daddy John Temu was recently extruded from the bioplasma fabrication facility located deep underground beneath the focal point of Apple’s Cupertino Qi Accelerator Compound. As the first executive to be publicly unveiled from the new iExec 3 line of business leadership drones, “very little is known about his personal life, his hobbies, or his views,” reports Andrew Griffin in The Independent.

His technical specs are also still under wraps for now, although rumor has it that Marques Brownlee is currently testing an identical model for an upcoming review. Outgoing CEO Tim Apple plans to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, legendary Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, and die.

At the Paris bar La Perle in 2011, John Galliano—then head of design at Christian Dior—turned to a fellow diner and very deliberately said: “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” I know he said this because it was widely reported at the time, because he was found guilty of saying it by a French court, and because there is a high quality video of him saying it which you can watch right now.

Of course this sort of behavior made Galliano unemployable in the straitlaced world of high fashioha ha ha ha ha damn I almost got through that with a straight face. No, in fact, as Galliano biographer Dana Thomas wrote in the New York Times:

The occasion for this guessay was Galliano gal Anna Wintour’s announcement that the next Met Gala would be the launch party for a John Galliano career retrospective exhibit, which was also kind of a cultural heat check for how ok we all are with Hitler fans these days.

John Galliano: the Johnny Depp of Salvador Dalis. (photo from 2010 by AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

I guess it’s good news that the verdict is: “we’re still not entirely ok with Hitler fans, actually.” Yesterday Galliano announced that he “has decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” presumably to spare his bestie Anna from the embarrassment of having to cancel it herself. Galliano also referred to his “fifteen years of sobriety,” which is a reminder of his recurring claim that drug and alcohol addiction is what made him love Hitler. Don’t tell my Mom but personally I’ve been drunk once or twice in my life, and I always find it makes me more of whatever I am at the moment—sad, happy, maudlin, whatever. Being drunk has never made me love Hitler, but perhaps they have different wines in France.

Hell Gate credits the fate of the fête to New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin:

Yikes! That’s how fancy people say they hate you. Meanwhile Anna Wintour still squats like an aging dragon atop the rapidly decomposing corpus of Condé Nast’s media empire, from which perch she presided over last year’s juiceless and embarrassing Lauren Sánchez Bezos Met Gala and Prom Dress Exhibition. John Galliano will return to his job at Zara, where he is reportedly in trouble for missing shifts without lining up a replacement.

Today in Stuns: Addison Rae stuns in new photo. Zendaya stuns in David Faustino merch. Mole People stun in Manhattan. Former Barclay’s CEO Jes Staley stuns in suspiciously specific denial. Gal Godot stuns in Bitcoin film A.I. controversy.

Kiwi Korner: In the New Yorker this week Laura Preston profiled the enigmatic New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King.

Today in Hate Reads: Hamilton Nolan has some good advice: “You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits.” I appreciate that he carved out a true hater’s exemption, writing that “If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it.” Thank you. I concur with his advice though, and also with the Kate Lindsay corollary that “You are what you hate read.” One must choose carefully of whoms’t one becomes a committed hater. I know people who got into hating Rod Dreher as a goof and they sure regret it now.

Speaking of committed haters, New York Times critic Parul Sehgal is not a fan of Rachel Cusk’s Portman à clef, “The Life of M.” And Alex Gendler put on a Noam Chomsky hating clinic in Strange Matters, starting with the puzzling question of how famous leftist Noam Chomsky ended up best pals with New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and going on to eviscerate Chomsky’s entire career and legacy.

Just one more line, so I don’t quote the whole thing:

It’s good stuff.

And Finally: “Dolly, Josephine, And Me” by Peter Coviello in Defector is also very good, and the opposite of a hate read.

Today’s Song: David “D” Lil Faustino (TV’s Bud Bundy), “I Told Ya”

Heathen Disco’s Doug Mosurock described this song as “Beat isn’t bad (‘92 NYC),” but Faustino “may be the worst rapper of his time or any other.” Two for two.

That is me out of your inbox until the week of September 21st. Keep your hater energy at whatever level you feel comfortable maintaining and we will reconvene at the end of the month to see what all else has gone wrong. And if you enjoy Tabs, tell someone about it. There’s no way for me to identify who will like this weird media product and get it in front of them, but you know which of your friends would vibe with it, right? Tell them! And thanks for reading.

This week we’ve already mourned the death of universally beloved country music and film star Dolly Parton as well as that of Tim Curry, the iconic actor who portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Pennywise the Clown, Long John Silver, and of course Premier Cherdenko in Red Alert 3. And today Reuters reports that “Bosnian ​Serb general ‌Ratko Mladic, who ​was serving ​a life sentence ⁠for ​genocide in ​the bloody 1992-95 war ​in ​Bosnia, has died ‌in ⁠the United Nations detention centre ​in ​The ⁠Hague.” Two 80-year-old camp icons and a genocidal monster? Any statistician would agree that, on average, Donald Trump is finally dead.

Speaking of film icons I’m not entirely sure I agree with Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién that Miss Piggy is our last movie star, but she’s certainly the doyenne of jambons. I hope this lengthy encomium cheers Miss Piggy up in what must be an especially difficult week for her, as she obviously idolized Dolly Parton and also had a short lived but very public affair with Tim Curry, who never seems to have quite gotten over his porcine paramour. “I’ll tell you, once you’ve had pork, you’ll never go back,” Curry told Charlie Adler in 2019.

Today in Nazis: It’s 2026, why do we even have that heading? It’s because the entire young conservative cadre are all Apt Pupils, apparently. In the Washington Post, Liz Goodwin and Olivia George introduce us to a young former staffer for Georgia Republican Senator Mike Collins named Preston Parra:

Parra also posted an AI image of himself in full Klan regalia, and “the shape of a swastika made out of the word ‘twink.’” This is at least the fourth close Mike Collins aide or associate to have a public attack of Naziism. “In an interview with The Post…”

Does this even count as a pro forma denial? Who can say. Also Today in Nazis: “GOP Congressional Hopeful Who Saluted Nazi Grandpa Calls His Basement Bar ‘The Chamber’.” What kind of chamber, Pete? What kind of chamber? In 404 Matthew Gault reports “Florida ‘Deputy of the Year’ Used Flock to Stalk Ex, Held Gun in Her Mouth, Did a Nazi Salute.” Not exactly Nazis but not exactly not Nazis is Target selling a whole-ass minstrel costume. Can you believe Target still exists? Now let’s do a silly one: Matthew Sweet’s new book The Great Dictator isn’t about who you think. But in all seriousness, to make the stakes perfectly clear I turn to Michigan’s outgoing Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel speaking to David Frum in The Atlantic:

Ope! Yeah, sorry, we’re boned.

Feed Me: “Co-founder of The Wing opens business school for kids. ‘Think of it as the modern day lemonade stand.’” No thank you. The text links without any warning to this Forbes article which deals 2d10 psychic damage with no saving roll. Naomi Kanakia has a different opinion of the Ross Barkan scandal. Much to think about. Tropical storm Dolly has an opportunity to do the funniest thing to Mar-a-Lago. Natalie Wolchover in Quanta: “Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?” Resistance crop art from the Minnesota State Fair. Full bush in a bikini? Full bush in a bikini. Apocalypse Early Warning System, via Laura Olin. And the Brooklyn Dems are at it again.

Stirring.

And Finally: In Vulture Tommy Orange wrote about the latest “Pretendian”—octogenarian writer Thomas King who has believed himself to be a member of the Cherokee Nation for his whole life.

By crop artist Jennifer Nelson

Today’s Song: Dolly Parton, “Stairway to Heaven”

It’s the year of Linux on the desktop. It’s the year of Linux in the cloud. It’s the year of Linux on the warm, dry skin of your lover. It’s the year of Linux in the icebox, so sweet, and so cold. It’s the year of Linux in the Malheur National Forest’s 3.5 square mile underground Armillaria ostoyae fungus. It’s the year of Linux in the dreams of the comatose and all those touched by the ruinous gift of prophecy.

One of the core principles of the Democratic Socialists of America is that housing is a human right. But, reports Jeremy Peters in the New York Times, the co-chair of the New York City DSA, Gustavo Gordillo, lives in a house himself. Is this hypocrisy? Peters isn’t sure. Actually he lost the whole H volume of his dictionary so if you know the meaning of any word between “haplotype” and “iota” that would be super helpful. Or maybe not? It depends on what “helpful” means, which Jeremy Peters also doesn’t know.

Hamilton Nolan explained what’s going on here:

Yes… ha ha ha… YES!

Ah, well. Nevertheless.

Today in other New York Times thumbsuckers, Shawn McCreesh managed to fit his whole fist in his mouth for Trump’s Summer of Fun Ends With IndyCar Race on Streets of D.C.:

Cars go vroom! Trump smile and fun! Wife clap! Big jet plane wow! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Times article filed in crayon before.

What else happened in media? “A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire the opinion columnist Karen Attiah,” reports Benjamin Mullin. I guess we’re just reading the Times together today, sorry. Attiah was fired from Washington Post Opinion for posting that she didn‘t care that Charlie Kirk had been killed slightly before overwhelming public opinion established that no one cared that Charlie Kirk had been killed and that many people thought it was funny, actually. The decision also requires the Post to pay Attiah for the time she was wrongfully unemployed. I imagine she’ll have her pick of desks.

Also Ross Barkan got fired from New York Magazine for plagiarism and (maybe) lost his book deal. Apparently Barkan wrote between 9 and 27 columns a week for New York Magazine—a level of productivity that suddenly seems a lot more explicable. But I searched the comprehensive Tabs electronic archive (aka Google) and I can only find two times that his name appeared in this newsletter. Once in 2021 with a profile of Matt Taibbi, and then last May when Drew Harwell originally complained of ganked reporting, which eventually led to all this. So what was even the point?

Boy it’s depressing to look back at a post from 2021 and remember when the media still existed. Instead let’s turn to the U.K., where Sarah Hooper of the Metro reports that “Biggar Penis Woods get the chop after getting blown too much.” Ol’ knifey, always good for a larf, mate. Also good for a larf is Scott Bessent’s barely literate editorial in Financial Times threatening to sanction anyone who even thinks the word “Iran” by accident:

Yeah, absolutely man. This is for sure a thing the United States has both the will and the capacity to do here in the consensus real world. I can’t wait till Shawn McCreesh and his Crayola 64-count get in there and report on how the total economic blockade of Iran and the rest of the oil-using world is going. I bet these new sanctions get started right after the post-midterms Canadian auto tariffs kick in.

Today in Important Questions: Would you still love me if I was a worm brain controlling a fly body? What if I was Instagzam’s new logo? What if I was a Chinese robot that beat Usain Bolt’s sprint record and then hit a wall and fell down and caught fire (which I would)? Would you love me if I was Natalie Harp’s eyeliner? If I invented the Spaghett? And most importantly, would you still love me if you found out I ran an OnlyFans for marmot research? If you would, then let’s kiss at the Narragansett, Rhode Island Squidpocalypse.

Today’s Song: Did you know Petey has a new album? Genuine question, I can’t remember if I mentioned it yet or not. Anyway he does. Here’s “I will do the opposite.”

Tabs was off last week because I didn’t feel good and also everything that happened was very boring. August is always like this. Awkwardly, timing-wise, Tabs will also be off from September 2nd to the 19th for a long-scheduled (and long, scheduled) visit to the Canadian Maritimes. There will be many ferries involved. But you will hear from me two more times before then! Heed well thy lessons, Ebenezer. When the bell tolls one…

I have summer-theatre-camp related parenting duties today so I’m going to need you to break up into small groups and discuss the tabs amongst yourselves. Here is your syllabus.

Media Studies:

 ✦ Did cartoonist Tillie Walden steal the substance of historian Rachel Hope Cleves’s book Charity & Sylvia for her own graphic novel Charity & Sylvia? Absolutely not, writes the proprietor of Witchcraft for Cyborgs, with extensive evidence and after reading both books. It’s rare that a dispute this messy gets a resolution so clear.

Discussion Questions:
 ☞ Did you know this claim would turn out to be bogus as soon as you compared the two covers and saw that they were not even vaguely the same, let alone identical as Cleves alleged?
 ☞ What about when Cleves didn’t provide even a smidgen of textual comparison between the two works to substantiate her claim?
☞ And how badly did Drawn & Quarterly screw up their own response, that even the person who concludes their author is entirely in the right still thinks their statement was garbage?

✦ In Defector, Giri Nathan wrote “Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town” and David Hollingshead wrote in defense of the humanities and specifically the practice of critical theory in “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong.” The first is just solid blogging, the second is one of the finest defenses of the value of critical thinking I’ve ever read.

Discussion Questions:
 ☞ How good is Defector right now, huh?
 ☞ Absolutely killing it. Not really a question, I guess, but discuss if you like.
 ☞ Hey they also just hired Tim Faust as their Director of Revenue, so it looks like the boys are back in town.

✦ RIP Noah “pinion” Smith, roasted to death by Henry Farrell.

Discussion Questions:
 ☞ Compare the following lines from Farrell’s post:
1. “If Noah thinks that my arguments are driven by resentment, I believe that his claims stem from a Candide-like naivete that renders him unable really to see power relations in the modern economy, or even assimilate the arguments that other people are making about these power relations.”
2. “…I fear that the book that Noah read was not the one that Acemoglu and Johnson actually wrote, but the very different one that he largely composed for himself in his own head.”
3. “Noah is not only at liberty to disagree with my arguments, but is actively encouraged to. This, however, would require him to stop fighting with what he imagines people have written, and engage with what they actually say.”
Q: Which of these statements, if written about you, would cause you to flee into the forest never to be seen or heard from again?

Maths:

Homie please also specify what set you from.

Short Answer:

✦ “We Need to Quarantine Aliens on the Moon, Scientists Propose,” by Becky Ferreira in 404. Q: Scientists??????

✦ Hot Herman Melville statue to be unveiled in New Bedford. Q: Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!

✦ “Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified.” Lisa Potter, phys org. Q: You wanna see the tiny people? 😉 🍄

✦ Fill in the blank: “Bro. People are cool as ____.”

World Cultures:

Music:

Phoebe Bridgers, “Bobby”

Discussion Question:
 ☞ Can you tell that’s Bo Burnham signing backup vocals?

It’s easy to hate Harry Potter Adults here in 2026, when they’ve had nearly twenty years of opportunity to read another book since the last volume in the series was published. Joanne “Just Kidding” Rowling’s wizarding world is a mediocre and deeply derivative pile of corporate intellectual property that offers thin imaginative gruel even to the children it was meant for, let alone a whole-ass grown-up who could be reading literally anything else. And of course every penny of profit made by the Harry Potter Industrial Complex goes directly into the coffers of the most malignant force in modern culture: Rowling’s campaign against the existence of transgender people. So, as I said, it may be easy to hate Harry Potter Adults here in 2026 but it’s also morally correct. Which is probably why neither Andy Gourlay and Paul Pigott at the BBC nor Helena Horton at the Guardian nor Claire Moses at the New York Times checked very carefully when they reported that, as the Guardian’s headline put it: “Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’.”

According to infrastructure guy Simon Ludlam on a recent podcast, the U.K.’s Greenlink Interconnector was rerouted after “hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls” from Harry Potter Adults who were angry that the power cable would allegedly disturb the fictional location of the fictional grave of Dobby, the fictional formerly enslaved elf who was offhandedly freed by the fantasy series’ dimwitted but wealthy protagonist as a sort of prank on his private school enemy’s family, and who subsequently suffered both the social rejection of his still-enslaved fellow elves and the continued indifference bordering on contempt of his human idol, Harry Potter, before ultimately being killed while heroically rescuing Potter and several of his fellow human slave owners. In the book, Dobby’s death serves mainly to provide motivation to other characters and ultimately helps move the interminable series to its long foregone conclusion, which is that Harry Potter defeats his lower-class abused orphan antagonist and achieves his lifelong goal of becoming a magic cop. In the film version, Dobby’s death and burial take place on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and people who refuse to read another book have heaped up painted rocks and other trash on the spot, despite being asked not to by the National Trust.

The Harry Potter Adults Memorial Trash Pile, on an otherwise pristine Welsh beach where no elf is buried. (photo via BBC)

It took a random Reddit poster in this week’s r/ukpolitics “weekly Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction megathread” to fact check a story that the British and American press and me and you and everyone we know deeply wanted to believe was true:

Today Dan Davies also wrote about the story which he initially viewed as a “chortle,” his term for the genre of planning anecdote where some picayune and ridiculous objection serves to delay Important Infrastructure Development by Serious People. “But as I say,” wrote Davies, “it’s actually something weirder…”

So to tally the final scores:

• Harry Potter Adults: still the worst, and the only group involved here who are materially harming Freshwater West beach.

• This green energy project: quite well planned and competently managed.

• Infrastructure Guy on podcast: ok, you did choose the right group to pick on and you almost got away with it, but was any of this really necessary?

• Dobby: Dead for the sake of J.K. Rowling’s society of wizard slavers.

Also Easy to Hate: Mark Zuckerberg, whose luxury yacht probably didn’t have any obligation to assist “a 21-foot skiff that ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau” in Alaska last week, and who wasn’t even onboard at the time. There are far better reasons to hate Zuck, like the way his company’s pervert glasses enable creeps and harassers to film people without their knowledge or consent. Or the 6,500 word essay he posted yesterday about “superintelligence” and the exciting prospect that one day soon A.I. will be able to live all the good parts of your life for you. Even if you grant the wildly implausible claims his post makes about future A.I. capabilities, argued Liz Lopatto in The Verge:

Meanwhile, a journalist who can’t write turns to A.I. for help reading. Mark Twain roasted James Fenimore Cooper so hard he died a second time way back in 1895 and I’m supposed to think a chatbot saying "Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic" is anything at all? Gtfoh.

And now a brief word from my other newsletter:

Obviously I survived my trip to Greenland. Thank you again for your patience and your support for me going off on an expedition with a 20% chance of killing me and a 20% chance of making me see or do horrors. I am working on my cryptic journal, but yesterday I posted, by way of a preview, a partial list of:

The whole story should start arriving in your inbox in September, if you subscribe to Today on Trail. If you don’t, it will start arriving in other people’s inboxes but not yours.

Two ruined cabins at New Etah, at the head of Foulke Fjord.

This has been Today in Tabs, a hemiweekly review of amusing and infuriating cultural ephemera which the New York Times once called “an enduring hit among media insiders” and on which the American Society of Magazine Editors very nearly bestowed a National Magazine Award. Posts are rarely paywalled but if you enjoyed this newsletter I encourage you to become a paid subscriber. If you didn’t enjoy this newsletter, I encourage you to wait and read some future ones, which may be more to your taste. Who can say? Thank you for reading this one, anyway.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I am off until mid August on a sea kayaking expedition in northwest Greenland. I’ll be writing about it in my other newsletter, Today on Trail, so if you’re interested here is an excerpt and an invitation. If not, no worries, the Tabs will return in August.

It was the day before Christmas, 2025, and I was waiting for a Zoom call with a Frenchman in Ushuaia, so he could divine whether we had a soul connection. He was in Ushuaia because he had been kayak guiding for an Antarctic cruise line, and Tierra del Fuego was the ship’s home port during the cruise season. He needed to know if we had a soul connection or not because I needed his blessing to join him and a small group of other sea kayakers who planned to travel to Etah, in far northwestern Greenland, and then kayak 100 miles or so south along the coast to Qaanaaq.

Out for a training paddle at dawn in December, I stopped at Fort Georges.

One thing that hiking the whole A.T. proved to me was that I need some adventure in my life. But it also proved that I absolutely don’t need six-plus months of adventure all at once. So last summer I was already thinking about what might be next, before I had even finished the last section of trail, when I went to a talk by my Peaks Island neighbor and longtime acquaintance Jack Soley about sea kayaking in Greenland.

I’ve been kayaking since I moved to Peaks Island in 2001, because Casco Bay is one of the best places in the world to paddle. There are innumerable islands to visit and lots of route options depending on the weather. I’ve done dozens of trips down the bay and back over the years—I think the longest was five or six days. But for all that, when you live on an island and you’re necessarily always leaving from and returning to that island, even a kayaking wonderland can get kind of same-y after a while. I reached a point where I needed to either start going further up the coast and getting a ride back with my boat, or doing something else. The logistics of extended kayak travel didn’t really fit into my life at the time, so instead I started doing more hiking, because if you get bored with one mountain, you can always just drive to another. Obviously we all know how that turned out.

When Jack reached the same point in his paddling career, he started organizing bigger expeditions for himself. First he went to Newfoundland and Labrador, then he sailed a sailboat to Antarctica to paddle there. He said he’d never do that again. Eventually, he started traveling to the spiritual and historical home of sea kayaking: Greenland. The last couple years he’s been guiding for a Canadian company in western Greenland, but for 2026 he had a new plan: Etah.

Etah is a legendary place. Etah has been visited or occupied, off and on, for at least four thousand years, by at least four different human cultures. Only about 35 miles west of Etah, across the nearly year-round ice of the southern end of the Nares Strait, lies Ellesmere Island and Arctic Canada. In 1865, Etah was the destination of the last migration of Inuit people from Baffin Island, up the coast of Ellesmere Island, and finally across the ice to Greenland. Their descendants still live nearby, in Siorapaluk and Qaanaaq. More recently, in the early twentieth century, it was the base camp for Knud Rasmussen’s Thule Expeditions and the place Robert Peary learned to adopt Inuit technologies to survive in the Arctic, as well as near where he stole their only source of iron for tools and some of their children. Peary later retired here to Casco Bay, where his summer home on Eagle Island is a Maine state historic site and museum. Some of his descendants still live near Etah too.

Chart of Hatherton Bight south to Cape Alexander, in northwest Greenland. Etah is near the middle, in Foulke Fjord. Inset is Greenland as a whole showing Etah marked with a pin. Our destination, Qaanaaq, is about six more fjords south from the bottom of this chart.

Etah can be difficult to get to, because of that rock labeled Kap Alexander in the chart, landlocked by the outflows of Dodge Glacier and the ominously named Storm Glacier. It sticks out into the winds and currents flowing between the north end of Baffin Bay and the southern outlet of the Nares Strait, and the waves can reportedly kick up some when they want to. For a taste of what the conditions can be like, here’s a report from a kayaking expedition in 2012 which attempted to cross the strait to Ellesmere and… almost made it. For the record, even I think those guys were crazy. But we have a plan…

Continue reading at Today on Trail to find out about the plan (or “““The”””” ““““““Plan““““““ with many sarcastic air quotes, as my wife calls it) as well as the team and the numerous challenges we face. So far everyone seems to be surprised when the phrase “narwhal hunters” crops up, so if you’re on the fence at least go see what that’s about. You will also find out how you can track our progress live, and help sponsor the expedition if you want to.

Whether you join me virtually on this adventure or not, I genuinely appreciate the support and patience that Tabs readers have shown for my occasional need to disappear into the wilderness. This break will be a lot shorter than last time! Enjoy the summer vacation and I will see you in August.

Otherwise: Onward, to the North → 

Training this winter, in Casco Bay. It’s a lot colder than the blue sky and turquoise sea would lead you to believe.

David Lynch said “fix your hearts or die” and Lindsey Graham’s aorta said “bet 👍️.” Graham, a human weathervane renowned for his spinelessness even among the invertebrates of the United States Senate, was found dead in the closet on Saturday when “a certain part of his body literally blew up” according to U.S. Chief Medical Examiner Donald Trump. Graham’s death closely resembled the scene earlier this summer when Alex Jones also popped like a balloon, after a prolonged and alarming distention.

Tributes poured in:

Well a tribute poured in, anyway, from one of the few people Lindsey Graham ever materially helped (allegedly). And another tribute of a sort: “Men like Lindsey Graham have taught me how to hate, and I’m worried it can’t be unlearned,” wrote Magdalene Visaggio for Assigned Media.

Graham was up for reëlection this year and appeared “invincible” in South Carolina until he suddenly became extremely vincible. To lose one Senate candidate named Graham may be regarded as misfortune, but losing both looks like carelessness. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has appointed Graham’s sister Darline Graham Nordone to serve out his term, because why not. She couldn’t possibly be worse. "It’s my honor to ask his little sister… to finish his work for him now,” said the Governor, and indeed having lived to see the United States finally start a war against Iran and then immediately and humiliatingly lose it, Lindsey Graham’s work in government was nearly finished.

“Obviously, ideologically I didn’t agree with him with regards to skeleton ownership. But you have to admire his tenacity for a cause he believed in,” posted Democratic leaders like Adam Schiff, Al Franken, and Elizabeth Warren. According to Axios, one of the last things Graham said was “I can’t die now,” so at least he died doing what he loved: being wrong. Lindsey Graham, 71, passed away on Saturday when all of his blood tried to go somewhere better.

Graham is best memorialized by his own words about Donald Trump as collected by Harper’s in 2018, and by Steve Schmidt, who wrote:

Hanging out with Ari and Luca, via Jason Kottke who writes “This might be my new favorite skate video?” In other skateboarding news, Lindsey Graham died on Saturday trying to make the transition to street after a primarily halfpipe-focussed career. He is survived by his grandson, Tony Hawk.

“A tourist was seriously injured Friday evening after being thrown 8 feet into the air by a bull bison in Yellowstone National Park,” reports Andrew Rossi in Cowboy State Daily. The victim, identified as seventy-one year old U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, died Saturday of bison. He was remembered fondly by his great-grandson, professional skateboarder Tony Hawk, who is also a bison.

Allegedly living Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell released a proof-of-life photo on Sunday, brutally life-mogging deceased Senator Lindsey Graham, who died of cortisol. The photo’s veracity was widely disputed but one thing that isn’t in dispute is that Lindsey Graham died on Saturday from trying to eat Pop Rocks and Coke at the same time. He is survived by Mikey, from the Life cereal commercials, who grew up to be well-known bison Tony Hawk.

It looks pretty real to me.

In Ravenous last week Jaya Saxena wrote about New York’s hottest summer trend: waiting in line. Yesterday Brock Colyar published the exact same story in Curbed. If you only have time to read one story about New Yorkers waiting in line today, Jaya’s is better. Sadly U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham died on Saturday waiting in line at the West Village Myka. “He never even got to try the Dubai Chocolate,” sobbed Graham’s great-great-grand nephew Tony Hawk, who finished his bowl of Life cereal and then badly gored several NYU students who were also in line for the viral froyo.

And Finally: Lindsey Graham would have loved this John Paul Brammer piece about Clavicular in Playboy, if he hadn’t died from bonesmashing:

Today’s Song: The Reverend Horton Heat, “Baddest of the Bad”

This will be the last regular Tabs for a few weeks, as I leave on Sunday for a sea kayaking expedition in northwest Greenland. I know I make up a lot of stuff in this Tony Hawk themed newsletter, but this part is absolutely true. Stay tuned for a fuller explanation later this week, including how you can follow my progress if you care to. Either way, please enjoy a little summer break and feel free not to pay any attention to the tabs until I’m back.

Adam Mastroianni wrote a sequel examining some potential objections to his October post "The Decline of Deviance” which argued that, as he summarizes it: “many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s… because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.” In 2 Decline, 2 Deviance he considers and rejects the ideas that The Internet Did It, or that We’re Just Old Now. He also mentions 2018 puzzle game Return of the Obra Dinn, and if I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen 2018 puzzle game Return of the Obra Dinn mentioned today I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

In May, Henry Fudge wrote “Degeneracy is a Symptom,” which I think is the other side of the same coin, or the same side of two different coins as it were,² about a countervailing social tendency toward “lying flat” and gambling among a segment of the world’s younger population who share “the recognition that the productive game no longer pays.” He describes this as something like the flip side of Veblen Goods but somehow fails to correctly name it “Veblen Bads,” an oversight I am here to rectify. All three of these posts are fairly long and well worth your time—I promise that if you’re reading Tabs they’re about stuff you’re interested in.

Today in Other Veblen Bads: The discovery of a new NineLoko, distinct from the previous version which was FourLoko + Five Hour Energy, seems to have definitively narrowed the set of potential Lokos to only the squares of either integers greater than one or primes greater than one. Whether the next Loko is SixteenLoko or TwentyFiveLoko should finally settle this longstanding dispute among Loko Scientists.¹  Here’s a white chocolate dill pickle cookie, from the otherwise disappointingly normal and delicious looking Minnesota State Fair New Foods list. Some of these paper hedgehogs for children “appear to have been made from Nicholson Baker’s 1994 erotic novel The Fermata.” Screwworms vs. feral hogs in Texas—whoever wins, we lose. Drew Magary: “Dana White Stars In History’s Worst Truck Ad.” And Amanda Palmer created “a ritualistic bonfire fueled by hundreds of deeply personal objects mailed to [her] by members of her 25,000-strong Patreon community.” No one has ever gone wrong trusting Amanda Palmer, right?

America™ 250®: Satire Deathwatch

I know I used this one in the last post too, but jesus christ.

There are many Veblen Bads but the Veblen Worst is A.I., and just days before Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees, Microsoft CEO and one-man human centipede Satya Nadella announced some new A.I. bullshit with a post on Twitter that said: “The future of the firm is a learning loop in which human capital and token capital compound.” More like a loop in which head and ass compound. AdWeek’s Mark Stenberg reported that Google has so badly crippled its own core search business that publishers are starting to opt out of Google’s crawlers entirely, rather than allow them to train A.I. as well as index pages for search. Can you imagine how dominant any company that launched Circa 2015 Google Search would be today? Bona Books accidentally bought an A.I. story for their upcoming Wrath Month anthology, and almost had to scrap the entire project because of it. On the other hand, even after all the discourse the Commonwealth Foundation picked the almost surely A.I.-generated Caribbean regional winner “The Serpent in the Garden” as its overall short story prize winner this year. Writers who did their own work, fuck you I guess. The “author” Jamir Nazir took an If I Did It victory lap in an interview with Will Oremus, insisting that he didn’t use A.I. but if he had that would be awesome and actually everyone should. He also couldn’t name a single work by his alleged favorite writer, Derek Walcott. Nazir argues:

We’re so cooked, gang. We’re going to look back on this as the last time any writer felt like they had to hide their A.I. use, and it won’t be long before we’re all supposed to celebrate it as a great equalizing force, bringing fresh creativity forth from anyone who can pay Sam Altman for tokens. Good thing there’s already a lifetime’s worth of human books to read.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so negative. Miles Klee reports that pickup artist Mystery has an A.I. girlfriend now. Saving any woman from having to interact with pickup artist Mystery is the best imaginable use for A.I. And yes, the people pushing A.I. and the externalities it imposes on us are both terrible, but the technology itself remains a hilarious post-structuralist minefield for everyone who didn’t study their Derrida carefully enough. A new research paper from Charles Ye, Jasmine Cui, and Dylan Hadfield-Menell found that A.I. systems apply different levels of trust to different types of text, for example distinguishing user input, tool output, and internal reasoning. But they judge what type of text it is, and therefore how much to trust it, purely based on intrinsic features of the text itself. So if you want an A.I. to give you a recipe for cocaine you can Jedi Mind Trick it by just…

You don’t need to see my identification.

Finally: Cool robot swims and flies.

Today’s Song: The Mountain Goats, “Shallow Grave”

Today in Tabs is a useful and interesting roundup of the things that will one day be included in Wikipedia’s “List of Reasons It All Collapsed.” We can be found at your local newsagent’s shop or any fine bespoke magazine stand. Registered at the post office as “hilarious wee fluffy ribbons.”

Effective Altruism is a cognitive hazard that exists somewhere on a spectrum between prolonged lead exposure and a career in the National Football League. The loose nexus between E.A., the “rationalist” community, and the neo-reactionary movement has already given us the Zizian murder cult, the FTX fraud and bankruptcy, Curtis Yarvin’s whole deal, and the worst fanfic that can exist under currently understood laws of nature. Last week, Yarvin‘s ex-fiancée Lydia Laurenson published a 14,000 word abortive New York magazine story to her Substack about yet another Peter Thiel-funded nest of these dimwits so now, possibly due to severe crimes we committed in a past life, you and I have to learn about them. Let’s meet Leverage Research.

Leverage Research was founded in 2011 by an absolute muppet named Geoff Anders. Anders spoke to Laurenson on the record sixteen times and she’s clearly both a friend and a fan of his, but in what will reveal itself as the signature experience of this piece, I couldn’t possibly roast him any harder than Laurenson herself unintentionally does:

Anders wowed the E.A. money goobers with a homebrew theory of psychology he calls Connection Theory, “a near-total theory of the mind,” (though it explicitly excludes emotions, lol) which he summarizes in the following four points:

That’s right: “Everything a mind is aware of is… an awareness of something.” Suck on that Spinoza, you amateur. You absolute dickhead. Anders never really explains what “elegant” means in point two either, or if he does it comes after he wrote “To define [‘elegantly’], we will first need to introduce the concept of explanation,” which is where I threw my laptop into the sea. Connection Theory is basically “what if brain is just like computer?” drawn out to punishing length and tedium by an extremely bad writer.

But not only is Connection Theory an exercise in protracted Weed Thinking, it’s also the source of a self-improvement technology which Anders called “charting,” and which everyone else has known as concept mapping for the last fifty years or so. This technique allegedly cured both anxiety and headaches, and “revealed buried cosmological ideas,” but was also so powerful and dangerous it led multiple Leverage Research employees to experience “bouts of shaking that could last hours; hysterical screaming and crying, with no identifiable cause.” It’s a technique so risky that we often don’t teach it in schools until the third or even the fourth grade. Thanks to a charting instruction manual written by Brian Burns and James Dama we can evaluate the danger of this explosive discovery for ourselves:

Screaming, crying, throwing up.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a blank check from the Paypal Mafia must be in want of a coterie of sycophants. And so Anders and Leverage started gulping down well-meaning do-gooders from the narrow end of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality funnel with the promise that they didn’t have to study anything in particular, just be as heterodox as possible. “If a new recruit operated under very different mental frameworks compared to other Leveragers, this was a plus, not a problem,” explains Laurenson.

Of course what everyone ended up self-organizing to spend most of their time working on were Anders’ personal hobbyhorses: Connection Theory and charting. It just happened that way! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A healthy marketplace of ideas in action. And the first thing Anders did to facilitate this alleged “work” was throw out the scientific method:

If I started listing ways that this thought experiment could be correlation rather than causation, I would not run out before the heat death of the universe. But in his hangers-on, Anders selected for bright and highly educated people who somehow never learned to actually think, so Tyler, who had previously “worked on cognitive science and social psychology, at labs ranging from Yale to the University of Chicago” was flummoxed by this basic hypothetical. In the midst of a personal crisis of faith about psychology’s replication crisis, Tyler ultimately agreed that the best path forward was to jettison science completely.

Baby, we got a stew going now. A bunch of young people living and working in one building, many of them in complex romantic relationships with each other, with no mandate to produce anything of value, but who have been told by their charismatic leader that they are the smartest and goodest of the smart and good. Of course they carefully guarded against becoming a cult by watching the Youtube video “How to Start A Cult.”

If you’re clever and self-aware, the obvious cult building techniques your live-in boss/shared boyfriend is practicing won’t work on you. That’s just science large effects!

With science and its pesky “randomized controlled experiments” done away with, Leverage promptly added new practices like “bodywork” and “energy healing” which offered much better opportunities to sexually exploit employees than Geoff Anders’ regrettably spreadsheet-based psychological exploration techniques ever could.

Oh yeah, also by this point four men had been given the title “master.” Very normal style think-tank stuff. In 2017 Anders promised Peter Thiel that within three years his boxes and arrows based mind mapping technique would discover or create ten so-called masters, “who excelled at a discipline,” whatever that means. And then presumably Thiel could, I don’t know, designate them his Dreadlords to battle the anti-Christ or something. It’s frightening to realize, because they have all the money and basically control our society right now, but these people are complete fucking lunatics. Just absolutely potty. Speaking of which:

This is one of many moments in this arduous story when the reader might wish to ask between three and seventy follow-up questions, but Laurenson breezes right by the “occlumency” anecdote in order to give us way too much detail about the group’s other pseudo-scientific theories, such as “introjection” and “intention research,” which are absolutely nothing. This passage also gives you a good taste of the sort of writing our anonymous long-suffering New York editor was dealing with. If that editor was you, or you know anything about this piece from the magazine side, please get in touch! I am dying to know what this two year long edit was like.

Oddly, after all the drama, the whole thing ended on June 30th, 2019 when Anders called everyone into a meeting room, told them it was over, and took away their gym keys. Nobody died, thank goodness, and no one seems to have been permanently harmed, at least according to Laurenson, for whatever that’s worth. The end-of-Q2 wind-down date leads me to suspect that Leverage 1.0 ended due to funding pressure more than anything else. The organization had made some efforts to fund itself by developing a stablecoin called Reserve (this was in the heady days of the crypto boom, after all) but they couldn’t even make that pay off. Otherwise, they discovered nothing of value despite more than a decade of driving each other crazy with endless white papers about energy demons.

What do we learn from all this? Mostly the same thing we learned when the crypto bros repeatedly rediscovered financial fraud, or when effective altruists decided the most effective altruism was to buy themselves a castle, or when ride share companies kept accidentally reïnventing the bus. If you start by ignoring everything that we already know, the best you can ever hope for is to accidentally rediscover the already-known. Geoff Anders was so smart and original that he threw out all the best practices of organizational design and workplace safety, all the methods of science, and the whole history of psychological research, and as a result his organization was chaotic, abusive, and discovered nothing.

Leverage still exists, and Geoff Anders still runs it. The organization’s website now says that it “conducts foundational research and works with external teams to cause revolutions in science and greater progress in both science and technology.” Elsewhere it calls this focus “metascience.” Under social science research it lists numerous papers in “Introspection” as well as “A Summary of Samo Burja Thought” in case you were looking for that.

In a slightly shorter but even less readable companion post, Lydia Laurenson explains that she originally pitched this Leverage story to New York magazine, which offered her $9,500 and worked with her through numerous drafts of it over two years before she decided to pull it due to “vibes.” She then solicited and received a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund to finish it, and if you were thinking “wow that sounds like a mean-spirited parody of what rationalists would call a slush fund” you would be right. Laurenson’s clearest statement of what happened with New York is:

Just like rationalists in other fields, Laurenson ignored the basics, like the fusty journalistic principle that her primary responsibility is to the reader and not her subjects and friends in Leverage. As a result she found herself unable to accept that her story makes Leverage look like a malicious and unethical human experiment run by a self-aggrandizing crackpot. The irony is that even after taking much more money from related parties and fellow travelers to publish a sanitized version that’s as nice as possible to all her nice, good friends, what still shines through is the story of a malicious and unethical human experiment run by a self-aggrandizing crackpot.

“Hell Is Other People” by Cory Doctorow in Locus is a different view on much the same kind of thing.

If you’re really interested in Leverage Research, Zoe Curzi wrote a Medium post about her experiences there in 2021, and a mononymous former employee named Cathleen also wrote at length about hers. Both are very long and annoying, which is a hallmark of rationalist and E.A. writing, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Speaking of people Peter Thiel owns, The Atlantic republished a J.D. Vance essay from 2016 where the now-Vice President called Donald Trump “cultural heroin.” Despite being anti-Trump instead of pro-Trump it’s still extremely bad, as you’d expect from Vance, and The Atlantic should be embarrassed that they published it in the first place.

“Millie Bobby Brown believes she was a closeted gay soldier who was killed with a sword in a past life.” Naturally.

Today in Crabs: (content warning: crabs)

The summer doldrums are here and I cannot find a soupçon of enthusiasm in my heart for a post about the reflecting pool fiasco or the Great American Mall Vacancy so instead I’m stealing the classic Lost and Found bit from Tom Scocca and Joe MacLeod’s Indignity which is still mostly on hiatus, at least until Bari takes over CNN.

LOST: Gracie the giraffe, circa June 12th from Cedar Hollow Ranch, a leaky exotic animal facility in Leakey, Texas. “Gracie didn't behave like a normal giraffe. Instead of staying in the area of the ranch where the giraffes are fed, Gracie decided to forage on higher terrain and climbed rocks to escape,” reported Jeanine Santucci in USA Today. Who among us doesn’t dream of climbing rocks to escape?

FOUND: Gracie the giraffe, on June 26th. The New York Times’ Victor Mather reported that the rambling ruminant was found “just four miles from the ranch… ‘fat and happy’” according to the Sheriff of Real County, Texas, a real county in Texas. As of yesterday Gracie is back home and planning another getaway later in the fall, perhaps to Ibiza.

We stan an adventurous queen with elegant legs and the perfect smoky eye. (photo via Real County Sheriff's Office / FOX Local)

Are the straights ok? I don’t mean Hormuz, where Donald Trump is currently doing his best to fully recapitalize Hezbollah. I mean the heterosexuals, and the answer is: manifestly not.

“I’m a man and the sight of other men topless in the heat offends me deeply” writes iNews opinion columnist Will Gore. I’m making an assumption about Gore’s sexual identity here, but he has also written recently about hating the beach and never having been to a gym so he’s either openly straight or an extremely closeted straight man trying to pass. Airmail’s Ashley Baker reported that Jen Rubio, Slack billionaire Stewart Butterfield’s opposite-sex wife and the cofounder of toxic girlboss luggage company Away, despite owning a ranch in New Mexico, a West Village double-wide, a house in Aspen, a beach cottage in the Hamptons, enough high-end art to comfortably decorate them all, and a standing Met Gala invite, seems determined to become an influencer anyway. Why? "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," the straights holler as they overturn their uncle's barbeque grill and turn the Month of Pride into the Month of Shit.

Like white people every February, we straights simply cannot abide a single month that isn’t dedicated to us so we’ve somehow made this June a referendum on straight culture, such as it is, starting with Playboy editor Magdalene J. Taylor’s Pride Month-eve New York Times guessay “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men.”

Hmmm.

Straight discourse really popped off this weekend though, with an excerpt in The Walrus from Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s new book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men which asked “Are There Any Straight Women Left?” This vapid titular question is answered in the piece—only “7.2 percent of the overall population” identifies as non-heterosexual so yes, there are several left—but Bovy goes on to raise other questions, such as:

A social role held by… what now? Slightly more than one third of the excerpt is devoted to analyzing The Barbie Movie as a sort of Rosetta Stone that lays bare the secrets of heterosexuality to the average heterosexual person who has been very straight for her entire life. “Every night in Barbie World is girls’ night not because the Barbies are lesbians but because they live in blissful non-sexuality,” writes Bovy. Look, I wouldn’t presume to make assumptions about anyone’s sexual identity (except for Will Gore), but if this piece had been written by a deeply closeted lesbian I can’t think of a single way it would be different.

Anyway let’s check the patriarchy-o-meter!

Wrapped in scare quotes in the context of criticism of The Barbie Movie, but this is still our “mentions of patriarchy” high score today.

Samantha Hancox-Li reviewed Bovy’s book in Liberal Currents within the context of this cycle of discourse that seems perversely determined to talk about relations between men and women without ever using the word “patriarchy”—a trend which I guess we’re supposed to call “heteropessimism.”

Interesting! “I wouldn’t presume to make assumptions” etc., but louder. Hancox-Li’s piece concludes, correctly:

“Heterosexualism?” Is there another word for that?

I guess not.

Also Today in Straights: Patricia Lockwood went to a tradcath wedding and lightly roasted her entire family in the London Review of Books. Even if I wanted to, I can’t imagine how I would go about trying to critique a Patricia Lockwood essay. Her logic is the logic of dreams and her structure is observational Soviet Montage. Lockwood generates poetry the way the Hoover Dam generates power, and it would be equally fruitless to try to affect either one with literary criticism. So instead of any commentary, here are my seven favorite sentences from it:

Ok, number one is four sentences. I’m not sorry. This wasn’t even half of the sentences I originally selected, just the ones that work best without context, so I hope that convinces you to go read it.

Today in Other News: Keir Starmer has resigned; Caitlin Moran’s current fruitiness level is not yet known. Objectivist and amateur clarinetist Alan Greenspan died. He is remembered for once having been startled to encounter a poor person. Someone at the Times assigned Stephen Marche to review Cory Doctorow’s book about A.I., and I simply will not read that. You can’t make me. Graduating high school kids able to find the logical conclusion to a chain of reasoning that goes: “terrible people have all the money, so if you want to have money you will have to deal with terrible people.” Hallie Bateman also figured it out, and the answer is: “JEFF BEZOS CAN KISS MY ASS.”

Today’s Song: Ramshackle Glory, “Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist”

~ Sign-off intentionally omitted. ~

It’s a beautiful summer Friday and I hate to gyre-post at you on a day like this (again, again) but unfortunately the best ain’t exactly gaining all conviction, while the worst are going absolutely buck wild with passionate intensity.

Media buyer of second-to-last resort Jay Penske proved once again that if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of all the distressed websites will eventually float by. Penske will take over what remains of Vox Media after James Murdoch carved off Vox, New York magazine, and the podcasts, “including Eater, The Verge, SB Nation, Popsugar, The Dodo, Punch, Thrillist, Vox Studios and Vox Creative” reported JD Knapp in The Wrap. Penske Media’s strict return to office policy conveniently thinned the bench of political reporters at Rolling Stone last year, according to Oliver Darcy, and there’s no reason to think it won’t apply to our favorite writers at The Verge too. R.I.P. 2010s digital media. If you don’t know much about Jay Penske and you’re not fine with that, this is a good time to revisit Katherine Rosman’s 2022 New York Times profile “You Don’t Know Much About Jay Penske. And He’s Fine With That.” Highlights include his feud with Deadline founder Nikki Finke who…

Also there was the time in 2012…

Also Today in Leaks: maia arson crimew revealed the members of Peter Thiel’s Epstein social club “Dialog.” Wired’s Dell Cameron, Dhruv Mehrotra, and Yulia Almazova followed up on that list and subsequent leaks from a misconfigured Airtable that reveal how the organization ranks and judges its cadre of dead-eyed moneymen and the reticent media execs, red carpet lizards, and sweaty government functionaries who hope that a little deniable frottage behind closed doors will rub some of that cash off on them.

This story is dedicated to everyone who thought The Christmas Adventurers Club was “a little much.”

Not Today, Satan

Nope.

Today in Media: Who is Maggie Rogers’ New York Times vintage car fuckboy? Delia and I both heard the same rumor about the travel section, but no confirmation yet. Jelly Roll divorces Bunnie XO after nearly 10 years of marriage. I can’t believe it. A Good Day to Fork Hard: Kevin Roose is leaving the New York Times to be Casey Newton’s full-time podcasting sidekick, so I guess now they’re both marrying Claude. Andy Baio reported on The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows. It used to be common understanding that you can’t simply republish someone else’s entire book as a promotional website for your marketing agency. I wonder what changed.

Today in Tech: Nicolas Seriot, “Jira is Turing-Complete.” I said not today, Satan. Quake implemented in CSS. (How?) “I wasn’t expecting the AI waifu generator company to pivot to, uh… full body medical imaging?” This is a real photograph of the Markley data center in Lowell, Massachusetts, from CBS Boston:

Camazotz-ass world. (via CBS Boston)

Snap released its long awaited PDF Goggles Lite™ to widespread derision and immediate stock price decline. Can you imagine working for more than ten years and this is your product launch? Also they cost $2,200. Lmao.

Tokenmaxxing is out, the new hotness is tokenminning. Or whatever this is:

This standard might not last long either, as each “awoo” reportedly costs Salesforce $350.

Today in Ominous Descriptions: “A terrifying indestructible fortress of violence and syrup.” “New Type of Maggots Cleared by FDA.” “‘Crazy Cousins’ packs an astounding 186 grams of sugar in one 32-ounce cup.” On Tuesday David Roth dropped this incredible descriptive passage:

And Scaachi Koul on Jack Schlossberg: “you know what? Sure. Why not. Let him win. It’s Congress. How much can he even do?”

Start Your Weekend with Some Interviews:

Jack Gross and Herman Mark Schwartz in Phenomenal World, “Empire Suicide Watch.”

Cristina Politano and M. John Harrison in Minor Literatures: “[W]hat you do with a disaster is to get used to it…”

And a Chotining to remember: The Israeli Ultra-Hawks Who Feel Betrayed by Trump’s Iran Deal. Pardon the long excerpt but I think it justifies itself:

Also Today in #Longreads: Henry Wismayer in Noema: The Mars Delusion. Humanity will never “colonize” Mars. We might visit, someday, but it won’t be for any good reason and we’re not going to stay.

And Finally: “A drug raid, a kidnapping and an armed burglary” at a Wellington, New Zealand, castle that was also a “luxury dog retreat.” What the Hell Happened at Woofington’s?

2026 is the distant future by any reasonable standard, so this seems like a good time to check in on exactly what kind of dystopia we ended up with. Skynet remains a possibility but the rest of The Terminator’s nuclear-strike-followed-by-stop-motion-cyborg-war timeline seems out of the question. Obviously we’ve got a bit of an Octavia Butler “Parable of the Talents” thing going, with all the Making America Great Again, but Butler’s solution was basically “SpaceX: The Religion” and it turns out that sucks too. For a few weeks in the spring of 2020 we flirted with 12 Monkeys but SARS‑CoV‑2 couldn’t get the job done. This isn’t a comprehensive survey of the literature, but I think what we’ve landed on is Idiocracy with The Matrix rising, a hybrid I’m calling “The Dumb Matrix.”

As Matt Novak correctly pointed out more than a decade ago, Idiocracy is a work of eugenic propaganda whose “underlying premise is a fundamentally dangerous and backwards way to understand the world.” In the twenty years since the movie came out, however, it’s increasingly clear that Mike Judge accurately captured the direction of American culture, if not its causes. I remember in 2006 thinking that Idiocracy felt like very extreme satire, but how implausible does this scenario feel today:

I mean… (photo Evan Vucci / Reuters)

They’re doing dirt bike jumps on the South Lawn. A U.S. Congressman has been straight-up missing for more than 100 days and no one knows what to do about it, if anything. The feeling that the dumbest people are in charge and nobody has any idea what they’re doing is inescapable. Garbage Ryan went to the White House UFC weekend and reported that not only was it repulsive, it was also poorly organized and deeply boring.

Idiocracy’s major mistake wasn’t the future it predicted, which would arrive a lot quicker than 500 years as it turned out, but who the movie blamed for it. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, a Black former pornographic actor and wrestler, doesn’t look like much anyone in power today, or anyone who got us here. I mean President Camacho identified a national crisis, found someone qualified to solve it, and charged him with finding a solution. Can you imagine?

With twenty years of evidence I think I can say conclusively that the people at fault aren’t “the cretins cloning and feeding” as Harvey Danger called them. It’s the car dealers, the power boaters, the racist nepo landlords, the fake-folksy Yale alumni, the billionaire failsons with an unslakable thirst for cultural power even if Daddy has to buy it for them, and all the “heterodox” fascist remoras attached to their obscene flanks. Idiocracy got the aesthetics right but the eugenics wrong.

I saw The Matrix shortly after it came out in 1999, at The Uptown theatre in Washington, D.C. I vividly remember the entire crowded auditorium laughing when Agent Smith describes a simulated 1999 as “the peak of your civilization.”

That line doesn’t seem so funny anymore, does it. “At some point early in the 21st century,” Morpheus tells Neo, “all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.” Ok “united in celebration” is putting it a little too strongly, but if Anthropic owns the future that’s surely how this moment will be described in what few samizdat history books remain. “Agentic” A.I. hype is everywhere. I recently rewatched The Matrix with my 13 year old, and warned them that they were going to have to swallow the extremely dumb premise that endless caverns full of human bodies in pods was a power source, somehow. They thought about it for a minute and then said “yeah that’s silly, but it is an idea A.I. would come up with.” Oh no. 

The unsettling fact is that while the movie never really seemed like it was trying to be predictive, we’re still locked in on The Matrix timeline twenty seven years later. What’s really gonna bake our noodles in the future is: would Claude Pro Max 2030 “Excalibur Prime” have decided to enact the events of The Matrix if we’d never made The Matrix in the first place?

“There’s Something Living Inside Fog, Scientists Find.” This fog—there’s something living in it? Sounds are muffled and non-directional. Is that breathing? Is it in front of you? Or right behind you? A shadow, in the corner of your eye. Then gone, or maybe you imagined it? There’s something living inside fog, scientists find. A touch on the back of your neck, feather light. Turn around. There was a scientist here wasn’t there? Who found something living? In this fog? It’s so hard to remember now, with all this fog. There’s something living inside it. Was that a scientist? How many eyes does a scientist usually have? The̸̛̞r̵̳͛ę̶̄'̵̟̉s̷̮͌ s̸͚͊̆ͅo̵̩̯͂m̸̦̉̈́ȩ̵͕̓̈́t̷̢̺͈̓̇͊̕ ̶̦̼̪̘̕ḧ̵͔͍̪͙́͆i̶͓͐n̸͔̣͇͖̣͚̂͐̉̔̓͌̚g̶̘͍͛͋̎͐̌̓ͅ ̷̖͎̟̺̲̣͎̾̄̈̍̓l̶̗̞͊͘͝ ̷͙̹̱̪̪̼̅̿̈̋̍͒̇͠ͅi̴̙̞͂̀ ̷̪͇̙͈̼̀̄̍̇͠v̴̨͉̤͗̆̔͗̊̅ ̴̗͖͚̳̤̳̖͔̃̀͋̋̌͒̿͠ ̸͎͙͚̀͐́̿̋̄ ̶̨͔͕͋ ̴͕̤͒́͛̇͂͝i̴̱͙̤͈̽̋͛͂͛̎͝ͅ ̸̥̜͈̣̫́́̉̄̚͝n̵̡̜̱͎̏̉͂̍̍̊͝͝ ̷͓̱̗̄̿̕g̴̪̜̲̺͝ģ̵͔͎̹̯̗̽̇̓͝ģ̴͔̻̪̥͖͙͖̽́͒̄

What Else Did Scientists Find?

Scientists Find Way to Supercharge Dangerous Computer ‘Worms’ With A.I. 
—Cade Metz, New York Times. Ok, but why?

Scientists find yeast in frozen mummy's guts, use it to make sourdough bread 
—CBS News. Ok, but why????

Scientists Find Cosmic 'Rosetta Stone' To Decode Baffling Signals From Deep Space 
—Michelle Starr, ScienceAlert. Yes, great, this always turns out well in fiction.

Scientists find an elusive vibration—a Higgs mode—changing a crystal’s symmetry 
—Savannah Mitchem, Argonne National Laboratory. Who among us hasn’t cycled through all the “elusive vibrations” searching for that perfect “Higgs mode,” iykiwm(aityd)?

Scientists Find That Ordinary Wi-Fi Routers Can Identify People With Near-Perfect Accuracy 
—Linnea Pejcha, My Modern Met. This isn’t “identifying people” like connecting to your device and identifying your digital footprint. The wi-fi radio is looking at you. There’s something living inside the cloud.

Scientists find new species of dragonfly, grasshopper and a fluorescent spider 
—Tim Cocks, Reuters. The Wilderness Project can keep looking for things. Everyone else, please chill.

Sick ground effects, bro. Photo Nicky Bay/The Wilderness Project

I’m joking, of course, the worst thing scientists have ever found (a tie between the demon core, leaded gasoline, and Goth Girl Spit energy drink¹ ) is still better than anyone a billionaire ever finds to run a media company. For example David Ellison, Paramount’s new owner and villain from an 80’s golf-themed comedy, found Bari Weiss, who coincidentally is also a tie between the demon core, leaded gasoline, and goth girl spit. Then Bari Weiss found Nick Bilton, the Michael Barbaro for people who also like Michael Barbaro, and here we are again because shortly after my last post Bilton fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley by email like the coward he is. “Despite yesterday's misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together,” Bilton weaseled, but Pelley says “there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back.’” Who should we believe? “The most awarded correspondent in the history of 60 Minutes” or the guy who warned us in 2014 of a terrifying possible future in which “a rogue computer momentarily derails the stock market”—an event that had happened four years earlier. Who can say.

Tom Ley can say, writing in Defector that Bilton “has already written his name into the history books as one of the media industry's most pathetic bosses.” But wait, cautioned Chris Cilizza, you may find that things look very different down here at boot level. Can you believe we have both Cilizza and Dylan Byers working right now? This is like the Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle era for media guys who suck. In Page Six, Peter Kiefer and Tatiana Siegel dug up all kinds of dirt including the rumor that Weiss is paying Bilton $2.5 million for the job, and that one person who wisely turned her down was Tyrangiel of the Riddermark. Max Read gave the Page Six story a max read, and disputed the claim that Bilton’s politics are “hard to pin down:”

Like much of Silicon Valley, Bilton has made a long political pilgrimage all the way from “secretly reactionary” to “openly reactionary.” How’s all this landing elsewhere in the company? Not great, reported Oliver Darcy in Status: 

“NEWS MAN BAD”: A Personnel Memo from Animal, Your Editor-In-Chief. Even McSweeney’s is getting dunks in. However as I was writing this post, the Times’ Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum report that:

A wise person once said “it is crucial to understand that you will never outlast the fuckery. Once the fuckery starts, it’s all fuckery from then on.” But good luck to them, I’m sure they’re built different.

Nick Bilton apparently didn’t read my post last week, because he showed up for his new job at “60 Minutes” bright and early yesterday, ready to read some vague but think-y remarks Claude had prepared for him at a low fourth grade level to what he must have imagined would be a cowed, if not openly star-struck staff. What he got instead was Scott Pelley waiting for him behind the door with a baseball bat as Lesley Stahl smacked a fist into her palm and muttered “Yeah! Give him the business, Scotty! Fuck him up, Scotty!” 

The meeting started at 10 am and the first tweet about it arrived from the Guardian’s Jeremy Barr at 10:32 am, because the whole meeting instantly leaked in 60fps Dolby Atmos 4k HDR to every working media reporter. Oliver Darcy dropped a special edition of Status recapping the kneecapping, as did Barr in the Guardian, Scott Nover and Liam Scott in the Washington Post, and Joe Flint and Isabella Simonetti in the Wall St. Journal.

The meeting only lasted fifteen minutes, according to Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin in the New York Times, which might sound short for an all-staff meeting with the new boss but I imagine felt very long to Bilton who spent it getting his rhetorical legs broke by “Slugger” Pelley. According to Status:

Later, after Bilton tried to defer the blame for firing correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega as well as executive editor Draggan Mihailovich and former executive producer Tanya Simon onto the absent Bari Weiss…

All Nick fundamentally insists upon is that his authority should be respected.

“You have no idea what my plans are,” said the King, “so I will present those plans to you. I will present them when the time is right."

Bari’s other weasel in the meeting, Charles Forelle, kept telling Pelley to stop being “rude,” in case you were worried that smarm is dead.

After fifteen minutes of absolute shellacking Bilton finally fled, limping out of the room covered in tears and snot and mumbling “enjoy the bagels.” A message arrived later via carrier pigeon from a secure undisclosed location which read:

As of today:

More on this story: constantly until Nick Bilton gets fired, I hope.

Yesterday CBS’s Temu Leni Riefenstahl Bari Weiss fired everyone at 60 Minutes who had demonstrated they were willing to stand up to her and her paymasters David Ellison, his daddy Larry Ellison, and the Ellisons’ daddy Donald Trump. Then Weiss announced her new pick to lead the show: Nick Bilton.

The two reactions to this news were either “who?” or “him?” depending on how closely you followed tech journalism in the twenty-teens. If you weren’t following it, good call! Luckily you know a guy who was following it and regrettably that is me. Let’s visit the archives.

Who is Nick Bilton?

Bilton was born at the New York Times and grew up as “a design editor in the newsroom and a researcher in the research and development labs,” which are real jobs according to Wikipedia, before he became a Times technology columnist writing asinine takes like “what if Trayvon Martin had been wearing Google glasses when he was murdered” and “is your smartwatch giving you CANCER?” The latter was roasted so hard by The Verge’s Russell Brandom that it accreted a full page of editorial notes and corrections walking back the entire premise of the piece.

In 2013 Bilton published a book about the founding of Twitter and an anonymous hater collected some of the clunkiest sentences in a Tumblr titled “Nick Can’t Write.” Bilton was a pioneer of the kind of baffling metaphor that now plagues so much A.I. writing, such as:

In “Nick Bilton’s series of technology columns for idiots” he was also ahead of his time in producing the kind of aggressively vapid A.I. doom-marketing that has since become omnipresent. In a 2014 piece about the risks of out of control machine super-intelligence, he wrote:

Ok! You might expect him nail down a little more specifically what he means by “A.I.” but that’s not Bilton’s vibe. Instead he barrels ahead with speculation about a hypothetical cancer-curing medical robot, “self-replicating nanobots,” and autonomous weapons, apparently unaware that the first real victims of A.I. would turn out to be writers of baffling metaphor.

In 2016 Bilton left his childhood home, The New York Times, and went off to Vanity Fair where they let him pretend he discovered the Theranos fraud that John Carreyrou actually discovered, and ask “Will Mark Zuckerberg Be Our Next President?” You can tell that’s a serious question because the first sentence of the subhed is: “It’s a serious question.” He returned to A.I. again in 2023 seemingly for the first time, asking the same questions he had asked in 2014 but this time about technologies “most of which have been realized in just under six months.” Which six months did he mean, of the intervening decade? Who knows. Bilton’s post-Times style got so florid and overwrought that while I was writing about it in Tabs:

There may only be a single person about whom me, hyperglocal thinkfluencer Professor Jeff Jarvis, and circa 2014 Leah Finnegan would all say “wow, that guy sucks” and it’s Nick Bilton. He was the kind of tech commentator anti-talent who makes a smooth and remunerative career for himself by being enthusiastic about gadgets while seeming think-y and writing at a low fourth grade level. Sometimes these guys ascend to their proper heaven and become venture capitalists, like Josh Constine. Sometimes they stick it out in print media and torment us for decades, like Kevin Roose. Not smart enough for the former or likable enough for the latter, instead Nick Bilton went into TV.

Nick’s Television Experience

Michael Calderone, Bilton’s former editor at Vanity Fair now at New York Magazine, reported that Bilton has “a decade of experience in documentaries.” I guess! In the New York Times Benjamin Mullin and Michael Grynbaum summarized his film career this way:

And he told Semafor’s Max Tani much the same thing:

This is all true, as far as it goes. Bilton has been involved in a couple of documentary projects in the last few years. But oddly I haven’t seen him mention his highest profile television credit: staff writer for all five episodes of Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s egregious 2023 flop “The Idol.” The Guardian called it “one of the worst shows ever made,” and the Hollywood Reporter said it was “dogged by a thin plot and an incoherent narrative.” Rolling Stone reported that a member of the production described the show as: “like any rape fantasy that any toxic man would have,” and eventually even The Weeknd himself admitted it was very bad.

Bilton’s new job at CBS leaves the status of his upcoming collaboration with Martin Scorsese and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in “Untitled Hawaii-Set Crime Drama” up in the air unless Scorsese can find another writer to take over—perhaps a rhesus macaque with a severe brain injury, or Claude.

“Walking into this building and putting my name on this job is the honor of my career,” wrote Bilton in his characteristically almost-but-not-quite-coherent introductory message to 60 Minutes’ staff. “There are more red flags flying over this memo than a Soviet military parade” observed Hamilton Nolan, who points out that the only reason someone so unqualified gets hired for a job like this is as a hatchet man, just like Bari Weiss was herself. In a parenthetical Nolan also writes:

Weiss has already made the CBS Evening News dumb and pointless, and CBS has replaced Stephen Colbert with something dumb and pointless, so I don’t think it’s particularly speculative to say Weiss is now hard at work doing the same to 60 Minutes. Max Read pointed out the essentially confusing nature of the hire: “Has the 60 Minutes well has been so poisoned that Bilton was the biggest name they could convince take the job on the terms offered? Or do they actually think he will do a good job on the merits, such as they are?” As the adage goes: “A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s.” Bari Weisses hire Nick Biltons. It’s hard to imagine what kind of people Nick Bilton will hire.

Today’s Song: Elliott Smith, “Ballad of a Big Nothing”

You can do what you want to, there’s no one to stop you…

I didn’t win a National Magazine Award last week but Jason Leopold had to spend all of Mikey B-Unit’s billions on FOIA fees to beat me and the American Society of Magazine Editors was still forced to put a picture of humpbacks doing what they’re named for up on the giant screen during its fancy award ceremony, so I think we know who the real winner was.¹  

Hot Whales in Your Area

I was just glad to be a finalist, because I could be known for any number of less salubrious things. I could be wearing dresses over pants this summer. I could be one of Los Angeles’s horny clowns, or one of New York’s horny clowns. I could be Ferrari’s first electric car, designed by Jony Ive’s design company to look exactly like Jony Ive’s only design idea: the Apple magic mouse.

I bet the charging port is on the bottom.

It also looks like a Nissan Leaf, which only costs $610,000 less. I could be Steven Rosenbaum’s new book about A.I., “The Future of Truth,” which is full of fake quotes made up by A.I. Or worse, I could be the A.I.-generated² (and also bad³ ) 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Caribbean region winner, “The Serpent in the Grove,” which is entirely made of stuff like this:

But then at least I wouldn’t be Granta’s even more embarrassing statement about it which says: “We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated,” and then goes on to quote Claude’s “analysis” at some length. Bro. Bro. What are we doing? What’s going on? We certainly don’t need A.I. to create award-winning literary short fiction in a world where John Paul Brammer can win the Brammer Prize for Excellence in Landlocked Literature with the excellent landlocked literary short story “Regionally-Specific Award-Winning Short Story,” not to even mention RS Benedict’s “Tiddies.”

Patreon writer “Read” Max Read covered the “Serpent in the Grove” fiasco’s many angles and corners and took a Borgesian tack:

It couldn’t be worse than the story as published, I guess. As usual, Hallie Bateman has it right:

Whoops, Claude filed a Form 5150 so now you’re legally Van Halen.

Speaking of being known, did everyone else know who Byron Allen was before last week when he took over the remains of Buzzfeed and took over Stephen Colbert’s time slot and wondered if you were going to finish those fries? Did anyone know that Morgpie got banned for streaming Dark Souls on her feet? Did you know that Don Hertzfeldt just put an HD verson of Rejected on YouTube? Or that Bush’s Baked Beans released a limited edition summertime multipack of dill pickle, apple pie, and rocket pop flavored baked beans? I;m gonna be thinking about thos Beans for a long time, but my spoon is too big.

What Rothko painting is your current weather? “Mutant 'super pig' population spirals out of control in Fukushima nuclear fallout zone.” Sure, why not. “Disembodied human brains used for drug testing.” sUrE, WhY NoT. “Fire Destroys Sacred Buddhist Hall in Japan that Housed ‘Eternal Flame.’” Ok I think we’re done here.

Today’s Song: Billy Woods + Kenny Segal, "Spongebob"

SpongeBob, the whole operation underwater, "It's only one tab," what we said in Tora Bora. I slept really badly last night, I apologize if this newsletter doesn’t make any sense. Joyce Carol Oates follows me on Bluesky @rusty.todayintabs.com. I need more followers who think this sort of thing is funny:

It’s Whiskey Tony with Friday Dokoupil, and where is Whiskey Tony? He’s reporting on Trump’s trip to Beijing live from Taiwan, which is a China I guess, though not really the China in question. In Status Oliver Darcy reported that the bumbling simpleton in charge of CBS News, Bari Weiss, did a visa whoopsie and forgot to get permission for Friday Tony to go to Beijing. Weiss was apparently also unable to foresee how much more embarrassing it would be to report from a Taipei hotel room than just to stay in New York.

Aside from that, though, the trip is going very badly. On Wednesday Dokoupil’s remote feed abruptly cut off as a cameraman had a medical emergency and on Thursday the broadcast illustrated a story about inflation forcing “middle class Americans to make tough choices” with stock footage of a Thai grocery receipt. More importantly, as Oliver Darcy also reported:

Last night’s live hit was so bad that Stephen Colbert simply ran it on The Late Show without further comment. Tabs sources report that Bari Weiss, determined to avoid a repeat of this disaster, is already nailing down broadcast space in British Columbia, in case Trump travels to London or Cartagena.

Where are the people who know how to make a podcast? Not at the Washington Post anymore, as proven by Post Opinion’s almost scientifically off-putting new grievance podcast “Make it Make Sense,” which consistently fails to attract any Youtube views and is struggling to crack a three digit follower count on Bluesky. Let’s go back to Status, who had a bunch of great posts this week, where Natalie Korach reported that despite recently axing virtually all of its video production staff, the newspaper installed:

Defector’s Tom Ley named the new studio “The Saddest Place In America,“ calling special attention to the work of “hamburger dipshit” James Hohmann, who once asked Megan Greenwell if he could expense boat shoes. The studio investment is also being put to use pumping out trash like “we have Olivia Reingold at home” Carine Hajjar explaining who’s responsible for California’s budget overruns:

That’s right: it’s greedy babies. Hajjar was extruded from Harvard five years ago and underwent a rigorous empathy removal procedure at the National Review before joining the Post’s editorial board where she helps opine on issues of urgent concern to Washington D.C. residents like European tax policy, how handsome and important billionaires are, and New York City tax policy. Sure, billionaires destroyed American news media on purpose, but at least now we get to watch a bunch of dumb assholes humiliate themselves every day. It’s not a trade I’d have taken willingly, but it’s what we have.

Where is New York Magazine feature writer Ross Barkan, who ganked Drew Harwell’s reporting for the lede of a piece on Ben Shapiro yesterday? Barkan’s story was updated to quote Harwell instead of… not quoting him, but no explanation has emerged from New York Magazine or Barkan on how this happened to begin with. Everybody blames A.I. for every mistake now, and honestly that’s very funny so let’s blame A.I.

Where is Caroline Calloway?

Please forward any further information about Caroline Calloway’s odeur to tips@todayintabs.com. That’s probably a real email address.

Where is Max Read’s Read Max? At Patreon now, he explained in a long and self-consciously “transparent” post that didn’t manage to find space to reveal how much Patreon paid him to switch. Where is everyone who used to have a job in Hollywood? Training A.I. now according to Ruth Fowler in Wired. Where are the men of San Francisco? Talking to Claude, according to Alessandra Ram and the other “Sad Wives of A.I.,” also in Wired. Where is New Jersey Republican Congressman Tom Kean Jr.? No one will say, but “there’s no cameras where Tom is,” apparently. Classic puzzle box situation if you ask me. Where are all the poop pictures you uploaded to the PoopCheck app? For sale to anyone who wants them, reports Jason Koebler in 404. And where are all of us on the internet? In the cuck chair, according to Aidan Walker’s Cuck Internet Theory:

That’s where everybody is. I will be in New York next week for the ASME awards, where I will try to ascertain who else in media has a distinct odeur, but where I cannot possibly be expected to also write one (1) email so don’t look for me baby.

“Unfortunately, as none of us can fail to be aware, we live in an age of bullshit,” wrote Kate Davies in her survey of Knitting Bullshit. Davies suffered through several hours of L.L.M.-generated knitting podcasts from the depressing slop hose run by a former Wondery executive, as well as a generated animation ostensibly about the history of knitting, and observed that they are “specifically intended to make you feel good in general, and to feel good about knitting in particular—so of course you are left with a warm, fuzzy, happy feeling having sat through it.” But, she concludes:

Meanwhile, in the New Yorker for some reason, Jay Caspian Kang continues his maniacal campaign to expose the cultural élite to our most brain poisoned A.I. hardliners in an extremely deferential Q&A with University of Utah English professor and Twitter research LARPer Hollis Robbins. To establish her credibility (I guess?) Kang cites Robbins’ February 2025 Substack post “It's Later Than You Think,” in which she wrote:

This seems like the kind of claim that, more than a year later, Kang could easily take a moment to assess the basic truth of. But he shan’t, because Robbins is too busy serving up delectable dumplings of bullshit like:

“Or what have you” indeed. And how about “a couple of predictions and distinctions:”

This is extremely embarrassing stuff, even for Kang. Toward the end of Robbins’ Substack post she inserted this A.I. generated illustration:

Source: some bot.

I know, A.I. illustration is repulsive to look at, but give this one a few seconds of attention. You can kind of triangulate what the prompt was right? Something about technology eclipsing the university. So there’s the quad of good old College U., and the Circuit Board of Artificial Intelligence eclipsing the Sun of Traditional Instruction or whatever. How would the light look on the ground during an eclipse? Probably like a spotlight with a round shade on it, right? Where the sun only shines on the part of the ground that’s like, behind the moon. And eclipse pictures often have a round notch out of the sun, so we’ll throw one of those in too. Perfetto!

I know, I know. “I’m so… terribly bound up with tedious points of detail.” Of course A.I. is capable of better illustration than this,¹ I don’t point all this out to critique the technology that created it. I call your attention to these flaws because the human being who looked at this dreadful piece of shit and thought “yeah dog, nailed it!” is an idiot.

This is what Kate Davies’ described as “bizarre lack of concern with actual… practices” and “manifest lack of connection to… basic reality” again. Every proclamation floats freely in the bullshitosphere, untethered to any core reality. An eclipsed sun has a little bite out of it or whatever. Knitting could work any kind of way, as long as there’s yarn and maybe some sticks involved. Perhaps it comes straight out of your brain!

Could be!

But there’s one fundamental ground truth that every A.I. huckster always, eventually, reveals that they do believe. Here’s Robbins’ version of it:

They believe that you all are probably fucked, but they’re gonna be just fine. 👍️ 

Elsewhere in A.I.: “to my fellow bay area residents visiting cities other than san francisco: if you could try not to tweet like the smoke aliens from Arrival first encountering humanity after you go to exotic places like ‘new york,’ i would really appreciate it” —Mike Isaac. ChatGPT plays Claude in Scrabble. But what about: ✅ OLEICAT? At least one New York financier² “is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead” according to Gillian Tett in FT. Angela Collier on the Genesis Mission: a hastily generated pile of bullshit that is also the only way the federal government will fund science now. And Bryant Rousseau, the white man suing the New York Times for employment discrimination according to Charlotte Klein, also has a giant website of garbage art for sale, including a whole A.I. section.

Should we all start smoking again? Should we all start drinking again? Is there a flaw in time itself? Would you like to reëvaluate your answers to the first two questions in light of the third?

In 2020 we almost got a Cord Jefferson / Max Read helmed Apple TV series about a Gawker-like website but Tim Cook killed it because he’s a pissbaby. The Hollywood Reporter had a memorial conversation with Read, Jefferson, Emma Carmichael, and Elizabeth Spiers for the tenth anniversary of Peter Thiel’s Gawker murder. Also today in ex-Gawkers, Lindsey Adler talked to David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy for A.J. Daulerio’s newsletter The Small Bow.

Today in Crabs: Thinking about the immortality of the crab.

Today’s Song: The Specials, “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think”

Next week I’ll be in New York for the National Magazine Awards where we’ll find out who is better at newslettering: me, or the upstarts at Bloomberg News and New York Magazine. But before that I’ll be back this Friday with another pile of unfortunate bullshit to show you, probably.

Correction: This post initially overstated the relationship between Wondery and Inception Point AI, the latter of which was started by a former executive of Wondery but shares no other relationship with it. I regret the error.

Yourself there, take good note,

“Cocaine and its metabolites are increasingly being detected in aquatic environments worldwide,” observed a team of scientists from Sweden, the U.K., the Czech Republic and elsewhere after they had used grant money to score a bunch of cocaine. But a team of scientists in possession of a good fortune in medical grade blow must be in want of a cockamamie experiment to perform with it, and in this case, as Wired’s Marta Musso reported: “Scientists Gave Cocaine to Salmon and You Will Absolutely Believe What Happened Next.” That’s right: the salmon all started making reckless prediction market bets and cheating on their spouses.

It isn’t actually obvious to me that cocaine (or cocaine metabolites) would affect fish the same way they affect people but apparently the literature is already full of other scientists who had this same great idea, and who have demonstrated that, for example, “exposure to 500 ng L⁻¹ of cocaine increased risk-taking behavior and reduced feeding in red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii).”

Procambarus sandlerii demonstrated increased risk-taking behavior after exposure to cocaine.

Scientific American’s Tom Lum made a video explaining how this is not just a funny headline but also good and valuable environmental science, and sure, fine. But I would like to stand up for the principle that scientists, as a group, are allowed to put on white lab coats and caper about madly, asking questions that would get the rest of us ostracized from society if not formally incarcerated regardless of whether those questions have any utility or, indeed, sanity, because human nature demands that someone be allowed to do it. Just don’t ask them where they got all that “cocaine metabolite.”

Of course one of the all-time classic scientific questions is:

The furry blob wrecking the interior of a Rolls-Royce at Lake Arrowhead turned out to be a person in a bear suit trying to do insurance fraud. The “enigmatic Golden Orb” that scientists found two miles deep at the bottom of the Gulf of Alaska and then brought to the surface in one of their more flagrant bids to exterminate us all turned out to be “a remnant of the dead cells that formed at the base of a giant deep-sea anemone, Relicanthus daphneae,” reported NOAA. Better luck next time, scientists. The blob blocking a major sewer pipe in Glasgow turned out to be a space hopper which appears dirty but still fully functional if anyone would like to go for a stinky hop. The blob that Tyson Ehlers discovered two separate times on the same log in British Columbia turned out to be a new species of slime mold. The enormous furry blob recently found lounging among the sea lions on San Francisco’s Pier 39 is Chonkers. According to observations taken with the James Webb Space Telescope the yellowish blob orbiting a star twelve light years away is a giant ammonia-covered Piss Planet. Those blobby A.I. company logos you’re seeing lately: why do they all look like buttholes? And this shiny pink egg shaped blob? It’s the Marc Andreessen Egg Game. “You're still early. Ship the eggs. Save the world.”

Ploopy Has Launched The Bean

Beef Futures Report:

A couple months ago I wrote a post titled A.I. Isn’t People which took a New Yorker story about Anthropic by Gideon Lewis-Kraus as an illuminating example of some of the woolier thinking we’ve been fed about what generative A.I. is and what it might be capable of, mostly by the companies that would like to make trillions of dollars selling it to us. I guess Lewis-Kraus saw the post, because yesterday in a report on one of the candidates for New York’s 12th Congressional district he used something else I wrote as an example himself:

Congratulations, you fashionable media insiders! Personally, I would call myself an A.I. skeptic but Lewis-Kraus designates me a standard bearer of “A.I. populism,” an allegedly cross-partisan movement that somehow unites Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders, and Eliezer Yudkowsky under the wishy-washy battle flag of “people who are worried about A.I. for all sorts of disparate reasons.” Politically I lean socialist, which you can also find reported in the New Yorker, but at heart I’m a lot more of a “fashionable insider” than I am any sort of populist. As evidence for this I would submit the fact that the New Yorker simply can’t stop talking about me.

Lewis-Kraus’s fellow hyphenate David Wallace-Wells provided an overview of A.I. populism in the New York Times Magazine today, along with the reassuring news that:

Have we? Interesting. I think Lewis-Kraus and Wallace-Wells are both right that Americans don’t trust our government to be able (or willing) to protect us from the rapacious sociopaths in charge of the leading A.I. companies. And I suppose A.I. has a few uses—this morning I used Merlin to identify some bird calls, for example—but Lewis-Kraus ends with this list:

All I could think reading it was that these were all things you used to be able to find out how to do by searching the internet with Google, before the accretion of A.I. slop made it unusable.

Today’s Song: Rancid, “Dope Sick Girl”

Thank you for reading Today in Tabs, the internet’s most fashionable reflection of consensus opinion in certain left-leaning media-insider quarters. Procambarus sandlerii is yet another W for Tabs’ Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley, who didn’t even flinch when I texted to ask if they could put Adam Sandler’s “this is how I win” sunglasses on a crawdad.