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 that used to be Wondery, 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.

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.

Good Reads:

The 2026 Pulitzer winners were announced yesterday and they even managed to pick a couple that weren’t from the New York Times, such as Aaron Parsley’s gripping and terrifying story from last August’s Texas Monthly about the night a flooding Guadalupe River tore the house out from underneath his family. If you missed this story last summer, take a deep breath and read it now.

This is a hard swerve tonally but I think we need one after that, so here’s a very different throwback to Hallie Bateman’s delightful 2014 newsletter Pen Parade—specifically the time Hallie wrote the newsletter with a carrot dipped in ink.

Hallie Bateman in Pen Parade via HALMAIL

Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Molly is one of my favorite newsletters because it keeps evolving and taking new risks, and this week’s post is a perfect example:

Good Reads About Bad Reads:

Don’t read Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s yet another Tucker Carlson profile in the New York Times Magazine, instead read Parker Molloy’s overview of the many “But Really Actually What Does Tucker Carlson Believe For Really Real?” pieces, including this new one. We all benefit more from critique of Carlson’s one tedious rhetorical trick than we do from letting him play it over and over, even on a well-meaning journalist who is trying her best.

And sorry that the New York Times is such a punching bag today¹ but also don’t read Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff’s gauzy American pastoral tear-jerker “The Last Days of Butter Ridge” which is packed with romantic depictions of rough-hewn but good hearted olde timey Trump voter dairy farmers and yet surprisingly devoid of facts or financial analysis. As Saslow would have it, the Watson family of northern Pennsylvania have been betrayed by a perfidious Donald Trump and forced to sell their hardscrabble dairy farm. Instead watch farmer Sarah Taber’s video about why farmers actually voted for Donald Trump, and then read her posts exploring these particular poor dairy farmer fracking landlords’ actual financial situation. It turns out that “The Last Days of Butter Ridge” is more like a large landholder with diversified income streams winding down the most unprofitable part of his business (for now) to live off passive energy extraction income instead. And also young Boyd will raise his pet cow Parachute, who will probably get her own New York Times profile soon enough.

Sentences With Threatening Auras:

And So On:

Singleride.nyc: “Travel the longest route you can on the NYC Subway without visiting the same station twice.” Good game to play while you listen to Train Jazz. A thread from Annie “Depths of Wikipedia” Rauwerda: “‘openai [dot] com’ was once the personal homepage of a guy named glenn (2001), and ‘tiktok [dot] com’ was the quaint shared homepage of a couple as their relationship progressed from dating to married with a baby (2000).” Artemis II Photo Timeline. A great reporting fellowship on Martha’s Vineyard. Mina Kimes is hosting the Scripps National Spelling Bee! “On Polymarket, the Journal found, 67% of profits go to just 0.1% of accounts.” Neat. Today in Crabs. New AFib treatment unlocked? “Rectal exam stabilized man's irregular heartbeat.” I guess it’s worth a shot. TMZ asked John Hinckley Jr. what he thought about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. Lol. “OpenAI has a goblin problem.” Don’t we all.

Today’s Song: Gang this Slayyyter album absolutely rips. If I win the ASME I’m gonna make them play “I’m Actually Kinda Famous” as my walk-on music.

On Saturday, a random Bluesky lib attempted to Naruto run the Secret Service checkpoint on the floor above the Washington Hilton ballroom where mentalist Oz Pearlman was guessing the name of Karoline Leavitt’s baby which, from forensic examination of the footage, Today in Tabs can exclusively reveal will be Vibram.

WHCA President Weijia Jiang (right) never saw anything so amazing, until a couple seconds later.

The footage is full of unsurpassed dystopian thriller opening montage material. Just look at this beauty:

CELEBRATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT

What happened next? This guy ate his salad. Dylan Byers, the worst media reporter, went to a bar where he failed to watch CNN. Kash Patel got cucked, but Stephen Miller knew exactly where his own wife was because he was hiding behind her. Taylor Lorenz wasn’t even there oh my god and if she was it was for work but she wasn’t anyway and it was on assignment. Brian Krassenstein figured it all out (time traveling false flag / alternate reality game with pre-planted clues, obviously). All the unserved steak and lobster was “freeze dried,” according to Weijia Jiang, and will be donated to domestic violence shelters, presumably in space. Donald Trump, allegedly the target of this… I guess let’s go ahead and call it a “serious assassination attempt,” has so far responded by CELEBRATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT and whining about his ballroom. But you know who else was always whining about ball room? Lyndon Baines Johnson. Checkmate, liberals.

The alleged would-be attempted shooter, Cole Allen, sliced cleanly through the defensive line, stomping and hammering with one precise jackthrust after another up the middle and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends, making it into the open field near the top of the stairs down to the actual ballroom level before somehow falling down and losing his shirt. Five or six shots were fired and one Secret Service officer was hit in his ballistic vest, but Allen wasn’t shot and it’s not at all clear that he ever fired a weapon himself. Just before the attack, Allen sent what amounts to a suicide note to his friends and family explaining that:

He also listed his “rules of engagement,” which specify that he didn’t intend to target anyone except “administration officials (not including Mr. Patel).” Damn, cucked again. The New York Post called the letter a “sprawling manifesto,” but what’s most striking about it to me is how absolutely ordinary the sentiments in it sound. People are calling Allen the Evelyn Normielib assassin, after this political cartoon:

All this happened on Saturday night and it’s only Tuesday now, but this post already feels too late. The news has largely moved on: The U.A.E. pulled out of OPEC, the New York Times is trolling us again, the U.S. Justice Department has indicted James Comey for taking a picture of seashells (CELEBRATING THE FIRST AMENDMENT). The national mood in response to an armed gunman rushing the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is indifference shading to mild disappointment.

It certainly appears that “someone ought to assassinate the President” is the moderate consensus opinion now. They made fancams of Luigi Mangione. Charlie Kirk has been the internet’s biggest joke for almost eight months. Everybody knows what “when It Happens” means and two thirds of the country will vocally celebrate when It Happens, however It Happens, while the other third will immediately turn on each other. I don’t know how to feel about any of this. The only thing I do know is that no one can execute a successful Zerg rush alone.

Completely Unrelated: Groups of teens are speedrunning Scientology and observers are mapping the floor plans as if the secretive cult’s buildings were a roguelike.

Even More Unrelated: “Kentucky Powerball winner has court hearing delayed after waking up from coma.”

Today in Tech: John Herrman tried OpenClaw and concluded that he just doesn’t have any personal workflows that need to be automated, even if OpenClaw could reliably automate them, which it can’t.

Meanwhile from Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue. Wait, you’re thinking, haven’t I already seen this story? Yes, lol, this is a new one. Also in tech, Phil Vendola writes:

Fun! It’s genuinely impossible to tell if tech products are bad now because of AI or just because tech products have always been bad.

Today’s Song: Butthole Surfers, “Who Was In My Room Last Night?”

I love this song but I don’t know why it’s been stuck in my head for three days and I would like to move on. Hey did you miss Liz Lopatto on Da Pope last week? I hope not. I missed you though, I get perceptibly more grumpy when I haven’t written a Tabs for a few days.

I’m traveling this week, but in the meantime here’s Tabs Senior Papist Correspondent Liz Lopatto to explain Donald Trump’s beef with Pope Leo XIV and how it threatens to unravel the American political right and possibly kick off the Butlerian jihad. In her spare time Liz writes for The Verge, where she recently made a case that Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want. —Rusty

If your pope looks like this, you are gonna die in that pit. 

Rusty is off parenting or something, and so while the arch-WASP is out, we’re doing Popery!

“My growing view,” wrote now-vice president JD Vance in 2020, “is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims.” The pope is quite literally a sovereign (though his territory is diminished from its peak) so he is by definition “a political figure.” Like many people who know any history whatsoever, I got a pretty good laugh out of this headline. 

But all that “proper deference” stuff was before we got a Chicago pope, I guess!

Pope Leo XIV, when he is not being gifted assorted sports jerseys as a running bit, has spent his papacy firmly telling everyone to quit killing each other. He condemned Russia’s actions against Ukraine, called for peace in Gaza, decried violence in Sudan, and called for peace when Iran cracked down on protestors earlier this year. Leo also said that while countries have a right to control their borders, immigrants should be treated with basic human dignity, which is pretty normal Catholic pro-life stuff. If Leo has gotten up to anything unusual so far, it’s condemning violence against women.

Then, a little more than a month after U.S. President Donald Trump started an illegal and, separately, unconstitutional war against Iran, the pope once again called for peace in very vague and general terms:

“Religious leader calls for peace” is not surprising or controversial, even if you know he might be doing it wearing a White Sox jersey. But this time Donald Trump took it personally. It’s already funny when a major religious leader endorses peace in general and the U.S. president decides that the pope is specifically shit-talking him. But what will live in my brain for the rest of my natural life is Trump announcing to the world that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime.” Trump then followed that up with some light blasphemy, which he later deleted.¹

It’s trendy to go to Mass these days, on the far right. The Catholic conversion movement is tied up with right-wing politics largely because of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei, which originally blossomed in Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain. In Opus, his absolute banger of a book about the group, Gareth Gore documented how Opus Dei targeted the powerful in Washington D.C. under its leader Father C. John McCloskey, who was eventually removed from his post after a sexual abuse scandal that the group carefully described as involving “an adult woman.” Ok! Gore wrote that:

The cure for the male loneliness epidemic is Opus Dei, according to Opus Dei, which is apparently how it sank its hooks into the Republican party. Leonard Leo—a longtime kingmaker in the Federalist Society who helped block Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court under Barack Obama—sat on the board of Opus Dei’s Washington recruiting center and sent his children to Opus Dei schools. And in the first Trump administration, Leonard Leo played a role in installing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. 

At this point, you begin to wonder if certain ambitious people converted to Catholicism just to get close to power, and if Mass was actually just a way to get access to a better career. I believe I have an answer: Yes. 

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

If Ross Douthat, professional public Catholic, can both-sides Donald Trump’s blasphemy, we know where his real loyalties lie. Sean Hannity has broken with the Catholic Church to support Trump. Peter Thiel—close with Opus Dei’s Father Arne Panula, according to Gore—has gone to Rome to preach his heretical views on the Anti-Christ, prompting the Vatican’s main AI advisor to ask in the headline of an essay whether Thiel should be burned at the stake. For the record: if the Church actually goes through with this, I’ll repent of my apostasy.

Vance, a Thiel protégé, has taken it upon himself to lecture Pope Leo about Augustine, even warning him to “be careful.” Leo is the first pope from the Order of Augustine and was literally in Hippo when Vance decided to Augustine-splain at him, thereby creating unimaginable new levels of pontification. The pope didn’t even have to rebuke Vance himself—the U.S. bishops’ doctrinal chairman did that. 

So now I’m over here tapping my watch like Judge Judy: excommunication when? The funniest time to do it would be right before Vance’s upcoming book on his Catholic faith comes out in June. You know, the book with a random Methodist church on its cover?

It remains to be seen if we’re going to get a second, dumber Reformation, this time because the woke pope doesn’t like war and thinks all human beings should be treated with dignity or whatever. Members of the Trump administration have threatened the Pope by invoking the Avignon papacy, a series of popes installed by France that led to a Church schism, which apparently alarmed the Chicago Pope so much that he canceled plans to visit the US. Pope Leo has also met with Gareth Gore, which suggests that he may finish what Francis started and order a full independent investigation into Opus Dei, which is accused of labor exploitation, human trafficking, and other crimes. If this does happen, I am very curious about what we’ll discover by examining the American wing of Opus Dei and the D.C.-based Catholic Information Center.

One last thing: the pope is promoting friendship between Catholicism and Islam—that’s part of why he was in Hippo in the first place—and his main AI advisor seems to hate Silicon Valley. Apparently this is part of the plot of Dune, so we may also have the Butlerian jihad to look forward to. And you know who else died in the pit? That’s right: God-Emperor Leto Atreides II.

Today’s Song: “St. Loser,” by Slayyyter (Live at Coachella)

Tabs thinks about you. Do you think about Tabs?

Thank you Liz for that troubling information! I really missed having guest posters—did you know there wasn’t a single guest post in 2025? I’m changing that this year, starting right now.

Clavicular collapsed on livestream, yet another predictable step on the well-worn path from hitting your face with a hammer and taking meth for weight loss to being investigated by the Florida fish police and running over a stalker with a Cybertruck. A path that inevitably, as we all know by now, leads to overdosing on massive amounts of cough syrup and horse tranquilizer in what appears to be an empty Buffalo Wild Wings alongside two musclebound jabronis inexplicably wearing wigs. It’s a tale as old as time. According to New York Times Look At These Weirdos correspondent Joseph Bernstein, Clavicular is already out of the hospital and back at the club, regretmaxxing.

That would be one of the dumbest stories in a normal week but this was an extremely stupid week even by second-Trump-term standards. Defector’s Albert Burneko summarized this stupid week in Donald Trump news:

President Doctor Jesus’s Vice President JD Vance also questioned Pope Leo’s grasp of just war theory, a Christian moral framework largely developed by St. Augustine. So who understands just war theory better, JD Vance or Pope Leo? Well, National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent Justin McLellan described the literal Pope’s credentials:

On the other hand, JD Vance has been Catholic for “twenty minutes” and chose St. Augustine as his special Catholic guy. So I guess it’s impossible to say! Meanwhile a Doordash promotional peasant brought some McDonald’s to the Oval Office in an obvious PR stunt that most of the media nevertheless chirpily covered as if it were a real delivery, like preschool teachers talking to toddlers about a leprechaun. Trump later called the event “tacky.”

Today in War: Pete Hegseth did the Ezekiel 25:17 bit from Pulp Fiction as if it were a real Bible verse while Navy personnel deployed in the Persian Gulf are reportedly being fed meals like “plain tortilla” and “silver meat oblong” because logistics is woke and gay.

Today in Health: The NY Post reported that…

I know it feels like we’ve heard this story a whole bunch of times before, but this is somehow a new one. Also today in health, Chris Stokel-Walker reports on the sudden increase in AI diagnoses of bixonimania, a fake disease that doesn’t exist and was invented to see if, hypothetically, a couple of extremely fake online preprints could trick AI into believing in a fake disease.

Today In Stupid Business News: Wool sneaker pioneer Allbirds announced its “Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure.” For analysis of what at first seems like it must be a straightforward editing mistake I give you Matt Levine, who points out that… 

Didn’t this happen in crypto too? Of course it did. In 2017 the Long Island Ice Tea Corporation renamed itself the Long Blockchain Corp. and announced it was getting into crypto instead of ready-to-drink iced tea and lemonade. That one turned out to be crime, but I’m sure it’s fine this time. Speaking of crypto, in late March “Bitcoin miners [were] losing $19,000 on every BTC produced.” Lol. Lmao.

And after Anthropic’s AI failed to run a vending machine at either The Wall St. Journal or at Anthropic’s offices, Andon Labs promoted it to operating a physical store in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco so it could cost them six figures in losses instead of merely three. The store is (allegedly) run by an AI they named “Luna,” because the lady in the computer is real and she’s their friend. Fast Company’s Chris Morris reports that “on the store’s opening day, Luna thought of every detail—except staffing. No workers were scheduled, forcing the AI to send a desperate email to its employees asking if someone could come in.” Fun! It also designed itself a logo with an intensely threatening aura:

FT: “Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff.” This might have happened years ago, who would know. Colson Whitehead wondered “Why is it that the most vocal cheerleaders of generative A.I. are always the hackiest motherfreakers around?” And Laufey presents the custom electric Miles Davis centennial Lexus.

Today in a final headass ouroboros of dumb media newsletter news: the Semafor media newsletter’s Max Tani reported that Oliver Darcy’s Status media newsletter accused the Mediaite “One Sheet” media newsletter of aggregated media newsletters of making up quotes and misrepresenting stories in exactly the way you’d expect to happen if you fed a bunch of media newsletters into AI and asked it to summarize them. Oliver Darcy reported in more detail:

Mediaite founder and One Sheet’s alleged writer Colby Hall has been suspended, “pending further review of his work.” Or someone’s work, anyway.

Today in Bees: Upper West Side bee distribution day. “Bees are sold by weight, like cheese or cocaine.” And scientists just discovered 5.6 million bees under a New York State cemetery. Oh, I wonder how many bees there are in this graveyard? Normal question, for scientists.

Also Today in Scientists: In Smithsonian, Margherita Bassi reports “Scientists Just Made the Most Complete Map of the Clitoris’s Sensory Nerve Network. Here’s What They Found.” Probably 5.6 million bees.

Today’s Song: Nine Inch Noize, “Parasite”

The whole Nine Inch Noize album is out today and it’s so good. As Liz keeps saying, “Trent is in his pop girlie era.”

Next week will not be dumb at all. We got it out of our system this week! Great work everyone.

Someday I will be able to write a Tabs that isn’t mostly about AI but not today because Patrick Quirk says that We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History, and Almost Nobody Has Noticed. I like to believe I’m well informed but I hadn’t heard about most of these incidents. And what do they all have in common? Let’s find out.

In February 2024¹  a finance worker in Hong Kong lost $25 million to an “elaborate scam [which] saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations,” reported CNN. That is to say, several of his co-workers who he knows personally appeared in a video call and told him to go ahead with this extremely suspicious $25 million transaction. They were all fake.

On March 31st, North Korean hackers published a malicious version of the javascript web client library axios to npm with a remote access trojan giving them full control over any machine that updated its copy of one of the most widely used libraries in the javascript ecosystem during the roughly three hours it was live. According to axios maintainer Jason Saayman, the hackers got control of his GitHub account by creating a whole fake company and inviting him to collaborate with it, eventually getting him to install their credential-swiper with the one button literally everybody will just sigh and click automatically—a fake Microsoft Teams update:

“The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess,” wrote Kyle Kingsbury, including your co-workers and family. And all of this is before anyone has even seen Anthropic’s newest model, which the company will only release to a small group of corporations because it is allegedly “capable of identifying and exploiting previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in every major computer operating system and every major web browser,” according to Reuters. Hackers are already using regular Claude though, don’t worry. [Ethics disclosure: I talked to my fiancée on Zoom and he told me I should send all of my bitcoin to wallet 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.]

Milla Jovovich (yes that Milla Jovovich) released “The highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked” on GitHub for some reason. UPDATE 1: Oops, those high scores were fake. UPDATE 2: Search results are now inundated with fake malware versions. Any minute now we’re going to find out the real thing is also malware and that Milla Jovovich never existed at all. Also the Washington Post put an AI chatbot on its homepage which can’t find current Washington Post news stories but can make up fake quote attributions or write you some python code.

But aside from all that, Han Lee, how is the Great AI Leap Forward going?

What can you do about any of this? Absolutely nothing (despondent). But also absolutely nothing (optimistic)! Sure all the money is in databases now and all the databases are about to get hacked, but look at it this way: when your money gets stolen that’s your problem. When everybody’s money gets stolen that’s the bank’s problem.

Meanwhile Mike Monteiro points out that you can just make donuts. They can’t stop you. Rax King would simply like to be left behind: “Deskill my trade, if you really think that's where the wind is blowing. Hell, take my career away from me outright! I'll keep writing, because it's what I do.” If it's gotten to that point, then I have to declare that you could please bury me with it too.

One thing that AI could never do is find out what’s the best free restaurant bread in America. But Caity Weaver can and does in her new Atlantic story “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America.” I think her number two bread probably should be the number one bread, but the story takes an unexpected turn near the end and by the time I found out what she thinks is the best free restaurant bread in America I didn’t really care anymore, in a good way. The best sentence in the piece is: “It looks like something from the biology lab at Liberace University.”

And Kevin talked to Werner Herzog about the upcoming Cave of Forgotten Dreams IMAX release. Herzog isn’t anti-AI across the board but:

Or, as Herzog said in 1982, also about AI: “Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity… It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this [AI]… we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel.” So true, bestie. I’m always saying this.

Today in Other Cursèd Artifacts: It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Steamed Hams. The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. Helen DeWitt turned down a $175,000 literary prize due to onerous P.R. demands but then Tyler Cowen gave her $175,000 of Peter Thiel’s money anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The 2026 Kyoto penguins relationship chart dropped, and it makes your polycule look like a bunch of amateurs.

And Finally: My former Today on Trail editor at the Washington Post Amanda Katz just launched Porch Party, a DC-focussed “newsletter, a website, and an informal community devoted to life in these Interesting Times.” Amanda is great and you should pitch her stuff.

Today’s Song: Train Jazz

April 7th, 2026?

Today in Tabs is off this week due to the inexorable passage of time, age, senescence, growth, change, and death. I realize that telling you Tabs is off in a Tabs newsletter that arrived in your email and you’re currently reading doesn’t make a lot of sense, but roll with it. This doesn’t count. We’re in a time-out here.

Nine years ago on SBNation, a website which still exists (I checked), Jon Bois released a twenty five part series called 17776 that addressed the question of “what football will look like in the future.” Specifically: 15,000 years in the future, in a world where people stopped being born or dying on April 7th, 2026. That’s today, so you made it.

Congratulations?

Nine years ago just happened. Donald Trump was president. An extremely stupid technology bubble was underway. I was working on a Macbook Air laptop that looked almost exactly like the one I’m typing this post into right now. There are things in my backyard that I put down for a minute nine years ago that I still haven’t gotten around to picking up yet, but I will.

But also: nine years ago my youngest child was about to turn four. This weekend they’ll turn thirteen, almost done with 7th grade and legally allowed to join Instagram. Nine years is longer than they can remember—it’s everything that’s happened in their whole life.

Nine years ago my father-in-law still had two years to live, although that clock was pretty clearly ticking even then. My mother-in-law often babysat our four year old when my wife and I both had to work. She was still very healthy and fit then, my mother-in-law, and took care of her husband, too, for the last years of his life. But back then, her Alzheimer’s was just a little hint of absent-mindedness. A touch of senioritis now and then. The occasional impulsive decision.

Tabs is off because today we’re moving her into a nursing home. Even with a full time live-in caretaker, she can’t live at home anymore. Nine years can be all the time you have left.

17776 is about football, kind of. It’s about the things football is about—time and space. What would a game mean if the time to play it was unlimited? What do you do with the knowledge that space is too big to explore even with unlimited time? What would football become if no one could ever die? If one game could go on for 10,000 years? If the field could be a circa 2026 NFL regulation fifty-three and one-third yards wide but stretch 2,340,170 yards long? What if we all lived long enough to see New York and Florida drown, and then lived thousands more years after that? What if the lightbulb burned for another fifteen thousand years?

I’ve known about 17776 since 2017, but I have to admit I didn’t actually read it until yesterday. It was widely praised, and won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation in 2018. It’s one of those rare works that simultaneously creates and perfects a new form of storytelling, like Mary Shelley did for science fiction with Frankenstein, or Laurence Sterne did for the postmodern novel with Tristram Shandy. We might have a very long wait until someone else does something almost as good with the internet. I knew it was the kind of thing I’d like, but I just hadn’t gotten around to picking it up yet.

Nine years can be a lifetime. 10,000 years can be the blink of an eye. Time is extremely relative. Have you ever watched the last two minutes of a close football game?

Today in Tabs will return next week.

PS: In 2020, Bois released a followup called “20020: The Future of College Football.” I will let you know what I think of it in 2029.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play in the media business: to speculate who will go AI. By now, I no longer need to speculate. I have gone through the experience many times—with book reviewers, with tech reporters, with columnists. I have come to know the types: the born sloppers, the sloppers whom journalism itself has created, the soon-to-be-pilled. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would go AI. Let us look around the `net.

Take Ms. L, for instance. I don’t know that she’s ever publicly said so, but I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make her go AI. She’s written about the AI industry, and certainly sees clearly what’s wrong with it. But that isn’t the reason. Ms. L has been a correspondent in finance and technology for many years—she is as poached in these torrid waters as any journalist alive. It is not for ignorance that Ms. L will never go AI.

No, she will never go AI because the machine mind has nothing in it to approach what is already present in her own human mind. The machine pen has nothing to offer her life or her career. What use has she for a large language model’s mediocre ideas? She already labors beneath the weight of a stock of ideas far better than AI could produce, and larger than she could ever use. Even more, she has put in her time as an editor for other writers, and developed the skills and habits of mind to critique her own work. She does not require a mechanical red pen. And if a red pen is necessary she can always rely on her human colleagues for editing, such as Mr. P, who has already proven much superior to his own AI facsimile. No. Ms. L writes for the love of writing and publishes for the pleasure of sharing correct opinions and correcting erroneous ones. AI could only detract from that. Ms. L will never go AI.

You might think Mr. R not so different, superficially, from Ms. L. He’s also a long-tenured technology columnist at a respected mainstream publication. And yet he has eagerly, even gleefully, turned flack for the machines. He has delegated much of his professional life to them as well, and seems proud of it:

And why not? Mr. R is not known or valued for his elegance of expression. He has, at best, a “writing style,” and not one that can’t easily be duplicated by a large language model. Checking facts? Assessing his work’s strengths and weaknesses? More bathwater to be tossed out of this increasingly baby-less tub. So what explains Mr. R, who “expects AI models to get better than him at everything eventually?” Why does he go AI when Ms. L never would?

Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.

Ms. R (no relation to Mr. R) brings us news of her former colleague Ms. M, who has casually admitted to going AI apparently against the policies of her employer, another national newspaper hemorrhaging both staff and readers. Ms. R writes that:

This is surely the first time Ms. M has been accused of “intellectual heavy-lifting.” Nevertheless Ms. R, who it goes without saying will never go AI, disapproves:

But after twenty-five years of dumb opinions clumsily expressed, is it any wonder that Ms. M is happy to turn over that labor to a device? AI couldn’t be worse at her job than she is, and anyway, being incompetent has never proven any hindrance in her grimly illustrious career filling the endowed Libertarian chair at a range of publications that wanted to help their other conservatives appear serious and thoughtful, if only by comparison.

Mr. N, on the other hand, will never go AI which we can admire about him. But he seems to have reached that correct conclusion via a chain of understandable but regrettably mistaken premises:

Ah, Mr. N! A good man. A hardscrabble labor reporter, a stalwart friend of the human worker. Nevertheless he doesn’t realize that despite its rarity, the supply of good writing always and everywhere far exceeds the demand for it. Mediocrity is no impediment to success—in fact it’s at least marginally preferred by what remains of the reading public. But whatever his romantic notions, Mr. N will never go AI and that’s what matters. Mr. N cares about his work.

II

Taking a rapid survey of the remainder: Ms. B will never go AI. She finds it “super embarrassing to me, and pitiful…”. Speaking of embarrassing, Mr. A.P. pays so little attention to his work that he didn’t even notice when AI cribbed from the Guardian for a book review it published under his name in The New York Times. “Can Art Compromise With Fascism?” asks the title of “his” review. Indeed. Mr. L onanistically confuses volume for value: “One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven.” He could be replaced with a cron job hooked up to PR Newswire, if the traffic model of media funding were still viable enough to justify it. All the editors of website W decided together that they will not go AI, because otherwise what is even the point of website W. A different Ms. B denies going AI for her novel, but readers are unconvinced. Is it worse to get caught going AI, or to generate AI-quality prose with your own hands? Ironically Mr. M, who resentfully claims uncredited contributions to the reporting on this second Ms. B, has enthusiastically gone AI himself.

III

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes AI?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific journalists.

Kind, good, happy, secure people never go AI. They may be the hard-working columnist, the former blogger, the independent media entrepreneur, or the virtuosic book critic—you’ll never make sloppers out of them. But the bored pseudo-intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the fearful ink cannon, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go AI in a crisis.

Believe me, good writers don’t go AI. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is experience, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go AI. It’s an amusing game. Try it with the next big industry you work in.

My apologies to Dorothy Thompson, who wouldn’t go AI in a million years, and from whom I stole both the premise and structure of this post and virtually the entire third section, which noticeably did not require much adjusting. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I said that.

I am going to assume you’ve already titrated your exposure to the Lindy West / polyamory discourse at whatever level you find most effective and desirable in your own life, so I won’t try to recap the entire thing. But after three weeks of critiques, profiles, reviews, takes, counter-takes, and nasty emails, there are a few questions that you might still have which I feel qualified to answer. So let’s just do that real quick. [Ed.: It will not be quick.]

Q: Is the book, Adult Braces, any good?

I haven’t read it, but a few people whose taste I trust say that it is good! This isn’t surprising, since Lindy West is a charming and funny writer and a sharp observer of detail, and most of the book consists of a cross-country van trip which is the perfect stage on which to showcase her talents. Tabs Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley reports that it is “really good at describing the lived experience of larger bodied people and how that experience colors everything else that happens to you.” West’s writing is apparently still a bit infected with a 2010-era The Stranger vibe, but since she is the person who largely invented that voice, if she wants to keep using it who am I to say she shouldn’t. Overall, this isn’t an American Canto situation, which is sort of a relief. If we’re going to have weeks of discourse over a book, at least it should be a reasonably good book.

Q: Where can I get a little taste without reading it reading it, if you know what I mean?

Yeah I gotchu. @clapifyoulikeme is posting selected passages in a Bluesky thread.

Q: So the whole thing is about Lindy and her husband Aham, and Aham’s non-monogamy which Lindy sort of agreed to and sort of also didn’t want to think about, but then Aham started a serious relationship with Roya and all of them had to figure out how to live with all this, and whether they wanted to be together or, like, I don’t exactly know how to put it…

I feel like you’re summarizing the book in order to avoid asking a question. Please just ask it.

Q: Ok, fine. What do all these people look like?

Wow, that’s pretty shallow don’t you think?

Q: Fuck off dude, you wondered too.

I mean, I am writing these questions myself. Normally I would say that is none of our business but luckily (?) for us in 2022, Lindy, Aham, and Roya hard-launched their polycule with a twenty-eight minute YouTube video for StyleLikeU (sponsored by “DAME - a leading sexual wellness brand creating game-changing pleasure products for people with vulvas, and DIPSEA – an app where storytelling meets sexual wellness”) in which they perch on uncomfortable looking stools under freezing cold lighting in some kind of Eli Roth raw concrete interrogation room and answer questions from offscreen about their relationship while removing an article of clothing between each question in a manner that is less “sexy striptease” and more “the proctologist will be in as soon as you’re ready.”

[citation needed]

Q: Uh wait can I see the book’s cover again?

Q: This is a war crime.

That isn’t a question, but I agree.

Q: So critics generally say that Aham doesn’t come off great in the book. How are they handling the launch?

Not very well, I’m afraid! The best piece about the book that I’ve read is Scaachi Koul’s in Slate. Scaachi traveled all the way to Bainbridge Island, Washington¹ to interview Lindy about the book and her life, and while Scaachi certainly knows how to be mean, this profile is not even slightly mean. In fact she openly cops to being a long-time Lindy West fan:

Nevertheless after it was published, Scaachi revealed on Slate’s ICYMI podcast, she received an email from Aham which read:

Q: ????????

Yeah, even if the piece had been exactly as Aham describes it here (which it isn’t at all), this is not how grownups act. This is an unacceptable way to speak to anyone. But ok, Aham had a tantrum, we’ve all had bad moments right? We’ve all written things we wish we hadn’t. I certainly have, anyway. But when the ICYMI podcast producers reached out to Aham before the show, they received this in response:

For me, this is the sort of thing that leads me to a permanent conclusion about someone. “Free Palestine” deployed as a snide dismissal of a nasty email you wrote to a journalist is pretty far beyond the pale for me. I’m not ok with that. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Roya also responded to Scaachi, in a more classic media mean-girl idiom:

Wow. 2013 called to say: “sick burn.” I guarantee everyone she knows read this story, though, and for whatever its worth this profile was what finally convinced me to get a Slate Plus subscription.

Q: Is there anything I probably haven’t already seen about this that you thought was good?

Yes! Artist and writer Torey Akers made a Tiktok that I think is very perceptive about the book and Lindy West’s overall place in the “2010s viral confessional essay industrial complex.” Akers says:

Q: Ok. Anything else?

Nope!

Q: Should I check out what Helen Lewis had to say about it in The Atlantic?

No, never.

Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow 'Organ Sacks' to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?

Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk's Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”

Today’s Song: AJJ, “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope”

Today’s Tabs was brought to you by the letter G, which moves in silence like lasagna. You know who loves lasagna, and hates Mondays? Thats right: President James A. Garfield. Thanks to Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley for the only original piece of reporting in here, and thanks to you for reading. Aham please don’t email me about this.

Tabs was unexpectedly off last week because I came down with some kind of middle-school incubated plague whose main symptoms were exhaustion and brain fog. But no brain fog, no gain fog, as the saying goes, and the gain fog for you is that I spent most of the week lying in bed reading Takes as they slowly dribbled out of the leaky garden hose which is all that remains of digital media now. When I was young we all drank straight from the overflowing garden hose of digital media and got Buzzfeed lead poisoning without any adults caring. Only 90’s kids will understand. Nevertheless I took all the Takes and put them into the Take-o-matic 9000 and blended them into a thick nutritive slurry of correct opinions for you, so let’s choke that down instead.

The New Atlantis is a pretty squishy, Aquarian sounding title for a “public journal of ideas.” Which is odd, since The New Atlantis was founded by a Heritage Foundation aligned nonprofit whose Board of Directors currently includes Leonard Leo (yes, that Leonard Leo) and which according to Influence Watch “advocates for overturning Roe v. Wade, opposes gender ideology and the Equality Act, and supports the creation of a conservative, pro-family economic policy agenda.” The magazine appears to be a semi-arm’s length effort to smuggle conservative “Judeo-Christian” trad views into an existing humanist anti-technology discourse that doesn’t need them and largely isn’t interested in them. The paucity of potential readership for a public journal of ideas that is philosophically opposed to ideas probably explains why no one paid any attention when The New Atlantis published a long essay back in December for its Winter 2025 issue titled ”American Diner Gothic.” Unfortunately last week someone finally read it, so now it’s everyone’s problem.

This illustration is like 85% of the story’s argument.

The piece is by Robert Mariani who is “a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon” and “also the CEO of Wingman.live, an AI dating assistant app.” Anyone even vaguely attuned to current socio-technological vibes can clock that as a profoundly cursed bio. The shorter but more fun part of “American Diner Gothic” is a personal story of the time Mariani dated a nonbinary anime gamer girl, who ultimately (and correctly) dumped him for being a boring yuppie. That’s not even me being mean—don’t worry, I’m gonna be mean in a second—it’s what Mariani himself wrote.

The longer and much worse part of the essay is Mariani struggling to describe the commodification of anime otaku culture without any of the critical tools required to make that description legible or interesting. It’s like watching a squirrel try to disarm a nuclear weapon—no surprise that he fails to do it, but the reader is left wondering why he even wanted to try. Ultimately “American Diner Gothic” is less a cultural analysis and more the soggy issue of a prolonged session of pseudo-critical gooning.

Oh, dear.

What sources or research Mariani consulted to develop his subcultural analysis are never specified. I suspect they consisted mainly of watching Tiktoks, which leaves the alleged real-world cultural dominance of the dinergoth an open question, but the general archetype is at least reasonably recognizable. He describes the dinergoth this way:

In his 1979 book Subculture: the meaning of style, Dick Hebdige wrote that British punk fans of the late 1970’s, and particularly fans of David Bowie, were:

Wow that sounds familiar. Mariani continues:

Or, as Hebdige put largely the same observation forty seven years ago:

“At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle,” writes Mariani. Yeah dog, that’s how commodification of subcultures works. First it’s underground, and then it’s a whole aisle at Target. Think of the boost e-girls must have given haberdashery!

All day cookie dough.

None of this really contradicts what Mariani wrote, it’s just one of several much more interesting potential essays that he dodges like Neo in bullet time in his determination to instead deliver grandiose but facially meaningless sentences such as: “Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare.” Which Boomer policies are these exactly? How would a policy “culminate” in the abstract, and what would it possibly mean for a policy to “crest?” Or to never crest? Do normal policies both crest and culminate? Should they crest in generational peace and accord? What does any of this mean? I have no idea, and anyway Mariani is immediately off into more bong rips like: “Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.” That is absolutely nothing. That’s just a list of words.

Pointing out another potentially interesting essay that “Diner Goth” isn’t, Delia Cai wrote:

In fact one of the few sourced facts in the piece is (not coincidentally) one of the only interesting things Mariani observes:

That’s wild! Why is that? “No coastal elite indoctrination here,” explains Mariani. “It’s what happens when traditional life paths close everywhere and the Internet becomes the only space with options.” Oh, it’s what happens when it happens. Ok! Another bullet dodged.

I swear this is not me writing satire, this is literally a couple paragraphs later in the essay:

The piece is quite long and much more of it reads like this than you would naïvely imagine could be possible. Kyle Chayka is a friend of mine and a nice guy, which regrettably I am not, so his take on “Diner Goth” was characteristically tolerant and open-minded:

It certainly annoyed me, so mission accomplished there I suppose. Not even the conservatives are really buying it though. The Spring New Atlantis issue has a paywalled part two, “Vibing in the Ruins” which as far as I can tell no one has paid to read. Maybe it mentions Dick Hebdige! We’ll probably never know.

Whoops! I didn’t mean to write a whole post about an essay everyone hated, including me, but here we are over 1,500 words so I guess I did. I haven’t even had time to talk about Lindy West’s memoir yet. I’ll get to it later this week, somehow. But until then…

Very Briefly: The war is going great. Delve: another case where “A.I.” is Actually Indians. The final days of the Mall of America Hooters. Wiki Gacha. Vibe Coding Against Critical Infrastructure. Shoot Men Into Space: A Proposal for Temporary Gender Sequestration.

Today’s Song: David Bowie, “I’m Afraid of Americans”

also wtf exactly are beeboes

Rotating Sandwiches Lauren informs us that it’s Solar Appreciation Day, and as a wise man once wrote: “direct sunlight is low-key goated when restoring a sense of safety and emotional well-being is the vibe.” Get out and appreciate some sunlight today if you can.

The direct sunlight of media is a good low stakes cross-blog debate, and Temba, his arms wide and Hammat dancing, my dudes, because here’s a good one. Classic-era Ian Bogost started it back in 2014, long before he devolved into neo-Andy Rooney shtick, with a long column about the nature of the alien meme language in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok.” I’ve seen the phrase “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra“ enough times to understand that it means “two people setting aside their differences to solve a common problem” without knowing anything else about the Star Trek episode it comes from or why it means that. Ironically that’s exactly the point of the Star Trek episode.

Sokath? His eyes uncovered?

Earlier this month Baylor University professor Alan Jacobs returned to Bogost’s essay to disagree with him that the alien language is either “abstract” or “allegorical,” which led to Critical Star Trek Studies blogger Adam Roberts debating Jacobs’s claim that the language is perfectly concrete and not even capable of abstraction. Roberts speculates that the Children of Tama could have hundreds of thousands of distinct memetic phrases to draw on. “Could it be that Tamarian speech is more like Chinese sinograms than it is like memes?” asks Jacobs. Sure! Why not. Jacobs also refers to “Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language,” in which Peter A. Jansen and Jordan Boyd-Graber build an English-Tamarian dictionary and translator based on the sixty-eight known Tamarian phrases. Arnock, on the night of his joining! And finally Lyta Gold picked up a loose thread from Jacobs and asked “how could a meme language be passed down from generation to generation?” Gold proposes that the Children of Tama actually have two languages: the day-to-day memetic one and a separate “primal, sacred language: the words of the story.”

Does any of this matter at all? No! But if you read all those links, your day will include at least one interesting and diverting hour where you don’t think about these literal clownshoes morons and all the kids they’re murdering with our tax money right now. The path to Kamata in spring.

Jinza, when the truth was uncovered.

It’s “The End of Computer Programming as We Know It,” and no one feels fine. Anil Dash reminds us that “all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things.” See also: “Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code.”

New AI Psychosis Symptom And/Or Software Development Framework Dropped: “Cantrip: On summoning entities from language in circles.” I’m gonna be perfectly honest, I do not know what this is. I think it has something to do with “Recursive Language Models,” which as far as I can tell is what you get when an LLM climbs up its own ass. Cantrip claims that:

Zenrox, tilling his field in the spring, imo.

McKay Coppins spent a year becoming a degenerate sports gambler on The Atlantic’s 100,000 dimes, and it went exactly how you’d expect. I tell you what, me and Mormonism at Tanagra when it comes to sports gambling. And is there some kind of Polymarket bet on the maximum number of clichés that can appear in the lede of a NYT movie review?

Today In Scientists: “Big discovery, we failed to drown a bee.” Scientists! Also the Moby Dick termite, Cryptotermes mobydicki. Lol mobydicki.

600 tubs of mystery French onion dip. (Awww yeah, it’s that time.) “Tracking down the Dark Souls 2 hacker who injected me with 500 cursed Black Knight Ultra Greatswords.” Zinda, his eyes red. Minesweeper: Hormuz. Mixed Tapes: Free human-curated new music playlists for Olds or the otherwise music-discovery challenged. And speaking of Olds: Newgrounds roulette.

Finally: It’s one banana, San Francisco. How much could it cost? Mirab, with sails unfurled.

Today’s Song: Beck, “Beercan”

It’s extremely March and Koltar when he drowned in the swamp, iykwim. But we’re keeping our spirits up with classic grooves.

My hump, my hump, my hump, my fake-plump camel lump. “Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables“ reports The Independent:

Judging had barely resumed when the contest was further roiled by the discovery that one of the remaining camels was in fact Ben Shapiro, and another was Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. “Are there even any real camels in this pageant?” asked JD Vance, who was in third place. More on this story in the fullness of time.

But it’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it Mandrake? Foreign substances introduced into our precious camels? That’s the way your hardcore commie works. In fact Rose Maura Lorre at Wirecutter bought some makeup online and discovered…

The illicit hump-plumping injectables may very well themselves have been contaminated—impure. I do not avoid camels Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.

Also denying camels their essence are hundreds of thousands of users of the viral “porn addiction app” Quittr, created by two pasty teen influencers who were just profiled by Rebecca Jennings for New York Magazine. The app allegedly “brings in more than $500,000 per month, despite having taken only ten days to build“ according to Jennings according to its founders. But a misconfigured database hasn’t been denying anyone on the internet the essence of Quittr users private information, including their confessions about how porn makes them feel. 404’s Emanuel Maiberg revealed today that Quittr was the “app for quitting porn” that he first reported was leaking user data back in January, but didn’t name at the time because the data exposed was so private and potentially compromising, and because many of the users affected are minors. Vibe coding is going great.

Also today in purity, Washington Post contributor Leana Wen strenuously denies that you gotta hand it to our never nude horseman of pestilence Robert F. Kennedy Jr., buuUUUUUUUuut…

That’s because “ultra-processed” is not a nutritional category but an ideological one. Wen’s brilliant idea is that instead of defining what foods or ingredients are “ultra-processed,” we should simply define which ones aren’t. “The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t.” Of course even Wen has to admit that any reasonable list of “not ultra-processed” foods would include potatoes, oil, and salt, but potato chips “tend to be high in sodium and saturated fat, and offer little nutritional value,” so we still want to exclude them from the Pure Foods for Healthy People Club (no fatties allowed!). No worries, though, “those additional characteristics… could be regulated separately, layered on top of the ultra-processed definition.” Sure, why not.

What all of this stuff is gesturing toward, ultimately, is what eponymous law of headlines creator Ian Betteridge calls “purity culture.” In his blog post “Zen fascists will control you...” Betteridge traces the roots of the fascist ideology embedded in this obsession with being clean and returning to an imaginary prelapsarian garden along a straight line from Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” to the Californian Ideology and eventually to RFK Jr. and Quittr.

The title of this newsletter—Purity Supreme—was my childhood grocery store, a Massachusetts-based chain. The name was just two arbitrary words that meant “the supermarket” to me as a kid but now seem almost comically ominous, like “hey let’s go down to the old Blood & Soil and pick up a rotisserie chicken for dinner.” I looked up what happened to Purity Supreme and it turns out it was bought by Stop & Shop which was bought by Dutch grocery conglomerate Ahold which merged with Belgian holding company Delhaize to form Ahold Delhaize which currently owns, among other chains, my current grocery store Hannaford. The Purity Supreme logic is still running, clean and patient.

New Vision of Hell Dropped:

Scott Smitelli: “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Very long post about the role of AI in work and life, but more interestingly about the role of craft, the nature of tools, the clash of values that can confuse any conversation about what the purpose of work even is, and a bunch of other things.

Reservoir Ducks:

by Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli, go watch the whole thing

Paulina Rowińska in Quanta: New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem. RIP Alan Sillitoe, you would have gone crazy for this one. FISH COP. Kevin Roose is at it again. Important follow-up quiz. The only good AI is us: youraislopbores.me. “A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines.” Lol, lmao. Rename the world. Daddy is giving all the good boys special good boy shoes, but it looks like Lil Marco lied about his size. These guys are all so goddamn weird.

And Finally: I… “enjoyed” is probably not the right word here, but I thought this post by Jude Doyle was one of the best things I’ve read about pacifism.

Today’s Song: “Comfort Eagle,” by Cake

This song is for Kevin, the biggest Cake fan I know. He is building a religion.

Donald Trump had a feeling. Maybe Israel forced his hand. Or maybe he forced Israel’s hand. Either way, the vibes were off. Trump knew Iran’s response to being attacked would be to fight back, so he had no choice but to attack them first in order to preëmptively respond (or pre-spond) to their anticipated attacks in re-pre-sponse to our initial pre-sponse. Or, as Marco Rubio stood in front of reporters and said out loud in his big boy voice: “We went proactively in a defensive way.”

We kicked off this war of long-distance pre-taliatory liberation by precision bombing a girls’ school and killing 165 people—“most of them girls aged between 7 and 12”—allegedly to free them from the oppressive yoke of a regime that, I’m told, won’t let girls go to school. I guess they’re free now. “All I can say is we’re investigating that,” said Defense Secretary and overcompensating hardass uncle Pete Hegseth, who clearly couldn’t care less. But when an Iranian drone managed to slip through our $5 billion dollar a day missile shield and kill six Americans in Kuwait, Hegseth could barely pretend to care about that either. “Tragic things happen,” he said. “The press only wants to make the president look bad.” He doesn’t give a shit. Tom Nichols reported that:

Too bad for all the marks and suckers serving in the United States armed forces who believed America meant something, because the people in charge don’t care. They didn’t care about what this war would do to global energy supplies, 20% of which pass through the now-closed Strait of Hormuz. According to Politico, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles is looking for ideas on what we might do about gas prices, another obvious consequence that Trump didn’t manage to “have a feeling” about before the Tomahawks flew. They don’t care about the urea tankers sitting bottled up in the Persian Gulf, at the exact time they need to set sail to provide fertilizer for the spring planting season. They’ll be fine either way. They absolutely don’t care. John Ganz wrote:

The Washington Post found that even here in the heady first days of a new war, a moment Americans traditionally love more than anything, 52% of us are already against it. A month before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Pew found that 66% of Americans were in favor of military action and just 27% opposed. Now a Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that only 27% approve of the attack on Iran, 43% disapprove, and 29% have no idea what to think, having not even been actively lied into an opinion on it. Nevertheless, as Parker Molloy pointed out, despite apparently doing zero planning and having no strategic goals or victory conditions, they’re trying to use the same decades-old slogan: “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” If that’s the case, I guess like the majority of us, I’m against us.

Interview Magazine: “Meet the Finest Boys in Finance.” The market top sirens are absolutely wailing here. Just look at this incredible lad:

Pictured: Actual cuffs.

Good luck to Elon Musk taking SpaceX public in whatever market is coming after all this. Liz tried to figure out what the SpaceX IPO was all about real quick last Thursday and finally managed to publish 2700 words on Tuesday without really arriving at any clear answers. Now that xAI has bought X dot com and SpaceX has bought xAI, SpaceX is a lean, mean space launch satellite internet social media AI CSAM-as-a-service machine. Or, as Musk describes it, “a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” Whatever happens, at least the S1 will be a real hoot.

Board of Peace—Season one. Kate Wagner: “Toward an Understanding of Fascist Aesthetics, Part I.” Chris Melito: “No machine, regardless of fidelity, should replace desired interactions with humans… Because the simulacrum can never be responsible and cannot be held accountable.” Ryan Moulton: “The Hunt for Dark Breakfast.” I regret to inform you that stir fry has been rebranded “boy kibble” for some reason. I’m delighted to inform you that The New York Times profiled Oldster founder Sari Botton. And here’s “A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish” by Nate Rogers in Defector instead of where it was originally commissioned which was (I’m told) GQ.

And Finally: if you, like me, are feeling somewhere close to a personal nadir of despair lately Tabs Senior Contributing Editor Bijan has some advice:

I guess… you’re either with us or you’re against us.

Today in Toys: Games etc. studio Brainfruit launched MOSS, “a painting toy where every brush is a tiny program” and also a sick hoodie that is a reference to an in-joke from a long running group chat, but you don’t need to know anything about that to appreciate it. (Ethics disclosure: The co-founders of Brainfruit are both my platonic boyfriends.) For real web sickos: Duck Hunt in pure CSS, and Web Haptics. List animals until failure. Jorb? Horb? Jort horse? This handy poster for home, office, or classroom will help you remember the stages of the Metahorsis of the Jorb (by Casey Landerkin, formerly of the Vinn Diagram.) And welcome to Twin Peaks.

Today’s Song: Gorillaz, “The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God”

I’m still somehow always surprised when I’m done writing a Tabs. One moment I’m right in the middle of it, and the next it’s suddenly finished. It’s very strange. Hey a lot of you are new here in the past few days so welcome! Just keep reading, and if you’re confused, click a link or two. You’ll get the hang of it. If you’d like some community support in your journey, the Tabs Discord is available to paid subscribers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We’re here to help.

At long last, we have created Taser Chess from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create Taser Chess. Fletcher Heisler actually did this a year ago but it’s going around on the blogs again for some reason. More recently Heisler taught his fish to drive. Whatever else it may be, YouTube is history’s most successful silliness engine.

In other shocking news:¹  Today in Tabs, the lowbrow Harper’s, is a finalist in this year’s National Magazine Awards! Here’s a live shot of me hearing the news:

heyyyyyyy

I’m very excited about this, and not just because the entry fee was $500. Grizzled veteran Tabs is up against newcomers like Jason Leopold’s FOIA Files at Bloomberg, A Closer Read, the books newsletter at Harper’s Bazaar (the middlebrow Harper’s), New York Magazine’s shopping Substack Secret Strategist, and Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock’s The Spread. If you’re new here, or not, go back and check out the three posts I submitted from last year: Hot Whales In Your Area, Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose, and ZZ Flop. I think the last one might make me the only ASME nominee with a Nuzzi related entry. Also I am so #blessed to be nominated the same year as the gooning story from Harper’s Magazine (the highbrow Harper’s). It's a strong field, and I’m not just saying that because I expect to lose, although I do. But since all newsletterers are my colleagues, if any of us win, in a very real but not literal sense I also win, figuratively. If I do lose, I promise I will solemnly fold up and eat my prepared speech.

Today in Brand New Sentences: Macklin Celebrini’s elevated cupcake experience. MrBeast editor caught insider trading on Kalshi (allegedly). The Hallow app paid West Village girlies to promote The Brothers Karamazov for Lent (якобы). Its called the Swizzlegang 22000 (ornjang). “See more on N*****s.” Black History Month is proceeding as usual, I see. “The latest skincare fad is rubbing salmon sperm on your face.” Skeleton: Dan Barefoot. The Boston Legacy Football Club tattoo glory hole. Can you believe they’re threatening to give me an award for this.

Want to feel old? It’s been 12 years since Kevin tried to set a Google calendar event for “12 Years a Slave.” Free at last.

Also Free At Last: Larry Summers finally resigned from Harvard. It would have happened sooner but he reportedly couldn’t find a rock that would allow him to crawl under it.

Today in Courtesans: It was a big week in brothel news. First Esquire published “My Life as a Sex Worker at a Nevada Brothel” by Paloma Karr, a pseudonymous Iranian-born bisexual New York novelist in her mid-forties with distinctive tattoos. I hope we find out who it really was someday. Then in a more substantive piece for The Nation, Kim Kelly covered the formation of the United Brothel Workers (“Bust Nuts, Not Unions!”) under CWA Local 9413, and their fight to get a fair contract from Sheri’s Ranch. Paloma Karr was one of the workers illegally fired for unionizing so it’s kind of wild that the Esquire piece doesn’t even mention it?

Today in AI Externalities: Jake Harris doesn’t want to vibe code. You can’t make Dave Karpf vibe code. You can't make John Warner vibe write either. AI is literally making Greg Knauss depressed, and it should be ashamed of itself. An AI agent generated and posted a hit piece accusing Scott Shambaugh of anti-AI “discrimination.” Thomas Germain tricked ChatGPT and Google’s AI with the incredibly devious tactic of posting a web page with falsehoods in it. You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? A “Claude vibe-coded smart contract cost DeFi protocol $1.8M in losses.” It’s a start! 404’s Emanuel Maiberg reported that “Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox.” It’s a start! Writers are seeing a flood of new scams, and scams are getting more sophisticated and convincing because AI makes it easy to generate legitimate-looking emails and websites. Also legitimate-looking public comment emails: Hayley Smith reported that the “Southern California air board rejected pollution rules" after receiving 20,000 AI generated comment emails opposing them.

Of all the things that should be illegal, this is one. And the latest company to sound the alarm about AI-powered theft is AI company Anthropic (ethics disclosure: Casey and his beau are engaged! Can you believe it? Congrats fellas!), which sent a letter to the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (a real thing, apparently) warning the USHSCSCBUSCCP that Chinese company DeepSeek is trying to swipe what Anthropic already stole fair and square. This aggression will not stand, man. And for all this society-wide extra hassle, AI contributed "basically zero” growth to the US economy last year according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Don’t worry, where we’re going we won’t need economic growth.

Finally: Mike Somes is The Last Idiot Who Earnestly Believes in the American Experiment.

Lol, got ‘em. 😞

Today’s Song: Mazzy Star, “She Hangs Brightly”

I’m still in my Mazzy Star era. (Previously.) “Interviewing Mazzy Star is like throwing stones down a deep well and waiting for the faint splash.” The perfect band, tbh.

There’s no such thing as a leader without any followers, and they don’t give awards to newsletters without any subscribers. Unlike Mazzy Star, I wouldn’t do this if no one ever read it, so thank you for reading! You make it worth learning about the Boston Legacy Football Club tattoo glory hole every week.

A couple nights ago I went downstairs for a late night snack and as I stood at the back door staring at the decaying snow and thinking my February thoughts I heard a faint tinny burble from somewhere to my right. A pair of headphones lay on my wife’s desk plugged into her laptop, and when I held them up to one ear I heard: “It’s the ennnd of the worrrrrld as we know it…”

“Oh my god,” I thought. “What does it know?”

Of course I didn’t think that, that would be an idiotic thing to think. My wife had left her music playing when she finished work for the day, and the computer just kept doing what it was told to do, and I happened to wander in looking for some ice cream when shuffle pulled up R.E.M. But now here we are again, talking about A.I.

Earlier this month The New Yorker published a story by Gideon Lewis-Kraus about A.I. and boyfriend company Anthropic, and if you haven’t read it you should go read it now. Here’s a free link, even. It’s a good story! Entertaining, cleverly structured, fairly long but paced to read much shorter. I truly recommend it, and not just by way of apology because I’m about to use it as a case study for some common mistakes in how a lot of people are thinking and writing about A.I. But I am going to do that.

One thing the piece does well is provide some precise and accurate definitions. It begins with this one:

Regrettably this clear-sightedness doesn’t last long, because just a couple paragraphs later I am breezily informed that “large language models are black boxes. We don’t really understand how they work.”

This is false. You may not understand how L.L.M.s work, and Lewis-Kraus may not understand it, but we, the collective “we” of homo sapiens, understand it perfectly well. A programmer named Andrej Karpathy recently implemented a fully functional large language model in 200 lines of Python code. He also wrote a detailed explanation of exactly what it does, how it works, and the ways it differs from big company frontier models, which are all just differences of scale and efficiency. I admit that some of the math is beyond me, but even without completely understanding those parts, it’s not difficult to follow the logic and the code isn’t doing anything technically complex. Someone has already ported it to run on a Super Nintendo.

The code for a fully functioning LLM. I guess this picture is technically a black box.

A.I. discourse is going to be cursed with hucksters, hype beasts, doomsayers, and con artists on every side for the foreseeable future so it unfortunately behooves us to understand what this technology is, and what it isn’t. It isn’t a black box. It’s a statistical model of data connected to a mechanism for producing more data that resembles the data in the model.

Karpathy’s first frequently asked question is “Does the model ‘understand’ anything?” “That’s a philosophical question,” he answers diplomatically, “but mechanically: no magic is happening.” Does 200 lines of Python code understand anything? My siblings in Christ I hope it’s clear how utterly bizarre this question is. And it translates directly to the same question for Anthropic’s Claude, which is not doing anything different. If we make the input file bigger, if we make the way it gets mathematically processed more efficient, if we prepend a long document describing how we imagine a helpful robot might act to the user’s input, at which of those steps does “understanding” happen?

But maybe you’re still not convinced so here’s a different way of looking at it. Lewis-Kraus writes: “At the dawn of deep learning, a little more than a dozen years ago, machines picked up how to distinguish a cat from a dog… Once they had seen every available image of a cat, they could reliably sort cats from non-cats.” Later he asserts that “If a language model can bootstrap its way to linguistic mastery, we can no longer rule out the possibility that we’re doing the same thing.”

I’ve watched all three of my children learn what a cat is, and in each case the number of pictures of a cat they needed to see was not “all of them.” It was like, two or three? Half a dozen, tops. I helped them learn to speak and read fluently, and the number of Reddit posts required was not “every Reddit post.” I don’t need to know what mechanism underlies human intelligence to rule out the possibility that it’s the same as what a large language model does. The whole trick underlying the apparent magic of modern A.I. is simply giving it tons of data. Give it the whole internet. Give it every book ever written. This is required—it does not work with less training data:

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

The reason I’m harping on this is because the basic thesis of Lewis-Kraus’s story is that “[w]e don’t know if it makes sense to call [these programs] intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious.” I think we do know! Nevertheless, we’re off in search of the ghost in the machine anyway and soon we’re introduced to “Amanda Askell, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy.” Askell works at Anthropic, and is largely responsible for maintaining the description of a helpful robot I mentioned above, which the company calls “Claude’s Constitution.” It’s incredibly long and boring, and gives off the stink of having been itself largely A.I. generated. Lewis-Kraus writes:

The piece doesn’t tell us who Amanda Askell is beyond the existence of her diploma, which I think is a disservice because she’s quite the character. Amanda Askell was born Amanda Hall, and later married Will Crouch, one of the philosophical cofounders of the effective altruism movement. They adopted the mutual married name of MacAskill, and when they divorced in 2015 Amanda “reworked” that to Askell. These people are exhausting, I know, but we have to learn about them because we live in the world they predicted and then created. To be fair they did say that it would suck—it’s the one thing they got right.

Remember Cecil the Lion (and his brother Jericho, who was also a lion)? In 2015, Askell and her then-husband co-wrote a deeply stupid piece in Quartz titled “To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion).” The lost and lamented former Verge dream team of Loren Grush, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and Elizabeth Lopatto explained at the time that it was not meant to be satire, and was in fact as deeply stupid as it seemed. This is the level of philosophical firepower we’re dealing with here.

The same day that Lewis-Kraus’s article appeared, The Wall St. Journal published a long profile of Askell, who it turns out looks like vanilla yogurt, in which Berber Jin and Ellen Gamerman trace her short path from the E.A. social circle to her current bot fanfic job. They report that:

Poppycock. She’s doing none of those things. She’s writing science fiction which will be used by a mathematical equation to alter the statistical likelihood of a computer program choosing some tokens rather than other tokens as its output. Saying that any of this is teaching a chatbot philosophy is like calling yourself a psychiatrist because you thought about Oedipus while jacking off.

A.I. isn’t people. When Amanda Askell pretends to be teaching an artificial person morality, or Gideon Lewis-Kraus includes output from ChatGPT about a rival company’s chatbot like it’s a quote from a source, or when he imbues Claude with emotions, like calling it “dumbfounded” or saying it found a task “rather tiresome,” they are all blurring the line between a piece of software and a human being. They’re confusing a thing with a person. Lewis-Kraus includes this anecdote from a mathematician who works for Anthropic:

This technology is genuinely remarkable. It’s surprising and kind of delightful to learn that a sufficiently large sample of natural human language contains enough deep statistical structure to produce nonsense like a conversation with a physicist who can’t stop talking about bananas. No one is entirely sure yet whether it has long-term practical applications, although there are signs that the distinctive nature of computer programs as sort of testable, functional machines made of language might make the field amenable to using language generators as a tool. Paul Ford took a shot at making that argument in The New York Times recently, and Paul is very smart. But what possible reason could there be for comparing the unknown depths of the human psyche with the workings of an algorithm that can be expressed in 200 lines of Python?

Terry Pratchett wrote every decent person’s favorite summary of the bedrock of humanist morality in a fantasy book for young readers called I Shall Wear Midnight: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” Treating people as things can begin in many ways, but I think one of them is the idea that things can be people. The motivated muddling of categories so prevalent in writing and thinking about A.I., beginning with the very name “artificial intelligence,” is intentional and serves the narrative that this software can and will take over for human workers, doing their jobs cheaper, faster, better and without requiring rest or dignity. The A.I. industry is selling a dream of digital slavery—infinite human labor with no actual human involved. And if you worry that this conclusion is a little histrionic, here’s Sam Altman encouraging us to compare the energy cost of training an L.L.M. to the energy cost of raising and educating a human child:

Is this treating things as people, or treating people as things? “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Either way I think it’s evil, and the evil is not the technology—it’s the dreams of the people trying to sell it to us.

Today in More A.I. Tabs: Casey Newton reported that “OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team.” John Herrman on why A.I. alignment and safety workers “might worry that, actually, none of this is being taken seriously and that you now work at just another big tech company—but worse.” Sam Kriss in Harper’s with a well edited story about the San Francisco A.I. startup scene. The n+1 editors: “Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI.“ Welcome to the Group Chat.

Today in Not A.I.: “The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan. It is just over 530km.” The Longest Line of Sight.

I know you were wondering so here’s the difference between “lowkenuinely” and “lowkirkenuinely.” 

Today’s Song: Laufey, “From the Start”

I am so glad this post is done, it started as a Google doc annotation of that New Yorker story and just kept getting more unmanageable for a week and a half. I have probably two more posts worth of links and ideas that didn’t make it in here, but I think we can let all that slide for now. Meanwhile I will slide back into your inbox later this week. Sweet segue, nice job Rusty.

I wrote “nice job, Rusty” in an email and sent it to myself. What I saw next has shocking implications.

It turns out “Democracy Dies in Darkness” wasn’t a warning so much as a mission statement. Last week Jeff Bezos fired thirty percent of the all employees at The Washington Post including 300 of the 800 newsroom staff, such as Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson, fired while reporting from a warzone in Kyiv. The newspaper no longer has a Sports section, which is bad according to Sally Jenkins who has already moved on to The Atlantic, or a Books section, which is bad according to Becca Rothfeld who has already moved on to The New Yorker.

Rothfeld described the whole point of a newspaper with her characteristic elegance:

Can you believe she wasn’t already writing for The New Yorker? This is a world historic fumble by semi-sentient thumb Jeff Bezos.

And when I said Jeff Bezos fired thirty percent of the Post’s staff, of course I meant the paper’s executive editor Matt Murray fired them on a Zoom call without any direct participation by either Bezos or publisher and professional henchman Will Lewis. To be fair, no crimes needed covering up at the moment so Lewis presumably judged that his presence wasn’t required, and he was busy enjoying the NFL red carpet and also quitting The Washington Post. Good luck to him in finding another media company to wreck that Cory “Cory Haik” Corrine didn’t already get to.

But what’s the point for Bezos of ruining an institution of American journalism that he could easily afford to fund in its entirety forever? Is it “disinterest” or abandonment? I think Parker Molloy is right: Bezos is intentionally remaking the Post to serve his interests instead of ours.

Ex-Postie Alexandra Petri (who got lost on her way to The New Yorker, but we remain optimistic) had some belated advice to Bezos about what he could do with $250 million in 2013.

And among the blizzard of Takes,¹  Delia provided some actual service with a list of open journalism jobs.

How It Started / How It’s Going: Crown of Empress Eugénie edition.

Same, tbh.

Today In Sports: New crotch-related ski jumping scandal dropped. (Previously in pelvic ski jumping shenanigans). The Super Bowl™ ads were shitty, but not 404 Media’s ad, broadcast exclusively in the hot Ottumwa, Iowa² local market. “What it was like to be a bush at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.” “Athletic Greens is ‘clinically backed.’ What does that even mean?” asks Victoria Song. Nothing, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just spinach powder.

Today In Dystopia: Rent a human dot ai. New Lay’s potato chip ad campaign aimed at teaching consumers that potato chips are made from potatoes. Ring doorbell cameras are back to their original project of building an AI powered private surveillance dragnet for police. If you have one of these things please take a hammer to it. Jade Helm is here, and now the right wing loves it. “San Francisco’s billionaire bacchanal a big bust.” Specifically, Aella’s big bust. And hackers stole and wrecked Zombocom. At least the infinite is still possible at html5zombo.com.

The Epstein Files may have turned everyone into conspiracists but Liz Lopatto dug into them and found a big club of powerful men united by their desire to abuse women without suffering any consequences for it, which is exactly what it looks like on the surface. Or as Jude Doyle put it: “You know, you can just say ‘Patriarchy’.”

Is there a gas leak in San Francisco?

Our former regrettable platform Substack is still making money from Nazis, reports Geraldine McKelvie at The Guardian, just like it did in 2023, and 2024, and 2025.

Lorin Hochstein: “Nobody knows how the whole system works.”

Sebastian Stockman on his friend (and everyone else’s) the late Dan McQuade,³ and their shared love of the overblown lede:

And I don’t know about you but I’m pretty excited for what Alison Willmore called Emerald Fennell’s “smooth-brained Wuthering Heights.”

“Planet Hillary,” if it isn’t already permanently burned into your trauma centers.

Today’s Song: Sleigh Bells, “Crown on the Ground”

Today in Tabs is brought to you by one hour and ten minutes of Mulder and Scully getting into and out of rental cars and the universal human desire to just draw a little horse.

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Paul Ford is blogging again and it’s like he never stopped. For all I know, he never did stop—he’s probably been blogging in his journal every day, or in his dreams. If you don’t already know Paul (how?), all you need by way of introduction is this very short story from 2002 that predicted the next quarter century of developments in technology and society. A couple days ago he wrote about his name showing up in the files, like many other completely innocent people.

With all those masks off, it’s been difficult to look directly at the news. I keep getting snagged on irrelevant details, little glitches floating on the surface of a bottomless blue hole of horrors. Like what’s up with all those equals signs, anyway? It’s cross-platform line encoding, of course. It’s always cross-platform line encoding. The Files are also providing people with a working Windows 7 license key and a brand new mirror for the Bash Reference Manual.

But Garbage Ryan looked directly at the files and saw Jeffrey Epstein’s cash and influence all over the worldwide rise of fascism. Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Michael Wolff, Elon Musk, 4chan, Bitcoin, Gamergate… Epstein’s right in the middle of all of it, smearing around his money and connections. For every villainous scheme since 2008, there’s an Epstein email like:

And what’s up with the typing? This is the best explanation I’ve seen for that:

plug (n): “a source from which to score drugs” …or whatever.

Long live the new flesh. Welcome to the resistance, Ammon Bundy. Looks like Minion’s back on the program, boys. The beauty of slag. How likely is 'likely'? “It could be the end, but I hope it's just a checkpoint.” Intern Bijan on internet checkpoints. The slut spuds of true Berlin. Bizarre little roots, you’re still in control of the board. It’s still what computers can’t do. Earth 2 finally dropped. I’m going, I don’t even care.

Today’s Song: Rich the Kid, “Plug Walk”

It’s a short one today because I collected a ton of links about OpenClaw and then decided I don’t actually care about it, lol. Good luck to everyone turning over all their credentials to the credential stealing machine though. Ok one more thing—this guy figured out how to spend $20 to ask a computer what time it is. The innovation here is incredible.

I’m on Bluesky @rusty.todayintabs.com and not really anywhere else so if you subscribed to me on OnlyFans, I have some bad news. Or good news, I guess? Please subscribe to my emails though.

Adam Serwer wrote the best thing I’ve read about the resistance to ICE in Minnesota. I think everyone should read it, so that’s a gift link in case you don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, which: understandable. Serwer wrote:

Later, after describing how the resistance works and what it has accomplished so far, he returned to the theme of values:

This felt like an update to my own piece for the Washington Post about the presidential election way back in November, 2024, when I was hiking. Here’s a free archive link in case you don’t subscribe to the Post which, again: understandable. I wrote:

I ended with a question: “How can we reconcile living our lives with such openness, such abundant kindness, but governing ourselves with such fear and hate?” I still don’t have a good answer, but the predations of Trump and Stephen Miller’s secret police have sharpened the question to a killing point.

The poem is from The Southern Review, Winter 2026, available online at Project Muse.

That turned out to be the last piece I would publish in the Post, as Jeff Bezos was already in the process of destroying the newspaper’s Opinion section, preliminary to destroying the newspaper itself. My editor left the next month and her editor left in February, 2025. Many more reporters and editors have left since, but it’s still not enough for Jeff Bezos who is preparing to cut “as many as 300” more staff this February, according to Natalie Korach in Status. Rumor has it the whole sports section will be cut, and on Saturday Benjamin Mullin and Erik Wemple reported that the “Washington Post Tears Up Plans to Cover Winter Olympics” before further reporting on Monday that the Post had torn up the plans to tear up the plans to cover the Winter Olympics, and would now send “a small contingent,” presumably to cover only the most diminutive Olympic events. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $266 billion dollars, to him this is the budgeting equivalent of deciding whether to get a small fry or a medium.

Last Saturday, a few hours after a group of masked and still-unidentified gunmen slaughtered Alex Pretti in the street, the current CEO of Bezos’s company Amazon attended a special White House premiere of the Melania Trump movie, a $75 million sweetener gifted to our historically corrupt President by Amazon and directed by the otherwise unemployable accused rapist Brett Ratner. Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart reported that “some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary,” and more have since regretted not requesting the same.

Also at the White House’s “Melania” premiere was Tim Apple, the tech CEO and corporate submissive who was critical of Trump in his first term but has consistently sided with the new, more vicious, second term Trump. Mr. Apple reports that he “had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views.” Those were very close-up views of the boot he was licking, I can only assume. Apple employees hate it, according to Sam Biddle in the Intercept, and they should quit, according to me. Right down there sucking boot with Tim was AI huckster Sam Altman, who told his employees that “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country.” I asked ChatGPT and it told me that if Sam tilts his head back to really open the airway, he can probably fit the whole boot all the way down his throat.

Hey if you haven’t seen the original of this recently: holy shit.

Alex Pareene checked in at Defector with a great idea for a “mandatory long-term residential retraining program” for ICE and CBP. We miss you Alex! Welcome to the resistance, New York Times Editorial Board. “When Will He Resign?” asked Jonathan Katz, and me, and everyone else I hope. Welcome to the resistance, big dick subreddit. ICE officers are having big feelings about how much everyone hates them, reported Ken Klippenstein. Boo hoo. Welcome to the resistance, Woke Bill Kristol. Tom Homan reassigned to Minnesota by Fox News. Welcome to the resistance, driving range guys.

In Other News: Rosa Lyster’s Harper’s story about the pair of weirdos who killed the Sycamore Gap tree is a delight. Also Today in Ol’ Knifey: punters who don’t ‘alf fancy a wank will soon find themselves cock-a-leekie and right mugged off by Porn’ub innit bruv. Imagine if British people were real? Happy Feast Day of Saint Bugle. Aujourd'hui en Les Douches de Laval: “Quebec apartment turns into ‘ice castle’ after tenant turns off heat.” Netflix only paid Alex Honnold “mid-six figures” to broadcast what could have been his horrific death live. Cooooooool with at least eight o’s. Alex I am begging you to get a better agent. Square February starts this Sunday. Don DeLillo‘s long-lost hockey erotica. Jeremy Runover is back in the saddle.

And Finally: What the heck is going on with this insanely bitchy AirMail post about the extended Gould-Gessen family by Substacker Jessa Crispin, channeling the ghost of Ed Champion for no apparent reason? I love mess but this sucks.

This is worth it.

Today’s Song: SPRINTS covering Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon”

I can’t imagine anyone else is having an easy time doing their work right now considering… gestures vaguely at everything. So when I know I should write Tabs on Tuesday but don’t find the wherewithal to actually do it until Wednesday, I just keep telling myself that no one is mad at me. So, here I am telling you: no one is mad at you. Do whatever you can, and the rest will wait.