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

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

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

America™ 250®: Satire Deathwatch

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

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

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

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

You don’t need to see my identification.

Finally: Cool robot swims and flies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screaming, crying, throwing up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today in Crabs: (content warning: crabs)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heterosexualism?” Is there another word for that?

I guess not.

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

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

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

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

~ Sign-off intentionally omitted. ~

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

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

Also there was the time in 2012…

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

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

Not Today, Satan

Nope.

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

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

Camazotz-ass world. (via CBS Boston)

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

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

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

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

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

Start Your Weekend with Some Interviews:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean… (photo Evan Vucci / Reuters)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Else Did Scientists Find?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As of today:

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

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

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

Who is Nick Bilton?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick’s Television Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot Whales in Your Area

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

I bet the charging port is on the bottom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Caroline Calloway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: some bot.

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

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

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

Could be!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yourself there, take good note,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ploopy Has Launched The Bean

Beef Futures Report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.