Taegan Goddard, a few days ago at Political Wire:

The sudden suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show after threats from FCC chair Brendan Carr was a jolt. It looked like the next step in Donald Trump’s campaign to silence dissent.

But there’s another way to see it: an opportunity.

It’s been clear since the last election that conservatives dominate the independent media space. Trump rode the reach of right-wing podcasts to victory while Kamala Harris stuck to traditional television.

But those old outlets are collapsing — and they’re never coming back.

That means the stars of late-night TV — Kimmel, Colbert and others — could thrive outside corporate networks. They can build their own platforms, reach bigger audiences, and escape the grip of billionaires and timid executives.

While Goddard didn’t say it in this piece, the subtext should be that building the alternative on Substack or social media is not the answer, either. The Internet is decentralized and built exactly to counter these forces our country is facing under Trump 2.0.

The big problem is YouTube. With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.

ABC is putting Kimmel’s show back on tonight, which is great. But I think it’s essential to watch the joke that triggered his suspension. I’m linking here to a CNN post with the full clip. CNN headlined their post “What Kimmel Said About Charlie Kirk That Yanked His Show Off Air”, and that’s basically how most news outlets have phrased it.

But the joke wasn’t about Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. It was about Donald Trump being a sociopathic ghoul. Trump was asked how he’s holding up after the death of “his friend Charlie Kirk”. You really have to watch it — a transcript of Trump’s answer does no justice to how sociopathic it was. And Kimmel called him out on it with mockery.

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Variety:

“This is misery,” Letterman said when asked about Kimmel’s suspension, speaking at The Atlantic Festival 2025 Thursday in New York. “I feel bad about this,” he continued. “We see where this is all going, correct? It’s managed media. And it’s no good. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. And you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”

“In the world of somebody who is an authoritarian, maybe a dictatorship, sooner or later, everyone is going to be touched,” said Letterman.

Letterman also said, “The institution of the president of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show.” Kimmel’s removal from late-night TV, he said, “was predicted by our president right after Stephen Colbert got walked off, so you’re telling me this isn’t premeditated at some level?” [...]

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Kimmel’s late-night show “indefinitely.” That came after FCC chairman Brendan Carr just hours earlier threatened ABC and its affiliates if they didn’t “take action” on Kimmel over what he perceived as objectionable comments about Charlie Kirk’s killer. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a conservative podcast. [...]

Regarding Carr’s comment that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Letterman said, “Who is hiring these goons — Mario Puzo?”, referring to the author of The Godfather. Letterman said when he was on TV, he never got pressure from a presidential administration, the FCC or any other government agency about his on-air commentary.

“Goons” is exactly the right word. Letterman’s commentary on this is, by far, the best I’ve seen, because it’s been the most clear-eyed. I quoted a lot above, but there’s more, so please read the whole piece. But this one extra snippet from the piece puts it on the right scale:

Goldberg posited that today, despite Trump’s attacks on the press, “we still have a free media,” to which Letterman responded, “Do we?”

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

The redesign is more than skin deep, however. Apple has rethought the way some of its most fundamental interactions work. For example, the increasingly long horizontal popover menus that hid options behind an interminable scroll have morphed into a dual-stage design. Tapping and holding on the screen brings up a popover with a few common options, but it now doesn’t make you scroll; instead, there’s an arrow indicating more options. Tap that, and you’ll get a big pop-up panel of all the available commands in a much easier-to-read and use format. As someone who frequently finds himself swiping through a very long list to find the one command I want (and somehow, it’s always the last one), this is a tangible improvement.

The big improvement here is that in the old popover (from iOS 3 — when copy and paste were finally added to iOS, and the popover typically only contained three or four items — until last year’s iOS 18), the scrolling you had to do was horizontal. And a lot of items were added to that menu over the years. And it wasn’t really scrolling, it was panning. And panning sideways through a long list of options is just a bad interaction experience. For me, a lot of the times I used this popover, I wanted the “Share...” command, and that was the last one, all the way on the right.

In iOS 26’s new tap-and-hold popover, it’s a vertical menu, just like a Mac contextual menu. And you don’t really have to scroll at all most of the time, because all the contextual menu options fit on screen. And even if you do have to scroll (which happens when the keyboard is open, reducing vertical screen real estate), you don’t have to scroll much to get to the bottom.

It’s one of the very best, most thoughtful, most useful changes in iOS 26. But also one of the most overdue: we know how contextual menus should be oriented. Vertically. We naturally make lists vertically, not horizontally. I sort of suspect Apple resisted making iOS contextual popovers vertical for so long because they didn’t want to make iOS more like a desktop computer OS.