Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
Are you old, or do you know who Sombr is?
An inevitable part of getting old is no longer recognizing the names of celebrities and musicians. Slowly and steadily, the more famous young and younger people get, the more their names will seem like incoherent phrases muttered by someone losing their mind, a vegetable side dish, or some kind of cruel trick. At some point, […]
The messy truth about free speech
On September 15, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show opening monologue included comments about the shooting of right-wing media figure Charlie Kirk and how the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” Soon after, Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission and […]
We may never get bird flu — or egg prices — under control
It might now be a distant memory, but by the end of last winter, the average cost of a dozen eggs soared to a record high of $6.23. (It’s now at $3.49.) The cause was H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza — or bird flu — that wild birds shed near farms as […]
Trump isn’t interested in war with China. But it might be interested in him.
Since President Donald Trump’s second term began, his administration’s approach to China has been arguably the toughest aspect of its foreign policy to parse. In part, that’s because the top members of Trump’s team haven’t always seemed to be on the same page with each other or with the president on the question of just […]
Elon Musk made his own Wikipedia. What could go wrong?
Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s attempt at creating an alternative to Wikipedia, is now live. Early analysis suggests that the site — powered by Musk’s xAI and fact-checked by Grok, the company’s right-leaning AI assistant — is already a sort of self-sustaining nuclear reaction of misinformation. More than anything, though, Grokipedia represents another front of Musk’s war […]