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:
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how Pope Leo XIV, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, is "too liberal" and "weak on crime"—for God's sake, there's graffiti all over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!—apparently in tantrum response to Leo XIV having criticized both Trump's war of aggression on Iran and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's framing of that war as having been ordained by God. A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder.
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:
Leo, the first pope to be a member of the Augustinian religious order inspired by the saint, traveled to Algeria to visit the site of ancient Hippo, the Roman city where Augustine was a bishop for 34 years.
Celebrating Mass in the Basilica of St. Augustine in Annaba which overlooks the ancient site, the pope said "the guiding principle above all for Christians is charity."
Before becoming a bishop, Leo was head of the global Augustinian religious order inspired by the life and teachings of the saint; he wrote his doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine’s understanding of authority.
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…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an avid animal genitalia researcher in his spare time, once pulled the family sedan to the side of the road after spying a dead raccoon and swiftly cut off its sex organs so he could “study them later.”
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…
…there are two levels of analysis here. One is, sure, Allbirds is pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure. That seems like a competitive and capital-intensive business in which Allbirds has no obvious expertise but, whatever, nostalgic fondness for the sneakers, maybe it’ll work out.
The other level is that Allbirds is pivoting its stock to being an AI meme stock. That definitely worked out!
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:
Just days after One Sheet launched, Laura Hazard Owen, the editor of Harvard’s Nieman Lab, contacted Mediaite to flag multiple issues with its aggregation. "Our story doesn't talk about regulators helping," she wrote in an email obtained by Status, detailing mistakes Mediaite had published. "The 80% quote and info about the U.K. competition are from a week-old Press Gazette story that isn't linked. The quote is not from our piece or from the Press Gazette piece. The takeaway has nothing to do with our piece."
In a Tuesday statement to Status, Owen said: "I've suspected that Mediaite One Sheet is at least partially written with A.I. since January, when it very weirdly summarized a scoop by Andrew Deck and Hanaa' Tameez, including quotes that weren't in our story. When I complained at the time, the editor told me in an email that A.I. is not being used and sort of attributed the error to a spreadsheet mixup. But I think these types of errors—made-up quotes, weird inaccurate summaries—point to use of some A.I. tool for compiling and writing. They aren't the kind of mistakes a human would make."
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.
