- Today in Tabs
- Posts
- A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Tabs
A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Tabs
Congratulations to TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: The Eternal Worm
Rusty Foster
December 15, 2025
Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Measles. Listening to this playlist1 as you read Tabs today won’t make it a better experience, but it will make it a different experience:
As I was saying, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: $25,000 Underwater Handsome Squidward. Andrew Dana Hudson wrote about what it’s like teaching freshman comp without technology during the Wackpot:
In the second half of the course… I ask the students, in small groups, to provide the tabs, present on them, and lead the conversation. This semester nearly every article they chose was about the troubles and travails of our digitally mediated modern life.
NBC News’s Kevin Collier, Jared Perlo and Savannah Sellers checked out the range of AI-powered kids toys available for your tots this Christmas, and found that they include a cute bunny who will happily list different implements your child might choose for impact play in the bedroom, a toy that claims to be a cross between a cactus and a teddy bear but is very clearly a sunflower in a pot, and a furry doll with inexplicable ahegao face that makes it look very turned on as it insists that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.” Disney will pay OpenAI a billion dollars to allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video slop hose to generate short videos of Goofy giving Woody from Toy Story the hyuck hyuck 9000 or Mickey doing 9/11 (which is at least historically accurate). As 404’s Matthew Gault put it:
The house that mouse built, and which has been notoriously protective of its intellectual property, opened up the video generator, saw the videos featuring Nazi Spongebob and criminal Pikachu, and decided: We want in.
Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: whoever at NPR chose this share image for their article about the Disney/OpenAI deal. In Semafor, Max Tani reported that The Washington Post is having some trouble with its new AI audio product, where generated voices that resemble podcasters deliver generated text that resembles the news. Internal review has found that the podcasts are full of statements which are, when compared with the reporting of the Post’s legacy human journalists, not true.
☲ ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT
What if people don’t want news that is quote unquote “true?” What if the true news absolutely sucks? Have you considered that, smarty pants?
It’s right, but they shouldn’t say it. The Department of Defense unveiled a splashy new AI platform which immediately identified Pete Hegseth’s war crimes, so who can say if AI is good or bad. Anyway, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The Grink.
Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Lockheed-Martin’s streetwear line, and also today in business you might enjoy this Bloomberg investigation by Adam Chandler into the shaky finances of Mormon tinted cookie juggernaut Crumbl. That‘s the way the something somethings, I guess. But congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The “dystopian” PureGym entry tube.
As a perfectly loving God I accept that you may freely choose to click or not click the posts I offer you, but do yourself a favor and watch this one.
“JCO” and I (After Borges). Dave Karpf considered “Hatereading as Method” and I would like to say: girl, same. Hardly anyone is even hatereading Olivia Nuzzi’s book, which “sold just 1,200 print copies in its first week” according to Mary Whitfill Roeloffs in Forbes. Thanks to Jonty from the Tabs subscriber Discord for introducing me to Clive James’s extremely relevant poem “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” And Scott Saul wrote a gripping reappraisal of Joan Didion for Dispatches through the lens of one of the few Saturday Evening Post columns she never chose to collect: “On Becoming a Cop Hater.” That’s probably the most pretentious sentence I’ve ever written in Tabs but it’s a very good piece. Before I forget, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas on a road trip.
Congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: Drunk Raccoon. The year’s almost over and the season of mandatory holiday parties is upon us, so it’s a good time to revisit Tom Scocca’s excellent advice to have two drinks at a party. I haven’t always followed this advice but I’ve never regretted it when I did. Congratulations to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: slop. And I enjoyed Sam Lipsyte’s somewhat shaggy intro to Curbed’s equally somewhat shaggy “Reasons To Love New York” package.
And finally, congratulations to TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year: The Portland Chicken.
Today’s Song: Lizard In The Spring, “A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Appalachia”
1 I know we’re not doing Spotify anymore but it’s what I still have and statistically it’s what you still have, too. One day soon we will each be part of an ethically flawless crystalline architecture suspended in the loving embrace of the universe but until then we do our best and keep it moving.
Reply