Everyone’s Changing So Much

I was hiking back in October when Sydney Sweeney got jacked so please accept my earnest apologies for how belated this “hell yeah” is. A second round of Swole Sweeney discourse arrived this week via a cursory profile by Lynn Hirschberg in W magazine which consists mostly of descriptions of Sweeney being photographed for the profile itself, a bit of postmodern ouroborosity that I would admire if it weren’t so boring. “Facing the photographer, Carlijn Jacobs, as Little Red Riding Hood, Sweeney tilted her head to the side, looking both intrigued and demure.” Intrigued AND demure? ¿En esta economia? The profile reassures us that “Sweeney had to drop the weight in only seven weeks for her next project” so my “hell yeah” is likewise dropped. Swole Woman Casey Johnston has more on the plausibility of gaining 30 pounds in three months but whatever she says I think you could do it, easy.

Axios’ Sara Fischer and Christine Wang outlined an idea for a story reporting that Warner Bros. Discovery, the company formed just three years ago when AT&T “reëxtrude[d] its media assets like a pulsating egg sac and mate[d] them with Discovery Inc.,” will now disgorge some of those assets, forming two new companies called (I assume) “Warner” and “Discovery Bros.” Chief executive idiot David Zaslav sketched out a full year of carefully tuned mergers and spinoffs, ending in one time-phase inverted hypercompany called:

which never produces anything but instead creates what Zaslav describes as a “tax singularity,” allowing shareholders to write off the entire epistemological concept of profit, thereby generating a fiscal pressure differential strong enough to suck tax refunds from an array of alternate quantum timelines directly into this one, a move which until now has existed only as a fringe hypothesis in advanced theoretical accounting. M&A experts generally expect the move to be successful, with only a “small to middling” chance of triggering an economic black hole that annihilates all real and imaginary business activity on Earth throughout the past, present, and future. Warner Bros. Discovery stock ticked up slightly on the news.

The Washington Post didn’t exactly announce but reportedly has named a new editor for its Opinion section and it’s some guy in a rumpled golf shirt standing in what appears to be a vacant lot and sounding like Jeff Bezos asked Grok for “4k photorealistic libertarian soyjak trendato su artstation.” We’re all going to learn so much about free markets and personal liberty.

Luke Winkie doesn’t like Bluesky. “The version of the internet I loved,” he writes, “the one where we could talk about sandwiches, is irretrievable.” Sounds like a skill issue to me.

Donald Trump has changed from real estate grifter to crypto grifter, according to Dan Alexander at Forbes. Former Mtv VJ Kennedy talked to Reason about her incredible journey from conservative young person to conservative old person. And Anil Dash is out the door at what used to be the collaborative coding and app hosting tool Glitch but isn’t anything anymore.

Today in Crabs: Smells Like Steamed Crablegs. This band is called Crabsmack and its oeuvre consists entirely of pop parody songs about discount crablegs, in case you thought there was no such thing as free will.

Today in Other Animals: “Mule-riding Kentucky man accused of unleashing raccoon in bar after being turned away.” A famous linguist once said that the most beautiful phrase in the English language is “maining the Cow.”

Today in Etc: Josh Gondelman’s notes towards a taxonomy of Dads watching tv standing up. Hamilton Nolan roasted the cops, and it’s very satisfying. January 6th: The Board Game.

And Finally: Tom Scocca wore an Oura ring to track his sleep for over six months and it sounds like you could just roll a d100 every morning and call that your “readiness score” for the day.

Today’s Song: Sorority Noise, “Blonde Hair, Black Lungs”

Thank God it’s Friday!