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- Thank God It's Whiskey Friday With Tony Dokoupil
If you’re reading this, you made it to Whiskey Friday with Tony Dokoupil (not sponsored by or affiliated with Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey or the Brown-Forman Corporation). Don’t forget to click “no” in Are You Dead Yet?, and congrats on the streak. Here’s a good post by Cari Wade Gervin on how to manage anxiety. No particular reason! Just in case you ever need it or whatever.
There’s a whole thread, click it
I assume Bari Weiss is practicing her box breathing, as all of Liz Lopatto’s predictions continue to come true. “You have elected to take a job where the primary purpose is for you to eat shit and own the death of broadcast TV news,” wrote Liz, and Bari is already eating more shit and owning more failure than even Liz likely thought possible. The new Anti-woke CBS Evening News with Tony “Who?” Dokoupil premiered with a spectacularly expensive week long national tour that generated a humiliating blooper reel of technical errors and embarrassing segments and lost the broadcast more than a million viewers compared to the same week last year. According to the New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin:
“The goal for this road show is not to deliver the news so much as it is to drive the news,” Ms. Weiss wrote in a note obtained by The New York Times. “We need to be the news for these 10 days.”
Perfect, nailed it 👌. Elsewhere in the Bariverse, Evan Mandery reports for Politico that Weiss’s libertarian themed University of Austin is now Joe Lonsdale’s Purity of Essence Anticommunist University, with only approved free speech allowed. The story is mostly a compendium of UATX’s affiliated peak-of-their-undeserved-success morons lamenting that the University hasn’t lived up to the promises that anyone with even a hint of electrical activity in their domepiece knew it would never, could never, and never intended to live up to. It was, after all, founded by the most cursed blunt rotation that the Devil ever assembled:
Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt…; [Larry] Summers; [Steven] Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to [Niall] Ferguson.
And that barely even scratches the surface. Congratulations to the first and hopefully final graduating class, here’s your diploma:
‘Stop sending butt plugs to Bahrain’: Toronto sex store receives letters from U.S. Department of War, CP24
Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Prior Lake woman arrested with bag of drugs labeled ‘Definitely not a bag full of drugs’, Prior Lake News Compass
Lawyer representing Elon Musk in OpenAI legal battle with Sam Altman is also a working clown, Independent
And finally: it’s not technically a headline but I can’t get the phrase “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla, and one other thing” out of my head.
Today in AI Takes: Robin Sloan attempted to divert our thinking on “Artificial General Intelligence” away from “does it exist yet,” to a potentially more useful question: “AGI is here! … What now?” Rob Mealey proposed that “AI is a Mood, Not a Method,” in his announcement of the Aristoi Institute, which will work on AI and machine learning tools to assist people with intellectual disabilities. Redis database creator antirez proposed an empowering view of the potential for AI coding tools in “Don't fall into the anti-AI hype.” His commenters largely disagreed but I found the debate enlightening. Cory Doctorow made roughly the opposite argument in “Code is a liability (not an asset).” I don’t entirely agree with either of them but I think they’re both triangulating on something true. In Platformer, Casey Newton (still taken, lads) kept Claude Code week rolling with a list of writing tools he had the robot build him. Maybe you would benefit from similar tools, I don’t know. Personally I feel more like Struan Donald:
For me the act of making a thing is partly about noticing. If you are taking a photo it is because something has caught your attention, and in order for that to happen you have to be paying attention. Writing is the same. You have to interrogate your thoughts and in the process understand the reasoning or feelings behind them. To do this requires, for me at least, spending time with things and that is one of the things generative AI is designed to reduce.
My post “Read, Play, Love,” for example, could never have existed were I using AI to do research for me. Sometimes I think it’s better to meander around for a while than head straight for a destination. On the other hand Casey is massively more successful than I am, so probably don’t emulate me unless your goal is mainly to fuck around and amuse yourself.
The Only Good Thing On Social Media Right Now is a Tiktok channel called Tastebuds_nyc, where two NYC bros spin a wheel of countries every week and go eat at a restaurant from that country in New York City. If you can get through the Bhutan episode without tears, you’re a lot stronger than I am.
Finally: A good Hear Me Out.
Today’s Song: “House,” Charli XCX feat. John Cale
I think I’m… House.
You may have noticed that I haven’t written anything about the Federal death squads terrorizing Minneapolis. I’m sure you know me well enough to know it’s not because I don’t care. It’s partly because my feeds have been completely full of horrifying news from Minnesota for more than a week, as I’m sure yours have also been, and I desperately need to think about something else, if only briefly. And it’s partly because I don’t have anything useful to add. I’m not there, I don’t know the city, whatever I might say is frankly just self-serving noise. Tabs reader Winston Hearn is there, and wrote a little about what it feels like to be in Minnesota right now:
In Minnesota right now—despite the ongoing risks presented by untrained clowns who will deploy weapons of war against literal children when they get scared—the change has happened. Our true nature has been given a chance to emerge.
It is so fucking powerful and beautiful that I struggle to capture what it feels like, but here is a small attempt.
Rumor has it that ICE is coming here to Maine next, presumably to terrorize the Somali communities in Portland and Lewiston, so perhaps I’ll have something worthwhile to say about it soon enough. Until then, for Minneapolis and everyone else experiencing the lawlessness and brutality of our federal government, be well and Fuck ICE.
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