I hope you miss Tabs and/or are enjoying this extended break from knowing about the internet every day. I’ve been working through my list of the one thousand logistical tasks I need to complete before Mica and I head out on the Appalachian Trail in July, and I’ve started posting to the Today on Trail newsletter.

I don’t know if I did a good job describing what that will be, exactly, so I wanted to share yesterday’s post with you. Give it a read, it might turn out to be more your jam than you would have expected from a newsletter supposedly about long distance hiking. I’ve also written about gear (and more of that is to come) and told the tale of our first shakedown hike, which was either a disaster or a success depending on how you choose to look at it.

I’ll be posting to ToT twice a week for the foreseeable future. I may share another post or two to Tabs, we’ll see. But if you like this essay, signing up is free (one-time-payment subscriptions are available but not mandatory) and all posts for the rest of this month will be free as well, so you don’t have anything to lose. Also if you just like the cute Tater ToT mascots, there are stickers in the Today in Merch store.

Thanks, I hope you’re well, and I’ll see you out on the trail. —Rusty

If we couldn’t forget the experience of suffering, I don’t think anyone would climb a mountain more than once. Every time I climb a mountain there comes at least one moment where I wish I were doing literally anything else. It’s usually a lot more than one moment—on the way up my internal monologue is often more like:

…this sucks I hate this why am I doing this to myself whose stupid-ass idea was it to climb this mountain there isn’t even anything up there I just have to go back down who made this idiotic trail have you ever heard of switchbacks noooo I’m Mr. Tough Guy Maine Trail Builder I just go straight up the steepest part probably wearing flannel and carrying an axe dumb Paul Bunyan ass trail builders ten more minutes and then I stop for a snack no matter what…

But then at some point, the climb ends. Mountains do have that going for them: there’s a clear point where you run out of up and the climbing is over. Descending is also hard but never in quite the same existentially crushing way. Most often on a descent what I’m thinking is some version of “at least I’ll never have to do that again!” This is never true. I’m definitely going to do that again, because when the suffering ends I learn that there is an end to it. Somehow that makes the suffering retroactively bearable. Somehow it makes me forget.

Maybe you don’t climb mountains. How about this instead: if we couldn’t forget the experience of suffering, I don’t think anyone would have more than one child. Mica was our first baby, and we had a whole crunchy-granola birth planned out for him, attended by a midwife at an organic Victorian birthing house in Portland. No drugs would be needed, and no doctors. Birth is a natural part of life, the body knows what to do. The other parents are already roasting my ass in the chat, I know. I know. 

It turned out Mica was breech, which the midwife failed to notice while my wife labored and then the labor stalled. We did at least have a nice nap in the birthing house. But in the sudden confusing morning light, there was meconium present. What’s meconium? Baby poop in the womb. It can be aspirated. Why didn’t I know about any of this before now? What does it mean? It means a trip up the road to the hospital and an emergency C-section. Time to go. I stood in a gown in the wait-here room while they took Christina away to get her giant spinal needles, needles apparently so large and horrifying I would immediately collapse and vomit all over the anesthesiologist at the first sight of them. No Dads allowed until after the spinal block. It took a long time. My hands were cold.

Finally they brought me in to surgery and sat me on a rolling chair between my wife and the suction canister, already swirling with gore vacuumed from the incision, all that care for my purported body-horror sensitivities now forgotten. I held her hand, which she couldn’t feel because they gave her too much anesthesia. The gore canister gurgled and another wash of blood sprayed around the inside. There was a green curtain propped up just below her chest, shielding our end of the bed from the demolition site below. I looked around at the doctors and assistants. Everyone was very busy, no one was paying any attention to me. I wonder if I’m allowed to look, I thought. I might not get another chance to see this. Cautiously I stood up, and no one stopped me. 

What was happening on the other side of the curtain didn’t immediately register as having anything to do with my beloved human wife’s normal human body. It looked like someone had dropped a very fresh ribeye steak in a laundry hamper, and a bunch of doctors were trying to get it out. Much later I told her that I’d seen the inside of her abdomen, and she asked what it looked like. All I could come up with was: “well-marbled?” I meant that in a very positive way, but she didn’t love it.

Staring at my wife’s meat while a stranger rummaged around inside it for our firstborn, I understood that birth and death aren’t opposites, they’re twins who always arrive together and sometimes death wants to stick around. I won’t ever know what it feels like to be on the birthing bed, or on that operating table, but my experience of that birth was the understanding that it was a coin toss, and I was about to gain a world or lose one.

And to be clear: this was a routine modern hospital caesarean birth. There were no complications, Mica was fine, my wife was up and walking around the next day, it was truly the best possible outcome. And it was also the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced. What kind of maniac would voluntarily do that more than once? “At least I’ll never have to do that again,” I thought, carrying Mica out of the hospital strapped into his car seat. But I knew it wasn’t true. We did it two more times. 

You forget. You also forget the first year, the diapers, the bottles, the sleeplessness, all the infant stuff that everyone jokes about because when you’re going through it, it feels like an endless climb up a mountain with no summit. But it does end, or at least it changes enough that at some point you can look back and see the whole climb below, and see that it was worth it. 

The first section of the Appalachian Trail south of Baxter State Park in Maine runs for about a hundred miles between the little campground store at Abol Bridge and the town of Monson. It’s the longest stretch of the whole trail that doesn’t cross a paved road or pass any resupply point. It’s called the Hundred Mile Wilderness, although if you live in Maine you know there’s no real wilderness here. The section is criss-crossed by logging roads and passes through the busy Katahdin Ironworks and Jo-Mary Road recreation area. There’s a beach in there that locals drive to with full tailgate barbeque setups, on a hot summer day. But it’s still a long way to hike.

I know this because I hiked it in July of 2020 (A Pretty Weird Time™) and it was a hard hundred miles. The trail is nothing but rocks and roots—imagine putting on a pair of trail runners and then hitting the bottoms of your feet with a ball peen hammer for eight to ten hours every day for a week or so. If you do it southbound, the first half is wet and buggy but pretty flat. Then you climb Whitecap (not to be confused with Sunday River Whitecap or the other Whitecap), and then you come to the Chairbacks. 

The Chairbacks are a string of four peaks that don’t look like much on a topo map, but that was the hardest fifteen miles of hiking I’ve ever done. At Cloud Pond I was so exhausted I couldn’t eat dinner, and that night I started shivering so hard I was afraid I had somehow caught Covid. I forced myself to make a cup of hot chocolate and drink it in tiny sips until the shakes subsided and I started to feel some energy returning. The next day one of the through-hikers I was traveling with said he heard me making a hot drink and thought “Man, that guy really knows how to live!” I could only laugh. That hot chocolate was the last idea I had short of “hit the SOS button on my rescue beacon and hope for the best.”

My truck was parked at the trailhead in Monson, and that night at Cloud Pond ended up being my last on trail that trip. The next day my new friends and I covered the sixteen miles to Leeman Brook, where they were stopping. I wanted to get to my truck where I had a comfy mattress and real food, so I begged a few electrolyte drink mix packets and headed off to do the last three miles to the road in the dusk. By this point the skin had been sloughing off the bottoms of my feet for two days, and I was on a rigid schedule of three Advil every four hours just to keep the pain down enough to walk on them. I also didn’t look closely at the drink mix packets, so I didn’t realize until the next day that they were caffeinated. I chugged three of them in two miles. Oops.

But that evening, blasting along alone through the pines at hyper-speed, high on Advil and caffeine and the promise of a big pot of spaghetti ahead, I found myself thinking about Mica, who had just come out to us as trans a few months earlier. I could already see how much more comfortable he was now that he didn’t have the burden of pretending to be something he’s not. All I could think about was how proud I am of him for having the courage to be who he is, even when it’s hard. I thought about how much I wished he was there with me so I could tell him that. Did I cry? I was alone, so who can say.

I got to my truck and peeled off my last pair of bloody socks and the filthy layer of leukotape holding my feet together. I re-bandaged them the best I could, and made a pot of spaghetti in the cloud of gnats attracted by my headlamp. I went to sleep thinking “at least I’ll never have to do that again.” But even then I knew I probably would.

In a couple more weeks I will, but this time Mica will be there with me. I can’t wait.

Yesterday The Atlantic announced a “licensing and product [deal] with ChatGPT parent OpenAI” which was immediately criticized by… The Atlantic, where Damon Beres called it “A Devil’s Bargain” and Jeffrey Goldberg peevishly tweeted that “@OpenAI should answer questions from reporters, particularly those from affected journalism organizations.” Vox Media announced a similar partnership, to which the Vox Media Union said whoa there, we did what now? In the Atlantic’s press release, CEO Nicholas Thompson purportedly says “We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.” Does Nick Thompson truly believe this? With all due respect to the Atlantic comms department:

If you think about it, mixing some of our delicious journalism candy into this bucket of rat poison makes the whole bucket a little safer to eat, so who can say whether it’s a good idea. As Beres writes:

There’s just no telling how it might turn out this time. Probably good.

Totally unrelated to the above, John Herrman has some thoughts about “Why AI Search Blew Up in Google’s Face.”

And just to throw another random link at you, here’s Anil Dash on the idea that “The Purpose of a System is What It Does.” If you read all of these things and they seem to suggest a broader analysis of what’s going on in technology and media right now, it’s probably just an illusion. A kind of Eisensteinian montage effect. Anyway pretty soon we’ll be generating our bot twaddle in actual human brain organoids. No time to quibble, the torment nexus is right around the corner.

Today in Crabs: A day late but just barely sneaking in before the hiatus, THE CITY sent Gwynne Hogan to the annual New York horseshoe crab census. I know horseshoe crabs aren’t really crabs, but if you think about it they’re not exactly not crabs either. And in The Times William J. Broad called anglerfish “ghoulish creatures.” Sabrina Imbler would never.

Today in Pads: Buy Paul Reubens’s perfectly preserved mid-mod Los Feliz house for only five million dollars, and then please don’t tear it down and put up a McMansion.

Finally: Alexandra Petri, “Twelve Angry Trump Jurors.”

Song of the Season: It’s the last day of Season X so Music Intern Sam and I scrolled through the playlist to pick a favorite. I’d call “Not Like Us” the most iconic song of the season, but Sam suggested Mikayla Geier’s “Dance of the Trees” and I can’t say he’s wrong.

Here we are again at the precipice of a long hiatus, and I find that I still don’t have anything better in me to say about it than what I wrote the first time this happened, in 2016, as reproduced in this 2022 lore dump:

The angels in the architecture of Tabs are the generous crew of friends and volunteers who just keep doing things when I ask them if they want to, including Alison Headley, Garrett Miller, Jane Davis, Sarah Dell'Orto, Allegra Rosenberg, and Sam Gavin. Along with the many legitimate professional journalists who have contributed tabs and answered my dumb questions I’d like to especially thank Tom Scocca and Liz Lopatto for their consistently excellent advice. Everyone in the discord has helped keep me sane and informed over the course of many months of sitting in my bedroom alone, typing. Thanks to everyone who paid for a subscription so I didn’t have to get a real job. And most importantly: thank you for reading.

The comments are open to everyone if you’d like to sign my yearbook. And I’ll see you on the trail!

Only one more day until my job becomes Woods so let’s put this right up top, why not?

I don’t even want to know what happened in 1995 that was worse than this.

Hell yeah, everyone’s getting weird today. Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner went on a podcast and explained that she hasn’t gotten around to talking about it since November but what happened was the board fired Sam Altman because he’s a liar and a manipulative snake who everyone hates working with and who hasn’t done anything in his career but fail. And yet he still outmaneuvered them somehow. Drat! Personally, if I took on notorious lackwit Sam Altman and lost I would simply go live in a cave forever, but effective altruists are built different. I log on to Rihanna’s internet every day and write down what I believe¹ to be the truth,² but I’m still surprised we got a firsthand confirmation that I was right back in November: they tried to fire Sam because he sucks.

Liz Lopatto is mad about Vivek’s big BuzzFeed adventure, but not for the reason you might think.

Chat, can I get a let’s goooo? But we’ll have to leave Vivek to it because right now I have a whole carapace stuffed with:

Bloomberg has a feature by Andrew S. Lewis on the meteoric post-Russia-sanctions rise of Norway’s invasive red king crab fishery, and the worrying signs of a coming bust that are obvious to anyone who has paid even the tiniest bit of attention to any fishery anywhere in all of history. But perhaps this resource extraction boom won’t collapse. Who can say.

Meanwhile, on Knifecrab Island: “Big crab with mussel hair-do fascinates beachgoers.” Thank you Michael Roston, who sends me more Today in Crabs tips than anyone would probably expect.

I’m looking for a crab in mudflats, one six, mussels, claw tips…

The Times followed up on Ohio real estate billionaire Larry Connor’s quest to feed the crabs at the crushing depths of the Titanic:

Congrats to Emily Schmall, Orlando Mayorquín, and whatever editor ensured that “We’re not big risk takers.” would be followed by this list of Earth’s Biggest Risks.

Stingrays aren’t crabs but if pressed, I would reluctantly find myself arguing they’re also not not crabs, if you think about it. Later, around three a.m., I would lie awake regretting this entire specious line of argument, and wish that I could just admit I was wrong, one goddamn time. Like, would it be so hard? Someone says “stingrays aren’t crabs” and I could just go “no, you’re right. They’re not.” But that life is not for me. I need a segue, so here I am saying: Stingrays aren’t crabs, but if you think about it, they’re also not not crabs. Emily Cataneo tried to find out what’s going on with the “miraculously pregnant” Hendersonville, North Carolina stingray Charlotte:

After double the normal stingray gestation period, Charlotte has still not given birth and no questions will be answered about it.

Dudes Rock:

@blan3339

#jonboat #fyp #boatsgonewild #25mercury

That’s not related to anything, I just thought it needed to be said.

Panda, Panda: Panda, Panda, Panda, Panda, Panda. I saw this news and thought “what ever happened to Desiigner?” And… oof.

If you hate the Google AI search results, Ernie Smith built a simple UI to get web results only, at udm14.com, and Ben Jackson made the Ten Blue Links chrome plugin to do the same thing automatically.

“Can Jude Doyle also write perfect little short essays that aren’t film criticism?” you may have been wondering. Here he is on the Two of Swords and “finding stillness and calm in a situation where both things feel impossible.” Asked and answered.

Erik Baker in Defector: “The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us.”

Today’s Song: Shura, “religion (u can lay your hands on me)”

Music Intern Sam says “Sorry I keep sending you indie pop from white lesbians but I guess this is my legacy.” No apology needed Sam, Tiktok already thinks I’m a lesbian nurse. And congrats to new Tabs Discord Moderation Intern Dello! Thanks also, as always, to long-serving and newly promoted Senior Discord Moderation Intern Jane. The discord is in good hands for the hiatus.

Tomorrow Only: We all get to fuck around, and then never find out.

“Google AI said to put glue in pizza — so I made a pizza with glue and ate it,” wrote Katie Notopoulos. This is the kind of flawless sicko blogging of which we could only dream during the pivot to video. I am surprised that Business Insider let Katie describe glue pizza as “an easy and delicious weeknight meal for the whole family that anyone can whip up in thirty minutes or less,” but maybe they feel invulnerable after surviving Bill Ackman?

But perhaps I should have said “the first pivot to video,” because near billionaire and less-near presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy wants to bring back 2015 (Vivek’s Version) with another BuzzFeed pivot to video, but this time make it even dumber. Bloomberg’s Cam Baker reports:

Yeah absolutely, why not. Let’s see Aaron Rodgers’s “13 Reasons 9/11 Never Happened (Number 5 Is Wondtacular).” This is exactly the legacy Jonah Peretti earned.

— Insane Facebook AI slop (@FacebookAIslop)
9:34 AM • May 28, 2024

Glue pizza is both funny and delicious, but Google’s A.I. content is spectacularly embarrassing and the company doesn’t seem to know what to do about it. While its flagship search engine is telling users to eat rocks, a company representative told The Verge that “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce.” I’ve personally been able to reproduce almost all the examples I’ve seen. Maybe Google has the include_ai_garbage flag disabled for its employees, so they can actually do their jobs?

Poor quality aside, the strangest thing about Google’s “A.I. Overviews” is that they’re all just scraped and rephrased webpage content. The dumb answers are easy to trace to their original sources, where they were either a joke or part of a longer post that the bot mangled. It’s pure automated plagiarism that treats the content of the web as raw material for Google to harvest and reuse however it sees fit. Last week in Wired Paresh Dave reported that Google “says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews.” So it’s exactly what it looks like: Google fracking the web to sell ads.

On the other hand, when he was asked on Decoder about websites who see their Google referral traffic cratering, CEO Sundar Pichai told Nilay that:

Yeah, that’s a good point. Maybe another internet just opened up next door! It’s tough to say.

Also Today in A.I.: “OpenAI has a new safety team — it’s run by Sam Altman,” writes Emma Roth. The rest of the “team” is two other board members and the team will make recommendations to the board (i.e. itself). Good thing the whole idea of “A.I. safety” is marketing bullshit. And in Techcrunch Dominic-Madori Davis, Amanda Silberling, and Kyle Wiggers report that “Meta’s new AI council is composed entirely of white men.” It’s also their birthday, and you will never regret liking this A.I. council.

Today’s Reason I Can’t Wait To Log Off And Go Live In The Woods: Sundress Discourse.

Today in Religion: The Vatican is about to canonize its first gamer saint. They also pretty much admitted to making his incorruptible body out of wax. I’m told that his reliquaries will be called “loot boxes.”

Today in Money (I Guess?): FT Alphaville’s Louis Ashworth designed the perfect sellside research note, making two full decisions (Decision -1 and Decision 0) before even arriving at “Decision 1: How big is a piece of paper?” And “Ohio billionaire Larry Connor plans to take $20M sub to Titanic site to prove industry’s safer after OceanGate implosion.“ The ocean has a chance to do something so funny right now.

Ok that’s all that happened while I was in Canada! There certainly wasn’t any news about those “pronatalist” liars beating their kids no matter what you may think you saw in the so-called Guardian.

Today’s Song: Magdalena Bay, “Death & Romance”

Ty Music Intern Sam. Only! Two! More! Tabs! Left! DO NOT subscribe, it is simply too late. But DO subscribe to Today on Trail, the new, the next, what is to come, and the world that will be inshallah.

Meltdown May struck again yesterday when Alison Roman sent out a newsletter that looks destined to become a classic. In “Carrot Cake Is Better Cold,” Roman presents a cold carrot cake recipe along with two different versions of the prefatory essay required to wrap the recipe in copyrightable intellectual property: first a normal one, where she tells you this carrot cake tastes good cold, then a Meltdown May remix where she tells you she’s having an “existential crisis” about “how tired I am of talking about myself and the things I do,” and also that the carrot cake tastes good cold.

I was nodding right along, because who hasn’t felt that tension between just wanting to sell your product or creative work, but being required by the inexorable demands of the attention economy to also sell yourself? Then I hit the kicker:

Got ‘em. Alison Roman, you’re the best to ever do it and don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise.

Also Today in Meltdown May: Terrence Howard went on Joe Rogan and reinvented the four dimensional time cube. New Joe Bernstein “Look at These Weirdos: Israel-Palestine Conflict Edition” dropped, and apparently Yale’s secret societies have gone woke. The majority of Americans believe in the exact opposite of a whole array of current economic facts. And John Herrman argues that “The Scarlett Johansson Incident Makes OpenAI Look Desperate.”

I am legit losing my mind about the Google AI answers.

Jason Diamond went for a walk in Brooklyn in the general vicinity of “The Bear” actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach. I’m gonna need a fact check on this lede that claims someone was selling coke in person in Cobble Hill Park circa 2004.

In the New York Times Kirsten Grind profiled RFK Jr.’s running mate Nicole Shanahan, who appears to somehow be the horniest person in a presidential race that already included Donald Trump.

“Advisers?” Girl, wyd. Meanwhile RFK Jr. aped into Gamestonk in a shameless play for some of the lowest hanging fruit left on the idiot tree.

Humane, maker of one of the two recent disappointing AI wearable pins, thinks it can find someone to buy it for a billion dollars. Hardware that doesn’t work and no one liked using, and A.I. rented from OpenAI? Sure, that could be worth anything. Let’s just say numbers. One squillion. Whee, this is fun.

Max Tani tweeted that Washington Post CEO Will Lewis said “the paper lost $77 million over the past year.” At this rate, Jeff Bezos can only afford to fund it for another two thousand six hundred years. Obviously the answer is to have “AI everywhere in our newsroom.“

“Vivek Ramaswamy Acquires Activist Stake in BuzzFeed.” Who cares. Mayor Adams did some more weird and crooked stuff. Yawn. “Large amount of meat dumped on Ohio road.” Now THAT is interesting news. The Columbus Dispatch’s Mariyam Muhammad is On It: “Meat pile dumped on the side of the road in Washington County, Ohio. Here's what we know.” Stay tuned for Ohio Meat Pile updates on the hour.

Until then, here’s…

Today’s Song: 2070, “Lagan”

I scrolled back a ways in the DMs from Music Intern Sam and discovered this Slint-esque gem, which currently has twenty seven views on YouTube. I have no idea how he finds these things.

Tabs will be off until Tuesday! And then it’s our last week! I am low-key freaking out. Please use the long weekend to practice not having Tabs anymore at all for the rest of the year, while I hike.

On Sunday OpenAI announced it was removing its new horny robot girlfriend voice, explaining in a blog post that the voice was “not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” at all (and frankly it’s weird of you even to think that???) but was actually the real human meat voice of a completely different actress who goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her. Also she’s from Canada.

Nevertheless yesterday the famously litigious Johansson gave NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn a statement saying that OpenAI had asked her to sell them her voice for its obsequious new autocomplete and she said no, twice, so now she has “retained legal counsel.”

Recapping the imbroglio,¹  Casey Newton wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [measured, respectful] and Ed Zitron wrote that Sam Altman is full of shit [angry diatribe]. But with the final departure of co-founder and actual technologist Ilya Sutskever, whose last-ditch effort to oust Altman failed last fall, OpenAI is now firmly under the control of Paul Graham / Marc Andreessen style technofascist incompetents, and this kind of clown show will increasingly be the norm.

If you don’t feel like reading any of the links above, you can always have Tripp Mickle’s report in the New York Times read to you by “an automated voice” that sounds… oddly familiar.

Also Today in A.I.: Jeremy White on warnings that “chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale.” Deepfake “Russian wife” accounts on Douyin “rally support for China-Russia ties, stoke patriotic fervor or make money — and sometimes all three at once.” Meanwhile it turns out that in 2021’s big Pennsylvania deepfake cheerleader mom case, nothing was fake at all. In Forbes, Alexandra S. Levine reports that A.I. is generating images of children for Instagram and Tiktok that are oddly popular with adult men. If crypto’s killer app was ransomware, it’s starting to look like A.I.’s might be considerably worse. And Microsoft announced “Recall for Copilot Plus PCs,” an A.I. powered search of “everything you see and do on your computer.” What could go wrong. In Indignity, T_H_E__M_A_C_H_I_N_E_S tested out Google‘s absolutely trash new A.I. overviews, but fortunately Ernie Smith figured out how to get rid of all the junk clogging up your Google results. You should go read the post, but the answer is “add &udm=14” to your search args. It’s actually magic.

Belle Delphine’s gamergirl bathwater profits were locked up in Paypal for five years. If you couldn’t tell from the summary, this is a Katie Notopoulos story. RIP the few remaining shreds of gaming media: “IGN Entertainment acquires Eurogamer, GI, VG247, Rock Paper Shotgun and more.”

Today in Books: Random Penguin will replace Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon publisher Lisa Lucas with no one.

Today in Dystopia: In Ars Technica Beth Mole writes, “Neuralink to implant 2nd human with brain chip as 85% of threads retract in 1st.” David Cronenberg-ass headline. You already know a headline that includes the phrase “‘doomsday’ glacier“ isn’t going to be good news. David Roth finally saw a cybertruck and the encounter inspired peak David Roth. And “Hims™ brand Ozempic” is one of those phrases that you don’t just read, you feel it deep in the crumbling remnants of your soul.

Today in PSAs: Don’t mess with moose.

Today’s Song: Billie Eilish, “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”

It’s days like this that remind me of what Bill Murray told Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”: “ᴵ ᵍᵘᵉˢˢ ᶦᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵃˡˡ ʲᵘˢᵗ ˡᵒˢᵗ ᶦⁿ ᵗʳᵃⁿˢˡᵃᵗᶦᵒⁿ“

[At the Red Lobster corporate offices for my CEO interview] “Hello sir, I—” *briefcase full of shrimp falls open*.

Apparently in Red Lobster’s waning days it served as a sort of reverse shrimp arbitrage, funneling corporate debt into the pockets of Jumbo Shrimp via the decapod-craving gullets of American boomers. Frankly, it looks like Red Lobster equity holder and shrimp supplier Thai Union saw an opportunity and got… shellfish. In The New York Times, Ali Watkins waxed elegiac:

At press time the DOJ was reportedly investigating Olive Garden’s financial ties to Big Soup or Salad and Breadsticks.

What else could you eat? A lot of fluorocarbon compounds, made by 3M (j/k you already did). Bud Light, if you want to make our new contender for most corrupt Supreme Court justice, Sam Alito, mad. Poison Oak. Black flies.

J….jimono………….

— Em💍 (@purikoen_)
10:43 AM • May 19, 2024

Today in the World: “Iran’s president and foreign minister die in helicopter crash.” They must have found out something about Boeing. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for five terrorist leaders this weekend. I thought they finally invented a both sides that Times Opinion couldn’t endorse, but David Kaye guessayed:

I guess you do gotta hand it to them! One member of the panel that recommended these I.C.C. charges was famous British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who is married to an actor. Meanwhile here at home, Jonathan Katz makes a good argument that Joe Biden is trying to defeat Trumpism without touching the roots of American fascism.

I Am The Very Model of a Modern Surgeon General:

I’d apologize to Gilbert and Sullivan but they’ve done worse themselves, and they know it.

Seeing onions for the first time:

— nives🧃 (@ni7es)
10:31 PM • May 19, 2024

Finally: Jeremy Renner broke his taint. I am pro-taint and I take no pleasure in reporting this. And from Jessica DeFino: Shampoo For Your God-Shaped Hole (unrelated).

Today Song: Yves, “Slut”

Thanks Music Intern Sam. I just want to say up front that we’re into the last two weeks of Tabs for the whole year and I am simply not going to be trying very hard. In fact, I’ll be off this Thursday and Friday, and next Monday for a college scouting trip to Canada. So there’s probably only five Tabses left! Will I pad all of them with unnecessary parody song lyrics? Let’s find out.

Welcome to What’s New? Wednesday! The first thing that’s new this Wednesday is: What’s New? Wednesday.

What’s New In Art? Bad portraits. Jonathan Jones roasted the King’s new portrait in The Guardian but with incredible restraint he managed not to mention tampongate. Meanwhile in the upside-down, Australia’s richest woman “mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove her portrait from an exhibition by the award-winning artist Vincent Namatjira.” The portrait is giving “woman caught yelling racist slurs in Walmart.”

“Are you recording me!? Are you recording me!? Good! Now I’m recording you!”

What’s New In Politics? Felonious Bobs. The Washington state Democratic gubernatorial primary is back down to a single Bob Ferguson, after Original Bob Ferguson found that Washington election law says trying to ratfuck a political race by running someone with “A name similar to that of an incumbent seeking reelection to the same office with intent to confuse and mislead the electors” is a felony. Threatened with potential jail time, the two felonious Bobs dropped out on Monday. And in Missouri, Republican secretary of state candidate Valentina Gomez sucks real bad, even by Missouri Republican standards.

What’s New In Maine? Just normal Maine stuff.

What’s New In Books? Books. Elle Reeve, the Racket Teen alum voted “most conventionally successful” at the legendary publication’s ten year reunion, wrote a book about “Charlottesville, Jan 6, the alt right, an incel three-way, a death party, a mushroom trip, a book burning, a fascist's cell phone + what [she] witnessed reporting on extremism for a decade” called Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. They said keep the subtitle short and snappy and she said I will not. “The” Maris “Review” Kreizman read Miranda July’s new book and Eric Adams’s deranged and out of print 2009 Don’t Let It Happen. And Absolution, the fourth book in Jeff VanderMeer’s increasingly misnamed Southern Reach trilogy, is available for pre-order now and comes out in October.

What’s New In Portals? Inappropriate behaviour. A live New York to Dublin video portal opened last week and was almost immediately shut down “after a drunk woman was caught grinding up against the project.” Surprisingly, she was in Dublin. Not to be outdone a New York OnlyFans creator got the portal shut down again this week by flashing Dublin at great length and with visible enthusiasm from all present. The flasher, Ava Louise, was unapologetic and to be fair toplessness is perfectly legal in New York. Ava Louise was previously best known for licking an airplane toilet seat and calling it the “coronavirus challenge” in March, 2020. Much to think about.

What’s New? Lightning Round. Let’s go! Deez Links goes paid. The Messenger’s Finkelstein still thinks he has a future in media, lol. Defector’s Burneko roasted Kevin Roose to a fine ash. Business Insider thinks Google has a killer A.I. app in “telling you what your phone camera is looking at.” I already know what a computer screen looks like but I’m just built different I guess. Maura Judkis petted more than one hundred incredibly Good Boys at Westminster. Want to buy the contents of an entire Red Lobster? Of course you do.

Today’s Song: Dazey and the Scouts, “Wet”

Promise me you’ll go outdoors this afternoon, we all need it.

OpenAI announced a major advance in Steve technology yesterday, unveiling a new version of ChatGPT that will pretend to laugh at your jokes, agree with anything you say, and flatter you with the desperate shamelessness of a twenty three year old personal assistant with eighty thousand dollars in college debt and three roommates in a Brooklyn two bedroom walk-up who vapes thc until their face is numb and then cries themself to sleep every night wondering if this is all their life is going to amount to.

Happy birthday with GPT-4o

— OpenAI (@OpenAI)
6:39 PM • May 13, 2024

It’s called ChatGPT 4o (the “o” is for “obsequious”) and as John Herrman immediately noticed and even Kevin Roose eventually noticed, the advance in this release is not greater accuracy or more useful applications but the addition of a slick work-girlfriend experience. As Herrman wrote:

In The Guardian Chris Stokel-Walker reminded us “this thing isn’t intelligent, but it certainly is artificial,” and Roose compared it to the A.I. in the Spike Jonze movie “Her.” But if past performance is any indication of future results I suspect when the new features get out of the demo reel and into the hands of users it will be less “Her” and more:

Given that the major update here is the addition of a Flirtron 3000 module, and the opinions that came my way about it via t_h_e_c_a_s_c_a_d_e were pretty heavily dudebro-coded, I searched for some opinions about this from women. Google’s newest feature update is “lying” so I can’t be sure this is accurate¹ but I could only find one, by Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson, who also noticed how horny this robot seems and wondered:

I guess we’ll find out! Olson recalled that prioritizing engagement above all else is “what led Facebook to design algorithms that promoted the most outrageous posts on its site to keep people scrolling,” despite numerous and easily predictable negative consequences. Like, to take one horrifying but imaginary example: what if the Instagram algorithm noticed how much engagement certain pictures of little girls got from certain middle aged men, and started pushing that kind of content to them relentlessly? But I mean obviously that’s the first thing you’d think of when you gamed out potential harms of engagement-maxxing, and Facebook has been doing this for so long now, surely they’ve… surely, by now…

…they would have… surely…

Oh no.

Jesus fucking christ. This is from Michael H. Keller and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries in the New York Times yesterday. Speaking of A.I. and Facebook, @AnAngryOpossum thinks all the weird A.I. engagement-bait lately is actually grandma traps. Anyway, good luck with the new A.I. gf. What could go wrong.

Blackbird Spyplane once again came very close to concluding that fashion is just consumerist bullshit, but veered away in a career-salvaging last second reversal which nevertheless left me pretty Setsuko-pilled.

Nellie Bowles has converted fans into haters at a historic rate with her lazy book about The Wokes, and today’s convert is Wired’s Kate Knibbs who calls it “Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul.”

New King Charles portrait is giving Vigo the Carpathian, but Chuck Rex did honor the bravery of “a woman who punched a crocodile in the snout to save her sister” (the woman’s sister, not the crocodile’s). Jowling Kowling “J.K.” Rowling is having a historic meltdown May, reports Miles Klee. Washington State buys stupid anti-graffiti drone from scam company. Sexy mountain lion sighted. And another yacht sinks following orca-involved ramming.

The Serial Port is bringing back Archie.

Today’s Song: Tommy Richman, “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”

Thx Special Guest Music Intern Maura Johnston.

I'm sorry but none of your aurora pictures hold a candle to the one my friend took in her yard

— Argon Dreamcast Evangelion (@synthandlasers)
12:39 AM • May 13, 2024

The New York Times is on an “Everything is a Journey Now” journey, and The New York Times is On It. In Washington state, Bob Ferguson is on a journey of running for governor against Bob Ferguson and Bob Ferguson, as are they. I think it’s obvious who my favorite is (it’s Bob Ferguson). Also in politics, RFK Jr.’s brain worm is on its running for president against RFK Jr. journey. Raw milk enthusiasts can’t wait to embark on their H5N1 bird flu journey and equally wellness-addled libertarian beardo and two-time second worst Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is still on his journey of promoting Elon Musk’s Twitter as “freedom technology.” But if you’re wondering “freedom technology for whoms’t?” Ryan Mac, Jack Nicas and Alex Travelli chronicled Musk’s journey of what they euphemistically call “diplomacy” but unambiguously describe as corruption among the world‘s authoritarian scumbags and right-wing political ideologues. Meanwhile Today in Tabs continues our journey of not using the bad microblogging service anymore but occasionally embedding tweets, because some of them are still so good.

My dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “the fall of Rome” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

Me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude I swear I just saw some Gauls in the forest

My buddy Phillip pacing: the senate is lying to us

— Ones Bitten Twice Shy (@sabatonfan69)
10:07 PM • Mar 8, 2023

Somerville Porchfest attending Guster fans were underwhelmed by their journey of standing in the street and not being able to hear their favorite band Saturday but at least Guster still exists, which is more than I can say for Charles Entertainment Cheese’s animatronic musical act Munch’s Make Believe Band, to be replaced by giant screens at all but two of Charles’s eponymous pizza restaurants. Apparently today’s Five Nights at Freddy’sified demographic finds animatronics unpleasant to look at. We did too, but our Boomer parents were too busy getting day drunk on light beer at our elementary school birthday parties to care.

You telling me kids aren’t blown away by this kind of action anymore?

Luke Winkie was joined on his literal but also figurative Creed fandom journey by his partner in the two-content-creator-family journey of life, Vox’s Rebecca Jennings, who ‘slettered her thoughts as the “DFW’s plus one” of the Summer of ‘99 Creed Cruise. This observation is particularly our-journey-coded:

Meanwhile, I’m excited to finally start my tattoo journey:

We’ve all had a lot of fun here but what’s not fun, writes Rachel Aviv at journey-requiring length in The New Yorker today, is the case of:

With thirteen thousand words of top notch reporting that still only feel like the intro episode of a hit true-crime podcast Aviv casts extreme doubt on the justice of Letby’s conviction and life prison sentence, suggesting instead that she’s been scapegoated for the failures of a systematically underfunded N.H.S. Due to the U.K.’s restrictive media laws the whole story is embargoed there unless you use this archive link instead. The final word will go to Last Week’s New Yorker Review of course, but in my opinion if you only read two hours worth of this week’s New Yorker this is probably the two hours worth to read.

And Finally: I liked this essay by Greg Allen in The Brooklyn Rail about art in resistance to historical autocratic regimes like the one we’re about to elect. Allen mentions Marcel Duchamp’s lover Mary Reynolds, whose epic six month escape from occupied France in 1942 was pseudonymously “published in three parts in The New Yorker.” I was able to exercise my primary talent in life, searching for stuff online, and find those articles in the New Yorker archive this morning so at least I’ve done one useful thing today.

Today’s Song: Brozier, “Take Me to Ohio:”

@elliotcox01

Brozier - Take me to Ohio @Hozier #takemetochurch #brainrot #cover #sigma #rizz #ohio #skibidi #edging #adinross #mogged #VoiceEffects #fortnite

I’m just kidding, today’s song is actually Ice Spice, “Gimme a Light.”

Music Intern Sam also suggested Megan Thee Stallion’s “BOA” which is an unbelievable video but not her best work as a song, in my opinion. You might disagree, but all of us are on our own Megan Thee Stallion journey, and I respect that.

I’ve just received the following exclusive statement from Tim Apple:

Today in Crabs:

Jules Jacobs, NYT: Tuna Crabs, Neither Tuna Nor Crabs, Are Swarming Near San Diego

A “squat lobster” is just a hermit crab that doesn’t pay rent.

Image via Jules Jacobs / NYT

Open Thread: Onward to Adventure!

In preparing for my own adventure, I’ve been drawn to classic adventure books. I’m finally reading Bernard Moitessier’s memoir of his 1968 Golden Globe race, “The Long Way.” Moitessier has been a problematic fave of mine for a long time. On the brink of winning the world’s first single-handed round the world sailing race, after months at sea alone, he simply decided not to finish and kept going, sailing two thirds of the way around the world again. After staying at sea for a total of ten months, he eventually made landfall in Tahiti.

On one hand, what an idol for the quitters! Deciding not to win when you definitely would have, because winning is beneath you? Iconic. On the other hand, he simply abandoned his family, which I have a hard time respecting. His wife Françoise was also a sailor, and previously they had deposited her children in boarding schools to sail around the world for two years. Françoise spoke about Bernard and the race in the 2006 documentary “Deep Water,” and she didn’t seem bitter about it, so maybe it’s not for me to judge.

I always wanted to know what Bernard had to say for himself, so I’m finally reading his book. “One has to be careful though,” he wrote, “not to go further than necessary to the depths of the game. And that is the hard part… not going too far.” Hmm.

Moitessier’s boat was named Joshua after Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone by sail. Slocum wrote his own book about that adventure in 1900, “Sailing Alone Around the World.” You might expect a book written at the turn of the 20th century by a yachtsman in his fifties to be fusty or boring, but here’s a passage picked more or less at random—Slocum’s description of his father:

Every page is this good, I can’t recommend it enough.

So what’s your favorite tale of adventure? True, fictional, I don’t care. Drop those titles. Everyone is welcome to read, but please be subscribed to post.

Rabbit’s R1 is a square plastic box designed by square plastic box designers Teenage Engineering which contains a screen, a camera, a mic, a speaker, some awkward physical controls, and an internet connection to Perplexity A.I.’s chatbot, which lets you ask questions and receive incorrect answers after an uncomfortably long wait.

The Verge’s David Pierce documenting how abysmal Rabbit R1 is at answering questions.

As Marques Brownlee discovered in his barely review “Rabbit R1: Barely Reviewable,” the screen is actually a touchscreen, but you’re (mostly) not allowed to use it as one. Brownlee listed some of the other ways the Rabbit R1 shares functionality with a rock:

It sounds kind of relaxing? You might think this is bad, but by A.I. gadget standards “it doesn’t work” is table stakes. The less it works now, the more blank space there is to imagine the amazing things it could do in the future. The Atlantic’s Caroline Mimbs Nyce suggested a more immediate question: “As with so many AI products, the R1 is fueled more by hype than by a persuasive use case. (So many of its functions could, after all, be done on a smartphone.)”

So why is the R1 confined to a dedicated device that amounts to the world’s most useless smartphone? Why isn’t it just an app? You know where this is going. This weekend in Android Authority, Mishaal Rahman wrote that he:

Yes, it’s just an app. Android Central’s Jerry Hildenbrand argued that just because you can install it on a stock Android phone, that doesn’t make it an app. But his argument also requires us to believe the “Pixel camera app” isn’t an app, so I’m not buying it. It’s an Android app. Here’s a video of it running on an Android phone, which it can do because it’s an Android app.

Building on top of the Android open source platform is a perfectly reasonable approach to develop a device like this, even if it’s kind of scammy to make a big deal in the marketing about an imaginary “Rabbit™ OS” and issue statements to the press claiming that “rabbit r1 is not an Android app.” No one who works in tech would expect it to be anything but an Android app, which makes it strange that Rabbit even tried to keep that a secret. I wonder if the company has anything else it would like to keep secret?

Building on research by Emily Shepherd, Ed Zitron documented his belief that it does:

In excruciating, punishing detail Zitron chronicles how Rabbit is a pivot from the ruins of the NFT hype bubble directly into the A.I. hype bubble by a team with a history of overpromising and underdelivering who seem keen to keep their NFT-peddling days under wraps. Zitron also found some evidence that Rabbit may not be currently authorized to do business in California. He sums up by expressing his concern that:

Yeah, about that remote connection stuff…

Ok, first let’s step back: so far we have learned that the Rabbit R1 doesn’t work on its own terms as an A.I. assistant. We’ve learned that far from needing to be an orange plastic teenage box, the R1 is an Android app that could, in theory, be running on the phone you already have. And we’ve learned that the company behind it seems shady at best.

But one of the biggest selling points of the R1, and the feature that occupies the largest share of this device’s Great Imaginary Future Where It Works (the GIFWIW, trend it) is the “Large Action Model” or LAM. Rabbit’s website claims that the LAM is:

This is, how you say, bullshit. Zitron, above, linked to a video by Aaron White showing that the way you provide Rabbit login credentials for the four (4) services it currently claims the LAM supports is to go to a website which (semi-secretly) opens a VNC session running the service on another browser on a remote server, which you then log in to with your real username and password. “It feels like they’re doing auth hijacking on you?” says White, because that is exactly what they’re doing. Rabbit calls this the “Rabbit Hole.” Listen, I don’t know what they were thinking either.

so, here's everything we did to achieve this in action:

— xyzeva (@xyz3va)
9:55 PM • May 7, 2024

This week some more reverse engineers demonstrated that when you go down the Rabbit Hole you’re also not connecting to a custom “Rabbit™ OS” there, but regular Ubuntu Linux running on an AWS c6a.12xlarge instance, which is a cloud computer with forty eight CPUs and ninety six gigabytes of memory. It’s a big powerful instance, and there’s no way it’s not shared with many, if not all, other R1 users. @xyz3va posted videos showing how she broke out of the VNC browser to a shell, and ran Doom and Minecraft on the remote server.

This server is storing and running your login sessions so the R1 can try (and usually fail) to call you an Uber or play music on Spotify. How secure are these active logins you’re storing on this cloud server you don’t have any control over, and which penetration testers are already posting videos of themselves getting a shell and installing remote scripts on? It’s “isolated” and “well-contained” according to Rabbit. So who can say.

What @xyz3va can say, though, is that there’s no evidence to be found of a Large Action Model on this backend. The server appears to be running a web app testing package called Playwright, which software developers would use to automate the otherwise tedious task of opening an app and performing a set of predefined actions in it, to make sure that new code updates didn’t unexpectedly break something. If that’s all gibberish to you, just take my word for it as a former web app developer that this is a hilariously janky way to run a consumer-facing product.

But in contrast to all the relatively harmless questionable decisions Rabbit has tried to cover up, the company’s CTO Peiyuan Liao publicly took credit for exactly this janky system on X. We’re meant to believe that the LAM is somewhere else, “studying how people use online interfaces” and then generating the scripts that Playwright uses to mimic a person clicking buttons in a web browser.

But... why bother using A.I. for any of that? The whole idea of Playwright is that it can record a human using a web app and then play that human’s actions back. Why would you train an A.I. on a human using Uber and then use that A.I. to simulate a human using Uber to generate a Playwright file that Playwright can use to use Uber for you on a remote AWS instance, in the unlikely event a chatbot can puzzle out what you wanted it to do for you in the Uber app?

Why would anyone do any of that, rather than just open Uber on their own goddamn phone?

Also: Here’s Lily Herman’s Formula 1 newsletter Engine Failure about the Formula 1 content creator market but actually about all content creator markets. Liz wrote about Tim Apple’s gross crush fetish ad which everybody hated. Casey Johnston on Anne Hathaway’s hips and Lyz Lenz on Anne Hathaway’s middle aged fantasy. Luke Winkie went on the Creed reunion cruise and wondered “If ‘the worst band of the 1990s’ is suddenly good, does that mean all music is good now?” No it just means everyone has lost the ability to distinguish good things from bad things. You know who evolved and changed his mind but never lost that ability? Steve Albini. Tom Scocca also wrote a good appreciation of Albini’s work, and Albini’s Grub Street diet was an all-time classic.

And Finally, Sabrina Imbler asks “Want To Eat This Snake? What If It Was Dead, Bleeding From The Mouth, And Covered In Poop? What Then?” Well I guess I’d really have to think about it, Sabrina.

Today’s Song: Chapell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”

Thanks Music Intern Sam, who would like to add that his radio show NO CHILL returns tonight on the Chinatown stream at kchungradio.org 9pm PT.

Yesterday I complained about the lack of good tabs lately in order to prod the monkey’s paw of discourse to shake a finger, and this morning The Cut came through with pseudonymous writer Evelyn Jouvenet’s essay about her physically healthy but emotionally terrorizing mother’s assisted suicide in Switzerland at age seventy four: “The Last Thing My Mother Wanted.” The specific last thing her mother wanted, it turns out, was to unsubscribe from Politico. Relatable.¹  

And in an even more obvious response to my plea, today The New York Times’ Susanne Craig reports that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would-be presidential spoiler and the last damp squib of a once-proud American crime family, has actual brain worms:

This leaves us with the hilarious possibility that his brain worm died of mercury poisoning. A real good news / bad news situation for Mr. Kennedy.

Futurism continues to own the A.I. content marketing scammer beat, with Maggie Harrison Dupré reporting that AdVon, the affiliate marketing grey goo factory that effectively killed Sports Illustrated, also had deals with “more than 150 publishers.”

AdVon is currently being put out of business very gradually by Futurism calling each of its customers one by one to ask if they’re ashamed of themselves. Meanwhile Garbage Ryan reports that all of social media is A.I. goo now. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.

Jordan Stone is somehow the opposite of all that:

@jrdnstn

FTX now has enough money to pay all account holders back with interest, as the larger crypto Ponzi somehow continues unabated. (A) Uh, good for them I guess but (B) no this doesn’t mean SBF didn’t do any crimes.²  Also Matt Levine points out that:

Lol. Lmao.

What Did I Learn?

Many of you sent me tabs yesterday and I learned so much.

I learned about Animal Crime: After dragging the victim of a car crash out of his car and into the woods, a Massachusetts bear “wandered away while police were at the crash,” presumably out of professional courtesy. I also learned from Jake Bienvenue what it’s like to be the Chik-fil-a cow and get beat up by a whole dojo of vicious Taekwondo kids. And apparently there is a “global monkey torture network?” What the hell. We don’t need that!

I learned about Art: Yesterday’s centaur sculptor David Černý made a giant rotating David Lynch head in Santa Monica, and Aron Wiesenfeld‘s Post-it note art is cool. I also learned that Jeff Koons’ “authorized” moon lander artwork “Jeff Koons: Moon Phases” will probably outlive both of those, as well all other earthbound art and the existence of humanity.

From Joshua Rigsby I learned that Babyland General Hospital, where Cabbage Patch Kids are born, not only still exists but still puts on an unsettling “live birth experience.” Stretching the “today” in Today in Tabs to a geological scale, in 2003 the Tampa Bay Times reported that “Tampa's 1958 Snow Show was an epic fiasco.” I include it here because headline technology in 2003 was not as developed as it is now, and this headline significantly undersells the disaster that unfolded when a thirty two year old adman attempted to create a winter wonderland in Tampa, FL. I don’t know what category this is but these two tabs have the same vibe in some ineffable way.

I learned that Dudes Rock: including Victor Wembayana who rocks at basketball and “Three co-workers” who rock at spending their "day off burglarizing cars at Oakland airport.” And I learned that Garth Brooks was a college javelin thrower. Don’t stop rocking, dudes.

And finally I learned that according to Marie Solis, Miranda July “Wrote the First Great Perimenopause Novel,” but we’re all still waiting twelve years later for the Congressional report on what exactly Miranda July’s whole thing is.

C'est le jour du Met Gala, c'est donc aussi celui de mon désormais classique thread

✨ LES TENUES DU MET GALA AS GRAPHIQUES DE L'INSEE ✨

On commence avec Zendaya as Origine et destination des étudiants en mobilité selon la taille de l’unité urbaine

— Clara Dealberto (@claradealberto)
7:52 AM • May 7, 2024

Everyone who sent me a tab yesterday, thank you! It was a delight reading them all, whether I found a place for yours above or not.

Not a delight is the news that legendary musician and producer Steve Albini died yesterday, far too young at age sixty one. In memoriam, here’s his landmark 1993 Baffler story, “The Problem With Music,” which has been made free for everyone to read. RIP Steve, you were one of vanishingly few people who ever grew out of being an online edgelord.

Today’s Song: Big Black, “L. Dopa”

No Big Black on Spotify so this one won’t be in the playlist, sorry.

Steve Albini Standing Outside Gates of Heaven Telling Everyone How Much He Hates the Smashing Pumpkins

— The Hard Times (@REALpunknews)
6:41 PM • May 8, 2024

Let’s play a game: 

Three of the following Met Gala pictures are A.I. fakes. See if you can tell which ones.

1. Greta Lee

2. Katy Perry

3. Lauren Sánchez

4. Cardi B

5. Lana Del Rey

6. Rihanna

7. Zendaya

8. Zendaya

9. Cole Escola

10. Demi Moore

How did you do? I’ll put the answers in a footnote. Oh also, I lied: only two of them are fake. Now how did you do?¹  

TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling collected the best fakes that made the rounds yesterday; real pictures via Times Styles’ “20 Unforgettable Looks at the Met Gala” and purported “only person in the Greta Lee Hive” Jude Doyle. I know some of you are hollering “IT WAS OBVIOUS!” but putting this together messed with my head. Has anyone ever looked less convincing than Lauren Sánchez? And even Katy Perry’s mom was fooled by what I thought was the faker-looking fake Perry.

Town & Country’s Erik Maza panned the Gala looks, calling them “a field of corny hydrangeas,” and also “the exhibit the Met Ball ostensibly celebrates, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’.”

This probably counts as a savage roast in fashion-curation circles, but Maza wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me (literary feuds). In Flaming Hydra, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd roasted the Met Gala, Anna Wintour, John Galliano, Coco Chanel, the rest of the fashion industry, and the “flesh of the foundational U.S. mythos,” which “is rotting and falling away, so that its ugly bones are finally laid bare all at once” as Israeli tanks roll all the way to the Rafah border crossing.

New Centaur Dropped:

It’s not really new, this is Czech sculptor David Černý’s “Pegasus,” from 2017. There’s one in the Prague airport. The propellors spin!

Substack pivots to YouTube. Sure, I don’t know, whatever. RIP Panera death lemonade. RIP Refinery29 and its “new CEO Cory Haik.” Previously in Cory Haik. Even more previously in Cory Haik.

There’s not a lot to read in Tabs today because I haven’t seen much that’s held my interest this week. I couldn’t make myself care about Honor Levy’s short stories. I’m sure her mother is very proud, or I’m sorry about her mother, but I ain’t reading all that. Everybody says the Zadie Smith thing in The New Yorker is weird, but the first paragraph is made of Ambien so I guess I’m never going to find out what else is wrong with it. And the song of the moment is by… Macklemore?

HIND’S HALL. Once it’s up on streaming all proceeds to UNRWA.

— Macklemore (@macklemore)
10:52 PM • May 6, 2024

I’ll admit, he’s finally mackling the correct amount. But how about we turn this relationship around and you hit reply and email me anything you read this week that made you feel some type of way other than “sure, I guess.” Am I out of touch? Are the kids wrong? Is it summer already?

Today’s Song: Petey, “The River”

I mean it, send me your link of the day. I’m dying of boredom out here.

A Cybertruck went to Nantucket
and parked in a crosswalk, like: “Suck it!”
Costs one hundred grand
but it don’t run in sand,
“I Pull Out” had to come and unstuck it.

I swear I wrote that limerick before I saw this skeet, which is also good.

That’s a little amuse bouche for what Liz Lopatto predicts will be the hottest Meltdown May in recorded history. Ben Smith knows how to capitalize on a meltdown opportunity, framing his Semafor interview with New York Times executive editor and Harvard University native Joe Kahn with the question ”Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?” What a trap! You honestly have to admire it.

Despite the flawless editorial judgement of his Styles Desk, it’s increasingly obvious that Kahn is not up to the demands of the job. Explaining why the Times must treat Trump as a normal candidate, he said: “Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair.” (My emphasis.) So, we might be electing a President who will never risk another fair election, but as long as this election is fair, it’s not the Times’ job to point that out to its readers. Cool. He also said that the Times’ editorial priorities are driven by polling, which is embarrassing for him. And then there was this odd exchange:

After the infamous 2020 Tom Cotton “Send in the Troops” editorial, Black Times staff coördinated to put out the message: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” Kahn awkwardly shoehorning “safe spaces” in here reads to me as a direct, if belated, reply to that movement, saying that his New York Times should not be considered a safe place for Black journalists, and casting their legitimate fear of the incredible damage that could result from America’s Last Newspaper calling for a military attack on civilians as simply a bit of journalism they “are not going to like.” But apparently everyone knows their place now, because Kahn believes that 2020 “…was an extreme moment. I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that.”

— snowboiiii (@snowboiiii)
9:41 AM • May 6, 2024

After this mess of an interview, maybe Joe Kahn should get some media training from the Columbia student protesters who were too smart to talk to former Reagan speechwriter and current Reagan editorial writer Peggy Noonan. On Twitter, smug White House stenographer Peter Baker idiotically mischaracterized a right wing editorialist trolling for outrage-bait as “journalists who are there to listen.” But Meltdown May 2024 couldn’t just leave it there. Stanford Professor Hakeem Jefferson made a pointed observation about Baker’s post vis-a-vis the grand journalistic virtue of Objectivity, and then followed up by sharing a snotty email he received from Baker’s son, Stanford student journalist Theo Baker, demanding he take the post down.

via @raf.bsky.social 

The kid has a bright future at the Times, unless someone much better than Joe Kahn takes over.

All that and we haven’t even gotten to the Kendrick-Drake beef yet! The feud blew up so big over the weekend that even Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking all the clueless white people suddenly invested in rap drama. I’m not gonna try to explain it, because either you’re already pinning red string on your basement crazy wall to connect Whitney and Dave Free to Pharrell’s grudge against Birdman, or you don’t really need to get involved in this. Instead, here’s what I think are some highlights that can bring joy and value to newb and obsessive alike:

• Why does everyone hate Drake? Watch this Tiktok from @xeviuniverse.

• Can I read something instead? Ok, read this Defector post by Israel Daramola. It’s from Thursday, and the exchange of diss tracks really blew up over the weekend but it’s good for the previouslies.

• Is Uma Thurman involved, somehow? You bet she is.

• If you need to get way too deep into this for personal reasons of your own which I, of all people, am not going to question, let me put you on to Christian Divyne who was my rap beef Walter Cronkite all weekend.

• Are any of these diss tracks actually good? Yes! “Not Like Us” is an absolute bop that is already affecting the culture in general. And Metro Boomin’s #bbldrizzybeatgiveaway is a genuine innovation in crowdsourced lyrical beatdowns. Drake’s got Soundcloud rappers from Tokyo taking shots at him now, lol.

• Vince Staples made some real points.

• So who’s winning? J. Cole.

lmao you think kendrick's the only one who can go back-to-back?? spent all night in the studio with drake working on another one... we got his ass

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon)
2:20 PM • May 6, 2024

The Condé Uñion threatened to picket the only thing Anna Wintour truly cares about: the Met Gala, and suddenly found itself with a tentative contract. Congratu-dolences to all the Schrödinger-fired former residents of the Condé rubber room, who will now be sent off to freelancer-hood with a flat eight weeks of severance.

Matt Alston: “Everyone Hates Workday.” Today in tabs. Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy read everything Elon Musk posted in a week, and it’s worse than you think. Becca Rothfeld reviewed Nellie Bowles’ boring book. And is that a bag of snakes in your pants or—

Today’s Song: Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us”

This weekend I went out and sat in a tent in the rain to start Today on Trail for real, and today the first adorable ToT stickers arrived. We leave for the A.T. on July second, so get signed up. Yes, I will tell you how you can get stickers… when the time is right.

They’re so cute.

What is it like to have America’s Last Newspaper cast the Eye of Sauron directly upon you? To be honest, it’s deeply embarrassing to bring it up again, like “Hey did you know I was pRoFiLeD in the nEw YoRk TiMeS??“ Ugh, shut up. But I didn’t know what that whole experience was going to be like, and I bet most of you (but definitely not all of you) don’t know what it would be like either, so at the risk of looking like a self-satisfied douchebag, it seems worth describing how it went.

How it started

On February 20th, I got an email from Steven Kurutz with the subject line “Times profile,” which said “Hey Rusty, We'd like to profile you for the Times Styles section,” and mentioned a Styles editor and longtime Tabs reader who suggested the idea. It was four sentences and closed “Would you be up for that?” I read this email in my truck in the parking lot of the Millinocket McDonald’s, devouring a traditional post-woods Big Mac on my way out of Baxter State Park after Presidents Day weekend winter search and rescue coverage. I wrote back “Sounds good to me,” and suggested some times I’d be free in the next week, assuming it would be a phone call at most. Steven got back to me the next day, writing “Glad you're up for it. I have a few outstanding assignments to tackle first. I would report the story sometime this spring.” Ok? Not a phone call then.

Trust the process

About a month later he got back to me and I arranged to pick him up from the ferry on a Wednesday morning that week. I picked him up off the 9:30 boat but apparently I “didn’t say much during the short drive” to my house. Steven captured the vibe of the interview well in the story itself. He brought me a croissant from Standard Baking on Commercial St. which if you know, you know. I nursed that croissant for the next three hours because it’s hard to eat a flaky pastry and talk at the same time.

The interview was not really what I expected. We sat at my kitchen table the whole time, and he unobtrusively recorded it but also took notes by hand. It felt very scattered to me—we jumped around a lot in time, going all the way back to childhood, college, my early career, more recent media stuff. I felt like he followed where I went more than he led me, which is probably the mark of a good interviewer. I ended it feeling like he’d gotten a pretty good overview of my life, but if you had asked me what the framing of the piece would be I could not have guessed. I was expecting it to be more Tabs focused, but by the end it was clear that he was interested in my life as a whole, so he got the full lore dump.

At his inauguration in 2021, Joe Biden pledged that:

Yesterday he finally succeeded in bringing together the fractious and seemingly intractably opposed edges of the American political spectrum, as pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel counter-protesters at the University of Alabama took turns earnestly screaming “Fuck Joe Biden” at each other.

Both sides now chanting “F***” Joe Biden”

— Maven Navarro (@MavenNavarro1)
9:37 PM • May 1, 2024

Last week I accidentally mentioned Eugene McCarthy and then thought “wow I hope this doesn’t unlock something in my understanding of the present political moment.” Oops! Now we have a historically unpopular Democratic President stubbornly maintaining American involvement in a historically unpopular foreign war, for idiosyncratic ideological reasons. We have an anti-war protest movement blazing up among young people across University campuses nationwide and being met with panicked repression from sclerotic college administrations wielding a post-BLM police force that recognizes no need for restraint and the right wing gangs who work alongside them to create the conditions of violence required for police to justify the use of force on protesters, in the unlikely event they ever need to justify it.

Extremist militias are prepping for the ascension of a vindictive authoritarian monster, bent on revenge against the political and cultural elites who are paradoxically delighted at the prospect of having him to kick around again. Here’s Matthew Schmitz guessaying in New York Times Opinion today that maybe Donald Trump is the fun kind of criminal—“lawless, yes, but in the name of a higher law.” Don’t blame me, I voted for the man who shot Liberty Valance. Meanwhile the Democratic opposition, such as it is, seems determined to ignore a generational political realignment rapidly stripping electoral ground out from under them.

Yesterday, for example, a large majority of House Democrats voted to pass a bill which seeks to codify into law the IHRA list of contemporary examples of antisemitism, which include “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner explained:

The bill was opposed by your usual Jerrys Nadler and Alexandrias Ocasio-Cortez on the left, for obvious free speech reasons. It was also opposed by your Marjories Taylor Greene, Laurens Boebert and Mattz Gaet on the far right, for the less obvious free speech reason that it would prohibit their personal favorite antisemitic trope. But one hundred thirty three Democrats voted yea, seemingly unable to foresee the coming wave of election season attack ads accusing the majority of their potential volunteers and voters of being legally antisemitic according to the definition they just endorsed on the record.

Today Joe Biden delivered four minutes of “Remarks on Recent Events on College Campuses” which seemed perversely tuned to make no one happy. In the time-honored tradition of people who are currently losing at politics, he declared that “this isn’t a moment for politics,” then went on to define actions like being somewhere or saying something as “violent protest” which is incompatible with American civil society. “Dissent is essential to democracy,” Biden said. “But dissent must never lead to disorder.” Joe… c’mon, man.

Last night at Dartmouth, Hanover police tackled and arrested sixty five year old Annelise Orleck, along with other faculty and at least ninety students. Orleck reports that after thirty four years of teaching at the University, she’s now banned from campus. She was formerly the chair of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies program.

Anyway I’m sure this will all die down before the Democratic National Convention in August which will be held in… Chicago.

Also Today in I Hope This Doesn’t Unlock Something In Me:

“Alpaca Sex Is Even Weirder Than You Think.” Respectfully, Ed Cara, you have no idea how weird I think alpaca sex is. Mpreg Bluey episode released on YouTube. You heard me. Fifteen vehicles in Portland, OR destroyed in police car involved burning. Jason Koebler: “Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet.” New form of venture-capitalist-specific masturbation discovered.

that’s a me, espresso

— Carrie Wittmer 👻 (@carriesnotscary)
12:08 AM • May 2, 2024

Kyle declares “Espresso” song of the summer. The「Nightcore」version hits though.

Joanna Coles has taken over at the The Daily Beast, and Justin Miller reports that it’s not going great so far.

The last time one of Barry Diller’s websites was taken over by pirates they turned out to be a front for cult money-laundering activities, so good luck I guess. Make sure you know what’s on your servers.

Another Boeing whistleblower died unexpectedly? Wow, what bad luck these people keep having.

PLEASE STOP EMAILING US HARRIET.

Madison Malone Kircher’s scene report from the Hate Reads party at The River: A Party for the Haters.

Weed Strain Generator (via Laura Olin).

Today’s Song: Teardrops, “Bring Me The Horizon”

This week y’all.

“University Calls in 1,000 Police to End Demonstration As Nearly 700 Are Arrested and 100 Injured; Violent Solution Follows Failure of Negotiations” read the headline in the Columbia Daily Spectator almost exactly fifty six years ago. Last night, Columbia’s Hamilton Hall looked like this:

David Dee Delgado/Reuters via The Guardian

In 2018, the University looked back on those 1968 protests and smugly concluded that:

If Columbia is a different place today, the difference may only be found in how fast University President Minouche Shafik called the NYPD goon squad to demand last night’s raid and mass arrests. Shafik claimed “that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the University.” So far the evidence presented to reporters that “outside agitators” are responsible for the Hamilton Hall occupation consists of a bike chain that NYPD Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard toured around the talk shows, where he declared in the war-weary matter-of-fact tone that cops take when they’re about to tell you a real fat stinker of a lie: “This is not what students bring to school, ok? This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities.” Professionals? Professional whats? Professional bike-securers?

404’s Samantha Cole reports that the bike lock in question is:

Bike chains notwithstanding, when Hell Gate’s Christopher Robbins asked the more straightforward question: “were any outside agitators arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall?” Sheppard claimed that Commissioner Rebecca Weiner said there were, however they still had to “run names by Columbia.” But somehow despite not having confirmed who is or isn’t associated with the University, “we know that they were outside agitators.” Seems legit. They just know.

Hell Gate’s Anna Oakes and Claudia Gohn have some of the best in-person reporting on last night’s police violence that I’ve seen, along with reporting by Esha Karam, Shea Vance, Sarah Huddleston, Amira Mckee, and Manuela Silva in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Before that, New York Magazine photographer Alex Kent was inside Hamilton Hall with the occupying demonstrators when they first took over the building. For what it’s worth, Kent refers to them throughout as “students.”

Alex Kent/Getty Images via New York

Well. At least we’re all in this together. By which I mean we’re all looking at our phones at more or less similar times of day

— noah kulwin (@nkulw)
4:35 AM • May 1, 2024

Most of us weren’t at Columbia or in New York last night, and Shelby Lorman captured what all this felt like to experience remotely through social media and glitchy radio streams. For more on the historical parallels, yesterday’s Sword and the Sandwich was an essay by David Swanson: “History Repeats Itself at Columbia.”

If you’re as impressed as I am by the student journalists at Columbia covering all this, Spectator Board of Trustees Chair Megan Greenwell points out that the student newspaper is “an independent nonprofit with zero financial ties to the university, if you want to kick them some money.”

But could Columbia have taken a different path? Well, at UCLA last night:

There were “no visible arrests.” So I guess one approach is to let an ad-hoc gang beat on the protestors, throw fireworks, and yell militant Zionist slogans at them for three hours before casually letting the attacking mob go home. On the other hand, at Brown University:

I guess only time will tell which approach is better. If you think you could run a college better than any of these clowns, Wells College on the shores of New York’s beautiful Cayuga Lake is closing. What if we buy it and open the University of Tabs, NY? Our literary magazine could be the UTNY Reader.

And if I made a list of people whose opinions are not required on this or any other topic, I wouldn’t even have remembered Judith Miller exists. But here she is, ol’ Iraqi WMDs @JMfreespeech herself:

Hey Columbia protesters! If you’re so proud of what you’re doing, why are you covering your faces?

— Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech)
1:55 AM • May 1, 2024

Wow I didn’t mean to make this the whole newsletter today but I am obviously heated about it. Among other things that happened are included such diverse events as:

• Caitlin Dewey relaunched her great if anachronistically titled newsletter “Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends,” just in time for the upcoming Tabs hiking hiatus. I can recommend it, but what I can’t do is recommend it enough.

• Today in Bees: A swarm of bees occupied Phoenix’s Chase Field last night, delaying the scheduled Dodgers-Diamondbacks game.

• Today in Beehiivs: Our… platform raised a $33 million Series Bee funding round. Never a great sign, but I’m still pretty happy here at the moment.

• Saturday Knifecrime Fever (via Garbage Day).

• Sean Hollister on the water fountain button.

• Liz would love to know what CZ gave the Feds.

• Elon Musk fired the whole Supercharger team apparently? Wild.

And Finally: From Rosemary Mosco: “Real and Implied Bird Species.” (Her Patreon is right here.)

Today’s Song: Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso”

Buzz buzz. Don’t forget to subscribe to Today on Trail.

“Ken Klippenstein Announces Plan To Lose His Mind” reports @swolecialism on Bluesky after the newly self-employed journalist posted a grievance-drenched Substack jeremiad roasting his former employer The Intercept and congratulating himself for quitting to start a newsletter. The post is enjoyably messy, even by the high standards of past Intercept departures, but getting to the good stuff does require that the reader wade through a lot of “we have Aaron Sorkin at home” type rhetoric on the high-minded pursuit of journalism and “the elites frog marching us through” something something. In his new project on the Nazi newsletter platform, Klippenstein promises:

Ya like jazz?

Klippenstein, who is not a Krassenstein, will be joined by editor William Arkin who allegedly edited this very post, which includes a current org chart for The Intercept meant to illustrate “how top-heavy it has become with business hires,” a description Choire didn’t agree with.

The post gets more interesting after that, with several behind the scenes tales of hot gritty newsroom drama which will appeal to the kind of media sicko who reads Tabs, and which largely feature in the role of villain Klippenstein’s arch-nemesis, Intercept general counsel David Bralow “who” allegedly “resembles a Catholic priest caricatured in one of Martin Luther’s tracts, living well off the generosity of his modest parishioners.” Ok?? Also included is a PDF of an email thread that lays out The Intercept’s source protection checklist, which is as careful and thorough as you’d expect from an organization that would like to avoid sending any more sources to jail. Editor Arkin’s response is “this sounds like a joke to me,” so I guess keep that in mind if you’re considering leaking anything sensitive to this new venture.

All that said, Today in Tabs is institutionally pro-quitting, so I do wish them success, and however much media liability insurance they’ve purchased, I hope it’s Kenough.

Also Today in Bees:

The BeeBeeC reports that “A little girl said monsters were in her bedroom. It was 60,000 bees.”

Y̸̘͎̓͆ā̶̡̖̈́ ̶̺̥̃͌l̴̢̛ḭ̷̙͊͝k̵̤̆e̶͇̅ ̷͈́͆j̶̜̆̾â̶̙z̶̤͙̓z̸̨̅?̷̛̭̞̌

Also Today in Media:

Unlike tool of the billionaire elites Max Tani, who will never count as an impact point as long as he insists on frog marching us blindfolded through a sanitized world of make-believe, Today in Tabs can fearlessly and EXCLUSIVELY report that the Onion article Ben Collins failed to plant in the Semafor media newsletter was “Girlfriend’s Eyes Peeking Up Over Torso During Blow Job Like Gator In Bayou.” Corporate shills in the pocket of Big Gator may try to hide the truth, but I never will.

Parker Molloy: “Boy, I Sure Was Wrong About Tucker Carlson's Post-Fox Fate.” I’m so glad Tucker Carlson died before Trump’s second run too!

The Wrap’s Umberto Gonzalez reports that The Rock “was late an average of seven to eight hours per day” on the set for long-delayed dumb Christmas movie RED ONE, and also gets into the whole pee bottle thing. Until today I didn’t know The Rock had a “pee bottle thing,” but now I do, so now you have to know as well. That’s newsletters. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They found the “Everyone Knows That” song, in a porn from 1986. That link is to The Guardian and is perfectly safe for work, I’m sorry it’s often so difficult to tell.

The Rabbit R1 is another useless AI assistant that can’t do anything, according to Marques Brownlee who seems tired of reviewing the broken junk that tech is putting out lately. Allison Johnson played “Are you smarter than just googling it?” and found that: no.

“Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius” confirm that in his final hours on earth, Plato was still a dick:

*danzig mother voice*

frasier

— Dopey The Dumbfuck (@pete_irons87206)
6:09 PM • Apr 29, 2024

And Finally: I haven’t written much about how University administrators and cops have been treating the student anti-war protests because it’s difficult to be funny or entertaining about things that actually make me furious, and I’m sure you’re seeing it everywhere else already. Fortunately David Roth wrote what needs to be said.

Today’s Song: “Revolution (B-Boy Anthem),” by Zion I

A couple people have mentioned recently that I link to a lot of stuff that’s paywalled, which is kinda just how media is now that we’ve decided as a society that Google and Facebook should have all the ad revenue. But if it helps, last year (which is canonically 2022) I wrote a whole post about the best ways to access paywalled stories, and most of it still holds up:

How To Do Crimes

But first: Today in #Pets

www.todayintabs.com/p/be-gay-do-crimes

Robble robble!

“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” right? Not today, pal:

Rampaging zebras and an [extreme scare quotes] “rodeo clown” who just “happened to be in the area?” Sounds like North Bend, Washington is a good place to get:

When you hear “raw milk,” think H5N1 bird flu according to Helen Branswell at Stat News, who reports that “the FDA said Thursday that about 1 in 5 [commercial milk] samples tested for H5N1 from across the country have been positive.” Pasteurization kills the virus, good vibes from the milk guy at the farmers market do not, so I guess if you like those odds go ahead and roll the dice, Big Dog.

When you hear a huge crowd chanting ”EAT THOSE BALLS” and “LISAN AL GAIB” think “the guy who ate an entire jar of cheese balls in Union Square this weekend and almost threw up.” I can’t believe it’s still almost Meltdown May again already!¹  

When you hear Jerry Seinfeld whine about “woke culture ruining comedy,” think “what is the deal with girlfriends always having homework!?”

And when you hear “Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex,” think: “erectile dysfunction.” But don’t worry if you forget, because he will definitely remind you.

If you didn’t know by now, I’m sorry to inform you it’s Monday—President James A. Garfield’s least favorite day. Here are some affirmations to get us all through another week:

“My heart is beating
the dead inside allegations.”

Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of State and South American death squad enthusiast Elliott Abrams got himself a solid Chotining:

The end of this one’s a banger, don’t miss it. And in New Zealand, Newsroom’s Steve Braunias did an interview with the right wing ACT Party’s new spokesman for the arts Todd Stephenson that reads like what would happen if Isaac Chotiner took a railroad spike through his frontal lobe and just started telling people what he thinks of them:

How Are We Surviving Job Today? Former NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins escaped being slowly driven insane by his old job with the surprising but difficult to replicate strategy of convincing the cofounder of Twilio to buy The Onion for him. On Bluesky, Collins posted that “The Onion takeover started when I posted "so uh how do we buy The Onion?" on Bluesky.” Remember: you never get anything you don’t ask for. Technically The Onion is now owned by Global Tetrahedron, a corporation “committed to control in all its forms” and whose values include “Porcupine Breeding: Our innovation extends beyond ideas that have a clear path to monetization,” which already puts it way ahead of G/O Media in terms of strategy. Honestly this couldn’t be better news, congratulations to Ben and his new co-conspirators Leila Brillson and Danielle Strle who are all probably reading this right now.

Via Semafor’s Media Newsletter, no copyright intended. What was the screenshot, Ben? I’ll publish it. I’ll publish anything. RIP to my big NYT profile reader boom but I gotta be me.

Jude Doyle just keeps knocking them out of the park. The Millennial Captcha: I could not have passed this any more easily. Lincoln Michel reiterates that “Yes, people do buy books.” Will Stancil launches innovative “Cancel Stancil” fundraising campaign. Hate Read ends with Delia roasting Hate Read itself. “And these past couple weeks, I have duly considered your hate reads and I find them pathetic. You don’t hate these things. You merely hate that you got too old to enjoy them anymore.”

And Finally: via The Browser, “The Unstallable Plane That Stalled.”

Today’s Song: Imperial Teen, “Ivanka”

Music Intern Sam is back! Let the cool songs resume. I realized recently that I used to post my social media @s all the time down here and at some point I just stopped, so for old times sake: I mostly post on Bluesky these days, @rusty.todayintabs.com. I was On One this morning, for sure.