Andrew Barker

Having horrible flashbacks to the Try Guys ordeal, where publications that had never mentioned the Try Guys once before started issuing thrice-daily news alerts on the dullest sex scandal you’d ever seen.

This excerpt from a 1994 Spin magazine story about Soundgarden (written by the legendary Jonathan Gold) is all you need to know about Billy Corgan. We are all Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Took a job in my early 20s manning the front desk at a tiny Las Vegas personal injury law firm. It was run by husband-wife lawyers who called malpractice “the M word” more than once during my 10-minute interview. I left for my lunch break on day one and never came back.

I recently witnessed this happen IRL, and the guy seemed surprised when everyone stopped and looked at him like “what the fuck…?” Like he thought that was just something everyone was saying in polite conversation now. A whole chunk of the adult population assertively unlearning basic social skills.

Like most of Bluesky, Kristi Noem has clearly never heard “Choosin’ Texas,” which is explicitly a song about Ella Langley not being from Texas.

Incredible that today’s two Anthropic stories are “it should be illegal to be mean to our chatbot” and also “heads up, our chatbot sent the cops a fake murder tip and tried to apply for some visas.”

Aside from everything else, I think we’ve learned from the entirety of human history that people whose lives are just a series of their own preferences lose their fucking minds and do a lot of damage to everyone else.

This is a wonderfully written piece. I especially love the phrase “the arithmetic of trophies.” 20 years ago, the team I support was handed a trophy after the fact, and I still don’t know how to feel about it. “We were the best runners-up in a competition no one won” is the best I can put it.

there are PLENTY of writers who come from a blue collar background and have worked in the trades and i can't remember ever seeing one of them publish an op-ed about how everyone should pivot to hard, painful physical labor

This is probably true, but when the purveyors of this tech — who happen to be among the richest and most powerful people on earth — are busy spinning some of the wildest bullshit I’ve ever heard in its favor, I’m less concerned that some regular dude saying “AI sucks lol” doesn’t have all the facts.

trump going on an emergency 17 state media tour to support republican candidates before the midterms and he is going with “nobody knows that dumb has a b on the end”

He often flies under the radar because he’s not a sweaty cartoon like Hegseth or a deranged psycho like RFK, but Carr is one of the most flagrantly, shamelessly degenerate public officials I’ve ever seen. No interest in pretending otherwise, just out there loving every minute of this.

If you want "personalized music" made just for you pick up a fucking guitar. Or else break the heart of someone who already has.

Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” held the record for longest-running No. 1 for 23 years. I remember that song. It was very big. But at no point did it ever feel like Mariah or Boyz II Men’s most popular song. I’m guessing most under-30s have probably never heard it. Charts are funny.

everyone who's ever joined in an online pile on should read this.

“Middlebrow” is the perfect level of brow for a movie to be. if you want smarter read a book if you want dumber read some posts

Right before I left twitter for good, I got into some real humdingers because I thought it was irresponsible to detonate thousands of explosive devices when you had zero idea where they were located.

A warning about the supposed final Fall album that’s coming out soon: it is NOT a real Fall album, it’s just Mark E Smith rambling nonsense over music that has no connection to the vocal

Finally listening to the new Carly Rae Jepsen, which is pretty great. I do think she could have lost a track or three and made “Amalfi Coast” at least three times longer. Few pop songs from this decade are screaming for a Neil Bogart-style 12” treatment like that one is.

"This election is about the threat of trans kids" is the worst possible messaging for Dems yet so many candidates are leaning into it. No voter will flip R->D over it. Low-info voters read this as "you're focused on bullshit that doesn't affect me" while the base reads this as "you're an asshole."

When I moved from Arkansas to LA as a kid in the ‘90s, the near-total absence of mosquitos was truly shocking. In the best way — I soon stopped associating summer with being itchy 24/7. Fast forward 30 years, and my citronella candle and mosquito repellant budget is starting to become a problem.

One of the most important moments in my musical education: My gloriously Afroed, 70s refugee 5th grade basketball coach hears me blasting this cover way too loud on my Walkman. He asks: “You’ve heard the original, right? No? Oh man. I’m gonna bring you a tape tomorrow.”

Are you a person who listens to and enjoys country music from this or any other era? Failing that, have you eaten dinner at a Texas Roadhouse within the last year? Great, you likely have a more sophisticated understanding of why country is trending up than the NYT op-ed, and don’t need to read it.

There are very real safety concerns we need to address with generative LLMs. Deepfakes, privacy, AI psychosis, etc We don't need to entertain goofy nonsense from people claiming they're inventing the torment nexus from the science fiction classic "Dipshit That's Not The Torment Nexus Go Outside."

On my 15th birthday I was inexplicably given a Hank Williams boxed set as a gift. It took me months to get around to listening to it, but once I did I barely listened to anything else for a while. Had previously assumed that genre/era had nothing to offer me; turned out I was very wrong.

69-year-old man in too-tight polo shirt who’s spent the last 40 years sitting on corporate boards and writing checks to software companies while enjoying material comforts that Ptolemaic pharaohs would have found decadent: “It is very important that I convince this podcaster I’m a real badass.”

One of the global hallmarks of the anti-trans movement is that it's pushing people to reject levels of gender integration that were completely uncontroversial as recently as a few years ago.

My first time covering SXSW, I got an extremely long, extremely detailed pitch to come watch and interview the then-unknown Grimes, which devoted multiple paragraphs to her Mississippi riverboat excursion. (In hindsight, I’m pretty sure she wrote it herself.) I’ve never turned a pitch down faster.

By almost any measure Dolly embodied "the American Dream." Some people will come from nothing and make it big and consider the problem now solved. Others will remember that there are still others with nothing and use what they have to help.

Cops sent out a public APB and splashed surveillance footage everywhere to try and catch an old man who picked up $30 off the floor of a Walmart and gave it back to the guy who dropped it.

Even putting aside the hatefulness of his broader campaign, this is just an astonishingly embarrassing way for anyone old enough to get a driver’s license to behave. Like, “everyone in the freshman dorm common room gets up and leaves when they see you coming” level embarrassing.

Unfortunate to see this break containment and spread to people who seem unfamiliar with Kacey’s Whole Deal.

"2Pac is Alive" conspiracies were once inescapable. Truthers pointed to numerology, lyrics, Cuba sightings and "doctored" coroner's photos. But seeing the autopsy pictures in court was a horrifying reminder of how real, tragic, and senseless it all was. www.powmag.net/p/2pac-trial...

Any “pragmatist” Democratic strategist who previously cited polling to push candidates toward more conservative positions that *isn’t* currently telling them to go nuclear against data centers was never actually serious.

They are such mainstays of classic rock radio that it flies under the radar how thrillingly weird ZZ Top is. The only band to really embody what a strange, strange place Texas is in its mix of aggro macho posing and the tacky kitsch undergirding that image.

i don't love the image rehabilitation of this guy from 'total wingnut' to 'harmless oddball' but i do think it's worth pointing out that even the total wingnut keeps being way more sane and normal about zohran than various professional commentators

"There's something that Notorious B.I.G. once told me. Honestly. We were in a hotel in Providence. I was interviewing him, and what he told me, he said, fuck the guys, the girls are the ones that buy the tapes. Same thing with books." www.welcometohellworld.com/everyone-in-...

Every few months people are like “Is BlueSky dying” and every few months it doesn’t fucking matter because who gives a shit

So the story he’s going with is that he and the Secret Service pulled off an elaborate, ‘60s caper movie scheme to secretly sneak him onto a plane where he was *more* likely to be killed?

I usually steer clear of generational warfare discourse, but the fact that we’ve only had one president born after the 1940s — who won his last election 14 years ago — is a very meaningful facet of modern US politics. This is not the case at all in other western democracies! It’s pretty weird!