Ethan Fry

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton invented the inverted pyramid while composing messages about Lincoln’s assassination to be sent via telegraph.

Pentagon Records Missed Almost Half of Troops’ Domestic Abuse Killings Essential accountability reporting by Daniel Johnson and Austin Campbell theintercept.com/2026/10/26/m...

👻 No tricks, just treats made by union workers! Get your Halloween candy stash ready with these union-made favorites. 🍬

It’s an impossible task to name what makes your own daughter special? We are not okay, fam.

I think the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity

Do you want to see the most cursed photo of all time?

Not great

Two University of Leicester students speak out over ‘absurd’ and ‘Orwellian’ decision by the BBC and ITV Studios to edit out pride pins worn on University Challenge

oceans are battlefields

I feel seen

JK Rowling’s transphobia has ruined Harry Potter. That is a shame, there was a real magic in the fantasy of it. As a kid, I always loved imagining going to private coed boarding school. Inheriting a big pile of money. Drinking non alcoholic beer. Owning a little slave guy

Met Dante and his sister years ago while writing a story about how his late brother was the youngest “beachmaster” on D-Day.

Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”

Memories...

the right doesn't reject empathy entirely, they selectively deploy it. when a white person is murdered by an immigrant, for example, they will call upon your empathy. but empathy directed at their enemies is cast aside as toxic.

This is a quietly metastasizing moral panic

when critics of bari weiss say that she is not a journalist, we mean that literally. she does not respect or even appear to understand the values of the profession. everything for her is propaganda. www.semafor.com/article/10/1...

If you were a toddler at the beginning of WW2, you'd be about 90 years old now. Racists boomers and Gen X cowards radicalised by Facebook and the History Channel need to stop using a vanishing generation as human shields for their bigotry.

And yet the Democrats(TM) keep sending me fundraising emails from this guy! I don’t think they understand how much that tells me about where their priorities are, and how clear it makes it that we want different things.

Donald Trump calls every Black woman who ever utters his name "low IQ" and elite media is like:

Right-wing billionaires now own the Washington Post, the LA Times, CNN, CBS News, virtually every local TV station, virtually every news radio station, most local newspapers, X, Facebook, Threads, and TikTok. (Did I miss any?) They own almost the entire information environment.

it is the same exact thing as demanding that black candidates for office “disavow farrakhan,” which happened quite a bit in the 90s and 2000s

The blueberries, they’re too big now

America's stupidest boomers are rising up.

ultimately it's shit like this that makes the decline of birth rates and resulting demographic skewing towards old people self-reinforcing. Greedy, wealthy retired people voting to destroy the funding for public services they relied on throughout their life now that they no longer need them

yesterday musk said that companies that "overstate claims about their product" will be banned from advertising on X, today he says that his cars are alive

Students from North Carolina A&T can be seen marching back to their HBCU after voting on the first day of early voting in the state. The Guilford County Board of Elections voted to remove the school’s on-campus polling site. (video via Todd Simmons) greensboro.com/news/local/g...

Marjorie Taylor Greene comes out with a statement opposing the raid on Ilhan Omar before Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic Party

If you would try to win by abandoning trans people (or any targeted group) you can save this “we need to win” talk; there is no “we.” I am about solidarity, and you have chosen anti-solidarity. You are not any “we” I recognize. You are the enemy I’m trying to defeat. Beating you is how my “we” wins.

"we can't confirm that story so we can't report it... Also everyone knows it's true and they don't care" 🫪

Masked Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian villagers on Friday, setting olive groves on fire and slinging rocks. Caught in the attack was Post photographer Heidi Levine. “They just kept kicking me and kicking me, like probably 50 times,” Levine said. https://wapo.st/4yt6dHY

Many of the people who complain about Trump's authoritarianism are notably silent about his vendetta against Ilhan Omar. What's up with that? www.thenation.com/article/poli...

This Day in Labor History: October 16, 1859. John Brown and a group of followers invade the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today WV) to start a war and end slavery. Let's talk about this key moment in American labor history!

Yes

yeah it’s improper for someone not actually admitted to the bar to call themselves a lawyer but Trump’s attorneys are spitting directly in the faces of federal judges every day without consequence so I can see why she’d think she can get away with it

strategic political capture of the court has, for 40 years, been a one-way ratchet. among other things, this has inculcated a sense among conservatives that they can act with virtual impunity. showing them that their opponents will play hardball is a necessary first step toward a better status quo.

will try to answer these in a piece next week but for now i will say that part of the *point* of court expansion, in my mind, is to create a disequilibrium — a potential race to the bottom — that will force a truce.

Stepped away from my desk for a few minutes

The Washpost Opinion section’s lede editorial tonight is blasting … the EU’s new rules for packaging, including cardboard boxes. No doubt, at least one of their readers is intensely interested in this issue.

I was in college when this came out. Didn’t help my GPA.

it turns out that “optimize for engagement” and “optimize for societal best outcomes” are opposing goals and if you look at the entire history of the tech industry you can see which of those two wins out

Republican Rep. Andy Harris incorrectly told a reporter they were breaking the law as the reporter and others recorded an exchange with him last night. Harris had just wrapped up a debate with Democratic challenger Dan Schwartz.

Seems oddly on point for that to be a blatantly AI poster, defending an hallucinated legacy.

Vestiges of an empire