Uncivil Servant

In 2016, while Pizzagate was taking off, I felt like I was losing my mind because I and EVERYBODY ELSE IN NYC KNEW that Trump and Epstein were best friends and nobody seemed to care. Epstein didn't become a US household word until the Miami Herald piece about his amazing plea deal in 2018.

It's a temnospondyl. Temnospondyls are all weird.

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

Oh holy hell for the first time in a long time I'm actually not jealous of the people who get paid to attend the tri-annual RUC (been there, done that). Also, shouldn't that properly be an ICD and not a CPT code? That's how unserious this is.

At this point I just think of The Atlantic as an anti-Think Tank, employing people who should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of policy (with the exception of Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols, and I have no doubt they have formal and informal access to policy levers anyways).

little-known fact: the worst video game ever, E.T., was even more difficult to play on the HP LaserJet.

The treatment of coronary artery disease. 30 years ago my dad needed triple bypass surgery. In hospital for a week, three months to recover from it. Last month I went in for angioplasty, was in theatre for an hour, came out with two stents, job done. Day surgery.

(it dodged a badly configured paywall to access read-only statistical information that was already available to anyone willing to pay a few dollars. Anthropic notified the Georgia government of the breach and they ignored it) www.axios.com/2026/10/25/a...

This is a good primer on Israel's political situation going into tomorrow's election. But I'd like to go deeper on something he only touches on, which is that part of the reason for Israel's electoral doldrums (and resulting geopolitical chaos) is its broken political system bsky.app/profile/avis...

a fascinating thread for constitutional design sickos about how a parliamentary democracy degenerated into personalism, semipresidentialism, and "mood parties"

New @nberpubsb "The Value of (Sub) Specialization: Evidence from Oncology" www.nber.org/papers/w3594... "Access to a relevant subspecialist reduces three-year mortality by 4.5 percentage points (10 percent)"

[CW: slavery, SA] I wish this were true, but it's not even close to true.🤷🏿‍♂️ "Wishing and hoping that you may yet live to increase the debt which our Country owes you" - Pres. Madison, to Pres. Thomas Jefferson Sally Hemings was younger than most of Epstein's victims.

In one day, two politicians - Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia - with ties to Trump have lost surprise elections thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.

Wait, wait, hold up a second. I just found out that lemons are not a natural fruit but a deliberately cultivated hybrid between citron and a bitter orange. Guys! Life didn't give us lemons we made them ourselves!

new public housing!

Believe it or not, being hearing impaired is actually easier for Gen Z. They're assumed to be bitchy, but for Millenials in the South growing up, lord help you if you failed to respond to certain people quickly and correctly, or you were likely to get hurt.

There was a fucking hole in our planet’s *atmosphere* Like a legit, no joke, “this will unravel our entire ecosystem” hole in the world, and then we fixed it by working together across national and political lines As a species we decided, “we will survive” Let’s do that some more

I was born in 1981, the year after the DSM-III, the first real medical version of that document, was published. Mental healthcare has improved dramatically in my lifetime, although arguably it was at an all-time low when I was born, after the mental hospitals had been shuttered.

A serious weakness in this paper by King and Worthington: The judges for the AI peer reviews are *not* experts in the field. They are former journal editors but no claim is made to substantive expertise in the reviewed papers. AI-generated reviews sound good *if you don't know the substance well.*

damage is probably already done. the world needs to derisk away from america. it was dumb to do it in the first place but the sales pitch was always "secular multicultural democracy with more or less functional institutions" -- well youre lighting all that on fire, mostly to be seen as cool online

> I keep hearing Pangram described as extremely “accurate”. This tells me that a) the company’s advertising is effective and b) [many do not know] what “accuracy” means with respect to language technology and how such technologies are evaluated. Thanks @emilymbender.bsky.social — much needed!

Section 230 is really short and really important, but the collective online sense of it is really strange. You can just read it. www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

MLB pitcher Oscar Levis (Levy) was Black, and he was Jewish; a great new story. His WAR of 12.9 ranks 8th all-time among Jewish pitchers: Koufax (48.9), Fried (32.3), Holtzman (27.3), Roberts (23.6), Pelty (19.2), Stone (17.1), Mayer (13.5). www.jta.org/2026/10/23/s... h/t Brad Kolodny

Re: Dawkins, it’s long past time for us to admit that “New Atheism” was always a way to launder reactionary bigotry into ostensibly progressive guise. Listening to the New Atheists talk about religion is like if I read one Stephen Hawking book and proclaimed myself a physicist.

The only time I've been repeatedly been given tests like that was as an inpatient in an epilepsy unit. The reasons for tracking one's state of consciousness in that setting is fairly obvious. Also I was treated as a fall risk with a big yellow bracelet. Just for context.

Gotta rant… I am not going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie and it’s making me kind of crazy that it’s becoming a phenomenon, because the Theranos story is about who got fooled, not who fooled them. This jaunty @wired.com piece is reasonable all things considered www.wired.com/story/how-el...

As we approach the midterms, remember that the Alt National Park Service is a merch sales operation claiming without evidence to be a group of federal employees, and is not a genuine source of news about elections of any kind. Please get your election info from a local, reputable source.

Can pretty much guarantee that Bacchus consented to this interaction

I'm reading john randolph tucker's speech defending slavery and secession and the part where he compares Lincoln to the biblical Rameses saying "Pharoah was resolved not to let the people go" is an incredible bit for a literal slaver

This seems like just straight-up antisemitism.

It’s unfortunate it required Ryan White to change perceptions about AIDS away from something it was your fault and God’s punishment if you got it, and you should be shunned. But change them he did. www.pbs.org/newshour/amp...

This is some brilliant malicious compliance

For Carrie Frances: 🎂 ❤️

Watching the NBA finals since it's 1-1, haven't decided who to cheer for. On the one hand, I like the Valkyries because Wagner would totally plotz if he saw a WNBA team with that name. On the other hand, I just saw that Angel Reese is averaging 12 boards/game, and I grew up playing Power Forward.