Geoff A.

Going to do a little clean-up for my organizing pin-post. Will try to do it in bite-sized chunks to avoid spamming anyone's timeline. But this is the new "Table of Contents" for topics I want to be able to quickly revisit. bsky.app/profile/pseu...

this one actually made it into the @newyorker.com

god damn lol

Has anyone considered that Trump is poisoning our lettuce with diarrhea to garner more support for high-pressure toilets? Political genius! www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

Facebook directly enabled the Rohingya genocide. Every executive involved in running the company today chose to work at a company that directly enabled those deaths. Compared to that, it is _nothing_ for their products to cause your children harm. Billions for a settlement is a pittance.

Turning a planet into Venus needs consideration of the whole planetary energy history. My new paper with Emma Miles discusses Venus analogs as an evolutionary energy-budget problem: tidal heating + pre-main-sequence irradiation can seal a planet's fate. arxiv.org/abs/2608.18290

If a sitting Supreme Court Justice is writing that a decision "lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating," I think there may be grounds to freak out a bit, actually. She's a pretty sharp legal analyst, too.

🤔 I really wish more of the discourse around Cofnas, Yarvin, Musk, Thiel etc and their successful lynching of a Black academic would refer to @quinnslobodian.com's "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" tracing Silicon Valley's route from Ayn Rand to 'race science.'

there's a pathology broadly in the engineering discipline (maybe exclusive to the US/west, i can't speak on that) that encourages this kind of transgressive behavior where engineers find space between "anti-social" and "enforceably illegal" and basically fester and metastasize in that space

Populations, in a genetic sense, are not "races" in the racialist sense, no matter how much the new scientific racists try to elide the two. That's the most important thing to remember when they start in on the topic.

coworker told me about how when he was a kid he was digging holes in his backyard looking for dinosaur bones but only found part of an old cowboy boot before his mom made him stop she said he was tearing up the yard but it sounds to me like she murdered a cowboy

These marathons were one of his defining achievements. And the British media pretended there was no evidence they happened. That it was just something he 'claimed' to have done... Now try and tell me their hounding was about "getting to the truth" RIP Jason 😢 26/26

Also it is important to highlight the letter leads with the fact Nathan Cofnas is committing academic fraud by instead of working on what he was hired to do, he is working on race science and his revolution.

Friends, have you seen the investigation on UK students hiring Kenyans to write their papers & dissertations? I assume it wasn't cross Atlantic news as the media only seems to be interested in laundering eugenics to the mainstream. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Excel: It’s January 2

In 2026 alone, there have been at least 35 deaths linked to federal immigration agencies. We consulted multiple lawyers, an immigration group, and the Consulate of Mexico to create a guide we hope you never need. The full story: lataco.com/federal-immi... By @chularadio.bsky.social

If I had a nickel for every time Jared Diamond turned out to be wrong... www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

AI RANT (cont’d) The most troubling thing about this is, Originality AI is apparently used by agents & publishers alike. Dear agents and publishers, PLEASE DO NOT FORGET: AI “detectors” are slop machines same as the slop machines whose output they purport to analyze. 🧵4/5

Because social media is a narcissistic enterprise, I can sense people disengaging on this topic. "I don't fall for the scams, thus it doesn't matter" is the reaction. It does matter. You know why it's hard to get people to care about Trump's corruption? They see Democrats as scammers, too.

The architecture of anti-trans panic is built, in part, by parents who refuse to accept their kids as trans and then become anti-trans pundits. Wrote about this phenomenon via a profile of Renton Sinclair, the trans son of an anti-trans influencer www.huffpost.com/entry/trans-...

Against that background, it is utterly obtuse for anyone who considers themselves even vaguely progressive to continue spending their time dwelling on “woke excesses” in the year of our lord twenty twenty six. This is facile, unserious behaviour, betraying deep naivety, at best 5/

Philosophers often bring up the "principle of charity": a willingness to assume good faith in an interlocutor and treat them accordingly. It's good to do in many circumstances. But it is worth formulating a principle of not being a fucking mark. If not during the rise of fascism, then when? 12/

Absolutely vile framing from the @nytimes.com. Why doesn’t this leave behind hard questions for the media that hounded him? Or the global right-wing that gleefully turned a local matter into an international incident?

Eaton Fire survivors are asking @gavinnewsom.bsky.social and the CA legislature to oppose any bailout of the utilities. These for-profit companies make billions, and don't need protection from the consequences of their neglect and failure. And especially not by taking from survivors. #dearnewsom

Holy fucking shit Jason Arday found dead

But journalism seems stuck in a mid-twentieth-century model of Senators as only loosely affiliated with party, mostly going solo. Reinforcing this illusion is, truly, journalistic malpractice in 2026. It's a partisan chamber—with partisan rules. Your audience deserves to understand how it works.

BREAKING: two of the SF gay bars that were using facial recognition ID checks just issued a statement saying they're going to stop after a major article about our artist boycott campaign. Big win!

Helpful rule of thumb: Good criticism is about how well you did what you were trying to do. Bad criticism is about whether you should be doing what you were trying to do.

These scenes worked because everyone knew the story. They recognized features & could 'read it' But we also have art of lost myths This one's famous: Ajax & Achilles playing dice on the beach at Troy. This fun scene shows up hundreds of times. It was popular! But it's not in surviving texts. /10

I lived through one in Guatemala. The thing about civil war is that it empowers the very WORST dregs of society. They come out of the woodwork once civil rules have broken down. And it means that good people wind up dead in the ditch with their hands zip tied and plastic bags over their heads.

Last night showed again #Ukraine ’s growing vulnerability to #ballistic missiles. According to Ukraine's Air Force, only 1 of 27 ballistic missiles was intercepted. The shortage of interceptors is often mentioned, but that's not the only problem. Some observations from my reporting this week:

“Let us engage in a thought experiment: what if the US suddenly annexed Greenland and Morocco annexed Ceuta and Melilla simultaneously, mirroring Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea? What would the EU do? 7/

Here's my story from yesterday: publicola.com/2026/07/30/m...

Just a reminder, after a week full of scoops and general insanity at Seattle City Hall, that my work is funded directly and entirely by reader contributions and subscriptions. LOTS of options here, from newsletter subscriptions to one-time donations to my physical address, for checks!

If you issue an apology whenever a rights-infringing organisation, movement or state objects to your research output pointing out their character as a rights-infringing actor, you might as well close up shop, because that's always going to happen, so you'll never be able to oppose any of them!

I wonder if the guys who sincerely believe they will buy eternal life by jacking hardware into their brains and harvesting organs from their own clones are worried about the condition of the world they're leaving for future generations. 🤔

this is my new favorite diagram

it is very important that we have independent media and I am again tapping the sign for you to find billionaire free, worker run news to support how and when you are able

As polling gets worse, expect more "digital twin" proposals...which essentially cede epistemic power to whoever designs the simulation.