New edition! New cover! New content! New low price! Out this week. The history you never learned in school; the argument you never thought you’d make

MAGA will be remembered as the most embarrassing political phenomenon ever to stain the history of America, just a gutter movement that elevated the worst, dumbest, most vile among us

The non-AI business model of SpaceX is to attract military contracts — public funds. The space-exploration stuff and “server farms on the moon” are just promotional loss-leader fluff. And its AI is barely competitive. So its shares are a bet on taxpayer money repaying investment

Provide me a visual definition of the word “bathos”

When Obama released his long form Hawaii birth certificate in 2011 and extra-definitively disproved Trump's birther idiocy, Trump didn't abandon the conspiracy theory; he just expanded that conspiracy theory to cram in the contradicting facts, pivoting to claims that the birth certificate was a forgery.  It's a time-tested conspiracist tactic. And he’s now using it again when trying to explain why Steve Hilton succeeded in the California primary elections Trump had baselessly declared were a fraud and were being rigged against Hilton: cnn.com/2026/06/11/politics/…

From the famously left wing @TheEconomist : “The British right wants a world in which criminals are put to death; where “millions must go”; where pogroms are the inevitable result of a country in which white people are now second-class citizens. It is increasingly clear what the likes of Mr Farage and Mr Lowe are selling. The hope is that British voters will not buy it”

The United States is going to reach net zero simply because its markets are more powerful than its federal government

One of the reasons Sadiq Khan has been such a hugely successful municipal leader is his willingness to say things like this. Speaking up for noise and late-night mayhem plays against expectations and displays a longer-term strategic sense of priorities

That clears it up

Swap the phones for newspapers and this is a subway photo from 1920. A sociologist named Erving Goffman described exactly this in 1963. He called it civil inattention: the learned habit of acknowledging that a stranger exists, then pulling your attention back so you don't intrude on them. A quick glance, then you look away. In a space packed with people you will never see again, looking away is the courtesy. It's the quiet contract that lets a few hundred strangers share a tight platform without friction. You signal "I see you, you're no threat, I won't bother you." Phones slotted neatly into that ritual. They are the most convincing prop anyone has ever had for performing it. The newspaper did the same job for a century. Subway photos from the 1920s through the 1970s show entire rows of riders vanished behind broadsheets, every face covered, nobody speaking. Radio got blamed for ending conversation. So did the Walkman. So did the cheap paperback before either of them. Each new object inherited the same eulogy: this is the thing that finally isolated us. Connection on a subway platform was always rare. Strangers waiting for a train kept to themselves long before anyone had a screen to disappear into. The phone's real footprint is at the dinner table and in the living room, the places where idle attention used to have nowhere to go and now always does. The behavior in this photo is a hundred years old. The object in everyone's hands is the only part that keeps getting replaced.

It's not just the exploitation of a tragedy. JD Vance's picture of Britain - where migrants have led to a crime surge - is the opposite of the truth. comment.press/vance1234

RT @Care2much18: This is the dumbest tweet ever written by an American, an astonishing achievement given the depth of competition for that…

Interesting clip from The Insider (1999)

60 Minutes made $206 million in advertising in 2024. It was not a struggling relic. It was the most profitable serious journalism operation in American broadcasting. Then David Ellison bought Bari Weiss's website for $150 million and handed her CBS News. She spiked a story on El Salvador's CECOT prison. She let Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own interviewer instead of sitting across from Leslie Stahl. She fired the executive producer, two on-air correspondents, and the behind-the-camera producers who actually ran the place. The replacement EP has never worked a day in broadcast news. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire endorsed the hire. This is not mismanagement. Ratings are down across CBS News. The journalism is getting worse. The audience is leaving. But Ellison's other corporate deals - the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition - got a presidential thumbs-up while Netflix got frozen out. Trump said out loud he would remember which companies played ball. That's the transaction. CBS News bleeds so that Paramount profits. Sharyn Alfonsi doesn't have a job so that David Ellison gets his merger. The people who watched 60 Minutes for fifty years to find out what was actually happening in the world... they just lost something that cannot be rebuilt under corporate ownership. Not in this environment. Not while the president is keeping score.

I’m Kid Rock.” “I’m Naomi Wolf.” “I’m Kanye West.” “I’m Matt Taibbi.” “I’m Catturd. Those stories, plus Rob Schneider, tonight on 60 Minutes.”

Great piece, illustrating the huge gap between Iran’s super-sophisticated society and its mediaeval regime. A gap that has now been reinforced

Trump has now officially done away with the vestiges of democracy Iran possessed while endorsing and fortifying the continuation of theocratic rule without elected legislature or president and allowing any alternatives to be quashed violently