Writer: @TheAtlantic. Faculty: @BardCollege. Trustee: @AmericanAcademy. Fellow: @GuggFellows, @AEI. Repped by: @APBspeakers, Wylie. 📕 Summer of Our Discontent

Joined April 2010
1,779 Photos and videos
Hey everyone, SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT is out today from @aaknopf! I appreciate the love, expect the criticism, and hope this book will reach all the open-minded readers who genuinely care about achieving a healthy and robust multiethnic society once and for all. 🙏🏽
192
39
364
303,227
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
we are going to reach immeasurable, off the charts, incomprehensible levels of "can you imagine if Barack Obama did this?" on Sunday night
The UFC just released footage of the fighters rehearsing their walkouts for the White House event 👀 (via @ufc)
170
845
11,682
310,064
RT @AmoneyResists: We are a fucking joke.

1,585
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
Possibly the most technical goal in football history

378
2,878
31,228
1,955,965
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
I still am struggling to wrap my head around the fact this is actually happening… Don’t care what your political views are, EVERYONE should be absolutely embarrassed & ashamed that this is happening at the Lincoln Memorial & White House. What a joke.

10,283
5,698
40,851
3,885,812
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
Has there ever been an op-ed that aged worse than this one?
24
1,265
24,779
461,115
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
This Iran deal must be horrible.
New tranche of UFO files and videos just dropped.
107
1,168
10,863
345,765
These people on Bluesky genuinely believe they’re the good guys
20
19
367
12,959
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
The Popehat trajectory has been something to watch
190
186
3,182
769,315
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
That the U.S. military is losing the first war of the drone era while the television-trained defense secretary focuses on facial hair and push-ups is probably not a coincidence. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
63
814
2,263
67,027
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
It’s really remarkable and frankly dispiriting how much the race discourse in America has deteriorated over the past 10-15 years, especially given where we were prior to that/in the early Obama era (as Thomas has written eloquently about).
Karmelo Anthony discourse marks a new nadir not even fully realized in 2020. Any society that would indulge that as self-defense is one you need to exit immediately.
3
2
26
6,042
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
I honestly have no idea how anyone reads this stuff and doesn't see a complete and utter embarrassment for U.S. power. We are in a weaker position now. Whole thing reeks of us begging for a deal we can't get. Empty threats from us daily. It's just wild.
252
532
2,474
100,385
Karmelo Anthony discourse marks a new nadir not even fully realized in 2020. Any society that would indulge that as self-defense is one you need to exit immediately.
The whole Karmelo Anthony uproar is insane to me. If a black boy were murdered because he refused to let a white boy in his personal space, there were would be mass protests calling it an act of "white supremacy." I'm supposed to believe the kid stabbed to death is the villain?
24
47
791
70,895
This is one of the least informed tweets I’ve ever seen from such a smug account. I’ve spoken with Marilynne Robinson about her years-long correspondence with Obama and his deep engagement with her work.
23
16
217
25,194
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
These guys spin the most arbitrary fantasies. Obama was such a reader that even as president he kept up w the latest literary fiction. A follower told me of an Obama cabinet member who turned him on to Liu Cixin.
82
42
1,000
201,457
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
Rubbish article for a few reasons, but the standout choice is writing in 2026 the assertion that there might be no such thing as innate aptitude as if it’s a serious claim. How is NYMag not embarrassed to publish this?
Gifted and Talented, or G&T, programs have long been a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. Some parents have already washed their hands of the whole G&T business, refusing to participate in what they view as a corrupt system of segregation. But countless others still place significant stock in the G&T designation and what it offers and are comfortable relying on cognitive testing, should it be required, to determine whether a child qualifies. “When your intelligence is the foundation of your self-perception, failing to achieve feels like soul death,” writes Katie Arnold-Ratliff. But if the limited amount of information we have about gifted kids long-term is any indication, most lead, at best, ordinary lives of modest accomplishment. A 35-year study of 677 gifted children found that by age 50, only 12.3 percent had reached a level of “eminence,” defined as “full professors … Fortune 500 executives … judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.” This means 88 percent never did. Arnold-Ratliff digs into the myth of the gifted child, and how our notions of intelligence may be inherently flawed: nymag.visitlink.me/9mc2Wh
Community note
Eminence is incredibly rare, so 12.3% among gifted students is decidedly over-representative. For example, around 0.023% of Americans are full professors at R1 institutions, yet 22 of 677 (3.25%) of gifted students studied eventually held this position (a ~140x fold increase). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC64…
33
34
491
30,849
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
Shocked to hear David Hockney has died. His huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless. He carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist. British art has lost a giant.
106
1,398
5,584
151,061
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
“Let’s completely destroy a grown man’s means to provide for his family because the Knicks won a basketball game” These people are fucking morons, hope they get facially recognized and prosecuted

549
1,181
13,378
466,788
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
That's our member behind the wheel. He was pulled out of the cab and suffered shock and physical injury to his arm, back and head. The whole city is elated about our hometown team — and that includes drivers who watched the game last night at airport lots while waiting for the next fare, listened on their radios while cruising for the next job, and huddled at hotel lines with the same heart-stopping anxiety that turned into the most beautiful joy. Pulling the cab driver out of his seat, stomping on and shattering his hood turned our joy into a nightmare. When you see the yellow, do you not see the person behind the wheel? That's someone's spouse, child, parent or friend — a New Yorker. He wasn’t out there for a joy ride, he was working to make ends meet and to get his fellow New Yorkers home safely. Cabbies pay just to go to work. They pay for their cars — whether through loans or leases. Drivers need safety on the job, both in the quiet moments of ordinary days and in the middle of public celebration. Shame on anyone who turns these joyful moments into nightmares for fellow New Yorkers.
BREAKING: Knicks Fans climb and smash Yellow cab on 7th Avenue in NYC after Knicks win Game 4 of the NBA Finals Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 | Licensing desk@freedomnews.tv
867
4,786
46,046
2,335,808
Thomas Chatterton Williams retweeted
Spurs had the lead in the last 2 minutes, minute, and 10 seconds of the three games they lost
7
10
122
23,622
This post was quite obviously written with AI 😫
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
8
3
71
14,480