Here’s the full trailer for season two of Poker Face (Natasha Lyonne, Rian Johnson). For this season, they have tripled down on special guest stars, incl. Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, Justin Theroux, Awkwafina, and Carol Kane.
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Entries for April 2025
Timothy Snyder on “the beginning of an American policy of state terror” (re: disappearing people to foreign gulags). “Whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the ‘criminals’ and the ‘terrorists.’”
The First Sighting of the Colossal Squid
A cephalopod captured on video in March has been confirmed as a juvenile colossal squid, the first live colossal squid observed in its native habitat.
It’s been 100 years since the colossal squid was formally described in a scientific paper. In its adult form, the animal is larger than the giant squid, or any other invertebrate on Earth, and can grow to 6 or 7 meters long, or up to 23 feet.
Scientists’ first good look at the species in 1925 was incomplete — just arm fragments from two squid in the belly of a sperm whale. Adults are thought to spend most of their time in the deep ocean.
A full-grown colossal squid occasionally appears at the ocean’s surface, drawn up to a fishing boat while it’s “chewing on” a hooked fish, Dr. Bolstad said. Younger specimens have turned up in trawl nets.
Yet until now, humans had not witnessed a colossal squid at home, swimming in the deep Antarctic sea.
(via @davidgrann.bsky.social)
Here’s a gift link to the WSJ article about Elon Musk’s “legion” of children that he’s had with his “harem” of women. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates.” It’s all just so weird, gross, & white supremacist.
How Well Is [NYC’s] Congestion Pricing Doing? Very. “The number of complaints about excessive car-honking in January and February was 70 percent lower than last January and February.”
Seth Rogen Speaks Truth to Billionaires, Gets Censored For It
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the search for the fundamental laws of the Universe and pure mathematics”. At this year’s awards, Edward Norton & Seth Rogen presented a prize in fundamental physics and Rogen took the opportunity to remind the audience — including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman — that the Trump regime is actively destroying the ability for people to pursue science in America.
And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science. It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast.
Rogen’s remarks were heard during the live presentation but have been scrubbed from the video on YouTube. I haven’t seen the uncensored video anywhere…drop me a line if you run across it?
The Guggenheim Fellows for 2025 have been announced and they include Miranda July, Nicole Krauss, Sheila Heti, and Sloane Crosley. (I have once again been overlooked. Next year!)
Robin Sloan’s monthly newsletter is one of my favorites, chock full of thoughts, recommendations, and links. The April 2025 issue is typically great.
New cookbook from Samin Nosrat called Good Things that includes “the things she most loves to cook for herself and for friends”. Nosrat is the author of the nearly ubiquitous Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
Swamped Skies
Photographer Joshua Rozells on his photo of our increasingly crowded night skies:
The light pollution caused by satellites is quickly becoming a growing problem for astronomers. In 2021, over 1700 spacecrafts and satellites were put into orbit. Light pollution caused by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are the worst offenders because they are low Earth orbit satellites, and they travel in satellite trains. One can only assume the issue will exponentially increase in the next few years, with SpaceX alone intending to launch over 40,000 satellites in total. The space industry is almost entirely unregulated, with no limits on the amount of satellites that anyone is able to launch and there is currently no regulation in place to minimise the light pollution they cause.
David Graeber (co-author of The Dawn of Everything): Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! “Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”
“Drew Struzan is a legendary movie poster illustrator, the man behind all the posters we grew up with. He started with legendary titles like Blade Runner, The Thing, and Back to the Future, and continued with Indiana Jones and Star Wars.”
“The Rise of End Times Fascism”
This is a really interesting essay from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about the rise of end times fascism and the far right’s bet against the future.
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
And (emphasis mine):
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
But:
In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
The whole thing is a must-read.
Do Not Comply: A Lesson from the Last Three Months of Anti-Trans Attacks. “The cruelty lies in the ambiguity. These orders don’t explicitly bar specific conduct but deputize decision-makers to interpret them in ways that inflict the greatest harm…”
I Didn’t Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong. “But for all the talk from pundits about how we’d see a new side of Donkey Kong once he took office, well, not so much. Turns out we got exactly what we voted for.”
Harvard Tells Trump to Go Pound Sand
Harvard is refusing to comply with Trump’s demands related to his regime’s racist, xenophobic political agenda, including a threat to cut $9 billion in research funding. From the AP:
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter to the Harvard community Monday, said the demands violated the university’s First Amendment rights and “exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote, adding that the university had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.
“These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” he wrote. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”
You can read Garber’s letter and the letter Harvard received from the Trump regime.
I recently attended a virtual talk and Q&A with Timothy Snyder and when he was asked about Columbia and other schools capitulating to Trump’s demands and what needs to happen in order to stop it, he replied something along the lines of: “Some big school is gonna have to stick their neck out and take the hit. Say ‘no’ unequivocally to Trump and get their funding pulled. Lead by example and others will follow. Solidarity is the only way out of this.” Good on Harvard1 for helping to lead the way on this…hopefully more schools will find their backbone after this.
- But bad on Harvard for the Claudine Gay fiasco. And they are hardly the only ones pushing back on Trump, but they are one of the 5 or 6 schools in the nation that people pay close attention to.↩
Ars Technica is doing a three-part series on the history of the internet; here’s part one, which covers ARPANET, IMPs, TCP/IP, RFCs, DNS, CompuServe, etc. “It was the first time that autocomplete had ruined someone’s day.”
In a meeting today, dictators Donald Trump & Nayib Bukele talked about building Salvadoran concentration camps for US citizens and defying a Supreme Court order to return Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention. “You gotta build about five more places.”
Palestinian Protester on His Way to Citizenship Test Arrested by ICE in VT
From Akela Lacy at The Intercept, Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE (archive):
Mohsen K. Mahdawi arrived at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Burlington, Vermont, on Monday. A Palestinian student at Columbia University, he hoped that, after 10 years in the U.S., he would pass the test to become a naturalized citizen.
Instead, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him and began the process to deport him to the occupied West Bank. Mahdawi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel’s war on Gaza, became yet another green card holder arrested and facing removal.
“Mohsen Mahdawi was unlawfully detained today for no reason other than his Palestinian identity,” Mahdawi’s attorney Luna Droubi said in a statement to The Intercept. “He came to this country hoping to be free to speak out about the atrocities he has witnessed, only to be punished for such speech.”
Windsor County state senator Rebecca White took a video of Mahdawi being escorted in handcuffs (also on Reddit & YouTube) from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Colchester, VT by hooded and masked men to a group of unmarked vehicles.
(thx, caroline)
Director Ryan Coogler Breaks Down Film Aspect Ratios
Filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) is a big ol’ movie dork, and it’s endearing to watch him break down all the different types of film, aspect ratios, and projection options as he explains how many ways you can watch his latest movie, Sinners, when it comes out this week. Super informative too if you’ve always wondered about the different IMAX formats and just what the heck it means when someone you love gets excited about 70mm.
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? “The fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles is perhaps the most elegant way anyone has ever described making a logo that resembles an anus.”
Are You Looking for Work? Are You Looking to Fill a Position?
Hey, it’s been awhile since we’ve done one of these. If you are out there looking for work, post a quick summary of what you do, what you’re looking for, and a link to your resume/portfolio/LinkedIn/contact info and maybe someone here will see it and want to hire you. Likewise, if you or your company/organization has job openings, post a brief description and a link to the opening(s). Full-time, freelance, remote-only, in-person, tech, non-tech, anything goes.
Since comments can only be left by members, if you’re not a member and are looking for work, send me your comment via email and I will post it for you. (If you are on the hiring side, you can afford to expense the membership fee to post a job posting. 😉 But if you’re a non-profit, email away!)
I don’t know what counts as spammy when I’m literally asking for ppl to post links, etc. but if it happens, I’ll delete spam listings.
Oh, and I’m happy to accept finders fees if your company hires someone from the comments here. Ok, let’s see what you’ve got.
M. Gessen: “This is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and [bring] education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.”
Unequal Rights
Heather Cox Richardson on where we are right now in terms of what type of government we currently have:
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
They are 100% going to try to do this with citizens:
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is still well above 40% (and is even higher if you don’t factor in the economy/tariffs). 🤷♂️
Letter from a high-ranking FBI official who recently resigned. “I took an oath to defend the Constitution. The unqualified leaders Donald Trump chose to lead the bureau act like they took an oath to Trump personally.”
I was chuffed to see that KDO’s own Edith Zimmerman has a cartoon in the New Yorker today! Go Edith!
George Monbiot: Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature. “Economic inequality breeds resentment and a desire to get even. That’s what fuels support for even incompetent regimes.”
I am catching up on what happened in season one of The Last of Us by watching and reading recaps. Season 2 starts tonight on HBO & Max at 9pm ET.
New Study Finds Average American Stands No Chance Against What’s Coming. “The typical American is toast.”
The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing. “Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration.”
Busy Day at the Airport
Cy Kuckenbaker compressed five hours of landing planes into 30 seconds of video. I love this. A great example of time merge media. (via colossal, which has been killing it lately)
All the headlines are following Trump’s messaging of a “pause”, but the fact is that goods imported from practically every country in the world are taxed at 10% and Chinese goods at 125%. These damaging tariffs are all Trump’s doing. Nothing is “fixed”.
Clean energy powered 40% of global electricity in 2024, report finds. “The milestone was powered by a boom in solar power capacity, which has doubled in the last three years.”
What It Feels Like, Right Now. “It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants…”
We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid. “The administration could create its own gulags with no more judicial review than existed when Stalin did the same thing in the Soviet Union.”
If You Heard What I Heard is a collection of Holocaust stories as told by survivors to their grandchildren. “Our generation is the last to ever hear our grandparents’ stories firsthand, in the same room, over the course of decades, directly from them.”
From the NYT’s Overlooked obituary series: Katharine McCormick, Force Behind the Birth Control Pill. In the 20s, she smuggled 1000 diaphragms into the US in her luggage and later funded the development of the birth control pill.
The List Keepers, on the informal efforts to keep track of the toll of AIDS in the theater industry. “Sometime around 1982, McAssey had opened a pocket-size spiral-bound diary and written LOST FRIENDS at the top of a page.”
Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms. “Paying someone $100,000 a year to host your blog. Come on buddy. I said I hate being a businessman, but even I know that’s fucking stupid.”
ICE director’s dream: “Squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages […] like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.” This is pure evil.
Speedrunning Economic Collapse for Funsies
Ryan Broderick on how, with the trade war that Trump’s tariffs has unleashed, we are speedrunning Brexit and other hyper-inflationary financial crises (thread) and Americans may soon find out what happens when US dollars don’t buy anything.
So from my uniquely weird perspective after living in the UK through Brexit, being in India during Modi’s demonetization, and living in Brazil when the real tanked during the Bolsonaro administration, I can confidently say that Americans do not and can not understand how bad this is going to be.
To sort of broadly describe what is about to happen if the Trump admin doesn’t reverse course, we are quickly racing towards a world where not only does our money just not work correctly anymore day to day, but the background radiation of a crumbling economy will become impossible to ignore.
After the Brexit referendum, everything in London just got slightly worse. A year or two in, you could feel it. But that’s because it took five years for the country to actually leave the EU. We’re speedrunning that. In Brazil, prices would change overnight, stores just wouldn’t have stuff.
There’s more; read the whole thing. Broderick was reacting to this brief WSJ piece (archive):
The broad selloff in U.S. stocks and bonds, and the continuing decline in the dollar, represents a “simultaneous collapse in the price of all U.S. assets,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said Wednesday. They warned that “unchartered territory” lies ahead.
- Markets are dedollarizing, they said, citing the lack of evidence that investors are hoarding dollar liquidity— a dynamic that in previous market routs fueled Treasury and U.S. dollar rallies but this time is leading to declines in the prices of both.
- The administration is encouraging the Treasury selloff, they said, in a bid to bring down U.S. asset valuations—a decision they said now is exposing the fact that “reducing bilateral trade imbalances is functionally equivalent to lowering demand for U.S. assets as well.”
- A financial war with China could lie ahead, they conclude, contending that “there is little room now left for an escalation on the trade front” and that “there can be no winner to such a war.”
I’ve been saying since his election that Trump was going to drive the economy into the ditch. This is more like driving it off a cliff.
The Phoenician Scheme
Ok so I’ve watched the trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie, The Phoenician Scheme, a couple of times and I still don’t know what it’s actually about? But from the looks of things, it is more of the same for people who like that sort of thing, which is lucky for me.
Also, Michael Cera might be the most Wes Anderson-coded actor that’s never before been in a Wes Anderson movie.
Which types of people aren’t big fans of “impartial” news? People who don’t have power. “The poor, those with less education, young people, and women are less likely to prefer ‘impartial’ news sources over those that align with their own views.”
The Rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Cartoons
Speaking of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animator Chuck Jones and his team were said to follow these simple rules when creating the cartoons:
- The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
- No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
- The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.
- No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
- The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
- All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
- All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
- Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
- The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
- The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
- The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.
The rules are made only slightly less interesting by their fiction; according to Wikipedia, long-time Jones collaborator Michael Maltese said he’d never heard of the rules.
Can I Teach the First Amendment If I Only Have a Green Card? “[Trump’s chilling actions] also make it difficult to work out how to teach cases that boldly proclaim this country is committed to a vision of free speech that, right now, feels very far away.”
25 Films to Help Understand the US Today
For The Guardian, the film critic Guy Lodge has complied a list of 25 films that “shed light on the US under Trump”. From the introduction by filmmaker Alex Gibney:
This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution — it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.
Here are a few of the films and their trailers — you can check out the article for the rest.
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016):
Election (Alexander Payne, 1999):
White Noise (Daniel Lombroso, 2020) {Note: this is not the DeLillo adaptation}:
American Factory (Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019):
I’m curious…what films would you add to the list?
Happy 10th birthday to Lit Hub, a site I’ve been reading and linking to more frequently over the past few months. “I believe deeply in making our small corner of the internet a better place, publishing work that elevates, interrogates, and inspires…”
DJ Bart Simpson & The Hood Internet
In a recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart becomes a DJ and KDO favorites The Hood Internet wrote the music and did all of Bart’s mixes. They also made a ending credits remix of some of the most memorable Simpsons songs, including See My Vest, Mr. Plow, Do the Bartman, We Do (the Stonecutters song), Dr. Zaius, and The Monorail Song:
(via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)
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