It’s a chess game at this point. We sadly have someone great at somehow running casinos into the ground, but here we are.

We’re a bit more widespread than most think.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Some 54% of U.S. adults read at a sixth-grade level or less? We all saw this coming from the '80s on, but I forgot that it’s been 40 years, and education has been properly gutted.

Sadly, “you’ll never work in this city again” has been true for my entire career. What are you going to do? Walk across Main Street to the other paper?

But it has never been an editor’s job to “push back on the folks who write articles,” which I thought would be the worst part of that sentence; literally, rewriting is what editors do. We don’t push back on staff, we push back on copy. A minor omission here, a glaring hole there, and – as a last resort – spiking a story until questions are answered.

No one has felt any job security in this industry for at least 15 years. “You can’t say that” probably cuts both ways at this point.

You’ve seen his age and diet, no?

What’s exciting here is this is a door opening into empirically exploring what sparked complex life. It could be bacteria insinuating themselves into cells and unintentionally ending up in a symbiotic relationship, or not, or a combination of evolutionary factors. This is nonetheless new data we didn’t have, and I’m always for that. Maybe it’ll be ruled out, or maybe it’ll create a new realm of science.

So often today, it feels like we’ve hit the end of science, and I’d argue that what we need to move forward are new data and forms of measurement. This feels like that.

I didn’t see the title as clickbait … did they recreate the circumstances of a known symbiotic relationship? Yes, with a bike pump.

But this does seem to open the door to a new area of scientific discovery, which is always cool and always comes with unforeseen risk.

2025 didn’t exactly open as the most vehicle-friendly year.

You put forth some profound questions well above my pay grade.

I prefer to view it as “what can I do to help myself and others?” I started out in journalism wanting to change the world. Then I hit my 20s. Then the buyouts accelerated.

And I can’t change the world by rewriting press releases. It keeps my belly full, and I believe in what I do, but Jan. 20 looms large.

Here’s the thing: The education system was intentionally gutted starting in the '80s to make critical thinking feel too hard, leading to where you’re at. If you want to screw the man, put in the effort to cultivate your own selection of news sources. It’s some upfront time, but then like a minute to add or remove sources.

I’ve never really lived anywhere my vote counted at the federal level, but downballot races are important because that state rep starts up the ladder. Whether your presidential pick matters is relevant and perhaps feeling fruitless now, but 10, 20, 30 years down the line, who you picked for school board could be running in a federal election because you supported them, alongside those in your community.

What can we do right now? This is going to be a dark period with some oncoming trains presenting as the light at the end of the tunnel. What we can do is vote people in at the bottom so they can eventually rise to the top.

Not saying you’re among them, but I think a lot of people neglect the ability of RSS to essentially roll your own morning paper from several disparate sources. Most of what I post on here is just waiting for me in a tab each morning … I have sections broken down into tech, news, politics, science and more.

When a source stops being useful, I remove it. Anytime I run into a good piece from a new source, I attempt to subscribe (usually with success). This keeps my feed from calcifying, and Beehaw is often how I run into new things.

Is that the hed or The Atlantic’s new tagline?

One result of The Atlantic’s sudden decline is I’m reading a lot more political thinkpieces from Rolling Stone via RSS. As a recent example, their coverage of Carter’s legacy from several different viewpoints has been top-notch.

I question the rigor of this reporting. I read the story, and it’s a series of “on the other hand” setups that generally tells you you don’t have a story on your hands.

Basically:

Is “AI” cheaper? Depends. Does it have wider reach? Depends. Is it more effective? …

You see where this is going. Down that road lies conjecture and anecdote.

One might call it a witch hunt.

The same thing happened in journalism starting in the early aughts, and I don’t see anyone saying the field is better for it 20 years on. When your entire stable is people less than three years out of college, you’re going to get what you pay for.

I’m honestly curious what Schengen functionally means at this point. The larger classical powers seem to be going the other way.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Austin seems to have the right approach given no public-facing nuisance. Basically, don’t run out into the road, and don’t shit in public, and in return, I’m left alone. It is way less expensive to let an invisible problem remain invisible than to address it.

This will work about as well as it always does.

The first sounds plausible, but I’ll have to wait for morning to look it up. “I saw an article” in our media landscape holds as much water as a colander, with ‘scare quotes’ adding holes. Pelosi for Bingo!

The rich are never happy with one of anything.