New: We talked to the anonymous memecoin millionaires who bought access to Trump. "Ice," part of a Singaporean crypto collective, hopes the dinner will be Big Macs. "Ogle" says he'll only unmask when the gala doors close. “The most corrupt thing a president has ever done" wapo.st/4kgR4mg

Meet ‘Ice,’ ‘Ogle’ and other crypto millionaires who bought a night with Trump

Most of the crypto investors who bought Trump’s meme coin for a chance at dinner with the president remain anonymous. Some are publicly celebrating their invitation.

wapo.st

The comment section of old jazz performances on youtube may be the last wholesome place left on the internet www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJf...

Freddie Hubbard sets the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Big Band on fire with Moanin'

YouTube video by Jazz Video Guy

youtube.com

Gonna be that annoying AI bro stereotype for a minute, but fellow journalists: do yourself a favor and pay for Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini was really bad for a long time, but guess what, it's good now! Why? Larger context window, chain-of-thought by default, and it doesn't always agree with you!

Vibe coded* an app to help sift through changes in the JFK docs. It loads two PDFs side-by-side, then uses OpenCV to visually compare every page - no OCR - to highlight differences like newly unredacted text. *I hate that I said vibe coded as much as you do

Here's what I know after 2 years at WaPo: despite shooting ourselves in the foot every 2.5 months by announcing weird changes to Post Opinions, the newsroom has remained laser focused on holding power to account. I haven't seen or heard anything that makes me think that's going to change. 1/2

I obtained documents revealing DOGE’s private plans to soon eliminate at least hundreds of government workers and offices they somehow tag as related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Help us keep doing this kind of reporting: message me on Signal at (202) 580-5477. wapo.st/4jVWqEd

The Washington Post obtained documents laying out step-by-step how DOGE plans to dramatically expand its purge of "DEI-related" initiatives and employees across the federal government in the coming months. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/... by @hannahnatanson.bsky.social & @chrisd9r.bsky.social

Records show how DOGE planned Trump’s DEI purge — and who gets fired next

A DOGE team plans to fire federal workers who are not in DEI roles and employees in offices that protect equal rights, internal documents show.

washingtonpost.com

My colleagues @hannahnatanson.bsky.social & @chrisd9r.bsky.social obtained documents showing how DOGE staffers developed plans to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (and employees who implement them) from the federal government. www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

Records show how DOGE planned Trump’s DEI purge — and who gets fired next

A DOGE team plans to fire federal workers who are not in DEI roles and employees in offices that protect equal rights, internal documents show.

washingtonpost.com

dei.gov was registered yesterday. Why? who.is/whois/dei.gov

and @drewharwell.com wrote a much more comprehensive and reported piece! www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Does Elon Musk cheat at video games? An investigation.

The world’s richest man has paid to boost his online warriors into global leaderboards, raising questions about his prowess — and his need for digital praise.

washingtonpost.com

Anyone who knows anything about our elections apparatus knows how absolutely and utterly impossible this would be from a logistics perspective. No voting machines created in the past several decades have online capability. You can't "hack" the election.

Somehow just now noticing Maltego Community Edition updated their license last August to allow commercial use. docs.maltego.com/en/support/s...

We don't know what Elon Musk meant with that hand gesture but we do know he's reinstated Hitler apologists on X, praised an extreme far-right German political party and endorsed the claim that Jews push "hatred against whites" www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Antisemitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.

Antisemitism has long festered on the internet, but the Israel-Gaza war and the loosening of content moderation on X have propelled it to unprecedented levels.

washingtonpost.com

Going to watch the son of former secretary of labor Robert Reich do improv @samreich.bsky.social

This Substack is making the rounds purporting to be from an "X Whistleblower" that claims X knowingly planted fake news stories and used bots to influence discourse. Unfortunately they don't provide much evidence - and some of what they do share, is wrong. For starters-

Important deep dive into cops' "outrageously dystopian" use of facial recognition by @douglasmac.bsky.social @davidovalle.bsky.social @aaronschaffer.com. A wrongfully arrested father of four was jailed for *16 months* before his charges were dropped: www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

Arrested by AI: Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches

Confident in unproven facial recognition technology, sometimes investigators skip steps; at least eight Americans have been wrongfully arrested.

washingtonpost.com

We had to evacuate Los Angeles. Most people I know there have also had to leave. We are safe in San Diego and our apartment is unlikely to burn down. We are very lucky. But alongside the visceral horror of the wildfires there is also the mundanity of dystopia www.404media.co/were-fine-lo...

‘We’re Fine’: Lying to Ourselves About a Climate Disaster

The dystopia of Los Angeles' fires are horrifying, mundane, and everything in between.

404media.co

i think after this particular disaster the “misinformation is rampant” stories about X are going to start feeling a bit redundant. it’s just the baseline. like rain in the pacific northwest.

I’m on site at the Sunset Fire in Runyon Canyon. Water drops are happening. Im not sure it’ll be enough to stop the spread of these fires into the neighborhood south of the canyon.

This Hollywood hills fire is a nightmare. Evacuation area covers an incredibly dense area. Thousands (tens of thousands) of residences (a lot of the buildings on hollywood are apartment buildings built in around the 1950s). Also includes the Hollywood Bowl, and Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Here's our full story on the Meta news today, which goes far beyond an end to fact-checking and heralds a wider pullback from content moderation as Zuckerberg repositions the company for the Trump era. Gift link: wapo.st/4h223hP

Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of community notes, calling the recent election a “cultural tipping point” on free speech.

wapo.st

I feel this one in my bones. I have no idea why I struggle with texting in 2025 - I was *constantly* on AIM (lol & RIP) in my teens and 20’s, and modern texting is basically the same…so why am I so bad at it? apple.news/ABsJRkG9XSFC...

The Agony of Texting With Men — The Atlantic

Many guys are bad at messaging their friends back—and it might be making them more lonely. January 06, 2025 My friend’s boyfriend, Joe Mullen, is a warm and sweet guy, a considerate person who loves d...

apple.news

More than 3,100 students died at Indian boarding schools between 1828 and 1970. @washingtonpost.com found 3x times as many deaths and nearly 2x as many graves sites as the Interior Department after scouring hundreds of thousands of documents and speaking to dozens of sources.

More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures

The Post’s year-long investigation found that three times as many Native American students had died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970 as the U.S. government had previously reported.

wapo.st

When Greg Kinnear says computers are the "end of western civilization as we know it" in the beginning of You've Got Mail.... ...he may have been right.

Everyone’s trying to be Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day but they’re actually Randy Quaid (I know, I know…this falls apart because Quaids character saves the planet )

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com · 2y ago

A New Jersey idiot on Facebook proudly announces her husband has shone a laser on a “drone”-which was actually a FedEx flight, an action that is a federal crime as these lasers can injure pilots and cause accidents. x.com/TakeThatClou...

"This thing this thing is going to haunt me for the rest of my life", Fmlk told us. She was also in contact with the german member "White Tiger" who has already been raided by german law enforcement agencies. More about him and the whole tragedy (€) www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web...

(S+) Gewalt in digitalen Plattformen: Die Chatgruppen, die Menschen in den Tod treiben

Auf Plattformen wie Discord oder Telegram organisiert sich eine gewalttätige Szene. Die gefährlichsten Mitglieder drängen junge Nutzer gezielt in den Suizid – wie den 25-jährigen Samuel Hervey.

spiegel.de

A deep dive into the dark world of so-called 'COM'/'764' chat groups, which push vulnerable individuals toward self-harm, animal cruelty, and even suicide: Samuel Hervey died a horrific death in front of a camera, encouraged and even cheered on by members of these chat groups.

hey look, a starter pack of Visual Forensics reporters at @washingtonpost.com go.bsky.app/7WK1tFG

wrote about the ritual of rifling through a suspect's internet accounts and pretending that any and all morsels of information are "news" www.404media.co/luigi-mangio...

Luigi Mangione Played 'Among Us,' Breathes Air

The ritualized rifling through old internet accounts usually muddies the story more than it informs the public.

404media.co