Tessera

Thanks to @jaubertmoniker.net and @razzlebathbone.bsky.social for supplying a topic for this weeks newsletter: dad revenge www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

the 'post-literacy'/'new orality' consensus is getting so strong im feeling positive its wrong 😎

the only j space i care about is the little alley for the dumpsters behind the video store where you can smoke a j before your shift

the double humiliation of a national loss that also confirms non-ball-knowers priors

VAR sucks but i love when refs make the box with their hands. all time great ref hand signal up there with traveling and holding

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.

something so typical and heartbreaking that this moment's particular flavor of transphobia is the sense that someone, somewhere is getting an unfair advantage in a situation of increasingly intense and supposedly existential competition

Gluesenkamp Perez: "At town halls, what I saw was the people who were the most upset had spent the last 12 years driving their girls to sports practice & they view their best shot of their student going to college as an athletic scholarship. So when we rush to moralize we miss some of the nuance."

i love to love mauricio pochettino

John Ganz @lioneltrolling.bsky.social · last mo.

we're live on ... riverside ! riverside.com/studio/max-r...

Riverside Studio

riverside.com

@maxread.info and John Ganz show returning this afternoon

bankbryan @bankbryan.com · last mo.

“Now, we wouldn't want to suggest that the *only* reason the chain has gone into hiding is to effect de-butchification so as to slip undetected into the Woke 2 mobs”…

Max Read@maxread.info · last mo.

in this week's newsletter: what happened to mark zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

two photos of mark zuckerberg taken one month apart. on the left, his chain is visible, on the right, his chain is hidden

greg2hats@cyberbadboy.com · last mo.

the widespread decriminalization of marijuana has done untold damage to our cultural understanding of liminal spaces

They should make some movies with positive representations of liminal spaces. Like when you work at a convenience store and you can go in the walk in behind the drinks. You can smoke back there and steal sodas. Why don't they show that on the movies

Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · last mo.

What happened to Mark Zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

infographic: left, the last time zuckerberg's chain was visible in a social post, when trump's disapproval rating was 49.5%

right? trump's disapproval hits 53.3%, the chain is now hidden

in this week's newsletter: what happened to mark zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

can't imagine caring as much as you all do about europeans and air conditioning

vibe shift watch: facebook ending its war on its employees?

the venue across the street from the bar where i watched game 5 hosted a band called "prostitute" on june 13 so apple photos has named the automatically generated albums of photos from that night "prostitute concert" for me and all my friends

my theory is that transplant discourse is heating up because everyone knows that a lot of the knicks-related nyc homerism is unbearably small-town and wack but can't admit it so they're taking out the psychic pain of being revealed as provincials on transplants

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 2mo ago

this @tcraggs22.bsky.social piece still the best take defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

If Weiss is exceptional, it's only in her knack for making a spectacle of the sort of things that slicker operators in media say and do all the time without causing too much of a fuss. When her CBS Evening News released "five simple principles" guiding its coverage, among them "We Love America," I thought back to the equally fatuous declaration by Weiss's old patron on the New York Times opinion desk, James Bennet, that the editorial page is "pro-capitalism." Bennet said this in a private meeting, a video of which was later leaked. CBS Evening News announced that it loved America in a thread on the Nazified shell of Twitter.

What Sweeney was describing was the routine stuff of mainstream journalism, the unremarkable, everyday work of determining what is and isn't salient, of identifying patterns and shaping a narrative around them, with pressure applied from on high but responsibility distributed across the newsroom. What she was also describing, though she didn't put it in these terms, was the promulgation of a regime-friendly editorial line. The Times let its bureaucracy do the work that Weiss, in scuttling the CECOT story, arrogated to herself. The result in either case was an approach to journalism that could reasonably be said to have abided by professional standards of fairness and comprehensiveness and that was also, on some basic level, utterly sociopathic. Normal newsrooms doing normal things.

Bari Weiss not beating the bootlicking propagandist allegations here:

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

the question of whether or not genai-led homogenization (in design, illustration, writing) is temporary is really interesting bc the flood of AI-scented product will change both human taste and AI apps themselves

good piece from @maxread.info. IMO the homogenization is temporary, but I don't have a great argument for this. I think it's kind of like how any new genre or scene looks (and to some extent is) homogeneous from the outside www.patreon.com/posts/substa...

But what worries me about the generative-AI future is that those previous "democratizing" developments were on the whole aesthetically diversifying: Anyone could make anything, for better, and much more often, for worse. Amateur and untrained designers could violate the laws of good taste at will, often creating enduring forms and aesthetics that would eventually be absorbed into the language of "good" design—"bootleg t-shirt graphics" among them. Generative AI, on the other hand, has become homogenizing: It "professionalizes" the vernacular designer's richly weird instincts into a bland RLHF'd sameness. This, I think, is the source of consumer-facing AI tools' swaglessness—how familiar and inescapable the product already is; how unable it is to surprise for the better or the worse. "AI could never design a Dieter Rams alarm clock" is true. But it could also never design, say, a Dr. Zizmor ad!

Adam Sternbergh @sternbergh.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"An under-appreciated dynamic of ongoing universal aesthetic slopification is that it threatens not just the professional design sector but the vibrant, inventive, and often inspiringly ugly world of amateur design." great read from @maxread.info on, essentially, de-enshittification of bad design

The Substackist politics of Nick Bilton and the AI-bootleg crisis | Read Max

The Substackist politics of Nick Bilton and the AI-bootleg crisis by Read Max on Patreon. Join Read Max's community for exclusive content and updates.

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sad to think that you can produce 40 hours of very serious television about a fake cuban ray gun that gives cia agents tinnitus and it's still not good enough to satisfy the ghouls and save your show

this might be right for bk heights but in FG the kids are named ava and leo not isabel and atticus; she's in-house counsel for an AI start up not an investor; he's only "thinking about writing a novel" because he recently got forced out of his design job at uber/fb/apple. nw nowhere near $42m

Justin Baragona@justinbaragona.bsky.social · 2mo ago

its really crazy to be a pretty successful writer of airport books and screenplays and decide to go do this instead

Well, about that:

Sam Biddle @sambiddle.com · 2mo ago

NEW: I've uncovered an AI slop mill quietly backed by U.S. Special Operations to push military propaganda across Latin American and the Caribbean disguised as a lifestyle content brand. theintercept.com/2026/06/02/l...

The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America

La Tilde publishes an unusual mix of personal finance guides and articles extolling American military efforts in Latin America.

theintercept.com