This is one deeply reported, beautifully written (or edited) story, and you should find time this Sunday morning to read every word of it. 1/2 Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/u...

How a Top Law Firm Went From Standing Up to Trump to Bending the Knee (Gift Article)

Paul Weiss was a progressive stalwart for decades and led the legal resistance against President Trump in his first term. Then it surrendered without a fight. This is the inside story of its transform...

nytimes.com

New: We found 50 cops who misused Flock cameras and other license-plate readers for personal purposes, often to spy on their girlfriends or ex-wives. He "watched every single move I made. ... Who do you turn the chief of police in to?" wapo.st/3S6rTuo

She left her ex. He secretly tracked her through a network of policing cameras.

Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems.

wapo.st

The democracies of the world must treat deranged individuals who live outside the constraints of the law, who are acting like hostile rival political powers, as the threat they are.

🗽LOLGOP🗽@thefarce.org · 3d ago

So why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh are we so in denial?

Damn... 300% higher yields for peppers 200% for tomatoes. 65% lower water use for jalapenos. #agsky #agrivoltaics ,🌱🌞🔌..

hoergen@hoergen.bsky.social · 4d ago

*American farmers slid solar panels over 62,000 acres of farmland, and the biggest payoff had almost nothing to do with electricity* #Erneuerbare #Renewable #Solar #Photovoltaik energiesmedia.com/solar-panels…

“If this was true, I would be in jail” is not a real profession of innocence; it is a brag about how strenuously the state protects the male right of private sphere violence against women and children.

Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 3d ago

Those who believe things like this are working hard at not understanding the finite options available to someone whose abuser has not been prosecuted, found guilty, etc. by the law. And how rarely those things happen to abusers, esp. high-status white male abusers.

A caucus of violent, drunk ex-husbands controls three branches of government and both chambers of Congress.

The Bulwark@thebulwark.com · 3d ago

Rep. Max Miller: "My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her…If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?"

I worked for New York’s largest medical center at the start of the pandemic. There were morgue trucks on the streets. They set up emergency medical tents in Central Park. Healthcare worker colleagues died. It is horrific that RFK Jr is on national TV lying that ICUs were empty.

The diarrhea lettuce company, Taylor Farms, uses slave labor contracted from the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. The backbreaking labor is often performed by imprisoned Mexican nationals who would be otherwise ineligble to work in the US. They are paid $1.50 an hour.

The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

The lettuce-producing Taylor Farms was linked to the widespread use of prison labor before its involvement in a cyclospora outbreak.

futurism.com

if I ever taught film criticism lesson one would be “you being smarter than the movie is not interesting to anyone”

Amazing that Iran is successfully attacking the drinking water in the American Midwest, and this is pretty directly the Trump administration's fault, yet this is not a huge scandal among his voters who live there

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 5d ago

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz responds to Trump: “DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyber attacks."

Ronald Reagan ignored the AIDS crisis—and his “dear friend” from Hollywood, Rock Hudson, who asked for help. Dr. Fauci jumped in and helped. Guess which guy the homophobic ghouls in the Republican Party revere today.

We never got into the details because it was one of the things the writers found cool but various other humans found a little pipe-y was how absolutely do-able most of Hardison and Breana's viral hacks were. The algorithm is a system built to be hacked.

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · last mo.

This is how easy it is to poison Google's AI search with Reddit comments Watch here and subscribe for more of this every single week: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uG8...

the thing Star Trek got most correct is that, if advanced sentient life exists, we will fuck it immediately and some of us will be marrying into the species within a year

Micah@rincewind.run · 7d ago

“can we fuck (in) it” truly the driving force of human nature

at last, we are reaching the final form of "elon company buys other elon company to bail out elon"

George Pearkes@peark.es · 6d ago

So $SPCX swallowing $TSLA is absolutely happening. www.wsj.com/business/aut...

it’s legitimately fucking offensive to me as a taxpayer that this entire administration is run by people whose only goal in life is to be on television

Brandy Zadrozny@brandyzadrozny.bsky.social · 6d ago

Someone posted this in slack and I actually thought it was The Onion. www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...

NEW: A glimpse at how AI image generators are used. Researchers set up a fake image editor on Hugging Face and within a week received 1,000 prompts. 73% of them were sexual and 83% of those were asking for people (women) to be “undressed”. Around 6% of the sexual requests also targeted minors

Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem

Researchers tested top image editing models on Hugging Face and found they could easily create explicit deepfakes—and 1,000 image editing prompts show how people use the software.

wired.com

After my parents were visiting set for the first time, I asked my dad what he thought. He said “I didnt realize, it’s like you’re building a house, and once an hour good looking people run in and put on a play for five minutes. Then they leave and you go back to construction.”

Alvaro M. Bedoya@bedoyausa.bsky.social · last wk.

People think "Hollywood" is rich and famous. The reality? Film and TV is a national industry. It's a blue collar industry. And it is an industry free fall. My latest for @newrepublic.com on how the Paramount merger would crush blue collar workers who can not afford it newrepublic.com/article/2136...

Let’s be clear here, when scientists say mistakes were made at the start of the pandemic, we DO NOT mean that we did too much. We mean not socially distancing quickly enough, not making tests widely available, and not acknowledging COVID is airborne and distributing N95 masks to everyone.

It’s completely nuts that Trump won by less than 2M votes with near universal media help and worldwide rage at incumbents and the media treated this like a permanent sea change towards MAGA and now less than 2 years later he’s the least popular President in history and there’s no media reckoning

I cannot believe Ari Emanuel would write this and @wsj.com would publish it without disclosing that they are business partners, and Ari’s company TKO got $7 billion from David Ellison’s Paramount for UFC rights. www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

Opinion | The Paramount-Warner Merger Could Save Hollywood

California’s attorney general ignores the reality of competition in the entertainment business.

wsj.com

one of the most frustrating things about what Rowling has turned into is how hard it is to explain to offline people that she’s not just another author who has turned out to have shitty views - her entire life and fortune is dedicated to destroying trans people

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · last wk.

Projection so powerful, you could screen the Odyssey in 70MM IMAX from it.

They’re coming for the whole damn BLT! 🥪

USA TODAY@usatoday.com · last wk.

Over 12,000 pounds of bacon recalled. See affected products

“state ethics rules”, rules are not laws, and hell, laws aren’t laws unless they’re enforced. There’s a giant “anti corruption” lane the Dems are ignoring for “affordability”. And I think we know why.

I worked at Disney a while ago. Do you know why theme parks are so safe? Because OOSHA reps can walk the track on any ride at any time and any safety violation they see is a $10,000 fine. Each. Theme parks are not safe because the company cares. They're safe because it's cheaper to comply.

Jon of The North@krauza.bsky.social · last wk.

Turns out that food companies were only checking their food because the government told them to, which is exactly why we need government regulations.

Studio execs are going to want to adapt more poems for the big screen now

Turned this rant into a blog post. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/the-data-c...

The data center backlash Is working. That's why the New York Times is so concerned.

I have a

davekarpf.beehiiv.com

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · last wk.

I'm reading the "environmentalists are wrong about data centers" piece from the NYT and ohmygoditssofuckingbad. Apparently, so long as you're punching left, they'll just let you say any goddamn thing you please... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/o...

Wrote about the Masculinity Scam, or how selling reactionary ideas about what makes a man helps a small number of bad people profit and makes everyone else (including men) miserable www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Israel is giving Trump's former campaign manager millions of dollars to fill the internet with pro-Israel articles written by AI, not so that anyone will actually read them, but so that *LLMs will train on them* & regurgitate their perspective. This is the future of the information environment.

Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.

dropsitenews.com

While we are in this Greek Mythology moment, may I remind you that Emma Thompson is adapting Pat Barker’s take on The Iliad, and she’s struggled to get it made bc the focus on what acts of war against women and survival thereafter actually look like (the core of Barker’s narrative) is too intense.

Emma Thompson adapting feminist retelling of Iliad for big screen

The actress told the Hay Festival she is writing a film version of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls to draw attention to sexual abuse in war zones

thetimes.com

These "we have made an AI so powerful" warnings are straight-up advertisements, btw. No different than "we have made an Oreo so delicious all other snack artists must relent."

FinTwitter@fintwitter.bsky.social · last wk.

OPENAI, ANTHROPIC STAFF CIRCULATE PETITION URGING US TO SUPPORT INTERNATIONAL EFFORT TO 'DELIBERATELY PACE' FRONTIER AI DEVELOPMENT, WARNING OF RISK IT ADVANCES FASTER THAN HUMANS CAN CONTROL; LETTER ALSO SHARED WITH GOOGLE DEEPMIND STAFF, EXPECTED PUBLIC THIS WEEK