“It also detected an “unintended consequence” of the ban: the proportion of parents who didn’t know their child had used social media increased by 10%.” Well who could have possibly seen that happening.

Ben Schwarz@benschwarz.bsky.social · 3d ago

Australia’s eSafety commissioner buried a report (released Friday afternoon) that shows the under 16 social media ban didn’t tangibly reduce teen social media use, and also resulted in parents tuning out of kids usage. We traded our privacy for no reason. theconversation.com/more-than-80...

I think this is fundamentally wrong but in an interesting way I will need to write about sometime. The key is a) consumers do not choose what is produced, or how, they choose between what is produced. This is a crucial difference

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈@maxdubler.com · 4d ago

I think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.

A sadde thinge that we have to worke arounde alwayes ys that the quiet, steadye, patient labor and kyndenesse required to holde up the worlde and keepe us all goinge ys nevir a newes item. Unshowye, ordinarye, hard-won skill at the job you must do for othirs to get on. The greatest honor ys there.

Downplay a book or movie: The Devil Wears Shein

Ross Thompson@wintermute115.bsky.social · 3d ago

Downplay a book or movie: Like Water For Carob

Ah, this warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart. Wait til you see the price a TERF had to pay for lying about a trans woman. "...also be required to publish a court-approved apology that must remain pinned on their social media channels for three months" www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/07/an-a...

An anti-trans activist lied about a trans athlete injuring cis women. Now she has to pay the price. - LGBTQ Nation

Kirralie Smith admitted in court she didn't have any evidence to back up her claim about a trans woman injuring two cis women.

lgbtqnation.com

Reading David Quammen’s book SPILLOVER, which in 2012 posited the imminent spillover of a coronavirus pandemic from animals, and then working on this WaPo story with him, convinced me the lab leak hypothesis is highly unlikely wapo.st/4yMTb9H

Opinion | Let’s leave the covid origin mystery to scientists

Spillover or lab leak? The answer matters, but a new House subcommittee should leave this mystery to the experts.

wapo.st

Sarah Jones@sarahjones.bsky.social · last wk.

lab leak is a conspiracy theory for people who want to seem a lot smarter than they are

The opening line to Tales of the Hasidic Masters really should be “it was the Besht of times, it was the worsht of times.”

Tal Lavin@swordsjew.bsky.social · last wk.

thats why he's the absolute besht

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

People expressing shock that some random person can just call CPS and a SWAT team shows up - usually not. Especially not if it's a famous heterosexual. In this case, it was a prominent gay male democrat, and the usual precautions on unfounded single source allegations vanished. Cops did this.

Fenit Nirappil@fenitn.bsky.social · last wk.

How did a false allegation lead to Pete Buttigieg's separation from his kids? Our exclusive reporting shows how authorities did not take steps to vet the caller who left her contact. We found the caller who said she wanted to thwart his White House ambitions. Gift link: wapo.st/45ok5XP

“This victory shows that universities should not capitulate to unjust and unconstitutional demands from the Trump administration,” Grundy added. “When we join together and fight, we win.” go AAUP and ACLU!! grow spines, university admin www.thedp.com/article/2026...

Federal agency drops subpoena seeking list of Jews at Penn

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s July 2025 subpoena garnered widespread criticism on Penn’s campus.

thedp.com

We're maybe a year out from AI note takers just having zoom meetings among themselves and sending us the notes.

Jeannette Bedard@jeannettebedard.bsky.social · 2w ago

I noticed Zoom has one now too—maybe it can attend meetings for me

When you say you find MTG more pro-Palestinian than AOC, what you’re actually saying is that you don’t think someone is fully pro-Palestinian unless they’re antisemitic too.

Post-Left Watch@postleftwatch.bsky.social · 2w ago

Will Menaker from Chapo Trap House says it's AOC's fault that people think MTG is more pro-Palestine than she is. "If you put yourself in a situation where Marjorie Taylor Greene can be compared favorably to you on the issue of Palestine, then I'm sorry, like, that's on you."

Is it a terrible idea to keep a running list of things I had to explain to my younger child in the process of reading "The Phantom Tollbooth" because said child has no context for them? So far we have tollbooths, phonographs, winding watches and, to my surprise, parking meters.

Some reading for today.

Halachic Left@halachicleft.org · 2w ago

Halachic Left proudly presents this collection of reflections on selected kinnot commonly recited on Tisha B’Av (in the Ashkenaz tradition)... drive.google.com/file/d/1BI_m...

there’s an entire essay in how ‘historically accurate’ and ‘nostalgia’ are just weaponised to mean ‘the world bigots wished they lived in’ and not something that has actually ever existed but i haven’t had enough coffee to write it yet

CE (Catie) Murphy@cemurphy.bsky.social · 2w ago

no no you don't understand madeline it would be the kind of historically accurate that *doesn't* have Black people in it 👀

This is child trafficking on a mass scale.

LorennaCleary.bsky.social@lorennacleary.bsky.social · 2w ago

I’m so angry, I’m crying.

I'd rather have more classes by @adapalmer.bsky.social and more Becky Chambers than yet another funding for « AI Safety » chair, indeed

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 2w ago

I say this with all love for speculative fiction: let's put our scientific resources towards real problems. (And we should also be putting more resources into literature and literary scholarship, but call it what it is. Also, I doubt the SFF community wants these clowns either.) >>

Could Excel be conscious? We surveyed more than Jan 1 1900 people to find out.

There is a huge difference between "You look like crap" and "oh, hey, I see you like eyeliner, you know what would really look cool on you? Have you tried that?" It isn't actually that hard to be honest and rigorous in critique without plunging a knife into someone's writing heart.

I said long ago that ICE specifically looks for guys with a history of domestic violence/violence against kids to hire because the administration knows they're asking them to ignore all the laws in the name of hurting and torturing people and that requires a piece of trash to have the stomach for it

Jacqueline Sweet@jsweetli.bsky.social · 3w ago

NEW: A second ex-wife of David Brouillette, the ICE agent who killed Joan Durán Guerrero in Maine, Lucinda Brouillette, issued a statement this morning. "If you were to ask me whether I believe David Brouillette is capable of this level of extreme violence, my answer is unequivocally yes." /

> No single person suggests making a logo that resembles an anus, but when everyone's feedback gets incorporated, that's what often emerges. Risk aversion in corporate environments naturally pushes designs toward familiar, "safe" territory, which apparently means anatomical openings.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

A humorous exploration of the uncanny resemblance between AI company logos and human anatomy. Discover why circular, gradient-based designs dominate the AI industry, and what this design convergence t...

velvetshark.com

It's interesting (and reassuring) to see some of the pushback that has been here all along make it to the mainstream. And I appreciate that the article emphasizes Odgers' point that the risk is not "being wrong" but failing kids and teens by missing the real causes of mental health struggles.

The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health?

Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of...

theguardian.com

Bittul in a nutshell.

thicc husband and father@lukeisamazing.bsky.social · 3w ago

once again thinking about the best Lord of the Rings meme

I blame this website entirely for the amount of time over the past day I have been playing Clues by Sam.

The more you understand what you're about and what you're communicating, shorter and tighter it gets (this is also why LLM slop is such a long, rambling, repeating mess. It dazzles with word count, not substance, because it's not sure where it's going one moment to next, like any unskilled writer)

One of the reasons why we are letting AI destroy our children’s education is because we have failed to root out the false idea that education is measured by what students produce. 1/

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3w ago

Unfettered access to chatbots can harm educational outcomes Using AI while solving problems improves performance by 48% (GPT base). When access to AI was taken away, students actually performed worse than those who never had access (17% reduction in grades) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

YES i recently did an essay on rainbow capitalism that also came to the same conclusion, based on the way the economy has tanked but companies standing by their DEI programs, and not bowing to the administration, are making more profit than ever www.tillystranstuesdays.com/2026/06/30/r...

Two people tried to enter a screening of The Odyssey without buying tickets after hiding inside a miniature model of the Trojan Horse. 😂😂😂

Most of these people were in shul on Shabbat and listened to the haftarah say “your religious works are revolting to me when you neglect the orphan, the widow, and those not like you”. And then did this. Because their religion is as empty as their morality.

Standing Together@standing-together.bsky.social · 3w ago

1/ This is settler terror. There is no other way to describe armed mobs attacking Palestinian communities, torching places of worship, destroying property, and terrorizing families under the protection, or in the presence, of an occupying power.

This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just…