- The AARP strikes again, this time with a quick and easy form you can use to urge your representatives to protect Social Security.
- A few weeks ago I was behind a woman in a bright blue Jeep Wrangler with one of those custom spare tire covers on the back. It was emblazoned with “Life Is Better in Flip-Flops” in cursive. Now, I cannot stand flip-flops. I hate them with the burning intensity of a million suns. I think they’re annoying and slovenly and uncomfortable and I detested every time either of my beloved grandmothers bought me a pair for the beach. (Even though they hardly knew each other and were separated by 1200 miles, they somehow both bought me and my siblings multiple pairs over the years.) Wearing flip-flops gave me blisters every time and they always broke or got snagged on something. I hate flip-flops. But, and I mean this so hard, that crazy woman in her Jeep does not hurt me at all by loving flip-flops. This is America. If it doesn’t hurt you (or anyone else), let people love what they love. [This is not about flip-flops.]
- Tina Fey Sparks Debate After Calling Out Rich Celebrities Who Have A ‘Side Hustle’… on an episode of the Amy Poehler side hustle podcast Good Hang.
- The Hubble Space Telescope explores the universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means it has observed some fascinating cosmic wonder every day of the year, including on your birthday. – via kottke
- It’s too bad there’s no trustworthy way to add third-party custom Apple Watch faces, because I would love making mine look like the Fallout 4 Pip-Boy.
- One more thing? It just feels wrong to watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Disney+.
Garbage World:
- Here’s a depressing (but important) crowdsourced Google Doc detailing all the resignations, layoffs, terminations, and general bad news from the US Department of Health and Human Services – via YLE
- POTUS pardoned a company sentenced to $100 million in fines for breaking money laundering laws, because he clearly thinks money laundering is what makes America great.
- The national security of the United States is in the hands of incompetent miscreants who don’t understand anything about technology or security.
- The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
- The current administration is actually dedicating federal resources to investigate the feasibility of invading Greenland.
- The administration has fired staff who were working on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration bird flu response as part of its mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Posts tagged “The Handmaid’s Tale”
- Less than 1% of Catholic nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.
- The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 8, 2025.
- Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” I feel like there was probably a powerful confirmation bias at work here. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d think was obvious, but… as strongly as I would expect the correlation to be, I am guessing we’ll soon hear of all sorts of problems with the statistics.
- I’d forgotten that Taylor Swift hosted SNL a few years ago and performed a ten-minute version of All Too Well. It’s been a long, long time since I needed to convert a YouTube video to mp3.
We’re dealing with actual Nazis.- What “Center” Is That, Exactly? is an essay by A.R. Moxon of The Reframe that includes the wonderful line, “I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally-counterfactual reactionary nonsense.” This echoes some of the Kübler-Rossian questions stuck on my mental treadmill since that somehow-malevolent escalator ride that foreshadowed so drastic a national decline. How do you watch Footloose and root for John Lithgow? How do you watch The Muppet Movie and root for Doc Hopper? How do you watch Captain America and root for Hydra? How do you watch Star Wars and root for the Empire?! Or – maybe more terrifying – how do you transform into a stormtrooper but think you’re a Rebel?
- When you’re done reading that, check out It’s The Fascism, Stupid, in which Moxon talks about how “the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure.”