something fascinating in the idea underlying that second quote there–that AI is so Western-biased currently in terms of training data that developing nations actually have a much easier time using it to generate persuasive and engaging propaganda than developed nations. critical support to Iran in this regard, i suppose lol

it’s incredible that the primary thing this story does is make clear that probably the best (or second best) thing you can do for the world as an IDF soldier is just kill yourself

digitizing the archive appears to be around 1/5th done as of now, and you can find it here

see also the coverage this has gotten in NPR:

The campaign, “Resist and Unsubscribe,” was started by influential podcaster and business commentator Scott Galloway, who said he was increasingly frustrated by what he sees as the Trump administration’s indifference to protests and public outrage over immigration enforcement, especially in Minneapolis, where federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens last month.

In recent weeks, there have been renewed calls to boycott Target, demanding that the Minneapolis-based retail giant publicly show solidarity with immigrants and oppose ICE. Last month, hundreds of businesses in Minneapolis shuttered their doors for a day as a form of protest against ICE operations in the city.

Galloway, who also teaches marketing at New York University, believes the president mainly changes course on policy when financial markets are under pressure, pointing to how Trump dropped his plan to impose tariffs on eight European nations after it rattled Wall Street. So, Galloway created a website listing over a dozen companies that have either worked directly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or play such an outsized role in the economy that a slowdown in their growth would send shockwaves to the markets.

" I think this is a weapon that is hiding in plain sight," Galloway told NPR. “The most radical act you can perform in a capitalist society is non-participation.”

they’re actually more overzealous in terms of policy about nudity and sexualized material than basically any alternative

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

i don’t know if it’s a function of the ideological bent or just because the gigantic influx of users has totally swamped their moderation, but yes it does have problems with fascists as of writing

oh, this is probably just because of the national strike day people are observing–it’ll be back up tomorrow

you can subscribe over here:

Who are we? A collective of writers, editors, and designers who love to cook and eat, bon vivants who aspire to never be boring on the palate or the page. We will be delivering, piping hot or pleasantly cool, a newsletter to your inbox twice weekly. One will contain a recipe from our brilliant squad culinaire; the other will deliver investigations, scoops, dispatches, postcards, love letters, decoder rings, instruction manuals, vibe reports, archival cuts, menu doodles, paeans, diatribes, and gossip from the front lines of the human appetite. We will not use AI, because it has no taste.

Like any good meal, our most basic aspiration is to fill an empty space. Food is the stuff of life, and over the last 20 years has gone from a niche concern (beyond the “everybody eats” of it all) to a pillar of popular culture. And yet we’ve seen the number of outlets devoted to exploring it with genuine curiosity and delight dwindle over that same period. The legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, chasing the pipe dream of infinite glassy eyeballs, and diluted their missions in the process. In an attempt to reach everyone, they no longer speak to anyone. Least of all, us: people who really care about food and cooking. Now, 16 years after it was unceremoniously folded, Gourmet has become a symbol of a food media that once was, a name sighed nostalgically to evoke a delicious absence.

This new Gourmet will be a return to form in some ways—fascinating, well-written, eccentric, delicious—but we will rely directly on our readers to keep the lights on, and avoid the hierarchies, inequities, and bloat of the ancien régime. We would rather write for a cohort of fellow travelers, passionate home cooks and nerds, than chase the dream of infinite scale.

We’re obviously not the only ones seeking alternatives to the Old Ways of Doing Things. Countless individual writers and cooks have set out on their own with a Substack, TikTok, or YouTube channel to disseminate recipes and tell stories about food. We love what many of them are doing.

But not everybody wants to be a singer-songwriter—some of us want to be in a band. There is something about a shared effort, a wobbly but recognizable editorial voice, a publication that is a stage, not a microphone, that we missed, and wanted to try to make. There is something, in other words, about a magazine.

i don’t know if these are going to topple the current government, but they’re in effect the culmination of every protest movement of the past few years and they’re coming after a reformist was elected so it seems something is going to have to give here

death toll is now at least 15 plus one of the shooters; it appears the duo were father and son and it is the son that is in custody

Serious question: don’t the artists have the ability to remove their music from Spotify if the deal is so bad?

yes, and more than a few prominent ones have such as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Xiu Xiu, but for most artists it requires negotiation with your label (annoying, not ideal, you don’t have much leverage) and the willingness to take a potentially permanent revenue and recognition hit (Spotify has an estimated 700 million users) in an already difficult business

please continue to “device hoard” folks

its founder, Georgiy Gongadze, was a late-90s crusader for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and anti-corruption initiatives in Ukraine and was likely murdered at the behest of the state for his reporting. i think the name is fairly straightforward

Ukrainska Pravda has no relation at all to pravda.ru as far as i’m aware

given that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!

there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

of note, CUPE leadership was willing to go to jail over the strike. for a sense of what they struck over, see these two articles from Spring Magazine, and CUPE’s “Unpaid Work Won’t Fly” page

the study: Majority support for global redistributive and climate policies

We study a key factor for implementing global policies: the support of citizens. The first piece of evidence is a global survey on 40,680 respondents from 20 high- and middle-income countries. It reveals substantial support for global climate policies and, in addition, for a global tax on the wealthiest aimed at financing low-income countries’ development. Surprisingly, even in wealthy nations that would bear the burden of such globally redistributive policies, majorities of citizens express support for them. To better understand public support for global policies in high-income countries, the main analysis of this Article is conducted with surveys among 8,000 respondents from France, Germany, Spain, the UK and the USA. The focus of the Western surveys is to study how respondents react to the key trade-off between the benefits and costs of globally redistributive climate policies. In our survey, respondents are made aware of the cost that the GCS [a global carbon price funding equal cash transfers] entails for their country’s people, that is, average Westerners would incur a net loss from the policy. Our main result is that the GCS is supported by three quarters of Europeans and more than half of Americans.

Overall, our results point to strong and genuine support for global climate and redistributive policies, as our experiments confirm the stated support found in direct questions. They contribute to a body of literature on attitudes towards climate policy, which confirms that climate policy is preferred at a global level17,18,19,20, where it is more effective and fair. While 3,354 economists supported a national carbon tax financing equal cash transfers in the Wall Street Journal21, numerous surveys have shown that public support for such policy is mixed22,23,24,25,26,27. Meanwhile, the GCS— the global version of this policy—is largely supported, despite higher costs in high-income countries. In the Discussion, we offer potential explanations that could reconcile the strong support for global policies with their lack of prominence in the public debate.

the study: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

this is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy’s that it has nothing to do with Beyonce’s win last year:

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”

Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.