This cannot be right. Wild if true.

Let me get this right. North Korean levels of government meddling by L&RW governments in public & private media during the pandemic was fine; but EU needs to protect public broadcasters in the few RW-run states of Italy, Hungary & Slovakia. Got it.

This is a picture in microcosm of the breakdown of high-trust mutually-supportive societies because grown-ups were not taught as children to put their effing toys away. Imagine blocking a narrow path and just leaving it there.

The best bit of wisdom gleaned from my gluttonous podcast diet was Konstantin Kisin generously reflecting on how parenthood changed him. Fatherhood sure is like Kondo for the brain, crystallising wanting to better the world while discarding the hysterical noise about the same.

Never mind the footballer, THE story to read in GQ is hasanabi A 😴 🤖 during the Kamala brat summer, his insights here are a timely balm for my TL. It’s basic intellectual hygiene to lean against the pendulum, and this is challenging but good gq.com/story/hasan-pi…

Ahead of Alaska Friday, seeing as Trump views conflicts through a property lens (Mar-a-Gaza, Arme-baijan highway, Greenland, Panama), how about Odessa as a European Singapore, a pan-Slavic Dubai, a Black Sea Hanseatic freeport? Zero tariffs as lube.

Alien : Earth is zoomer autism trying to do Twin Peaks. Worse even than Stranger Things.

My iPhone camera now has features only a photography major could understand but it keeps crashing, no matter updates or fixes. Maslow pyramid lessons should be mandatory for product developers to ensure basic functions are solid before moving on to frills the base can’t sustain.

So VanMan has articulated something I’ve been mulling: skepticism - just short of nihilist cynicism - is a top-5 skill to maintain/obtain/impart in a world swimming in infoslop, be it “fact-checked” or AI-hallucinated.

Uncharacteristically modest. No “bestest meeting ever”? Refreshingly promising.

Every now and then, I think about Büsingen am Hochrhein – a small German exclave in Switzerland. If you live there, you get to pay Swiss consumer prices AND German taxes at the same time. The poor sods.

It’s cheesy but The Gilded Age makes me nostalgic for the missed promise of inclusion+assimilation; before some amongst the newly-included decided to try to dismantle whiteness, patriarchy and heteronormativity, and some straight white men responded by withdrawing inclusion 😔

Canary in the coal mine on the South Africanisation of Australia? afr.com/wealth/people/…

Not an AI truth bomb; it’s truth napalm

Would love to see the transcript of Zelensky’s “sartorial cabinet” discussing what he should wear to the White House.

Now that we’ve “revisioned” everything from the Spanish Civil War to Churchill, are we ready to consider the erstwhile heresy that Kelly Rowland is the best Destiny’s Child alumna, ahead of Beyoncé? Or must Tucker platform Chadwick Moore to stretch the Overton that far?

Taron Egerton in Smoke is a masterclass in charisma

Grateful to Greco Gum hilarious PR team for keeping the “safe and effective” trolling going. We shall not forget.

Easily the most insightful, least hysterical article on this topic in months 👏