By 2024 Sarah Longwell had conducted four hundred focus groups over eight years and she’s learned some things about American voters of every political persuasion, many of them quoted in this book. As she says in her introduction Listening to what Americans actually think is the only way we can understand why they think and…
Read more Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus
Walking Men Worldwide. Fun! (h/t Kottke, and he’s right about Warsaw.) Who do you love? I’ll tell you who I love: an sf geek who uses Dune to explain economics. Quote: “But the premise of the novel is that there’s this planet, Arrakis, which is the sole source of something called spice, which is essential…
This may be the most grounded, the most clear-eyed look at where we need to go that you will hear in the current moment. Sensible questions with informed, measured answers. She never weasels or rabbit holes, is always direct and gets to her point and answers the question. I feel like I learned more in…
Still the greatest Buffy episode ever, with a different genre for every song. They’re channeling their inner Broadway babies here all right.
From the Authors Guild. (New York, September 21, 2026) Explosive new documents released last Thursday in Authors Guild v. OpenAI—the major book authors’ ongoing lawsuit alleging OpenAI and Microsoft illegally trained their products on copyrighted books—show that executives and employees at both companies intentionally broke the law and their disdain for human authorship. The brief…
Dana sez–I’m not what you could call a political animal. Mostly I just want those guys to take my taxes and fix the roads and then leave me the hell alone. I always vote, sure, but that’s as much to honor my parents as it is to do my duty as a citizen. This election…
DCS Kat Frank of the Warwickshire police, back too early from bereavement leave, demands her boss put her back to work. Fine; he saddles her with the first AI policeman and sets them to work on cold cases involving missing people, mostly as a way to totally disprove the utility of AI in police work.…
I’ve just discovered The Thing About Austen podcast and am busily bingeing it as I winter-proof (heh) the yard. I began at the beginning, way back in 2022, and so far I can tell you that Ep.2 (The Thing about Wentworth’s Umbrella) and Ep.6 (The Thing About Darcy’s Pen) are insightful, hilarious and not to…
Another itsy-bitsy excerpt… "How are you, Clemens?" "All the better for seeing you, Harvey, even if I did arrive behind one of your confounded steam engines, belching cinders the whole way. Stagecoaching is infinitely more delightful." "Yes, yes, I know, we are the devil’s work." Order for Kindle US…
From The Divine Miss M. If you don’t have it in your playlist that can be remedied and should be immediately.
