The Internet, Filtered

(via Lady Gaga - Killah (Saturday Night Live/2025) - YouTube)

Easy conversations also serve as a foundation for harder ones. The typical progression is to move from easy, to real, to hard. The easy part is getting to know someone with simple questions about their background and interests. The real conversations begin when there is enough trust to talk about difficult moments in your life, your real hopes and ambitions, your successes and failures. The hard conversations can involve differences of opinion on things that matter — politics, for example, or organized religion, or how best to raise your kids.

(via Post by @patrickgaley.bsky.social — Bluesky)

I love potato chips, and I always have. The height of my obsession was in college, when I’d keep an emergency kettle-cooked bag of barbecue chips in the center console of my Volvo (just in case I got stuck in traffic); I’d scavenge any and every school event where there was an opportunity to bag some free snacks; and occasionally, I’d even treat myself to a simple family-sized bag for breakfast. (Before you judge—worry about your own eating habits.)

(via Lady Gaga - Abracadabra (Saturday Night Live/2025) - YouTube)

And society has struggled to keep up. Is it okay to play a video without headphones? What if it’s a busy street? What about FaceTime? Is that really different from talking to a real person in front of you? What are the rules for behavior?

...Private action to set the rules for behavior is more important in a multicultural society, not less. Having a clear set of rules gives people something tangible to debate over. Everyone knows the discomfort of realizing you’ve broken some unwritten rule and struggling to figure out what you did and why. It’s much better to know that there are strong expectations; then you can decide whether it’s worth it for you to break them.

...More artists should follow Bridgers’ example, but also, more people should get comfortable voicing their opinions. I was sitting in a diner doing some work a few weeks ago, and a couple began watching TV on their iPad. So, I just asked them if they could use headphones, and they turned it off. I did the same at a coffee shop a few days later, and the other person apologized and turned it down.

(via Post by @coreyatad.com — Bluesky)

Slop exists at scale.

Slop remixes culture without understanding it.

Slop has contempt for both creators and audiences.

Slop hides producers from consumers, and vice versa.

Slop exploits parasocial identification with right-wing power.

The best way to understand Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News is as an extension of Weiss’s media persona, which has been built around a peculiar sort of performance. She brands herself as a heterodox thinker, a champion of free speech, even someone who leans to the left, and then  adopts positions that flatter the reactionary oligarch class. She isn’t a conservative! She just independently thinks her way to conservative conclusions over and over again. If you’re a rich white man convinced that pronouns and trans athletes are the greatest threats facing America today, Weiss is there to assure you not just that you’re right, but also that your bile is proof of your intellectual fearlessness.

He starts the week as a stubborn stage resigned to polishing silverware, a task he sees as “punishment for being ancillary.”

...“They’re treating this like going into battle,” Russell adds. “And the battle is against everything that can go wrong.”

...“This is a time where he begins to take not just himself seriously, but he takes his life with his daughter seriously, he takes his job seriously,” Wehde says. “This is kind of the big pivot point.”

But as I spent a bit more time there, the sheer weight of it all began to hit me. The hundreds of pallets in that warehouse were just a portion of the thousands of pallets sitting in storage across the country, all containing stuff that consumers and stores didn’t want.