Let’s hope someone has a Plan B if this shit goes down — from @jbouie of the NYT:

There is no reason to act as if the former president is issuing idle threats, especially given his efforts as president to wield violence against protesters, migrants and other perceived enemies of the state. “When he was president,” Asawin Suebsaeng and Tim Dickinson report in Rolling Stone, “several ideas that Trump repeatedly bellowed about in the Oval Office included conducting mass executions, and having U.S. police units kill scores of suspected drug dealers and criminals in urban areas in gunfights, with the cops then piling those corpses up on the street to send a grim message to gangs.”

The only reason these fantasies never became reality is that his aides and top officials either ignored or refused to carry out his orders. Next time, he’ll be surrounded by loyalists and sycophants. Next time, we won’t be so lucky.

There Is No Precedent for Something Like This in American History

Fact-checking was a promising solution for addressing the explosion of misinformation and disinformation online. But it has been proven ineffective at combating the sheer amount of bullshit that inundates people wherever they get their information. Now it seems that the politicization of fact-checking is having a major deterrence on these efforts, with the lying classes winning the battle.

We need new solutions to combat untruths online, which is only getting worse with AI junk.

Read a story on this trend via Axios

I’ve been exploring how to use Generative AI tools in my writing practice, so I was excited to see this story in The New Yorker that reflects back some of the experiences I’ve had with them. Here’s an interesting excerpt:

The chatbot couldn’t produce large sections of usable text, but it could explore ideas, sharpen existing prose, or provide rough text for the student to polish. It allowed writers to play with their own words and ideas. In some cases, these interactions with ChatGPT seem almost parasocial.

Apple really needs to up the game! Why just foldable? That’s so Samsung. How about rollable? Come on. iPhone Fold to be joined by foldable iPad

Did anyone else read this article published by The New Yorker about Spotify? I only got on the platform last year, so I don’t know how shitty it has become. Why I Finally Quit Spotify 🎵

Tremendous work of literature! I can’t recommend it enough. It is devastating and complicated, both a dialogue with Mark Twain and a response. James by Percival Everett 📚

Interesting story about efforts to rebuild local news in the UK. I like the subscription-first model because it harkens back to the strength of the newspaper business. My question is always whether there is a local audience for this type of coverage. www.theguardian.com/media/art…

I wrote about the last album by the Mexican band Caifanes for Grammy.com - Revisiting “El Nervio del Volcán” 🎵

The Washington Post shows why so many Americans are feeling an economic crunch: Housing costs are out of control.

I do not want an AI iPhone. Apple Intellgence sounds like a privacy nightmare. There’s no guarantee that they will do no evil with the data being sent to their services. OpenAI is a malicious company. More from Disconnect

What would a federated news organization look like? What would the benefits be?

I read that the fediverse will save us from Big Tech. But for godsakes, how many tutorials do I have to read to understand it? What the hell? I am also wary of anything that the Instagram head honcho has embraced.

Great conversation on 🎙️Search Engine: Are news orgs ready for what is expected to be a web traffic catastrophe?

There are so many good lines in this Platformer story, but this one makes it clear how Google is on the verge of fully capturing the web through AI. Google’s broken link to the web

Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.