Blog
"One's output must never exceed one's input."
So said a wise former editor of mine. So, from the vast jumble of words that I read each day, here's some interesting reads and notable work from talented human beings. Inspired by Kottke.org.
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Threatening the Church
Christopher Hale in his 'Letters from Leo' newsletter:
In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.
“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
Read it all: The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy
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One word a minute
This 2,800-word essay took me 45 hours to write. I wrote it from scratch five times, and only 10% of my words made the final cut. That comes out to an average pace of one word per minute; imagine typing a single word, taking a brief walk, and then coming back to type the next. Writing happens at an unbearably slow pace for a culture that’s glued to vertical feeds with split-second reward loops, but thinking takes time. Good thinking takes a lot of time and even more toil. Essay writing is a process I’ve grown to love, a process I believe is deeply human, and yet it’s a process that’s becoming endangered.
-- Michael Dean: Essay Writing as Personal Sovereignty
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The simple North Korean test
Facing a problem of North Koreans posing as different nationalities for remote jobs, one tech start-up implements a simple test: Will they insult Kim Jong-Un?
Here is a video of a North Korean IT worker being stopped dead in their tracks upon being required to insult Kim Jong Un.
— tanuki42 (@tanuki42_) April 6, 2026
It won't work forever, but right now it's genuinely an effective filter. I'm yet to come across one who can say it. https://t.co/8FFVPxNm8X pic.twitter.com/KXI5efMo5LTechCrunch has more on the practice here.
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Bluesky isn't growing
James Ball on Bluesky's (lack of) growing pains:
This is the better question about this stuff: most of us aren’t technology investors. We just want a social network we can use, and which ideally isn’t full of fascists, trolls, and bots. Bluesky’s small size can feel like a bonus against that backdrop: for many of its current users, the network feels fine as it is. Why worry about it growing? I’m getting what I need from it now.
The problem is monetisation: Bluesky costs a lot of money to run, and at present the bills are being paid by investors. They don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so in the hope of making vastly more money later. Generally, investors will be happy to subsidise the losses of a company if it is growing, especially if it is growing fast.
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One less person
Hamilton Nolan:
No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.
Read the rest: Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.
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A clear violation
A note attached to a New York Times book review:
Editors’ Note: March 30, 2026:
A reader recently alerted The Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian. We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an A.I. tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on A.I. and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times’s standards. The reviewer said he had not used A.I. in his previous reviews for The Times, and we have found no issues in those pieces. The Guardian review of “Watching Over Her” can be read here.
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You can't defeat the robots
Minnesota Twins manager Derek Shelton becomes to the first to be ejected from the game for becoming infuriated at the decision of the robot umpire.
This season, which started this weekend, is the first to include the controversial technology.
The commentator's call is pretty special:
"He's arguing with the robots"
— FanDuel (@FanDuel) March 29, 2026
The ABS system has been awesome so far 🤣pic.twitter.com/ZVKWSeeYXo -
We would use different words
Colby Hall in Mediaite on how we've stopped being stunned by the batshit cabinet meetings hosted by President Trump, one of which was held on Thursday and lasted 98 minutes. Hall:
Here’s what I keep coming back to: if a transcript from this meeting came from the government of Brazil — or Hungary, or any country we cover from a comfortable critical distance — we would not file it as a cabinet meeting. We would write about it as a document. We would ask what it reveals about the man producing it and the institution that has formed around him. We would use different words.
But we don’t use different words for Trump. We stopped a long time ago, so gradually that I’m not sure anyone made a conscious decision to stop. It just became the way the job gets done.
And I say “we” deliberately, because Mediaite runs the clips too. We package the highlights. We write the posts. I’ve written more of them than I care to admit, and I’ll probably write more, as the traffic they generate is part of what keeps the lights on here. So I’m not throwing stones from outside the house. I live in this house. That’s actually why it bothers me.
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Greenland sharks
In 1606 a devastating pestilence swept through London; the dying were boarded up in their homes with their families, and a decree went out that the theatres, the bear-baiting yards and the brothels be closed. It was then that Shakespeare wrote one of his very few references to the plague, catching at our precarity: ‘The dead man’s knell/Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives/Expire before the flowers in their caps/Dying or ere they sicken.’ As he wrote, a Greenland shark who is still alive today swam untroubled through the waters of the northern seas. Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again.
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Amputee murderer couldn't dispose of the body
What's the opposite of burying the lede?
NPR:
A professional cornhole player who is a quadruple amputee has been arrested in connection with a fatal shooting.
Blimey. Being a quadruple amputee apparently not enough of a hindrance to shoot a man, but hiding the body was an altogether trickier matter:
The sheriff's office said in a press release that passengers in the backseat saw Webber shoot Bradrick Michael Wells, also 27, before he pulled over and asked them "to help pull the victim out of the car." They refused and left, at which point Webber "fled with the victim still in the car." All of the passengers knew each other, authorities said.
Nearly two hours later, a resident of Charlotte Hall, Md., about 14 miles away, called police to report "a body in a yard," the sheriff's office said.