Dave Lee

The mod installs 235 Flock cameras around the fictional Los Santos, a riff on the real-life city of Los Angeles. Players can smash and shoot down the cameras and get paid $600 for each one they destroy, which Kolman priced based on a teardown of a Flock Falcon Flex Camera by the Iowa-based civil liberties group Eyes Off of Cedar Rapids. The in-game cameras log every time a player destroys and drives by one, and players can render a photo album of their interactions.

You Can Now Destroy Flock Cameras for Cash in GTA Vwired.comA new GTA mod lets you smash and shoot Flock’s automatic license plate readers around the fictional Los Santos.

A new big player in Washington D.C journalism, capitalizing on the Post's Bezos-driven brain drain:

We launched two years ago as NOTUS, a news site focused on national politics and policy. But as we watched others pull back on Washington coverage, we knew our hometown deserved better. So we invested — more than doubling the size of our newsroom in just six months.

Welcome to The Washington Sunwashingtonsun.com

Metz’ piece has the texture of what I’ve come to see as “AI-Interest” stories. Their hominid counterpart, the human-interest story, tugs at our heart-strings as we read about a pet being found after wildfires or a classmate’s chemotherapy paid for with lemonade stand money. Most human-interest stories are little more than fun filler, but they can equally disinform and distract; keeping us from wondering why there are so many damn wildfires and that kid’s chemo isn’t covered by something other than lemonade sales. The same thing is happening here: we’re being distracted by a cutesy little story and asked not to think too deeply about the bullshit beneath it all.

Anatomy of an AI Interest Story · Joe Bak-Colemanjoebakcoleman.comSince when is three cranks receiving an email worthy of space in the grey lady?

The Hollywood Reporter gets an early look at Alex Gibney's upcoming documentary on Elon Musk:

None of what we have seen and thought about Musk can fully ready us for what the filmmaker has done here — an adventurous but methodical movie grounded in the thesis that, as he sees it, a dangerous huckster is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data. Gibney’s basic take on Musk is that he’s a confidence man whose power comes only from the stock market and disappears the minute we see through the facade of sales pitches — but can do a whole lot of damage until that happens.

Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: “Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power”hollywoodreporter.comHe is the richest man on earth. An explosive new film from the Oscar-winning director suggests he may also be the most dangerous.

my work

Elsewhere: Review: Jon Ronson's The Castle

Jon Ronson is happy to be known as the written word’s answer to the awkward TV documentarian Louis Theroux. In The Castle, Ronson’s first book in 11 years, he briefly references their intertwined careers. The friendly rivals have evidently realized the extreme-people-watching beat has more than enough material to go round.

That both men have turned their attention to the “masculinity crisis” shows how consuming the topic has become. Theroux’s hit Netflix documentary Inside The Manosphere used his trademark naive patter to let subjects dig their own holes, the realization dawning on them in real time. Ronson’s subjects seem to realize only belatedly that they’ve said too much. That’s certainly true of Christopher Mark, the aggressive, paranoid, castle-owning subject of Ronson’s book.

Review: Jon Ronson's The Castlebloomberg.comPoking the manosphere

I adore the Non-League Paper. It embodies the deep roots of football in English culture. Yes, there's the world famous Premier League, but it's this long tail — the 1,500 people who stand out in the rain to watch a sixth-tier match — that really sets English football apart. This Columbia Journalism Review profile is charming:

By 6:30pm on a typical Saturday, an army of freelancers and local enthusiasts positioned throughout England and Wales file their missives. Then Badcock and the staff “crash it all” into shape, with just over three hours to hit their print deadline. The reports, which Badcock said are all handled with the “same respect and importance,” top out at four hundred words. One of the challenges unique to this work is that, with some of the smaller teams, the only person available to write a report is often a team volunteer, who may choose to celebrate their own club no matter the result. “Sometimes a team might lose four-nil, but the goalkeeper”—the guy who let in the four goals—“gets awarded ‘Man of the Match’” by an unwincingly biased correspondent. “It’s part of the charm,” Badcock said.

Notes from the non-league.cjr.orgThe Non-League Paper, devoted to the lowest tiers of English soccer, reports on more than a hundred games each week—and has earned a fan base of its own.

Inc on some hugely impressive subscription numbers from The Onion:

“Our goal for the year is to get to 100,000 subscribers, because that would beat The Washington Post in terms of circulation,” Collins says. “And we’re going to get there.” Currently, The Onion has around 85,000 subscribers, making it one of the five largest newspapers in the country by circulation. Under Collins’s direction, Global Tetrahedron—named after a deep cut from the publication’s 1999 book Our Dumb Century—continues to reinvent distressed media properties in ways that are audacious and seemingly engineered to go viral.

The Onion's Audacious Plans for Infowars Are Not a Jokeinc.comOwner Jeff Lawson, CEO Ben Collins, and comedian Tim Heidecker tell Inc. how they found themselves owning goblinlove.net and selling gay frog plushies, and what it means for the future of 'The Onion.'

Kitchen-table populism

The Guardian surveyed 6,000 Democrats in search of the winning formula:

The top-performing messages we tested have a simple formula. They focus on Americans’ day-to-day struggles to pay for rent and groceries, and the widespread frustration with prices that rise faster than working-class wages. They insist that working people should be able to give their kids a better shot. They promise to bring costs down, make the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on the people who game the system. Ultimately, they tell a simple story: hard work should pay off.

We call this winning combination “kitchen-table populism”.

We surveyed 6,000 Americans. Here is the winning message for Democrats | Dustin Guastellatheguardian.comIt’s about ‘kitchen-table populism’: focusing on Americans’ day-to-day economic struggles

New BBC director general Matt Brittin with what seems like an excellent idea, and the kind of bigger thinking you'd expect from putting an ex-Google man in the role. Will be watching this closely:

The BBC director general has suggested opening up the BBC to YouTube-style user-generated content as he backed the idea of a “public service algorithm” free from the interests of US tech companies.

Matt Brittin, who arrived at the BBC after 10 years leading Google in Europe, said the corporation and public service media in Britain had the opportunity to build a platform “unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart”.

BBC chief proposes ‘public service algorithm’ with YouTube-style user-generated contenttheguardian.comSpeaking at Edinburgh TV festival, Matt Brittin says BBC platform would be free from interests of US tech giants

From The Trace:

Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.

Murder-Suicide Appears to Be Rising Among Older Americansthetrace.orgA Trace analysis found more murder-suicides involving victims 65 or older in 2025 than in any year since tracking began more than a decade ago.

So long, Dolly.

Dolly Parton, the effervescent and glamorous “Queen of Country” who emerged from extreme poverty in rural Tennessee to become one of America’s most distinguished songwriters and wealthiest self-made women, has died. She was 80.

Dolly Parton, Country Queen Who Sang of Strong Women, Dies at 80bloomberg.comDolly Parton, the effervescent and glamorous “Queen of Country” who emerged from extreme poverty in rural Tennessee to become one of America’s most distinguished songwriters and wealthiest self-made women, has died. She was 80.

Another one. Considering the impact this might have — influencing the actions of the Treasury secretary — this is particularly egregious.

A billionaire acknowledged on Tuesday that his widely read opinion column in The Wall Street Journal criticizing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bond market intervention was written using artificial intelligence.

Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller’s WSJ Op-Ed Criticizing Bessent Was Written With AInotus.org“I write everything using AI now,” Druckenmiller, who questioned the treasury secretary’s bond market interventions, said.