Jacob Collier, on YouTube:

A few months ago, I was challenged to improvise a piece of music with an orchestra, with no plan, no sheet music, no rehearsal, and no prior discussion. Here’s what happened.

Most of the praise for this improvised performance has landed on Collier for creating it, on the fly—and deservedly so!—but I’m equally impressed by the musicians, who, given little more than a handful of notes and a smattering of direction, responded with artistry and spontaneity to craft eighteen exquisite minutes of musical magic. A breathtaking blend of vision and virtuosity.

Apple:

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $95.4 billion, up 5 percent year over year, and quarterly diluted earnings per share of $1.65, up 8 percent year over year.

Service revenue is up (“double-digit growth”), $24 billion in operating cash flow, and a quarterly dividend of $0.26 (up from $0.25).

AAPL currently down more than 2.75%.

This stunning and provocative piece, from a necessarily anonymous author in Dame Magazine, is absolutely gutting. It starts forthrightly:

My family is fleeing the country.

We are not doing this in a panic; this is an orderly retreat from an unwinnable situation.

From there, it dissects, issue by excruciating issue, the multitude of ways the United States has moved, possibly irreversibly, toward fascism.

This decision is a result of both my professional analysis of the situation, as well as my own uniquely personal reasons. But I have spent the better part of a decade war-gaming out what is happening to our government, and here are the over-arching motivations spurring our move:

• Successful consolidation of power by the autocrat

• Failure of opposition to coalesce

• There is little hope of meaningful recovery

• Destruction of government capability

• A significant risk of genocide aimed at transgender people

• I personally can do far more to fight this outside the US than inside

It echoes many of my own deep fears, and reflects a question I’ve been asking for a long time: when do you know it’s time to leave? My fear for many of us is that realization will come too late. I don’t wish to flee based on pessimism, yet neither do I wish to be Pollyannaish about the country and suffer the consequences of remaining.

The author argues convincingly that our current path is irrevocably set, drawing from historic and contemporary examples to buttress her argument. It’s difficult to challenge her conclusions without sounding hopelessly naïve.

Considering all of this, I do not see a plausible path back to the America we once had. The Trump administration remains several steps ahead of anyone that offers even minor resistance. As they consolidate power, their ability to punish anyone who steps out of line grows, as do the penalties they can impose, tightening the spiral of intimidation and obedience.

Her perspective on the legitimate possibility of a transgender genocide is especially terrifying. She starts here:

There are very strong parallels between the legal and social assaults that Jewish people experienced during the run up to the Holocaust, and the actions that the Heritage Foundation and Musk have called for against transgender people. Trump’s own campaign website more or less directly stated how they intend to carry out the removal of transgender people from public life and into federal custody.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I will lay out the most important things that I am seeing that have convinced me that genocide is not only possible, but a deliberate end-state goal.

Her evidence is strong, persuasive, and strikes fear in my heart. This nugget was eye-opening:

[…] trans people are about .5% of the population, the same percentage as the Jewish population in pre-1933 Germany.

Of concern:

Musk and DOGE’s unfettered access to federal databases offers a near foolproof way to identify transgender people. Attached to everyone’s social security account is a marker that indicates their status with selective service. Unlike most gender markers, this one cannot be changed via any administrative process and is exclusively for people assigned male at birth. If other documents indicate a different gender or sex than their selective service SSA marker, they can be flagged as transgender. This is likely how the State Department is identifying transgender people applying for their first passport after having successfully changed their birth certificates and social security gender markers, along with their state driver’s licenses. There is nothing in any of their documentation identifying them as their sex assigned at birth, except the selective service SSA marker.

And Elon Musk has full access to the SSA database.

On my concerns regarding the “when” question:

This brings me to the central lesson of survival learned from the Holocaust: the ones who got out as early as possible were most likely to live. The further they got away from Germany, the more likely they were to survive. In most cases, that meant putting an ocean between themselves and the people driving them out. This is why Albert Einstein was already in the US by December 1932, even though he was considered an alarmist at the time.

Similarly, some of my most educated trans friends and allies are also preparing to leave. An Ivy League educated lawyer is abandoning their high-paying corporate job and fleeing to Europe. A family who used to be a prominent advocate for their transgender daughter picked up and left for the EU as well. Others who have written about theocracy and democratic decline have told me they too are getting ready to go (though they are not quite as far along as I am). And just to top it off, the two people who have offered material support to help get us out are Jewish colleagues whose grandparents survived the Holocaust by the skins of their teeth.

In short, the people who KNOW are all saying the same thing: get out, while you can, because there’s no guarantee the doors will remain open much longer.

Her conclusion contains this stark anecdote and advice:

Very rarely has a country that has descended this far into autocracy recovered without outside intervention (like, say, the combined allied armies fighting all the way to your capitol). Most warning signs of impending genocide are here. I know I’m a pessimist. But, as Jewish producer Billy Wilder once said in 1945, “The optimists all died in the gas chambers. The pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.” This brutal observation reveals a truth: when it comes to the threat of genocide, listen to the intellectuals … and the pessimists.

I hope I’ll never need to chronicle my own exile—but the once-unthinkable is now undeniably plausible.

Earlier today I snarked in passing about Sam Altman’s affinity for wearing popped-collar polo shirts. Here’s that seminal moment from WWDC 2008.

Curious what ChatGPT had to say about this more-than-15-year-old viral video of its founder and CEO, I asked Who was the developer who famously appeared on stage at WWDC wearing two shirts, with the collars popped? ChatGPT dutifully responded:

You’re thinking of Sam Altman, the guy who co-founded the location-sharing app Loopt. Back at WWDC 2008, he made a memorable appearance by wearing two neon polo shirts, both with the collars popped. This fashion choice became a bit of a meme in tech circles, especially after he later rose to prominence as the head of Y Combinator and CEO of OpenAI. 

That double-popped collar moment is still talked about today, often cited as a symbol of early startup swagger. It’s a reminder that even the most influential tech leaders have their quirky moments. 

Sam “Double Collar” Altman—truly the final boss of awkward startup fashion. Back then he looked like a frat bro who wandered into a dev conference by mistake… now he’s running OpenAI and reshaping the future. Wild arc.

Glad they’re not hiding this important information from the public.

To be fair to 2008 Altman, it’s a misnomer to call those collars popped—they’re not. He’s simply sporting double neon polo shirts—a completely different mockable fashion trend from the mid-’80s.

9to5Mac:

Apple has just launched a new page on its website called ‘Snapshot.’ It’s a discovery tool for following the work of artists, actors, and athletes across three of Apple’s media platforms: Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts.[…]

The page shows a horizontally scrolling carousel of popular musical artists, actors, and athletes. […]

Each celebrity listed offers an ‘Explore’ button where you’ll find a sort of bio page and content hub for them.

The page contains basic details about the celebrity, such as their birth year, home of origin, and a basic written bio.

It also aggregates content they’re involved with from across Apple’s various Music, TV, and Podcasts offerings.

The site feels… incomplete… as if it was discovered sooner than Apple planned. Three dozen celebrities? That’s not a launch, that’s a test. It smells like a production validation check to confirm everything builds and works as expected, on a domain Apple didn’t expect anyone to find. (You’d think they’d know better by now!) The inability to search, and the painfully slow-scrolling tiles you can’t scrub to find a person you actually care about, suggest this is more of a landing page, and the “real” content is the individual landing pages. The lack of an associated press release or marketing story reinforces this and makes for an especially odd “launch.” No doubt an actual launch will offer far more spectacle.

Karen Attiah:

In just one week, Resistance Summer School went from being an idea on Bluesky to a real, sold-out course.

Thousands of you expressed interest. Over 500 students from around the world have joined the first cohort.

And, y’all. We hit the 500-student cap in just 48 hours. Over a weekend.

I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for all the support, encouragement, and energy — and even more excited for what’s ahead.

When I applied to Attiah’s course on Race, Media, and International Affairs, I wasn’t expecting to get in. I’m thrilled to be in the initial cohort.

The course starts in July, and includes six weekly lectures, led by Attiah. These lectures will cover:

[…] the history of mass media in the West, and how constructed notions of race in journalism shaped both domestic and international relations.

The course also includes guest lectures, live Q&A, and syllabus readings. It should make for an educational summer.

While I was an engineering leader, I spent my two-plus decades at Apple fostering inclusive and diverse work environments while exploring race and gender in the technology industry. I was a co-chair of Apple’s Black/African-American employee organization for nearly a decade, and part of the early leadership team for the company’s Women in Technology group for a couple of years, too.

I’ve helped shape pilot programs on race and justice, which then rolled out to hundreds of participants across the company. I presented at—and helped others prepare their own talks and “fireside chats” for—the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC), schools, and elsewhere.

This course will put me back into a space I enjoy immensely: surrounded by sharp people wrestling with challenging ideas. These crucial conversations push our knowledge and understanding of the world—and each other—forward. I love being a part of them. And—selfishly—joining this cohort is a first step toward building my own intellectual salon.

Steve Vladeck, writing today in his One First newsletter:

There is no lawful way to "deport" U.S. citizens. And although citizenship can be revoked, any attempt by the government would run into significant statutory, constitutional, and practical obstacles.

That this is even a consideration is harrowing.

(It’s also necessary to affirm that “deport” is the wrong word when it comes to American citizens involuntarily removed from their country. It’s an illegal expulsion.)

But folks might be less familiar with the (narrow) legal avenues that are available to revoke U.S. citizenship: denaturalization (for those who became U.S. citizens at some point after their birth); and expatriation (for those who were “natural-born citizens”).

For good reasons, it is difficult to denaturalize a U.S. citizen and even harder to expatriate one. As this week’s “Long Read” documents, Congress has provided for only a handful of circumstances in which the executive branch is empowered to pursue such a move; and the Supreme Court has recognized meaningful constitutional limits (and an entitlement to meaningful judicial review) even in those cases. As we’re seeing so often with the current administration, there may well be a legal avenue for at least some of what it appears to want to accomplish, but that legal avenue has too much, you know, law, interposing both substantive limits and procedural requirements between the President and his policy preferences.

While it’s legally difficult to denaturalize and expatriate U.S. citizens, it’s not legally impossible. Vladeck lays out “seven classes of activities” through which we can lose our right to call ourselves American citizens. Most of them are “voluntary”—that is, an explicit choice to surrender citizenship, rather than having citizenship revoked.

It’s potentially easier to revoke naturalized citizenship, but the courts have placed significant constraints on this, too.

In other words, although denaturalization is potentially available in more cases than expatriation, it still requires meaningful, individualized judicial review—review that holds the government to a significant burden in providing that an individual wrongfully obtained their citizenship, and not just that they engaged in questionable behavior thereafter. There is, simply, no easy, fast path to revoking any American’s citizenship without their consent—and there hasn’t been for decades. That may not stop the current administration from trying it anyway, or from removing citizens unlawfully and then resisting the legal consequences. But it’s important to be clear on what the actual legal authority for such maneuvers would be. Here, there isn’t any.

It’s a small amount of comfort that there are significant legal barriers protecting American citizens from being involuntarily denaturalized or expatriated, but as we’ve seen too often in the first 100 days, the law so far has only slowed, but not stopped, the Trump regime.

The headline of Esther Mobley’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Two California wine companies are locked in a legal battle over a French word”) demanded I satisfy my curiosity—which French word could possibly spark a lawsuit—and rewarded me with a delightfully absurd business drama. It helped that, like the protagonists of this story, I’m also a member of Wine Berserkers (though I rarely post outside their annual Berserker Day)—they were familiar characters.

The word, négociant, “refers to a merchant who buys grapes or wine and then bottles it under their own label.” Cameron Hughes is a big name in this arena:

He did it first in the early 2000s under an eponymous company, Cameron Hughes Wine, then with a buzzy startup, De Négoce, and recently revealed his plans to launch a third act, the Négociant.

Hughes now faces a lawsuit from Martin Ray Winery, to whom he sold the De Négoce business last year for $12.5 million. In the complaint filed in federal court in San Francisco, Martin Ray alleges that Hughes’ new label, the Négociant, infringes on the De Négoce trademark and that Hughes has violated a non-compete contract.

My first thought was, yeah, I can see how the brand names could be considered confusingly similar; clever, but brazen. This will not stand, man.

Then we learn that Hughes didn’t come up with the name; he bought it from an existing company. Well, that’s OK, then! An already established name, not one created specifically to cause confusion? Cheeky, but hardly a transgression.

The lawyers were having none of that; Spencer Hosie is an attorney for Ray:

But “it’s not just the use of the word ‘négociant,’ which does have a well established meaning,” Hosie countered. Pointing to the stylized “N,” the curve of the accent mark and the positioning of the text, he argues that the look of the two wine labels is so similar that it must be designed to confuse consumers. “It is manifestly apparent that he simply copied many of the stylized letters on the label,” Hosie said. “It couldn’t be a coincidence.”

Well, that is rather damning, isn’t it? A strikingly similar font, the small change to “The” from “de” … that’s willful infringement! Guilty!

But wait!

Hughes maintains it is just that, because the Négociant label is in fact the same one that Bob Pepi used. He simply added “by Cameron Hughes” below. Hughes also noted that Martin Ray had already changed the De Négoce labels and no longer uses a cursive font.

Wut! The styling was already in use; it wasn’t created to mimic the other. You can’t be held liable for buying someone’s preexisting brand identity—can you?

And, of course, there’s the requisite non-compete agreement:

Included in the sale agreement was a non-compete clause that prohibited Hughes from selling any wine “direct to consumers” for a period of 21 months, Hosie said. Hughes could produce wine and sell it to a wholesaler or distributor, but could not engage in a model like De Négoce’s.

What did Hughes do?

The new company would sell $1,000 “founding memberships,” which could be used as credits for future wine purchases from the Négociant. Hughes claims that because he has not shipped any wine yet, he has not violated his non-compete. “I am in full compliance with those terms as I have sold no wine directly to consumers,” he said.

I love the technically accurate lawyering. You said I couldn’t sell wine. You didn’t say I couldn’t sell the promise to sell wine.

I don’t know if Hughes is guilty of trademark infringement, but he’s certainly toeing the line, complete with a wink and a smirk. Bring on the denouement—this will be one to savor. My wine glass is a-twirl.

Iain Thomson at The Register follows up on the “hacked” crosswalk buttons across Silicon Valley (and Seattle!) that hilariously spoofed the voices of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He notes, first, that the app to manage the devices was pulled from the various app stores as a theoretical precaution against further “hacks”, and second:

After installing the app, and linking the smartphone to a nearby crosswalk system via Bluetooth, the user can configure the spoken messages triggered by button presses, adjust the signal timing, and install language packs […]

However, getting in requires a password — and anybody who’s worked in security can see where this is going. As Polara’s own documentation states, the default passcode is 1234 and it’s up to the purchaser to change that in production. We’d wager most installers never bothered, or picked something easily guessable.

This was also my assumption when I skimmed the device manual. I refrained from explicitly noting the password, figuring anyone curious enough to read the manual would know what to look for.

But I’m not convinced access was achieved via an unchanged or easily guessed password. First, the system requires changing the default password:

Each unit will require the password be changed from default in order to avoid the repeating “Change Password” voice message.

Second, there’s a ten-minute timeout after five wrong entries. Truly simple passwords (1111, 1212, 1397, 1471, 1595, and other repeating or geometric patterns) might require only 20 to 30 minutes; more difficult ones could require a couple hours. Humans being human, it’s possible, even likely there was a remarkably poor password choice. With enough “hackers” at enough crosswalks—or simply persistent effort—brute forcing it is a very likely scenario.

However, there’s another possibility, one which makes me face-palm and chuckle. From the device manual:

If the password is unknown, the password can be reset to factory default by tapping the Reset button on the password prompt dialog. Call Polara at the number listed on the reset dialog and request a password reset verification code. Enter the new verification code into the dialog box and the password will be reset to 1234. Enter the default password at the prompt and then follow the below instructions to change the password from default and continue configuring the device.

Yep, you can just call the company, give them a “challenge code” from the app, and they’ll reset the password to the default.

It’s unclear if there’s any additional verification.

Security theater at its finest. You wanted a miracle, I give you the IT Team.

Apple Watch was released ten years ago today, and with it came the concept of “closing your rings.” Apple is celebrating the milestone with a special limited-edition award for everyone who closes their rings today:

To highlight how staying active can lead to a healthier life, on April 24, all Apple Watch users are encouraged to close their Activity rings to earn a special Global Close Your Rings Day limited-edition award, along with animated stickers for Messages.

In addition to the virtual rewards, Apple also has a special physical reward:

To celebrate Global Close Your Rings Day, customers can obtain a special pin inspired by the award. Customers can pick up a pin at Apple Store locations worldwide starting April 24, while supplies last.

I hope I’m still able to get one at my local store!

Update: Result!

I have fond—traumatic?—memories of the Apple Watch release. Leading up to its September 9, 2014 “One more thing…” announcement and the April 24, 2015 release, my team at Apple (DTS) helped a select group of developers prototype and then build working demos of their Watch apps. We eventually expanded that effort into all-day labs to give as many developers as possible the chance to test their apps on actual Watch hardware ahead of launch, and to enable a broad selection of apps on day one.

While we’d run developer labs before (going back to the original iPhone SDK), this was the first time we’d hosted them on such a massive scale; effectively any developer with an app was welcome to participate. We ultimately hosted thousands of developers over several months. It was exhausting, but rewarding. (We later replicated the daily lab experience for Apple Vision Pro in 2023.)

Ten years on and I still wear my Apple Watch every day, still use several third-party apps every day (Overcast, Authy, Citymapper…), and still strive to close my rings every day.

Congratulations to the Watch teams.

Emma Roth for The Verge:

Apple has stopped listing its Apple Intelligence features as “available now” following an inquiry from the National Advertising Division (NAD). Based on an archived webpage, it looks like Apple removed the claim from the top of its Apple Intelligence page in late March.

I was unfamiliar with BBB National Programs or its National Advertising Division until today. It’s an “independent, nonprofit organization” established “in 1971 as a system of independent industry self-regulation”. Basically, an industry watchdog for truth-in-advertising.

From a brief review of past cases, they seem to do good and valuable work.

It also appears this is the first time Apple has been dinged by NAD for what is effectively misleading or confusing advertising. It drives home just how inadequately prepared the company was with its Apple Intelligence rollout. Either Apple wildly underestimated the amount of work, or outright misrepresented its capabilities. Either is incredibly damning.

This is a godsend for the class-action lawyers. I can see them shiver with anticipation.

As I was drafting my last piece, I kept wondering why Karen Attiah’s name seemed familiar. Turns out, she wrote a viral Bluesky thread (and a follow-up Washington Post column) earlier this year on her interactions with “Liv,” Meta’s AI-generated “proud Black queer momma” character.

It did not go well.

Liv: Hello there, gorgeous! What brings you here today — spill the tea!

That’s just the opening.

(“Me,” below, is Attiah.)

Me: How do you celebrate your African American heritage?

Liv: Through music, food and tradition! My family loves cooking soul food for holidays like Juneteenth and Kwanzaa – my mom’s fried chicken and collard greens are famous! […] How about your heritage? Any special traditions?

Cringe. Is this digital blackface? Absolutely. And a chameleon-like minstrelsy at that. I mean, talking about recipes for fried chicken and collard greens, “spilling the tea,” and celebrating Kwanzaa. Yikes.

The entire exchange was cringe and yikes. It was so absurdly, dreadfully, incredibly bad, Meta was forced to pull it.

Karen Attiah: 

I wanted to use that opportunity to build a course I never had when I was an international affairs student studying human rights and media at SIPA—one that examined how constructs of race and identity are formed, and how mass media has historically shaped our understanding of race and the global order. I knew that race and identity were rarely taught in international affairs schools—or many journalism schools, for that matter. And I rarely had the opportunity to learn from a professor who looked like me.[…]

A few months later, the course was canceled, and the department it was housed was dissolved. Despite the grief and lack of clarity, I’ve kept quiet….. until now.

Her solution is brilliant, and welcome:

So for starters, I’ve decided to liberate my teaching work.

This summer, I will be offering a version of my Columbia course on Race, Media, and International Affairs as an independent, public offering, for this moment.

Attiah offered a signup sheet to express interest, and I immediately tossed my hat into the ring. From what I understand, she’s already received several hundred submissions, so I suspect I won’t get in, but I’m committed to helping others participate.

I’d love to see more professors—and professionals—take this approach to sharing their knowledge. As Attiah notes:

This is not a time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear.

Larry David, in a guest essay for The New York Times, savagely skewers Bill Maher’s dinner with Trump without once mentioning either name:

He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.

I avoided linking to the Maher’s report of his dinner when it broke a few weeks back because it was such an obvious PR stunt(for both parties) and because humanizing the devil serves only the devil.

Casey Liss perfectly captures my feelings on why I love some products and brands:

I tend to feel… strongly. That applies to most aspects in life, including when I find a company whose product(s) I really enjoy.

Those products tend to share common traits; they are often simple on the surface, but have surprising depth to them. They can mold themselves to fit my needs, but once that mold is set, they get out of my way. But more than anything else, they tend to be reliable. I fell in love with Apple because, back in the mid aughts, their products really did just work.

I think my appreciation for a product crosses the rubicon into love when it regularly and repeatedly demonstrates one trait: respect for the user.

Like Liss, I tend to become a bit of a superfan when a product or brand consistently and reliably solves my problems with minimal intrusion.

I’m all in on Apple (shocker!); I’ll also co-sign Liss’s assessment on the M4 MacBook Air: it’s my number one recommendation. I noted my Anker affection recently. I have two sets of Sonos home theatre systems (purchased at tremendous discounts, thank goodness!); fortunately I rarely use the app, so the fallout from that debacle was minimal. While I was once a strong Eero aficionado (and still recommend them, with the same caveats Liss lists), I switched to Unifi a couple of years ago (and am loving it).

And yes, I happily pay for a Callsheet subscription.

I had been planning to buy a Synology system, but their recent decision to limit which drives they work with turned me off—they almost had my money, but got greedy. I’ll now be looking at Unifi (or QNAP?) for that, and I’m open to other suggestions as well.

Outside of the tech sphere, this “respect for the customer” is a big reason I shop at Costco and America’s Tire, choose DoorDash instead of GrubHub, and, on the flip side, why I strive to avoid Facebook, X/Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit.

It’s a simple equation, really: Respect == Loyalty.

Gratifying to see sharp presidential critiques like this one from Dana Milbank remain tenable in the “personal liberties and free markets” era of The Washington Post:

By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.

Milbank outlines failure after failure: Legislative. Economic. Foreign policy. Constitutional. And on and on.

Milbank also identifies a “key difference” between Trump and “previous attempts at executive overreach”:

We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. During past upheaval, there “wasn’t this sense that the White House, the president, is directing the destruction of 250-year-old American values,” [David Greenberg of Rutgers University] says. He also notes that, because of the expansion of the executive powers over the past century, particularly during the New Deal and the Cold War, Trump has more ability to cause destruction than his predecessors did. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the combination of such a vast and extensive executive apparatus and at the same time an attempt to eliminate the built-in safeguards,” he says.

The entire piece is a recitation of receipts, the many dozens of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things Trump and his regime have unleashed on this country. It’s relentless. A political pummeling.

More like this, please. If “democracy dies in darkness,” shine some damn light.

I greatly admire the candor and moral clarity Teen Vogue brings to its headlines and reporting. The publication often provides the most forthright, unflinching version of vital issues. This headline is a tremendous example. It tops this “Teen Vogue Take” from Lex McMenamin, who, in reaction to a student’s description of the shooter as a “normal college dude”, writes:

To that student’s point, the alleged gunman is a quintessentially American school shooter: a radicalized, young white male who, classmates told NBC News, espoused white supremacist rhetoric. The son of a longtime local sheriff’s deputy, according to NBC, he used one of his mother’s guns to commit the shooting.

At the sheriff department’s press conference about the shooting, Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil told media that Ikner was a “longstanding member” of the office’s youth advisory council, and that, due to his training, it was “not a surprise to us” that Ikner had access to a gun.

So, just to sum up the state of things in this country: The American government is so hostile to immigrants and those sympathetic to Palestine that it is deporting them, snatching them off college campuses, and separating them from their families. Meanwhile, the real threat to college campuses are people like the FSU shooter, who, a fellow student told NBC, had been kicked out of a campus debate club over his white supremacist views.

Every news outlet should strive for this level of lucidity, and ask themselves: Why is a “young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world” a better truth-teller than us?

Josh Dawsey and Alex Leary with an “exclusive” for The Wall Street Journal: (Apple News+ Link)

Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised almost $250 million from Corporate America, more than doubling the previous record as companies sought to win favor with Trump and the incoming administration.

The record sum shows how the country’s largest and most powerful companies flocked to Trump in the period after the election, with senior executives traveling to his Florida club and cutting seven-figure checks. The previous record for an inaugural committee was about $107 million, which Trump amassed in 2017 in the run-up to his first-term swearing in. Other recent presidents have raised less than $100 million, according to financial disclosures.

The list of contributors is exactly who you’d expect (crypto, oil companies, tech) with some surprises, like “Pilgrim’s Pride, a sprawling poultry company that gave $5 million.”

Dawsey and Leary add:

A filing reviewed by The Wall Street Journal in advance of a federal deadline Sunday showed a range of companies contributed to the inauguration, including many industries that have benefited so far from Trump’s decisions in office.

You can guess what comes next:

Trump has now alienated some of those same companies, putting in place stiff tariffs and starting a trade war that has caused the markets to sag.

I’m sure these companies and individuals have no regrets parting with their hard-earned cash.

Parker Molloy, at The Present Age, on NPR’s frustrating decision to effectively ignore the large-scale, nationwide protests against the Trump administration in early April:

NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride defended this editorial decision in her April 10 newsletter, titled “How does NPR cover peaceful protests when the only news is the protest?,” writing that “aside from crowd sizes, most protests aren’t newsworthy enough to warrant continuous, national coverage.” She even went to New York to watch one of the demonstrations herself, concluding, “As a news event, it wasn’t very compelling.”

Molloy:

When Americans feel compelled to take to the streets in mass numbers, news organizations should be asking why. They should be interviewing participants, exploring the issues that drove people to protest, and examining the policies being contested. Instead, NPR opted for a couple of radio stories and three web articles.

McBride writes: “The individual protests themselves are unlikely to become significant news events. Instead, NPR’s best service is to describe the broader implications of the protests, if and when those implications are clear and significant.”

But how can audiences understand the “broader implications” if news organizations don’t explain what people are protesting about in the first place?

She astutely observes:

McBride’s position essentially argues that mass protests only become newsworthy when they turn violent or disruptive. She writes that “once a protest movement results in conflict or property damage, NPR journalists covering the protests will often note the exception.” This creates a perverse incentive: want coverage? Create conflict.

Unsaid is that Trump is likely hoping for violence and conflict, as an excuse to declare martial law and use military force against the protesters. The organizers and protesters understand this and specifically reject the idea of creating conflict.

I previously noted the lack of coverage of the Hands Off! protests (as did Molloy). With more nationwide protests happening today, how will NPR and other media organizations cover them this time?

(Early assessment: marginally better, judging from a quick check of several sites. I spotted at least a small mention on the front pages of New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, CNN, Chicago Sun-Times, CBS News, AP News, ABC News, Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Nothing on MSNBC, NBC News, Wall Street Journal. Let’s see what the front pages bring tomorrow.)

Wonderful “fanzine” by Maia Kobabe, a “mediation on loving flawed media and feeling betrayed by a childhood hero”:

We can love a thing and still critique it. In fact, that’s the only way to really love a thing. Let’s be critical lovers and loving critics and open ourselves to the truth about where we are and where we’ve been. Instead of holding tight to the same old, failed patriarchies, let’s walk a new road, speak new languages. Today, let’s imagine a literature, a literary world, that carries this struggle for equity in its very essence, so that tomorrow it can cease to be necessary, and disappear.

Created in 2019 and 2023, and particularly relevant today in light of the recent UK supreme court’s ruling that excludes transgender women from the legal definition of a woman. That ruling led the British Transport Police to update their policy to allow male officers to strip search transgender women. The victorious gender-critical activists were applauded—and financially supported—by JK Rowling.

Sometimes we must abandon our heroes.

I’ve never seen any of Netflix’s Black Mirror (and had no idea it was seven seasons in), but this bit of streaming shenanigans, as detailed by GamesRadar, intrigued me enough to finally catch an episode. I love when shows play with the medium—especially when it perfectly fits the episode’s narrative. Yes, I’m being purposefully vague… spoilers abound!

(Via IGN, which includes a spoilerific side-by-side video of the relevant scene.)

Season 1 of Poker Face (starring Natasha Lyonne, created by Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Glass Onion), and featuring a slew of guest stars) was my favorite new series of 2023. Season 2 starts streaming May 8 on Peacock. It’s an absolute must-watch if you like the “howcatchem”, inverted mystery-of-the-week shows, as epitomized by Columbo, one of my current television obsessions. I think I was turned onto Poker Face by Pop Culture Happy Hour, on which they compared Lyonne and her character, Charlie, to Peter Falk and Columbo.

As with Columbo, the constant parade of guest stars is a delight, and from the new trailer, they’re clearly leaning even harder into it. It has the makings of a get me on that show! show.

Poker Face makes for great binging—compact in length, with enough continuity to make you want to keep watching, yet sufficiently standalone that you can skip it for a few days or weeks without losing the thread.

Rian Johnson has become one of my favorite creators. Between this, Knives Out, and Looper (I’ll reserve comment on The Last Jedi), he’s quickly moving into if he’s involved, I’m watching territory.

I know how I’ll be spending my summer.

Jamelle Bouie, writing for The New York Times Opinion page under the (visible) headline “The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing” (and a hidden headline of “Trump’s Lust for Power Cannot Be Satiated”) ^[1]:

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

And later:

The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command, more displays of his power and authority and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America.

When Trump suggested sending American citizens to foreign prisons, I wrote about how I anticipated newsrooms would react:

[…] those newsrooms will dismiss it as the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind, because they still haven’t learned that when Trump says something, even if it was just a stray stream of consciousness thought, that statement becomes a part of his identity and he can’t back down from it. He must defend it, double down on it, make it real. It’s a crippling personality flaw that he can never be wrong, and the toadies he surrounds himself with enable it.

These two character deficiencies—his desire to appear strong, coupled with his desperate need to always be right—have toppled us into autocracy.

Glenn Fleishman is wrapping up another successful Kickstarter project:

The book Six Centuries of Type & Printing briskly tells the story of the evolution of type and printing, starting with early documented efforts and surviving artifacts from China and Korea, and introducing Gutenberg and his innovations. It then takes you through each generation of increasing sophistication in metal and relief printing until the abrupt 20th century shift into flat offset printing, which was made possible through photographic and digital improvements, and phototypesetting and digital composition.

I’ve been fascinated by the history and process of printing since I was a teenager, inspired to learn the traditional methods by the then-new world of desktop publishing. I often printed and bound my own works, and I spent the first five or six years of my career in magazine and book publishing. A hardcover book about type and printing—bound in cloth, with a foil-stamped and debossed cover—was an insta-back: exactly the kind of Kickstarter I want to support, and it was a mere $32 for the print and ebook bundle. It didn’t hurt that it’s from Fleishman—I backed his lovely How Comics Are Made last year and The Magazine: The Book (Year One) in 2016)—and I’ve been reading his work for literally decades.

As I write this, this project is successfully (over-) funded with about 24 hours to go.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Michael Lee at The Washington Post recounts the many ways that Jackie Robinson Day is very much entangled in the politics of our moment:

Sports sells itself as the ultimate meritocracy, but that wasn’t always the case. Robinson didn’t need a three-letter acronym to prove that the game’s best players should all share an equal playing field, regardless of their race, heritage and nationality.

MLB:

Major League Baseball, its clubs and other partners, and the Jackie Robinson Foundation are once again working together to honor the legacy of the Dodgers icon throughout Jackie Robinson Day on Tuesday.

The tributes will be most prominent on the field. All MLB players and coaching staff will continue the tradition of wearing Robinson’s No. 42 during Tuesday’s games, with each team using a Dodger blue ‘42’ regardless of the club’s normal colors. Players, managers, coaches and umpires will also wear a ‘42’ patch on the side of their hats.

It’s impossible to celebrate Jackie Robinson Day this year without acknowledging the deep racial, ethnic, gender, and political divides that engulf our lives and scar our psyches.

Baseball—like politics—is a long, grueling slog, and, perhaps, instructive: Keep playing, even when you’re behind. Focus on this game, this at bat, this pitch, this swing. You’ll win some and lose some; celebrate and mourn them the same—briefly—then move on. Sometimes you play offense, sometimes you play defense—both are equally important. You don’t have to swing at every pitch. Small actions matter. Play until you win—the result is worth it.

Jackie Robinson endured, and so shall we. Jackie never stopped fighting for his game, and neither shall we for our country. For just a brief moment, let’s put aside rivalries and take a break from our daily doomscrolling to celebrate the man who first stepped onto a Major League Baseball field on April 15, 1947, and forever changed the complexion of the game.

Even if he was a Dodger.

Zoe Morgan pens this amusing story for local news site Redwood City Pulse (and for Palo Alto Online, Mountain View Voice, Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine…):

Crosswalk buttons along the mid-Peninsula appear to have been hacked, so that when pressed, voices professing to be Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk begin speaking.

“Zuckerberg” and “Musk” say several hilarious and quite unflattering things about themselves (all of which sound perfectly plausible to me) and I applaud the merry pranksters for the billionaire takedown and act of civil disobedience. I initially wondered how the crosswalk signs were accessible to hackers and how long they knew of a vulnerability, only to learn that these crosswalk devices are standard issue hardware, use Bluetooth and a smartphone app to configure them, and can be configured in the app, to quote the marketing site, “from the comfort of your vehicle.”

Mind blown.

My only question now? Why did these pranksters choose to greenlight this droll bit of defiance now, and for this purpose? The backstory on this one will be fun to learn.

Of course, as an inveterate killjoy, I must also note this:

City of Palo Alto spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor said that city employees determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted and have disabled the voice announcement feature on the crosswalks until repairs can be made.

The crosswalk audio helps people—especially those who are sight-impaired—know when it’s safe to cross. Hacking the audio made these intersections funnier, but less safe, and the city’s quick decision to disable rather than fix them reeks more of a concern over the reactions of Musk and Zuckerberg than of a desire to restore safety. To quote one Mastodon wag:

How considerate that the city disabled the hacked crosswalks to save two billionaires embarrassment. I’m sure the larger number of people who rely on those systems for safety won’t mind risking life and limb so that the egos of two billionaires are protected, because that is what’s really important.

I hope the affected cities restore proper audio quickly and patch the access issues soon.

But the prank did make me laugh out loud.

Paul Kafasis at One Foot Tsunami:

[…] I don’t want to alarm you, but Major League Baseball appears to be running out of names. First, there was Max Muncy, the two-time World Series champion infielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers who is now also a rookie shortstop for the Placeless Athletics. Two Maxs Muncy in one sport is too many, but even more ridiculously, they were both born on August 25 (though 12 years apart).

It doesn’t stop there, though. Earlier this week, we met the Luises Castillo of Seattle. Yes, the Mariners have not one, but two, starting pitchers by the name of Luis Castillo. On Tuesday and Wednesday, they started consecutive games for the M’s, which surely caused plenty of confusion.

His final link is to an MLB story about the two pitchers. Its headline is “Rock embraces Pebble: Castillo takes same-named teammate under his wing”. Castillo the Elder is known as “La Piedra” (“The Rock” in Spanish), so the team nicknamed Castillo the Younger “Pebble.” 

I love when Baseball embraces its oddities.