Apple, via Newsroom, continues its “big week”:

Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the latest-generation cellular modem designed by Apple, which is up to 2x faster than C1 in iPhone 16e. The 48MP Fusion camera captures stunning photos, including next-generation portraits, and 4K Dolby Vision video. It also enables an optical-quality 2x Telephoto — like having two cameras in one. The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display features Ceramic Shield 2, offering 3x better scratch resistance than the previous generation and reduced glare. With MagSafe, users can enjoy fast wireless charging and access to a vast ecosystem of accessories like chargers and cases. […]

iPhone 17e will be available for pre-order beginning Wednesday, March 4, with availability starting Wednesday, March 11. iPhone 17e will start at 256GB of storage for $599 — 2x the entry storage from the previous generation at the same starting price, and 4x more than iPhone 12 — giving users more space for high-resolution photos, 4K videos, apps, games, and more.

iPhone 17e introduces a new color to the lineup—soft pink—alongside black and white. In all of the ways that matter, the iPhone 17e significantly improves on last year’s iPhone 16e, and adopts several features of its older iPhone 17 sibling, but the most welcome addition is the return of MagSafe, which inexplicably went missing from iPhone 16e. I’m sure Apple heard plenty of feedback from its supposed target audience. (I neglected to mention it.)

The iPhone 17e shares the A19 chip with the iPhone 17 (one fewer GPU core—4 vs. 5—but it inherits the Neural Accelerators). It also gains Ceramic Shield 2 (for better drop and scratch resistance) and a somewhat improved camera system (no front-facing Center Stage, alas). It also doubles the starting storage, to 256GB, from 128GB.

(Which no doubt explains the iPhone 17e’s 2-gram (0.08-ounce) weight gain.)

To me, the iPhone 17e feels as much like a scaled-back iPhone 17 as it does an improved iPhone 16e. That’s a good thing.

Comparing storage to iPhone 12—a device released in 2020—is somewhat odd, but it helps explain who Apple believes is in the market for this phone: people upgrading from much older devices. The marketing page comparisons are limited to iPhone 11, iPhone SE 2nd gen, iPhone 12, and iPhone SE 3rd gen—all released between 2019 and 2022.

It’s actually rather disconcerting to see how little the iPhone has changed in the last five years. (That links to the full iPhone comparison page, set to iPhone 17e, iPhone 12, and iPhone 11; here’s one for iPhone 17e, iPhone 16e, and iPhone 17.)

One comparison Apple doesn’t make is to the iPhone 16, which remains available. iPhone 17e has double the starting storage, an improved chip, and better battery life—and is $100 less expensive than iPhone 16. The main advantages of iPhone 16? A slightly better camera system (including Camera Control), faster charging, and the vastly more interesting colors. Other than for those colors, I’m not sure why anyone would buy iPhone 16 today.

Apple, via Newsroom, kicks off its “big week”:

Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster Neural Engine, higher memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more unified system memory than the previous generation. With M4, iPad Air is up to 30 percent faster than iPad Air with M3, and up to 2.3x faster than iPad Air with M1. The new iPad Air also features the latest in Apple silicon connectivity chips, N1 and C1X, delivering fast wireless and cellular connections — and support for Wi-Fi 7 — that empower users to work and be creative anywhere. Available in two sizes and four gorgeous finishes that users love, the 11-inch iPad Air is super portable, and the 13-inch model provides an even larger display for those who want more space to multitask.

A small but meaningful speed bump, but it’s the memory increase to 12GB (from 8GB), plus the added N1 and (for cellular-equipped devices) C1X chips, that really stand out. Otherwise, it’s basically the same as the M3 iPad: same colors (blue, purple, starlight, and space gray), storage options (128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB), and form factors.

Pricing starts at $599 for the 11-inch and $799 for the 13-inch, with a $50 discount for education. Preorders start Wednesday, March 4, with availability starting Wednesday, March 11.

One curiosity: both the M3- and M4-powered iPads Air sport an 8-core CPU, however, the M3 splits its cores evenly between performance and efficiency. The M4 gives up a performance core in exchange for an efficiency core: 3 performance, 5 efficiency. I wonder if the trade-off was for cost, battery, heat, or yield, and how a 4/4 M4 would perform by comparison.

(It’s worth noting that the no-adjective iPad (with an A16 chip) is still the only iPad in Apple’s lineup incapable of using Apple Intelligence. Will that finally change this week? It’s been 16 months since I first anticipated an Apple Intelligence-capable iPad “nothing,” and a year since Apple updated it (via an “also”) to the A16. It’s starting to get embarrassing.)

Maia Mindel, at Some Unpleasant Arithmetic (on Substack, regrettably), writes a discursive, 11,000-word primer on AI, asset bubbles, and the anticipated economic impact of the artificial intelligence industry. It’s copiously linked and genuinely helpful, complete with comparisons to the dot-com implosion, the financial crisis of 2007, and the housing market crash of 2008 (oh, joy). It’s very much worth the read and I could quote it at length; here are three:

The fundamental question for AI is the same fundamental question the dot coms faced: is the business model there? Given that […] the business model is heavily betting on AI revolutionizing the economy in the short term, the stakes are high on all ends. If the AI bet pays off, the labor market implodes. If the AI bet doesn't, the capital market does.

I’m hoping for a third option.

On infrastructure:

Thus, the question is infrastructure: are AI companies overbuilding relative to a reasonable level of demand? That's the central question. If the companies are reasonably estimating demand, then they will recoup their investment on data centers and other physical assets. If they're not, then it's a bubble and we'll all go to shit.

Mindel’s conclusion:

So the question about AI isn't whether there's an irrational mania; it's whether the market is pricing an endeavor that involves spending mid single digit trillions of dollars to produce low double digit billions in revenue. […] The amounts of debt required to finance all this investment are also astronomical, and are increasingly complex, featuring a number of byzantine instruments and byzantine financial arrangements that are driving comparisons to the financial crisis of 2007, which is how you know that everything is going well.

[…]

The problem […] is that eventually the fake reality of finance has to give way to the real reality of fundamentals. The housing bubble was driven by supply-side constraints preventing effective housing demand from being met, a rapid expansion of debt and credit without sufficient oversight, and extremely complex and opaque instruments proliferating. Unless the AI bubble generates cash flows, it will suffer the same destiny. But, after the housing bubble, people still live in homes. After the AI bubble, people will still use AI.

I’m hoping the coming burst of the AI bubble is the result of a technological breakthrough that massively reduces the compute and energy needs, making infrastructure cheap and driving costs through the floor. I’ve lived this before, with internet connectivity: from dial-up to DSL to cable to fiber. I recall craving expensive ISDN or T1 lines, which were vastly more expensive than—and a tiny fraction of the speed of—your average cable internet and fiber connections today. Internet access is faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous than it was before the dot-com implosion. After this seemingly inevitable crash, I expect AI will be, too.

(Via Faisal N Jawdat.)

Brian Eason, reporting for The Colorado Sun:

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston on Thursday issued an executive order directing city police to intervene during clashes involving federal immigration officers, saying that local law enforcement has a duty to protect people’s civil rights and provide aid to Denver residents.

Johnston’s order also requires local police to identify and record Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using body cameras when “tactically safe,” and confirms the Denver Police Department will investigate criminal allegations made against ICE agents. […]

The executive order calls on local police to de-escalate clashes between immigration officers and protesters. It also says they have a duty to intervene when force is used by federal agents that “could cause death or serious bodily injury,” and requires officers to provide life-saving aid.

An American mayor needing to protect American residents from the atrocities of the American government. Our country is immeasurably broken.

Tim Cook, still posting on X/Twitter (routed through XCancel for your sanity):

A big week ahead. It all starts Monday morning! #AppleLaunch

The included video is of a hand squeezing, swiping, and flicking an Apple logo into existence against a background reminiscent of the aluminum finish of a MacBook or iPad.

So that confirms it: Apple’s new products will have an Apple logo.

(MacRumors has a roundup of what’s expected.)

Mike Masnick at Techdirt, on West Virginia’s demand that Apple scan for CSAM in iCloud:

Here is the part McCuskey’s complaint does not engage with: the moment a court orders Apple to conduct those scans, any CSAM those scans find becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search—and under well-established Fourth Amendment doctrine, that evidence gets excluded. Defense attorneys will move to suppress it. They will win. And without the CSAM itself as evidence, convictions become nearly impossible. […]

Read that again. If West Virginia wins—if an actual court orders Apple to start scanning iCloud for CSAM—then every image flagged by those mandated scans becomes evidence obtained through a warrantless government search conducted without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule means defense attorneys get to walk into court and demand that evidence be thrown out. And they’ll win that motion. It’s not even a particularly hard case to make.

Masnick also notes that the lawsuit’s very basis is dangerously flawed:

Count I—strict liability for design defect—alleges that by choosing to implement end-to-end encryption and not build surveillance capabilities into iCloud, Apple has defectively designed its product.

Think through what that means if it succeeds. Any company offering customers strong encryption becomes potentially liable for design defects unless it simultaneously builds government-accessible backdoors. Signal is a defective product. ProtonMail is a defective product. Any messaging app that doesn’t scan your conversations for the government is a defective product.

From the out-of-context executive quote to the “defective by design” conceit, this lawsuit never smelled right. Now I know why.

The Steve Jobs Archive announces its latest publication:

Letters to a Young Creator is a collection of honest perspectives on what it takes to make something great, written by people who have done it before.

The series features contributions from notable figures across business, design, technology, and the arts, written in response to questions posed by past and present SJA Fellows. The title is a nod to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet—one of Steve’s favorites—and to Steve’s own practice of exchanging ideas as a path toward clarity.

Laurene Powell Jobs, in her introduction to the collection:

Among the books that mattered to Steve was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. I’m struck by this line from its pages: “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

This is a time to live your questions. The beauty of answers, when they do come, is that they allow us to ask new and better questions. Life is learning how much we have yet to learn. In this volume, we have asked distinguished creators of diverse fields to share some of their answers to questions you asked at the beginning of your fellowship year. You’ll find candid stories of struggle and success, mistakes, and milestones. The wisdom they share in their reflections was forged by asking the kinds of questions you’re asking now.

I’ve read a few of the essays and each one sparked a moment of joy, reflection, or inspiration. I expect I’ll return to it often.

The collection is also available on Apple Books and as an EPUB. To mark the launch of the collection, the SJA organization is hosting a Zoom event with Letters contributor Es Devlin on Wednesday, March 4. I’m signed up.

Todd Bishop, GeekWire:

Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet, caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the precise spacing between specific letter pairs.

Desktop publishing was one of the biggest reasons I obsessed over computers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Though I spent more of my time in QuarkXPress than PageMaker, I can trace my early creative and business ambitions to the software and industry Brainerd pioneered. I was so enamored, I almost started a DTP business in 1991 (even buying Desktop Publishing Success as motivation) before I landed one of my earliest corporate jobs: providing software training and technical support for a magazine publisher that was adopting desktop publishing—an important milestone in what turned into a thirty-year career in computers.

Thank you, Paul Brainerd. RIP.

Jason Snell at Six Colors releases the site’s eleventh “report card” on the state of Apple. It’s rather damning:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. […]

They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category. […]

The net changes between 2024 and 2025 are displayed below—you’ll note that scores were down in 11 of the 14 categories.

My takeaways from this year’s report:

• Apple’s software quality has taken a sharp downturn, especially macOS 26 Tahoe. Some of that is Liquid Glass, but, on Mac especially, it’s the slow erosion of Apple’s vaunted “usability.”
• Mac hardware continues to be best-in-class, but is struggling to overcome its software weakness.
• iPhone continues to putter along, improving incrementally each year, with a notable rise in satisfaction coming from the base iPhone 17.
• iPad saw a marked improvement after a few years of decline, driven primarily by ultra-high-end hardware and the introduction of useful and usable multitasking support in iPadOS 26.
• Services is buoyed by the strong television fare on Apple TV streaming, but tied down by the high pricing and constant upsell.
• The relationship with developers is as bad as it’s been in a decade, driven by Apple’s unwillingness to cede any control of its App Store, the company’s ongoing fights with regulators across the world, and the icy reception to Liquid Glass.
• Apple’s “leave the world better than we found it” ethos sustained a massive—potentially unrecoverable—blow this year, primarily from Tim Cook’s obsequiousness toward and appeasement of the current administration.

On that last category (“Apple’s Impact on the World”), here’s Snell’s summary:

This year, the bottom fell out. Tim Cook’s relationship with the Trump administration dominated the discussion. Panelists overwhelmingly condemned what they described as obsequious behavior — the gold-plated plaque, the Mar-a-Lago dinners, the inaugural donation — as a betrayal of Apple’s stated values on human rights, the environment, and social responsibility. Several panelists noted that Apple had quietly deprioritized environmental commitments and removed the ICEBlock app from the App Store. A few acknowledged the difficulty of Apple’s position as a multi-trillion-dollar company navigating an unpredictable administration, but most argued that Apple was obliged to take a stronger stand.

I could handle the imperfect software, the Services toll, and even the regulatory malfeasance, but Apple’s stature as the one company I could trust to always do what’s right has been forever tainted.

Brent Johnson, NJ.com (subscription required; syndicated via Yahoo):

As Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey consider a flurry of proposals to push back against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, one bears a provocative name that’s being either praised as bold or derided as vulgar.

The measure is called the “Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered Act.”

Or, the “F**K ICE Act,” if you read between the lines.

Yes, it’s real. This may be the New Jersey-est thing New Jersey has done. Let’s hope more states follow suit.

I’m quite disappointed that news outlets are censoring the name of the act. The New York Times can’t even bring itself to do that much, referring to it instead as “a bill that is encoded with an unsubtle message” and “the legislation, known by its blunt acronym.” Name it. It’s the F.U.C.K.I.C.E. Act.

Published to West Virginia’s Office of the Attorney General’s site last Thursday (CNet’s coverage):

West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey today filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc., alleging the company knowingly allowed its iCloud platform to be used as a vehicle for distributing and storing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — and for years chose to do nothing about it.

I understand the purpose of a press release of this sort is for the Attorney General to position their case as favorably as possible, but “allowed” and “do nothing about it” are awfully strong. But that’s not nearly as assertive as this:

The lawsuit reveals that Apple, in its own internal communications, described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn” — yet took no meaningful action to stop it. Rather than implement industry-standard detection tools used by its peers, Apple repeatedly shirked their responsibility to protect children under the guise of user privacy.

The press release doesn’t cite its source for the quote, but the filing does, linking to a 2021 article in The Verge that highlighted “All the best emails from the Apple vs. Epic trial.” From entry 71, “Apple’s head of fraud suggests Apple may be unwittingly providing ‘the greatest platform for distributing child porn.’”:

Halfway through an iMessage conversation about whether Apple might be putting too much emphasis on privacy and not enough on trust and safety, [Eric] Friedman comments that “we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn,” adding that “we have chosen to not know in enough places where we really cannot say” and referencing a New York Times article where, he suspects, Apple is “underreporting” the size of the issue.

It’s a pretty damning quote, and, as you might suspect, is taken somewhat out of context, while being simultaneously presented as though Apple as a company was content with this assessment. That’s more salacious and headline-grabbing than what it actually was: a Trust and Safety executive expressing frustration about his efforts to resolve an inherent tension in Apple’s staunch privacy stance. As Friedman says in that iMessage chat just ahead of that quote:

We’re committed to doing the work so that we can maximize all three: features AND safety AND privacy. But it requires real commitment to get there.

In context, Friedman isn’t confessing; he’s lamenting the obvious privacy tradeoffs. I’m confident in saying that Apple was (and is) aware that its strong stance on privacy—which benefits most people—also has the unfortunate side effect of “protecting” a small group of bad actors who leverage that privacy to perform nefarious acts. The alternative is to reduce everyone’s privacy, which is something Apple has (rightfully) been loath to do. And make no mistake, that is very much what’s at stake here.

Back to A.G. McCuskey’s press release:

Federal law requires all technology companies based in the U.S. to report detected CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). In 2023, Apple made just 267 such reports. By contrast, Google filed 1.47 million reports and Meta filed more than 30.6 million.

The key word here is “detected.” Apple made 267 reports because Apple doesn’t have access to your files; Google and Meta have no such restrictions and thus can detect and report files they—or anyone—have deemed inappropriate.

The lawsuit alleges that Apple (knowingly) harbors large amounts of unreported CSAM, based on the assumption that because its peers do, Apple does too (and on a passing comment by an executive). Apple is being targeted because it doesn’t report sufficient CSAM—not because it hosts it. The lawsuit seeks to weaken privacy under the guise of protecting children: the exact opposite of Apple’s stance.

Also: Holy smokes, what is going on over at Meta? 30.6 million reports of CSAM? What percentage does that represent of total CSAM on Meta platforms? I truly hope it’s substantially all. That many reports—and the vast amount of information Meta has on its users to make them—are still insufficient to stem the tide of CSAM coursing through its platforms. It knows it’s there. It reports it. And yet it continues to proliferate. Meta reports the material, but seemingly does nothing to actually stop it.

Which may be enough to satisfy the West Virginia Attorney General.

The YouTube algorithm strikes again, surfacing this deeply satisfying conservation and restoration video of an extremely rare Japanese Star Wars poster (which then sold for $14,950). I appreciated both the craftsmanship of the restoration and the history of the poster, and the results are nothing short of miraculous. I welcomed the narration of the original Fourth Cone Restoration channel, but they also offer an ASMR version sans narration and music, just the restorative sounds of spraying water, crinkling acrylic, and squeaking squeegees.

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune:

An awkward moment between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at an AI Summit Thursday captured the increasingly icy relations between two rival tech leaders who started off as colleagues.

Onstage with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the India AI Impact Summit, Altman and Amodei seemingly refused to touch during a photo op. Modi grabbed Altman’s hand and lifted it for a group photo, but Altman and Amodei, standing side by side, did not clasp hands or make eye contact.

The video for the Altman–Amodei non-touch was deeply cringe, but it was still less awkward than the Tim Cook–Bono finger touch (and both are outshone by Altman’s double-collar polos).

OK, one more Rev. Jackson clip, this time from his 1989 appearance on A Different World. I’ll bet many students were inspired to register and vote following this episode. (From s2e21, “Citizen Wayne,” available on Netflix.)

Another classic: Rev. Jesse Jackson leads a group of children in reciting “I Am… Somebody!” on Sesame Street in 1972:

This clip is so deeply embedded in my subconscious that I only hear the poem with Rev. Jackson’s and the kids' call-and-response cadence.

After Theodore (Dr. Seuss) Geisel died in 1991, Rev. Jesse Jackson paid tribute with a reading of Green Eggs and Ham on Saturday Night Live. I’d forgotten about this until my friend and former colleague Tom shared it and it all flooded back. The glasses removal and the forehead wipe are perfect touches. It’s so good.

AP News:

The former Prince Andrew was arrested and held for hours by British police Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office related to his links to Jeffrey Epstein, an extraordinary move in a country where authorities once sought to shield the royal family from embarrassment.

It was the first time in nearly four centuries that a senior British royal was placed under arrest, and it underscored how deference to the monarchy has eroded in recent years.

I hope America is taking notes.

Donald Trump, to reporters on Air Force One:

I think it’s a shame. I think it’s very sad, I think it’s so bad for the royal family, it’s very very sad. To me it’s a very sad thing. When I see that it’s a very sad thing.

What’s “sad” about the arrest of a man credibly accused of heinous crimes? This is what working systems of justice are supposed to do, not target your enemies and re-litigate debunked conspiracy theories.

By contrast, here’s King Charles:

What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course.

This is how a leader responds.

Peter Applebome, The New York Times (gift link):

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died on Tuesday at his home in Chicago. He was 84.

I recall friends and family talking excitedly about Jesse Jackson’s two presidential runs in 1984 and 1988; there was this palpable sense of possibility, tempered though it was by political reality—everyone then knew that a Black man could never become president of the United States, not in their lifetime.

In 2014 and 2015, Rev. Jackson forcefully called out Silicon Valley tech companies for their ongoing lack of diversity. His efforts drove intense conversations inside Apple, drawing attention to the work many of us were doing to improve Apple’s diversity practices. The result was greater visibility for our recruiting and community efforts and led—indirectly, at least—to the release of Apple’s first diversity report. Jackson’s voice amplified ours at a time when few were willing to listen to us.

We Keep Hope Alive.

This looks like tremendous fun. I really hope it’s good. We’ve not had a good Star Wars movie in a long time. A long time.

Claire McNear, Rolling Stone (spoiler alert for the week-ago episode):

As Final Jeopardy!’s soothing doo-doo-doo came to a close, host Ken Jennings turned to contestant Alison Betts, who trailed her two opponents in a distant third place. But Betts hadn’t attempted to work out which 1960s book character had been rewarded by having “his brave act go unrecognized.” Instead, she placed a small bet and wrote, “I hope they both bet everything” along with a smiley face. The studio audience laughed. Then Jennings turned to the contestant to Betts’ right, Isaac Hirsch — who was wrong and did indeed bet everything, sending him to zero. And then it was Josh Hill’s turn to reveal his results. Another wrong answer. Another wager of everything. Another zero.

The most un-Jeopardy! of sounds rang out across the Alex Trebek Stage: Gasps! Cries! Somewhere in the country, surely, dentures tumbled. Betts collapsed into her lectern, the come-from-behind winner with a ticket punched for the Jeopardy! Invitational Tournament’s semifinals.

I loved the logic behind Betts’ betting (really, is there a more perfectly named contestant for this story?). There are many reasons I’d tank on Jeopardy! but mathing under stress is high on the list.

Joe Macken built a tiny, hyperrealistic replica of New York City out of wood and cardboard. The 50-by-27-foot model is now on display in the Museum of the City of New York. Alaina Demopoulos at The Guardian:

“This is all about consistency,” Macken said. “I just started cutting one little house at a time.” It took him 10 years to cover Manhattan, and then another decade to get through the rest of New York.

I love a good obsession.

The New York Times covered the project last summer and again ahead of the move to MCNY.

From the MCNY’s exhibition page:

It renders the city’s skyline, neighborhoods, and landmarks with remarkable precision, character, and imagination. Macken started with the Comcast Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, infusing its familiar form with details that signal his personal artistic vision.

Shame on MCNY for calling it the “Comcast Building” and not “30 Rock.” I bet they also say “Avenue of the Americas,” not “6th Avenue.”

This bit from the Guardian story made me happy:

In the late 60s and early 70s, Macken watched the twin towers rise from his childhood bedroom window. He remembers seeing cranes hoist girders into the sky. “It was my favorite building,” Macken said. So he put it in the model, which has replicas of both One World Trade Center, which opened in 2014, and the original towers. “No matter what, the [former] World Trade Center was going to be in there,” he said. “That was just a personal thing I wanted to do.”

The twin towers are also dear to me. I’m thrilled they’re represented.

You must watch this short video clip of Paul Birdsong, at a protest shortly after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good, in which he offers a strongly worded warning to ICE while legally armed with a semi-automatic shotgun. Birdsong—who identifies as a member of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party for Self-Defense—did not come to play and does not mince words. The transcript is below, but I encourage you to take 75 seconds to watch it. The overtly violent imagery may drive MAGA headlines, but it’s the underlying message that’s important to hear.

A Black man with a gun scares people—recall that after the original Black Panther Party called “for Black people to arm themselves,” the NRA strongly supported gun control—and Birdsong’s unabashedly aggressive language has sparked performative outrage from the likes of Infowars. It worries me that Birdsong and the other members of his group are putting themselves in harm’s way and might soon be targeted by ICE or another government agency—or MAGA agitators—even though I agree that a legally armed group of citizens can prevent ICE escalations and protect the public.

Isn’t this what Second Amendment advocates have been preaching for decades?

Here’s the transcript:

Won’t no ICE agent ever run up on me. I guarantee you they won’t, I’ll put a hole in their chest the size of a window. “Safelite repair, Safelite replace.” That’s what’s gonna happen if they touch me.

Unarmed woman was killed by ICE. If you think you about to come and brutalize the people while we’re standing here—fuck around and find out.

Our interactions with the police and ICE, and—we hold them accountable. We hold them accountable. We patrol the community, and we hold them accountable.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, we’re the same Panther Party from back in the day, but we’re a little more aggressive now, you dig, carry bigger guns, and we don’t take no shit.

Places where there are a lot of immigrants at, I think that the community around them needs to take special care to them, and needs to start escorting them to and from everywhere to make sure that they’re safe. Because them ICE agents ain’t gonna act like that if it’s a bunch of people standing outside with assault rifles and shotguns.

It’s a semi-automatic shotgun. That means them shotgun shells that shoot out of a pump, this shoots them rapidly. If you are gonna legally arm yourself, arm yourself with something bigger than what they got. Those who serve in the public, they should be fearful of the public. They should be fearful that the public’s gonna be dissatisfied with their job that they’re doing, not feeling like they’re tyrants, not feeling like they’re bullies, because they got guns and body armor and walkie-talkies, that makes them immune to whatever the people would do.

I think you want to correct the ideology of the pig and the mentality of the slave catcher, you meet them with equal force.

All power to the motherfucking people. (No power to the pigs.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer has more on Birdsong and this iteration of the Black Panther Party. Birdsong has previously identified himself as the national chairman of the Party, a claim some disputed. The group has since changed its name to The Black Lion Party For International Solidarity.

A couple of months ago, while partaking in some tasty whiskies, my drinking buddies were taken aback that I’d only just recently started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time, but were downright shocked—verging on horror—by my confession that I had never seen Babylon 5.

I vowed to watch it as soon as I finished ST:TNG, but it wasn’t on any streaming services I had.

That’s changed, as Babylon 5 is now streaming on YouTube for free (with ads) as part of a marketing push by Warner Bros., reports Luke Bouma at Cord Cutter News:

The uploads started with the pilot episode, “The Gathering,” which serves as the entry point to the series’ intricate universe. This was followed by subsequent episodes such as “Midnight on the Firing Line” and “Soul Hunter,” released in sequence to build narrative momentum. The strategy involves posting one episode each week, allowing audiences to experience the story at a paced rhythm that mirrors the original broadcast schedule. This approach not only encourages weekly viewership but also fosters online discussions and communal watching events, much like the fan communities that formed during the show’s initial airing.

I’ll give the first few episodes a gander (in my Apple Vision Pro, now that YouTube is finally available there). If the series captures my fancy—as my friends confidently assure me it will—I may have to buy the series on Blu-ray, because there’s no way I’m watching 111 episodes of TV on a weekly basis. This isn’t 1993, and ain’t nobody got time for that—binge or GTFO.

Wait… is that the point? Curse you Warner Bros. and your diabolical marketing team!

Lauren Forristal, TechCrunch:

After two years of initial hesitation, YouTube has finally unveiled its dedicated app for the Apple Vision Pro.

Seventeen people: Yay.

When Apple’s headset first launched, YouTube opted for a web-based approach instead of developing a dedicated app, directing viewers to use Safari to access content.

It’s been an embarrassment on both sides: for Apple, which couldn’t muster sufficient enthusiasm for its first new platform in a decade; and for Google, which actively opted out of allowing its iPad app on the Vision Pro two years ago—and then blocked third-party apps hoping to fill the void.

Fortunately, per Samuel Axon at Ars Technica:

It’s not just a port of the iPad app, either—it has panels arranged spatially in front of the user as you’d expect, and it supports 3D videos, as well as 360- and 180-degree ones.

I should hope so. It would have been an even greater insult if all Google did after two years was to recheck that App Store box.

While I haven’t yet fired it up on my Apple Vision Pro (it needs to be charged, lol), I’ll give this release a qualified finally.

Much to my chagrin, I found Anna Peele’s Vanity Fair profile of Bianca Censori rather fascinating. Under the headline “Bianca Censori, Uncensored: For the First Time, Kanye West’s Wife Is Speaking for Herself,” Peele paints a profile of a tortured, intellectual artiste who’s going to great lengths for her craft and is simply misunderstood.

(Here’s an Apple News+ link.)

The only reason I—and probably you—have even heard of Censori is because of her shockingly revealing outfits and the rampant speculation she was coerced into wearing them by her notoriously controlling husband, Kanye “Ye” West:

The public perception seemed to be that Censori was a mute captive being trafficked in daylight and dressed by her husband like a sex doll […]. “I wouldn’t be doing something I didn’t want to do,” Censori says. Every time she has appeared nude, she says, it has been her choice.

This interview casts Censori as a once-“precocious little girl” who “would read books of factoids so she’d have something to say about any topic that arose,” and today lives for her artwork and speaks animatedly about affordable housing.

The revelation, though, that captures everything I needed to understand about Censori and her relationship with Ye, is this:

Censori says she has always been guided by overwhelming emotion. Her parents had to remove the phone in their living room because she would incessantly call her father at work, demanding to know when he was coming home. If the clock went one minute past the ETA, Censori would ring him back. “You’re a liar!” she’d yell. “You’re not here! Why would you do that to me?”

“I wasn’t able to regulate for my whole life,” Censori says. “I also pair-bond so intensely and so deeply that that person becomes part of me. That’s my person. You know that movie Together, where they’re getting into each other’s skin? I loved that one. That’s kind of who I am.” In the 2025 film, actors and real-life spouses Alison Brie and Dave Franco slowly fuse into a single being. This depth of feeling tracks with how Censori describes nearly every relationship: As a girl, she would sit by the fence and wail when she couldn’t be with her young neighbor; of her husband, she continually repeats, “I love him…. I love him so much”; when we part, she tells me she feels like she made a friend. “It’s only ever brought joy to my life,” she says of codependency. “I just love that person so deeply, so intensely, that I want to be around them.”

Some people lack emotional control and have an irrational need to make any perceived slight—no matter how small or imagined—all about them. Such people will make wild claims—or take extreme actions—to train and maintain attention on themselves. These folks often feel deeply lonely and “unworthy” of love. I’m sure we’ve all witnessed it—I sure have.

Censori may well be the “artistic, sensitive” person who “is currently into a cryptography puzzle app,” and is using her body to make “a statement about control and sexuality”—that person peeks through in this interview—but it’s also hard to ignore the massive amount of attention she and West both seem to crave.

With Censori’s only joy coming from codependency, and with her lack of emotional control, I doubt she needed to be coerced into anything. I suspect that to feel “loved,” she’d willingly perform any extreme act to avoid feeling alone and abandoned.

Bill Bernard of Between Two Firewalls, on the “the underpinning privacy issues” of the aforelinked Ring “Search Party” feature:

It sounds great, doesn’t it? “More than on pet per day has been returned” per the ad. Laudable goal, and I’m sure that across the nation there being at least 366 families each year who are reunited with their pets are quite happy. (that’s as many as it takes to be able to claim more than one per day) I know there are a couple times I was worried that my dog had been lost, and I might have appreciated such a capability.

But there’s a lot going on in order to make that work, and every single bit of it has privacy implications that you need to be aware of as the ad - and indeed the concept itself - does a great job of downplaying these implications.

Let’s put this another way: do you believe there have been more or less than 366 personal privacy violations from this self same system per year? The rest of this post will be a consideration of those privacy concerns and what we can do to still have home security cameras that we trust without participating in an outsourced mass surveillance system.

Bernard goes through several issues with this feature (and similar features from other companies), including:

• Cloud Based Home Security Camera Storage: “In order for this system to work, your camera recordings have to be stored and viewed by the company behind this technology. Read that again. Stored. Viewed. By somebody who isn’t you.”
• Law Enforcement Access To Your Recordings: “the companies that run consumer cloud services must comply with US law. Not only that, many of them want to curry favor with federal and state government, after all the same companies that run these cameras have lucrative contracts with those same government bodies.”
• Facial Recognition and AI Review: “The unspoken part of this is that these companies have AI which is capable of performing facial recognition on your recordings.”
• The Impact On Your Friends and Neighbors: “Surely we have some level of responsibility for their privacy expectations as good friends and neighbors, don’t we?”

He suggests alternatives to cloud-based security systems, recommending Ubiquiti for example, which I second. (I can also recommend Eufy and Eve, both of which I use with Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video.)

Bernard concludes:

I realize that this advice may mean that up to 500 pets a year aren’t recovered as quickly as they could be if you have a cloud-based camera solution, but I’m comfortable suggesting that the privacy you give up in order to reunite those pets with their families isn’t worth it.

There were several terrible ads this Super Bowl, but the one from Ring, Amazon’s security camera system, was easily the creepiest and most unsettling of the bunch—selling neighborhood surveillance under the guise of being a “hero.”

The commercial touts Ring’s “Search Party” feature that purportedly helps people find their lost pups: post a photo of your pet, and, with the help of AI, every outdoor Ring camera in the neighborhood is activated to spot Spot.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media calls this feature “dystopian surveillance accelerationism”:

It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant.

Koebler quotes Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author, who called the ad and feature “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”

Ring has long cozied up to cops, recounts Koebler:

The company threw parties for police, employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties, and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate. It helped police set up elaborate, completely useless package “sting” operations designed to catch criminals but that did not result in any arrests. Ring gave cops devices that they could raffle off to people in their towns, gave police “heat maps” of where its customers lived, used its social media accounts to post footage of supposed suspicious people, and incentivized customers to create “Digital Neighborhood Watch” groups that could earn them swag if they used their Ring cameras to report suspicious activity to police.

Ring is using sentimentality—lost puppies, forlorn kids—to entice us into (willingly) building out a massive surveillance state. First the family pet, next the suspicious stranger. It’s not being paranoid to imagine ICE seeking access to these cameras to track the movements of immigrant families, protesters, or other “persons of interest.”

The Ring ad notes that 10 million pets go missing a year, but thanks to this new feature, “more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family.”

Given this is a marketing campaign, that “more than” claim probably means 366 to 548 dogs (more than that and they would have said “nearly two dogs a day”). At the (very generous) high end, that’s a paltry 0.00548% reunion rate—five and a half thousandths of a percent. If we allow for a whopping 100x increase in found pups following the widespread adoption of this feature, this dystopian technology will reunite perhaps 55,000 doggos (0.55%) with their humans. Great for those families—not so much for our privacy.

Yes, that’s exactly as stupid as it sounds, and would not be out of place in The Onion or The Babylon Bee. Aaliyah Steward, a law student at FAMU, told Florida station News 6:

“We couldn’t use the word ‘black’ in Black History Month. We would have to abbreviate it,” she said. “I was very angry and baffled because this is a Historically Black College and University, and for them to say we can’t use the word ‘black’ was kind of insane.”

I have questions… Can we still call FAMU a Historically Black College and University, or is “HBCU” permanently required? Can we abbreviate the verboten word as “Blk,” or must we censor it, as we do expletives—“B***k”—so as not to offend? Or do we need to excise “Black” completely, and celebrate “History Month” at Florida’s only public “Historically College or University”?

Perhaps they’ll allow “Negro.” Or “Slave.”

FAMU also reportedly banned “affirmative action” and “women,” so perhaps we can anticipate “W***n’s History Month” in March.

After initially acknowledging the ban (“in full compliance” with state law), the university has since backtracked, with FAMU President Marva B. Johnson, J.D., writing in a statement to various media outlets:

As the state’s only public Historically Black University, the word “Black” is central to the mission and identity of Florida A&M University. We take seriously our responsibility to communicate clearly and consistently on matters of law, governance, and public accountability. The University unequivocally confirms that the use of the word “Black,” or the phrase “Black History Month,” does not violate the letter, spirit, or intent of Florida Senate Bill 266, Board of Governors Regulation 9.016, or any relevant federal guidance.

Cecil Howard, FAMU’s Associate Provost and Interim Dean of the College of Law, blamed staff:

Howard explained the issue was “a staff-level error—an overly cautious interpretation that went beyond what the law requires,” and that the university immediately engaged a Florida higher-education law expert who confirmed that neither state law nor Board of Governors rules ban use of the word “Black” or the phrase “Black History Month.”

It’s ridiculous that the word “black” requires legal affirmation of its use. We live in the dumbest timeline.

(Via Ronzilla.)

The Onion:

Infuriated at the sullying of a cherished American tradition, angry conservatives across the country vented their outrage Friday over this weekend’s Super Bowl being held in the foreign city of Santa Clara.

Sad to see this great newspaper reduced to plagiarizing reality.

CGTN, last month:

With the Year of the Horse approaching, a netizen in Hangzhou recently shared photos of a stuffed horse toy that came with an unexpected flaw – its mouth had been stitched upside down. Instead of a cheerful smile, the little horse looked unmistakably gloomy, quickly earning it the nickname “Cry-Cry Horse.”

Cry-Cry Horse’s dismayed expression perfectly captures the feelings of a planet.