If you listen(ed) to ’90s electronic music, you likely recognize that quote from The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. The Orb were probably my earliest introduction to electronic music, and this track is one of my favorites.

The track kicks off with this question by an unknown interviewer, who for years was mistakenly thought to be LeVar Burton. Ian Scott finally discovers who really asked this important musical question.

(Via kottke.org.)

Who Asked “What Were the Skies Like When You Were Young?” in “Little Fluffy Clouds?”

Who asked the famous question in the song Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb? TL;DR: it’s music writer Carl Arrington. Read on for more background.…

Ian “polpo” Scott

So many fascinating tidbits about Brooklyn’s layout and history this long-time Brooklynite was unaware of, explained in a wonderfully clear and casual manner by Daniel Steiner:

The story of Brooklyn is the story of a bunch of disparate settlements that grew until they eventually merged together to become “Brooklyn.”

Steiner’s YouTube style is like visiting with your best bud as he recounts his latest fascinating discovery over a cup of chamomile. I could watch him talk about maps for hours, which is great, because he also has explainers for Manhattan’s grid, and the maps of Staten Island, Las Vegas, London, and his latest, Los Angeles (plus several more).

If you’re of a certain age and grew up watching Sesame Street, you count to twelve to a funky, jazzy, surprisingly complex tune (sung by The Pointer Sisters) that accompanies a trippy pinball animation, aka “Pinball Number Count”. Charles Cornell, who analyzes and explains musical concepts on YouTube, uses music theory to break down the tune’s odd time signature and unexpectedly intricate melody. The deeper Cornell dives into the song, the crazier it seems that this masterpiece of music was written for a children’s television show. It certainly made it memorable—it manages to live rent-free in my head, 40-plus years on!

(Watch all 11 versions—yes, 2 through 12; there is no 1.)

Jasmine Mooney writes in The Guardian about her harrowing experience being locked up in a series of ICE facilities after her visas were revoked:

I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.

For two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was and no one answered our questions.

Stories about the inhumane conditions in these detention facilities mainly seem to make the news when it’s someone who “doesn’t belong there,” but the conditions are awful for everyone. It’s imperative that we continue to bring attention to this issue. I’m glad Mooney was willing to speak out and use her personal privilege.

To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.

Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.

I can’t imagine having no way to reach someone who can help you, whether in the US or your home country, because you don’t have their telephone number or email address. It’s a nightmare—and there’s no incentive for the facilities to resolve things:

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn't just a bureaucratic nightmare. It's a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It's a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560mfrom Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

If Donald Trump and Elon Musk were truly serious about cutting wasteful government spending, they’d abolish ICE.

Which I’m sure is next, right after “cancel Starlink contracts”.

Because rueful laughter is still laughter.

A brief follow-up from my last link: Garrett Bucks, in his preface to that piece, wrote:

We have wished (appropriately) for bravery from our media, from elected Democrats, from public officials in general. However fair those wishes are, they come with a risk: that we miss the opportunity to be the lonely voice for justice in our own community, the person who makes it a little easier for a second and third and fourth lonely voice to start perking up by our side.

That idea—one lonely voice making it easier for others to perk up—stirred something in me and I started to hum, an indistinguishable tune at first. Only after hitting publish did it coalesce into something recognizable.

I was in my eighth grade choir—this would be 1982, 1983—and one of the songs we performed, and which has clearly stuck with me all these years, was Barry Manilow’s One Voice:

If only one voice would start it on its own

We need just one voice facing the unknown

And then that one voice would never be alone

It takes that one voice

(Complete lyrics.)

The parallels with Bucks’ phrase teased this forty-plus-year-old memory from the depths of my subconscious.

It’s a beautiful song, and a beautiful sentiment.

Garrett Bucks on the importance of taking small, seemingly insufficient actions:

Why? Because others will see you do them, and it will make it easier for them to take their own (slightly less lonely but equally beautiful) action by your side.

From February, but still (maybe even more) relevant today.

Here’s the first one:

The next time you read an article about how USAID or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau or the Department of Education is being attacked, remember that no matter how impactful the agency, movements don’t coalesce around acronyms—they are always about empathy for each other. Take a few minutes to research a specific program administered by those agencies that help people, and ring the alarm for everybody you know. Stop saying “Trump and Musk are the worst” and practice saying things like “Trump and Musk are sentencing millions of AIDS patients to death” or “Trump and Musk want credit card companies to rip us off” or “Trump and Musk just cut mental health and math tutoring resources for your kids’ school.”

I’m working to do better at this when I rant on Mastodon. And I’ll try to do a few of the remaining 29, despite many of them giving me, as Bucks puts it, “anxiety about putting [myself] out there.”

David Mora and Michelle Jia wondered if it’s true that they don’t make love songs like they used to:

The proportion of love songs in the 1960s was 23%. In the 2020s, it’s 12%. The proportion of love songs has almost halved! So, was Boomer Bob right? Are love songs, in fact, dying?

Not quite: we think Boomer Bob has too narrow a view of love. Sure, these lovey-dovey tunes have declined. But what about other songs? What about Adele’s Someone Like You? Or T-Pain’s Buy U a Drank? Or WAP? If we look more closely, we uncover a story that will change how you see love in pop music.

A thoroughly engaging visual and aural exploration of the evolution of the love song. Today’s “love songs” are much more… nuanced.

As with most pieces from The Pudding, the methodology is as interesting as the results, so be sure to read “Nerds: learn about our methods and data” at the end. Of particular interest to me: the use of ChatGPT 4o, with an extensive prompt, to help label songs. I may have more to say about this in the future.

Is the Love Song Dying?

We categorized songs in the Billboard Top 10 to see if love songs are on the decline.

The PuddingThe Pudding

Shirley Wu, a self-described “obsessed” fan of Hamilton, explains her astonishingly deep dive into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant work:

When I started digging through the lyrics, I was curious about two things: the relationships between the main characters, and the recurring phrases associated with those characters.

So I went through every single line in Hamilton (twice 😱 ) and recorded who sang each line, as well as who that line may have been directed towards. I've noted every phrase that was sung more than once across more than one song, and grouped them into broad themes.

It’s a good thing I didn’t see this visualization a decade ago when I was completely obsessed with this musical, or I wouldn’t have slept for days. As it is, I spent all too much time exploring the themes and relationships and, yes, singing the lyrics. It’s a brilliant and fun way to revisit what is certainly one of my all-time favorite musicals.

An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton

When I first heard of Hamilton, I was doubtful...but from the moment I sat down to listen the whole way through, I was done for…

The Pudding

On a recent trip to Los Cabos, another tourist imitated the ducks wandering along our path, and from those vocalizations, I guessed he wasn’t a native English speaker. Thanks to this fun and illuminating data visualization (and sonification?) of the onomatopoeia of animal sounds in multiple languages, I now know it was the Korean version of “quack.”

How do animals sound across languages?

Analyzing animal onomatopoeia across languages can demystify how we shape sound into meaning.

The PuddingThe Pudding

From John Broich in The Conversation (via Smithsonian Magazine^[1]):

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

First published in December 2016. Our biggest newspapers have learned nothing since, and—dare I say—are even worse now.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get.

When will today’s journalists come to the same realization about Trump?

What will historians write about today’s newspapers one hundred years hence?

I linked to this fascinating, enlightening, and, frankly, terrifying article from Timothy W. Ryback in The Atlantic (Apple News+) in my previous piece, but it deserves its own post. I’ve referenced it a lot since January 20, 2025. Though I was broadly aware of Hitler’s rapid rise and subsequent consolidation of power, I wasn’t aware of just how quickly it happened, nor how “democratically” it was done:

In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

I was already convinced Trump was America’s Hitler. After reading this article, and watching Elon Musk dismantle government agencies, I thought, Musk is Trump’s Wilhelm Frick, sent in to dismantle everything, with little oversight.

But maybe I have it wrong. Maybe Trump is President Paul von Hindenburg and it’s Musk who’s the Chancellor who usurps all power.

Regardless of who’s playing which role, since the inauguration, it’s felt like this country is speedrunning an autocracy/oligarchy challenge, with Trump seemingly trying to best Hitler’s democracy destroying record. I’ve wondered, more than once, how we will recognize when we’ve crossed the democracy rubicon? What’s the sign we’ve hit our “53 Days”?

Has it already passed, after Trump ceded power to an unelected, non-Senate-confirmed billionaire, targeted the most vulnerable, and purged the country’s military leadership?

Is it ongoing, with Congress ceding its power to the White House?

Or still to come, once Trump “acquires enough muscle to enforce his lawless proclamations,” a scenario more likely with Trump loyalists heading the FBI and Justice Department?

As you’d expect, not everyone finds this comparison appropriate:

I am not a fan of using comparisons to 1932 and Hitler.

This is not post-WWI Germany operating under the treaty of Versailles and the war reparations act, nor does the US have an inflation rate of 29,000% per month.

To me, the situations don’t have to align for the comparison to be apt. Hitler and Trump both gained power via legitimate, democratic means, and used/are using those same levers to undermine the very systems that brought them to power.

Trump admires Hitler and men like him, and is surrounded by others who do too.

I find it valuable to acknowledge the historical rhymes, even if we don’t like the meter.

Priscilla Alvarez, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene, writing for CNN:

The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

The little-known 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, gives the president tremendous authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts have argued it would face an uphill battle in court.

[…]

The announcement, which could come as soon as Friday, has been a moving target as officials finalize the details.

This threat isn’t new—Trump has been making it since at least September 2023—but this latest report, coming just days after the illegal detention of Mahmoud Khalil, suggests a move may indeed be imminent.

(Not to get too conspiratorial, but today—Friday—marks Day 53 of the Trump regime, which some may recognize as significant.)

Calling it an “uphill battle” is a bit of a gloss, though. Here’s the relevant section of the Act (emphasis mine):

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

To my layman’s eyes, a plain reading of the Act makes it clear that it cannot be invoked without a declared war or invasion from a foreign country.

The “first” group Trump wants to use this Act against:

The primary target remains Tren de Aragua (TDA), a Venezuelan organized crime group that is now operating in the United States and other countries.

Are we supposed to believe we are at war with or threatened by an invasion from Venezuela—a country with fewer people than Texas? Does Trump even know where Venezuela is?

Attempting to use it in this situation would be, at best, misleading and at worst, blatantly illegal. Not that such trivialities matter much to Trump.

Trump wants to use this Act for one, simple reason:

Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act would not be allowed to have a court hearing or an asylum interview since they would be processed under an emergency, wartime authority — not immigration law. Instead, they would be eligible to be detained and deported, with little to no due process, under Title 50, the section of the U.S. code housing America’s war and defense laws.

Bypassing the courts and the legal system: the preferred tactic of every would-be dictator.

This Act has been invoked just three times since 1798, all in times of war. By first threatening to invoke this little-used law against a foreign criminal gang, Trump is defying us to defend them, daring us to stand with “the enemy.” After all, who’s against cleaning up our streets from dangerous gangs, right?

If he succeeds with this abuse, who gets flagged as a “member” of the gang will expand, followed by which gangs get targeted. You can bet Mexico and other South and Central American “gangs” are on his list. Muslim and African “gangs” won’t be too far behind. Eventually, it won’t even need to be couched as “members of a gang.” It’ll just be dehumanized “vermin” from “shithole countries.” By the time the country realizes what he’s doing, it will have been normalized.

Every immigrant—legal or undocumented, recently arrived or decades settled—is at risk to the whims of the Trump regime.

It’s just a matter of time before Trump starts detaining natural-born citizens, too.

Joseph Gedeon, writing for The Guardian:

The mayor of Miami Beach is attempting to evict an independent cinema from city-owned property after it screened No Other Land, the film about Palestinian displacement in the West Bank that just won the Oscar for best documentary.

Steven Meiner’s proposal would terminate O Cinema’s lease and withdraw $40,000 in promised grant funding. In a newsletter sent to residents on Tuesday, Meiner condemned the film as “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents”.

An American government official should understand that, in America, screening this movie is a First Amendment right:

“Screening movies to make sure they conform to local censors’ tastes is a practice we left behind with the red scare,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire).

“If the first amendment doesn’t mean that a movie theater can show an Oscar-winning film, something is seriously wrong.”

Something is, of course, seriously wrong.

Madiba K. Dennie, writing in Balls and Strikes about the backlash against Justice Amy Coney Barrett for daring to dissent, even briefly, from the conservative orthodoxy:

Barrett’s fellow travelers on the right felt betrayed, and voiced that betrayal with the kind of vitriol they normally reserve for minorities and poor people. Often, when a marginalized person ventures outside of the box conservatives try to put them in, Republicans attack their credentials and character, painting them as undeserving and ungracious. Barrett, a lifelong conservative less than three years removed from casting the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, got to experience a version of that this week. Republicans have from time to time been disappointed in the Republican men on the Court too, of course, but they aren’t telling Roberts that he’s unqualified, that he has kids at home, or that he should go back to Indiana and smile on his way out. Barrett is a dutiful foot soldier of the patriarchy, but she’s still a woman.

In this circle, “DEI,” of course, means “not a white man,” and “conservatism” is all about following the white male playbook. Failure to do so will be punished, regardless of how much in the tank for their cause you otherwise are.

I fly in and out of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) several times a year—it’s my home airport—and while I know it has a lot to offer, I’ve never considered it a destination to be explored. This video has me reconsidering. Perhaps the next time I have an easy flight, I’ll get to SFO early or wander around after I land.

Listening to the music from F-Zero put me in a nostalgic mood and brought to mind another of my favorite SNES games, Axelay. It has one of the most cinematic and emotional openings I can remember, and a killer gameplay soundtrack.

The Mute City 1 (track 1) music from F-Zero was stuck in my head yesterday. A quick search on YouTube later, and I was scratching that earworm itch while reliving a beloved SNES game soundtrack from one of my most-played Super Nintendo games, without having to hunt down my console.

I love Harrison Ford and single malt scotch, and this six-part (plus teaser) campaign is a cinematic delight. I’m hoping for more installments. I shall pour myself a dram tonight. (I’ve been meaning to link it up since I found it while searching for his Jeep Super Bowl commercial. A recent “How do you pronounce it?” query reminded me—thanks, Tammy!)

This New York Times piece, from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, purportedly about serious disagreement inside Trump’s Cabinet over which of his sycophants are in charge, reads more like a Television Without Pity recap of an episode of The Apprentice, only with less clever writing.

It’s filled with weird quotes-that-aren’t (reading like a lightly altered transcript of a surreptitious recording), and contains some truly awful New York Times-isms, like this one:

Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.

One: There is zero reason to believe this “concept” is Musk’s goal (and plenty of evidence to believe otherwise). It’s unadulterated mendacity.

Two: It admits these cabinet officials want to bring about the destruction the US government and the pain it inflicts on the American people, just slower and with more meetings.

It’s an infuriating passage—a demonstrably false premise, paired with a disingenuous conclusion—and sanitized through the antiseptic language of propriety.

This exchange really struck me, though:

At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details […].

The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.

Many of us have known about Musk’s racism for almost a decade, and about Trump’s for far longer, so we understand that when they say “diversity, equity and inclusion” they mean “not white men.”

The additional “tell” is the suggestion to hire from MIT, because in Trump’s mind, “geniuses” = “MIT” = “white”.

Just 7.6% of MIT’s student population is Black.

In addition to yesterday’s MacBook Air announcement, Apple dropped a two-fer: A new Mac Studio with an M4 Max and an unexpected M3 Ultra configuration.

First, the new chip. A new M3 variant is a surprise in itself; I assumed—as I think most people did—that any new chip configurations would be based on the M4. It appears, though, that there won’t be an “M4 Ultra”: Apple told Ars Technica “not every chip generation will get an ‘Ultra’ tier,” and French technology website Numerama (via Mac Rumors) was told “there are no UltraFusion connectors on the M4 Max chip” (Safari-translated from the original French), making an Ultra M4 physically impossible.

That’s a bummer (and makes me wonder about the future of an M4-based Mac Pro), but the M3 Ultra is a beast of a chip:

Apple today announced M3 Ultra, the highest-performing chip it has ever created, offering the most powerful CPU and GPU in a Mac, double the Neural Engine cores, and the most unified memory ever in a personal computer. M3 Ultra also features Thunderbolt 5 with more than 2x the bandwidth per port for faster connectivity and robust expansion. M3 Ultra is built using Apple's innovative UltraFusion packaging architecture, which links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections that offer low latency and high bandwidth. This allows the system to treat the combined dies as a single, unified chip for massive performance while maintaining Apple's industry-leading power efficiency. UltraFusion brings together a total of 184 billion transistors to take the industry-leading capabilities of the new Mac Studio to new heights.

And:

In fact, M3 Ultra is built for AI, including ML accelerators in the CPU, Apple’s most powerful GPU, the Neural Engine, and over 800GB/s of memory bandwidth. AI professionals can use Mac Studio with M3 Ultra to run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters directly on device, making it the ultimate desktop for AI development.

The AI power in this chip makes me wonder if it (or something like it) powers the Private Cloud Compute servers scheduled to be built in Houston, TX.

On to the new Mac Studio itself:

Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine.

The M4 Max Mac Studio is a significant upgrade and readily induces lust, but the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is just off the charts:

It delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts, and massive amounts of unified memory.

That “massive amounts of unified memory”?

Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts with 96GB of unified memory, which can be configured up to 512GB — the most unified memory ever in a personal computer — and up to 16TB of ultrafast SSD storage, so content and data can be kept locally.

I’ve been trying—and failing—to recall the last time Apple introduced a computer where the highest configuration was powered by a faster version of a previous-generation chip. It may well be unprecedented.

The M3 Ultra allows the Mac Studio to accomplish some mind-blowing feats, including driving up to eight Pro Display XDRs, and playing back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video.

I would love to see that rig!

With great power comes great responsibility… for your credit card. The base M3 Ultra starts at $3,999 (compared to a paltry $1,999 for the M4 Max) and maxes out (ultras out?) at $14,099. Whew.

Pre-orders have already started, with availability beginning March 12.

Apple’s “Air” releases continued today, with the long anticipated M4 MacBook Air. The highlights:

• “The blazing-fast performance” of an M4 chip.
• New 12MP Center Stage camera.
• New sky blue finish, “a metallic light blue,” which, from website photos, just looks like silver to my eyes. I’m curious how it plays in person.
• Lower starting price of $999 ($899 for education).

A solid update (especially for anyone on an M1, or especially an Intel, MacBook), with a fantastic starting price. But, as with yesterday’s iPad no-modifier, very few people are walking out the door with a sub-$1000 M4 MacBook Air—the base storage is 256GB, which I consider miserly to the point of malice—even pre-ghost Ebenezer would wince. I usually recommend at least 512GB storage for most people—1TB would be better for future-proofing—but the cost of those upgrades is bananas: $200 and $400, respectively. For some, it may be better to pick up an external SSD or two (I have a bag full of them) and deal with that (minor) hassle.

I do legit love my refurbished, 13” 16GB/1TB M2 MacBook Air in midnight, though. I originally purchased it in mid-2023 as a “travel” laptop to reduce the weight in my backpack, but it’s become my most used computer. (I’m typing on it right now!)

(Yes, refurbished. These are some of Apple’s most screamingly good deals. For one thing, the memory and storage markups are significantly reduced, which is how I managed to pick up this 1TB MacBook Air for under $950.)

I put the M-series MacBook Air near the top of the list of best computers Apple has ever made. It’s thin, light, well-priced, and more powerful than it has any right to be. It’s my number one recommendation for almost anyone looking to buy a computer. Not laptop—computer.

My only disappointment: I really do wish Apple would finally add cellular. If they’d done so here, I would’ve bought this new one instantly (rather than trying to justify the purchase with a trade-in).

A couple of days ago, Tim Cook teased that “There’s something in the Air” on X/Twitter. More about that in a bit. Today, Apple released a new iPad Air, announced via press release:

Apple today introduced the faster, more powerful iPad Air with the M3 chip and built for Apple Intelligence. iPad Air with M3 brings Apple’s advanced graphics architecture to iPad Air for the first time — taking its incredible combination of power-efficient performance and portability to a new level.

It’s a very minor spec bump (to be generous). Other than the upgraded CPU (and a 0.01 lb./2g weight reduction) very little has changed from the previous M2 generation. Notably, Apple speed-compares it against the older M1-based iPad Air, not last-gen’s M2.

The M3 brings with it hardware-accelerated ray tracing (for that undoubtedly sizable segment of iPad gamers who’ve been missing it), plus 8K HEVC, 4K H.264, ProRes and other media processing muscle for those looking to record or edit their high-end video.

It’s a classic product speed bump, especially useful if you have a non M-series iPad.

Pre-orders start today, with availability starting Wednesday, March 12.

New Magic Keyboard

Along with the upgraded iPad Air, Apple announced a new Magic Keyboard “designed for iPad Air”, and at lower prices ($269 for the 11” model, $319 for the 13”). It gains a larger trackpad and a 14-key function row, as with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, but loses backlit keys and trackpad haptic feedback. The price drop had to come from somewhere, right?

The big shocker: An updated iPad (no modifier) that can’t support Apple Intelligence

An update to the iPad—that is, the entry level, $349, no modifier iPad “nothing”—was relegated to an “also” in the iPad Air release:

Apple today also updated iPad with double the starting storage and the A16 chip, bringing even more value to customers. The A16 chip provides a jump in performance for everyday tasks and experiences in iPadOS, while still providing all-day battery life. Compared to the previous generation, the updated iPad with A16 is nearly 30 percent faster.

It’s an odd announcement. Double the storage at the same $349 price and an A16 chip is nothing to sneeze at for an entry level product, except we’re living in an age of Apple Intelligence, and this update leaves the iPad no-modifier as the only iPad (indeed, the only iOS or macOS device) in Apple’s lineup incapable of supporting what Apple touts as a crucial part of their products.

When Apple released the iPad mini with an A17 Pro last October, I wrote:

It’s $349, and it’s likely Apple’s best selling iPad by far, but it can’t handle Apple Intelligence: Its A14 Bionic chip is a generation older than the one in the outgoing 6th generation iPad mini. I can’t imagine Apple would let its most popular iPad lag behind without support for Apple Intelligence, so why not update it now, in a joint press release with the iPad mini?

I was mostly pondering timing: would it come in a press release; in a (then-anticipated) October event; or perhaps a new iPad-with-no-modifiers wouldn’t be coming at all:

The final possibility is rather intriguing: What if there’s no update to the iPad-with-no-modifiers, because that iPad is going away? That leaves us with a classic Good/Better/Best scenario: iPad Mini (A17 Pro, Good), iPad Air (M2, Better), iPad Pro (M4, Best).

But would Apple drop its likely best-selling iPad to execute this strategy? I’m having a tough time believing that.

My guess: A significantly upgraded iPad is coming. M4-based is a strong possibility, but my money (today) is on an A18 or A18 Pro (likely), the same chips in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro.

I would have been less surprised if Apple had discontinued the iPad-with-no-modifiers than I am by a non-Apple Intelligence-capable iPad.

I would have been surprised, but not shocked, by an A17 or an A17 Pro iPad no-modifier. As an entry level device, using a generation-old chip would be a clear cost-saving move. What do you expect for $349, right?

Nope. Apple couldn’t be bothered to meet even that bare minimum. Releasing a “new” iPad in 2025 that’s not Apple Intelligence-capable conveys a distinct disinterest from Apple in the iPad “nothing”. It signals an end-of-life product that’s being kept on life support for purely emotional (that is, “monetary”) reasons.

Apple is a master of market segmentation. No doubt this “update” is all about satisfying a specific segment of buyers—students and kids; kiosks and points of sale; bulk buyers, like airlines; anyone with a pre-A-series iPad who needs it for daily productivity or TV viewing. Maybe even first-time buyers upgrading from an Android device.

Let’s not ignore the all important “starting at” price anchoring. In addition to mastering market segmentation, Apple has also mastered the price ladder. The 11” is too small, you say? How about the 13”? And what’s this about Apple Intelligence?

If I were recommending a new iPad to someone today, I could not in good conscience suggest the iPad no-modifier, except in some very limited instances. My guess is unless a buyer is extremely price sensitive, they were never making out the door with a $349 iPad.

“There’s Something in the Air”

Back to the beginning. When Tim Cook teased this release with this tagline, he wrote “This week.” Not “Tuesday.” You can be certain there was no uncertainty surrounding the release of the iPad Air; that date was locked weeks ahead of the announcement.

So why “This week”? The obvious answer is another “Air” product is still to drop. There has long been speculation about an M4 MacBook Air or (much less likely) a thin new iPhone—I think more people expected a new MacBook Air than a new iPad Air today—so it’s safe to assume Wednesday will see another press release (perhaps this time with a video?).

My one hope: that the M4 MacBook Air includes Apple’s new C1 cellular chip. If that happens, I’ll immediately be in the market to replace my perfectly fine, two-year-old M2 MacBook Air. A cellular Mac would be too compelling for me to pass up.

C’mon Apple, take my money!

Brandi Buchman breaks this story for HuffPost: 

Commemorative bronze duplicates of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Jan. 6 police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol appear to have been removed for sale from the U.S. Mint’s website.

There’s also this apparently independent report from NBC News where the author, Ryan J. Reilly, describes the removal as:

another instance of President Donald Trump’s administration moving to take down material related to the violent episode stemming from his falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results.

I saw this just days after I questioned if some US Mint coins this administration might deem “woke DEI” would even get minted today, so I was immediately outraged, but held off on linking to it. As tempting as it was to unleash righteous indignation on Trump for this, I didn't want my confirmation bias leading me to the wrong conclusion about a change that could have a perfectly innocuous and reasonable explanation. After all, there was only the HuffPost report (and later, the NBC one), with no indication of why or when this medal was removed. 

The why remains uncertain, but the when has a smidge more clarity: The Internet Archive’s January 9, 2025 snapshot of the US Mint’s Medals page shows an entry for “Those Who Protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” I presume it’s the medal in question. That page has a “last updated on” date of November 26, 2024.

(The Medals page lists all medals available from the US Mint.)

A February 22, 2025 snapshot—with a “last updated on” date of February 5, 2025—does not list the medal.

I can therefore say with some confidence that this entry—and, I presume, the medal—was removed sometime between November 26, 2024 and February 5, 2025. That’s a pretty broad window, spanning the last months of the Biden administration and the first weeks of Trump’s.

I can also say with confidence that the only change to the page was, in fact, the removal of that one medal entry.

This is not dispositive. It’s possible the Biden administration or the US Mint decided—for completely practical, pragmatic, and uncontroversial reasons—to remove this medal from the site.

The alternative is to suggest that Donald Trump—who denied the insurrection, pardoned 1,500 rioters, purged Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents who worked the Jan. 6 cases, scrubbed the DOJ’s “comprehensive website cataloguing the largest criminal investigation in modern department history,” and has lied, repeatedly about Jan. 6—directed the US Mint to remove a commemorative medal “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6.

It’s quite the coin flip.

Jess Weatherbed with a fantastic review of some of the political history behind the UK’s recent attempt to backdoor the world, and Apple’s response of pulling Advanced Data Protection from their UK customers. This, especially, rings true:

Apple’s withdrawal of ADP can be interpreted as a call to break an intentionally curated silence around Britain’s bullish efforts to crush end-to-end encryption services. It’s a call that other encryption service providers don’t seem to be answering, however. Meta, Signal, and Telegram haven’t made any announcements about their own services that provide full encryption and haven’t responded to our requests to comment on the situation. Their silence and the ongoing availability of encryption features in the UK would suggest that nothing is amiss.

Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at the EFF, says that this is likely the case because the encryption services provided by most communications companies aren’t as broad as Apple’s ADP offering.

My working theory is the UK government doesn’t care (as much) about your text messages—iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, etc. They will happily grab them if available, of course, but people understand text messages are viewable by others and are therefore more likely to either delete them or write obliquely if they’re hiding something.

No, what the UK (and other governments) really want is all the other data from Apple devices that people may not realize is being collected—locations, photos, search history for Maps and Safari, and so on—data that is accessible to Apple and governments on Standard data protection-enabled devices (via the keys that Apple holds) but which becomes inaccessible when Advanced Data Protection is enabled.

They’ll happily leave your text messages encrypted (but see the next section) if it allows them access to the truly valuable data the average person doesn’t even realize is exposed. Texting about robbing a bank is suggestive. A month’s worth of location data showing you hanging around with other suspected bank robbers, then being at the bank while it’s being robbed, along with photos from the area a week before, and a Maps search showing the fastest route from the bank—that’s actionable.

Kristen Bell opened her hosting duties at The 31st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards (her second time) on Netflix—its second year in a row—with this delightful tune.

I do love me some Kristen Bell. She’s a legit snack. (Potential spoiler for an almost-decade old TV show.)

Samantha Cole at 404 Media provides the background behind this absurd video:

A venture capital-backed “AI performance monitoring system for factory workers” is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency.

In a launch video demoing the product, Baid and Mohta put on a skit showing how Optifye.ai would be used by factory bosses.

When I first watched the video, I thought it was a bone-dry satire of the kinds of anti-worker, AI-driven systems that VCs and big tech roll out in the name of “efficiencies,” and which exist mainly to induce fear in workers by convincing them they’re disposable yet utterly dependent on the good graces of their company for their continued employment.

But nah—it’s an earnest pitch for yet another exploitative, extractive, VC-backed idea.

The demo doesn’t even purport to solve any issues beyond providing ammo for yelling at workers: no explanation of the supposed inefficiency, no actionable steps for improvement—just “numbers down, must yell now.”

It’s telling that both founders come from families that run factory lines—and it shows in the video, which is overtly owner-centric, with a “management” style that treats the workers as nothing more than cogs to be adjusted for better performance.

Robert Berkvist on the tragic death of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, for the New York Times:

Gene Hackman, who never fit the mold of a Hollywood movie star but became one all the same, playing seemingly ordinary characters with deceptive subtlety, intensity and often charm in some of the most noted films of the 1970s and '80s, has died, the authorities in New Mexico said on Thursday. He was 95.

Mr. Hackman and his wife were found dead on Wednesday afternoon at the home in Santa Fe., N.M., where they had been living, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department. The cause of death was unclear and under investigation. Sheriff's deputies found the bodies of Mr. Hackman; his wife, Betsy Arakawa; and a dog, according to the statement, which said that foul play was not suspected.

It’s one level of grief when a celebrity with the stature of Gene Hackman dies. It’s even more tragic when a loved one dies too.

When I learned of Hackman’s death, two movies came immediately to mind: Superman^[1] and Enemy of the State. Probably not the first two films most people think of, but I came late to most of his work.

Hackman, it turns out, was a significant part of my classic films self-education—movies released “before my time”—but I didn’t realize as I watched them that they were Hackman classics; they were just classics: The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, even Young Frankenstein (which, until now, I never realized he was in).

(I saw The Royal Tenenbaums, but that movie occupies the “WTF did I just watch” spot in my brain, so I don’t recall most of it.)

Most of his other iconic movies—Bonnie and Clyde, Hoosiers, Mississippi Burning—remain on my “to watch” list.

That list will be getting a workout over the next few weeks.

The trailer for this new documentary film from Apple TV+ just dropped, and looks to be an inspirational journey:

With unprecedented access and candid interviews, “Number One on the Call Sheet” takes us on an intimate journey with some of Hollywood’s most extraordinary leading Black men and women as they shine a light on the joys and challenges of being a Black actor, share breakthrough moments, discuss blueprints for success and honor legends, while recognizing the next generation’s enormous potential.

It’s a two-parter, one focusing on “Black Leading Women in Hollywood” (directed by Shola Lynch), the other on “Black Leading Men in Hollywood” (directed by Reginald Hudlin) who are, in fact, number one on the call sheet—

A Hollywood term for the lead actor or actress of a film listed first on the daily schedule.

Also, a term of status.

I had no idea status was attached to the top slot of a call sheet, though I understand how rare it is for that slot—usually the lead of the movie—to be held by a Black performer.

It’s a prodigious assembly of extraordinary artists, and the trailer tells me the stories will be funny, inspiring, and unforgettable.

Number One on the Call Sheet is the culmination of four years of work and streams on March 28 on Apple TV+.