Blog

"One's output must never exceed one's input."

So said a wise former editor of mine. So, from the vast jumble of words that I read each day, here's some interesting reads and notable work from talented human beings. Inspired by Kottke.org.

(RSS / Archive)

• 10 Apr, 2026 Dolly Parton's popularity

  Dolly Parton is the most popular person in America, an (actually quite rigorous) poll finds:

  Parton has a net favorability of +65, 50 points higher than Barack Obama (+14) or Volodymyr Zelensky (+13), and more than 60 points above the just-barely-positive Taylor Swift (+3). Of course this doesn’t directly translate to popularity; a T-Swift tour will outsell Parton 100 times out of 100. The poll suggests that though Swift may be a juggernaut, nearly as many people loathe her as like her. With Dolly, there’s love everywhere you look.

  While it’s just one poll, UMass Lowell is a reputable pollster; Silver Bulletin gives them an A-. Dolly is included in the questions in part because she’s an example of a genuinely beloved figure, which is rare in these often less-than United States. She’s used as a bar that no politicians seem able to reach. Even Swift at +3 far outpaces most national figures in office.

  We should never be drawn too much on this, obviously, but I do think it's notable how Dolly is, at the core of it, an unashamed and unequivocating liberal (or what American's consider "liberal," in our absurd times).

  She was so pro-Covid vaccine she funded its development. On LGBT rights, she said "We are all god's children, we are who we are. We should be allowed to be who we are."

  Has she spoken on all issues? No. But you couldn't accuse of her of not doing her bit to promote some sanity among the madness.

• 09 Apr, 2026 The end of the anecdotal lede

  Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel declares the days of the "anecdotal lede" to be numbered. Among the reasons why, he says, is how AI might change our habits:

  AI is another important factor pushing in the same direction. How much AI is going to take over news delivery is, I think, more of an open question than some techno-enthusiasts believe. But there is no real question that the degree to which content will come to us filtered through AI will grow substantially. And AI is simply going to strip away the grace (and, I am afraid, the power) of anecdotal ledes from those who insist on continuing to employ them. If you are summarizing a story, Kilgore’s nut graf survives—it even floats to the top. But the slow slide into the pool of the anecdotal lede is deemed surplusage.

  "And not before time!" says a room of grumpy editors. (I'm not in that room.)

  Tofel talks about the bulleted AI-generated summaries many news orgs (including the one I work for) are placing on top of stories these days. Why have this and then drop into an anecdotal lede? It's a good point. But I'm not giving up the right to an anecdotal lede that easily. I have two simple rules. First, the anecdote needs to be extremely relevant to the story at hand. Second, the anecdote needs to actually be good.

• 08 Apr, 2026 Threatening the Church

  Christopher Hale in his 'Letters from Leo' newsletter:

  In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

  “America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

  Read it all: The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy

• 07 Apr, 2026 One word a minute

  This 2,800-word essay took me 45 hours to write. I wrote it from scratch five times, and only 10% of my words made the final cut. That comes out to an average pace of one word per minute; imagine typing a single word, taking a brief walk, and then coming back to type the next. Writing happens at an unbearably slow pace for a culture that’s glued to vertical feeds with split-second reward loops, but thinking takes time. Good thinking takes a lot of time and even more toil. Essay writing is a process I’ve grown to love, a process I believe is deeply human, and yet it’s a process that’s becoming endangered.

  -- Michael Dean: Essay Writing as Personal Sovereignty

• 06 Apr, 2026 The simple North Korean test

  Facing a problem of North Koreans posing as different nationalities for remote jobs, one tech start-up implements a simple test: Will they insult Kim Jong-Un?

  Here is a video of a North Korean IT worker being stopped dead in their tracks upon being required to insult Kim Jong Un.
  
  It won't work forever, but right now it's genuinely an effective filter. I'm yet to come across one who can say it. https://t.co/8FFVPxNm8X pic.twitter.com/KXI5efMo5L

  — tanuki42 (@tanuki42_) April 6, 2026

  TechCrunch has more on the practice here.

• 05 Apr, 2026 Bluesky isn't growing

  James Ball on Bluesky's (lack of) growing pains:

  This is the better question about this stuff: most of us aren’t technology investors. We just want a social network we can use, and which ideally isn’t full of fascists, trolls, and bots. Bluesky’s small size can feel like a bonus against that backdrop: for many of its current users, the network feels fine as it is. Why worry about it growing? I’m getting what I need from it now.

  The problem is monetisation: Bluesky costs a lot of money to run, and at present the bills are being paid by investors. They don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so in the hope of making vastly more money later. Generally, investors will be happy to subsidise the losses of a company if it is growing, especially if it is growing fast.

• 31 Mar, 2026 One less person

  Hamilton Nolan:

  No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

  Read the rest: Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.

• 30 Mar, 2026 A clear violation

  A note attached to a New York Times book review:

  Editors’ Note: March 30, 2026:

  A reader recently alerted The Times that this review included language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian. We spoke to the author of this piece, a freelancer reviewer, who told us he used an A.I. tool that incorporated material from the Guardian review into his draft, which he failed to identify and remove. His reliance on A.I. and his use of unattributed work by another writer are a clear violation of The Times’s standards. The reviewer said he had not used A.I. in his previous reviews for The Times, and we have found no issues in those pieces. The Guardian review of “Watching Over Her” can be read here.

• 30 Mar, 2026 You can't defeat the robots

  Minnesota Twins manager Derek Shelton becomes to the first to be ejected from the game for becoming infuriated at the decision of the robot umpire.

  This season, which started this weekend, is the first to include the controversial technology.

  The commentator's call is pretty special:

  "He's arguing with the robots"
  
  The ABS system has been awesome so far 🤣pic.twitter.com/ZVKWSeeYXo

  — FanDuel (@FanDuel) March 29, 2026

• 27 Mar, 2026 We would use different words

  Colby Hall in Mediaite on how we've stopped being stunned by the batshit cabinet meetings hosted by President Trump, one of which was held on Thursday and lasted 98 minutes. Hall:

  Here’s what I keep coming back to: if a transcript from this meeting came from the government of Brazil — or Hungary, or any country we cover from a comfortable critical distance — we would not file it as a cabinet meeting. We would write about it as a document. We would ask what it reveals about the man producing it and the institution that has formed around him. We would use different words.

  But we don’t use different words for Trump. We stopped a long time ago, so gradually that I’m not sure anyone made a conscious decision to stop. It just became the way the job gets done.

  And I say “we” deliberately, because Mediaite runs the clips too. We package the highlights. We write the posts. I’ve written more of them than I care to admit, and I’ll probably write more, as the traffic they generate is part of what keeps the lights on here. So I’m not throwing stones from outside the house. I live in this house. That’s actually why it bothers me.

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