More evidence for the argument that, as @jamellebouie.net wrote in his recent column, the "vibe shift" did not mark "a durable turn to the political right" for many of the voters who swung toward Trump in 2024. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/o...

In New Jersey, for example, heavily Hispanic neighborhoods with a majority of Spanish-speaking households boomeranged back toward the Democrats by almost 20 points.

A higher compliment has never been paid to an app imo

8.
Ideas are cheap. So, too, is content. Value rests in my dwindling days, in my choice of how to spend them. Will I drown in the lethean pleasures of the feed, or will I attend to something else. Time, as always, is running out.

7.
Instagram, my carefully curated followings have been overrun by content algorithmically decided for me, often videos of still images of text from X or Tumblr, and I gag on it, half-remembering that there are other ways to spend the 1,200 or so weeks I have left to me (if I'm lucky).

6.
When I fire up the internet these days, I am reminded that I will die. The slop shoved down our gullets—meant to anesthetize us—tastes so revolting, it startles me out of complacency.

5.
A fading body and limited time with which we can bear witness: "Attention is biological curation," Alioto says.

4.
Alioto points back to the only human place left to us, which, conveniently, is the truest, oldest human place. Things have meaning, Alioto argues, because we die. "Attention is what makes us human," she writes. "But death is the only reason attention matters—and by extension, art."

3.
Everything must go. Kierkegaard's clearance sale has reached its endpoint now, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. And a cottage industry has risen alongside the technology: what does anything even mean anymore?

2.
"Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale," Søren Kierkegaard wrote in FEAR AND TREMBLING. "It is questionable whether, in the end, there is anybody who will want to bid." Ideas, in other words, are cheap.

3.
I've recreated a blog, but since I send this to just a couple of friends, it's a blog with a limited audience. I love it. "Social" media has devolved, it seems to me, into a lot of content I didn't ask for from people I don't know.

I can't recommend this enough: A purposeful group blog.

2.
I've found this process meaningful, almost meditative, especially the *finding* of articles that mean something to me and that I want to share. I added the ability to put in a "note": an explanation for why I'm including something, and I've started to treat these like mini-essays.

The highest compliment!

For the nerds, here's how we did it: www.wsj.com/business/air...