Robert Kagan’s ominous view of the Iran war –
“There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be ‘open,’ as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.”
Doc Searls has a fantastic breakdown that I agree with 100%, especially the point about skipping ad reads.
Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-overs are very effective and remunerative (bringing much higher CPMs).
Five additional points.
First, you can listen on your own time. You’re free from the tyranny of “What’s on." This is the triumph of personal optionality over … I dunno, you name it. Yes, we still need what’s live, at least for news and sports. But we don’t need it all the time for everything else. While that doesn’t completely obsolesce the things called “stations,” and “networks,” it does relegate them to a legacy niche. It’s an open question how big that niche will be when the transition is over.
Second, not all podcasts are ad-supported. I know, the ones without ads are mostly out on the long tail, but what matters is that anybody can podcast on the Net, just like anybody can publish there. RSS—really simple syndication—gives all of us scale. This is, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, a miracle on the order of loaves and fish. It’s foundational.
Third, podcasts are liberating. Radio and TV required licenses on the transmission side and dedicated instruments (radios and TVs ) on the receiving end. With podcasting, the thresholds of production, distribution, and consumption verge on zero. Got a phone? You’re in.
Fourth, a huge advantage of podcasts is that you can skip over the ads. Whenever I hear Kara announce the first “quick break,” I usually hit the forward-30-seconds icon six times, to jump over three minutes of 30-second ads. (Though lately Pivot has gone to seven of those in the first break.) Still, I’m sure the advertisers' money is well spent, because some percentage of the audience won’t skip all the ads all the time. And the host-reads are good and effective, as they say.
Fifth, if it’s not “wherever you get your podcasts,” it’s not a podcast. The context for what I sourced above was Kara and Scott’s back-and-forth about Netflix moving into video podcasts. I think “video podcasts” is a contradiction, especially if those podcasts are just another form of TV you can only get from one exclusive producer. If that’s the case, it’s just a show. But look at Us magazine’s list of the 7 Best Podcasts on Netflix Right Now (April 2026). The audio versions of all seven are available wherever you get your podcasts. That makes them real. If they become exclusive to Netflix, or to anybody, they aren’t podcasts anymore. Find another word for them.
The NBA Draft Combine runs May 10-17 at Wintrust Arena. Three names from this year’s Final Four team are on the invite list: Keaton Wagler, Kylan Boswell, and Andrej Stojakovic.
Wagler’s the lock. Top-10 projection, consensus All-American, Jerry West Shooting Guard of the Year. He won’t have to scrimmage. The interview rooms are basically a formality.
Boswell is the one I’m watching. He averaged a double-double at the Portsmouth Invitational a few weeks back and made the all-tournament team. He’s projected late second round right now. A strong week in Chicago could only help his stock.
Stojakovic has until May 27 to make up his mind, and the smart bet is that he comes back. The three-ball still has to come around (please shoot 500 threes all summer), and another year with Underwood is worth more than a contested 50th pick.
Miss the days when we all watched the same episode and talked about it the next day. Now everyone’s at a different point in the season. That shared TV excitement is getting harder to find.
Baby, if you’ve ever wondered.
A radio station in Cincinnati just changed its call letters to WKRP this week. Yes, that WKRP. The one where the turkeys couldn’t fly.
Here’s what I love about it. The show was set in Cincinnati, but was never broadcast or filmed there. The call letters bounced around. Most recently, a low-power nonprofit in Raleigh put them up for auction this spring.
Grant County Broadcasters won the bidding. They took 97.7 FM and started playing the same kind of music the show used to spin. They ran the theme song on a six-hour loop before flipping the switch Monday morning.
Most of the time, nostalgia is just something we feel sorry for ourselves about. Every once in a while, though, a fictional place gets to become real, and a station that should have existed all along finally does.
That’s pretty cool.
The first time I heard the Rocky Horror soundtrack, I was at a neighbor’s house. He had the LP from the movie and we played it like it was a normal album. We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.
A year or two later, the old show Night Flight ran the “Time Warp” section of the movie. Just dropped it on the screen with no setup. I had no idea exactly what I was seeing. I still hadn’t seen a single frame of the actual film, but I knew the song.
I was transfixed.
Here’s the confession. I have never been to a midnight showing. Not once. No rice, no toast, no shouting at the screen. For somebody who loved those songs that long, that’s an embarrassing gap. I should fix my “virgin” status.
The revival opened last month at Studio 54, which is the perfect address for this kind of show. Luke Evans is Frank-N-Furter. Stephanie Hsu is Janet. Rachel Dratch is the narrator. Juliette Lewis is Magenta. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is Columbia. The production picked up nine Tony nominations, including Best Musical Revival.
Last Monday, they took it to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. They did “Sweet Transvestite."
I’ll admit something. That’s my favorite song from the show. Has been forever. It’s also the song most likely to make somebody clutch a pearl, and that’s part of why I love it. Written in 1973, it still has teeth.
Luke Evans walked it out on The Tonight Show stage in full regalia and pulled no punches. They put it all out there. It was glorious.
Rocky Horror dared you to be weird in public. It still does. The people who showed up at midnight in 1976 weren’t trying to be respectable, and the ones lining up at Studio 54 right now aren’t either.
Forty-some years of knowing every word without seeing it is long enough.
My random hot take on a Sunday trying not to doomscroll:
Not all opinions are equal. Your “vaccine research” is not more comprehensive than immunologists that have devoted their life’s work to this. Barely literate parents are actually not as qualified as educators to teach children. I could go on and on because somewhere along the way we have decided as a culture that it’s exclusionary to recognize expertise or listen to experts. It’s not.
Mike Brock explaining Ben Shapiro’s approach to debate/intervews in the most articulate and enlightening way possible.
The structure is one-way and worth naming plainly.
You concede every factual claim your interlocutor makes. Yes, Trump is corrupt. Yes, Trump tried to overturn the election. Yes, Trump’s loyalists are unfit. Yes, the reframing of January 6 is awful. Yes, the family enrichment is unprecedented. Yes, the response to political murders is morally egregious. You concede all of it.
You then argue that none of these concessions can justify changing your vote, because what you are voting for is policy. The policy is what matters. The character, the corruption, the constitutional vandalism — all of these are bundled with the policy and you cannot get the policy without the bundle. So you take the bundle. You take the wannabe dictator because you also get the tax cut, the conservative judges, the Israel alignment, the DEI rollback. The plumber fixes the toilet. The footprints on the floor are the cost of doing business.
When the interviewer asks what would constitute disqualifying behavior — the level of corruption, the level of constitutional violation, the level of cultural degradation — you respond that disqualifying is not a meaningful concept, because politics is binary and the alternative is worse. There is no level. There is no threshold. There is only the comparison. As long as Kamala Harris exists, Trump cannot be disqualified. As long as a Democrat exists who would do the wrong things on Israel or DEI or taxes, no Republican can be disqualified.
The implication, which Shapiro does not quite state but which is the only honest reading of his position, is this: there is no Republican who could be disqualified by character or conduct, because the alternative is always a Democrat, and the Democrat is always worse on policy. The category of disqualifying has been emptied. There is nothing a Republican president can do that would cause Ben Shapiro to vote against him, because the only available alternative would be a Democrat, and Shapiro has decided in advance that no Democrat can ever be acceptable.
This is not a political philosophy. This is a one-way ratchet. And the ratchet has a name. It is what authoritarian movements have always required from their apologist class, in every country where they have come to power: a class of articulate people who concede every factual point about the authoritarian, who acknowledge his crimes, who profess discomfort with his methods, and who continue to vote for him anyway because the alternative is the left. The apologists do not have to believe in the project. They only have to provide cover for the people who do, and to refuse, when asked directly, to ever pull the lever the other way.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have a couple of former Fighting Illini basketball players on their roster, Terrance Shannon, Jr. and Ayo Dosunmu. Both stepped up in the first round of the NBA playoffs to take down the Denver Nuggets.
Last Saturday, Dosunmu scored 43 points off the bench. Thirteen of seventeen from the field. Five for five from three. Twelve for twelve from the line. Forty-two minutes of work, a 27-foot pull-up to put the game away, and an arena chanting MVP at a guy who joined the team two months ago.
Thursday night, Shannon delivered a breakout performance, helping the Timberwolves close out the series. Just like Ayo, he had to start because the Timberwolves have been bitten by the injury bug. He scored a playoff career-high 24 points while adding six rebounds, one assist, and two steals. He shot 9-of-20 from the field and was perfect from the free-throw line.
Watching their individual highlights from the games and it was just like watching both in an Illini uniform. I keep thinking this is exactly how it looked to anyone who watched them at Illinois. It’s cool to see these two players excelling in the NBA and representing Illinois.
I don’t really watch much NBA, but the highlights (Dosunmu, Shannon Jr.) are fun.
Most weeks, the internet is a place that takes things from you. This week, it gave back. Hank Green pulled together every NASA photo from the Artemis II mission, all the videos posted to Instagram and YouTube, the official mission schedule, and the public API that tracks the Orion spacecraft’s location at any given moment, and he stitched them into an interactive timeline. You scroll through ten days of crewed flight to the moon and back. You see what they saw, when they saw it, where they were when they saw it.
NASA uploads its photos to Flickr with the EXIF data intact. Flickr preserves it. NASA also publishes the spacecraft trajectory through an open API. Three pieces of public infrastructure, free for anyone to use, were sitting there waiting for someone to combine them. Hank Green did.
“You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person,” says Buffett. “Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two. I tell them, ‘Everyone here has the intelligence and energy—you wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the integrity is up to you. You weren’t born with it, you can’t learn it in school.”
– Warren Buffet
At least, that’s what he thinks. His life is mundane enough that it takes him a while to notice the days repeating. So he tells Elise. She doesn’t believe him, but she helps him anyway. With her encouragement, he finds a way out.
That’s the surface.
Watch it again and the loop starts to come apart. I’m not convinced it was ever a loop. Clues are planted early and they aren’t obvious. You’ll finish the second viewing holding a theory you didn’t have after the first. You might not be any more certain.
I love these kinds of videos.
After 18 months of court fights, the deal is done. The Onion has acquired Infowars. Alex Jones can cry all he wants.
Obviously, satire and comedy won’t fix what Jones did. Nothing can. But watching the machinery that tormented the Sandy Hook families get repurposed as a joke against itself, with a judge’s approval and the families' blessing, is maybe the closest thing to real justice we’re going to see this year.
When you watch the official title sequence for 007 First Light, you might be fooled into thinking there’s a new Bond movie coming.
It’s not a movie, but close enough.
The video game features the original song “First Light,” written and composed by Lana Del Rey and David Arnold. It’s got the slow strings and the punchy horns, and it slides a bit of the old Monty Norman theme into the end of the chorus. I think the song is a fantastic addition to the Bond soundscape. Not better than Adele’s “Skyfall,” but way better than “No Time to Die” by Billie Eilish.
Watch the title sequence again. It’s silhouettes and explosions and abstract smoke, the choreography and visuals someone figured out in 1962 and nobody has improved on since. Perfection.
Sean Bonner is on a tear and I’m here for it —
I’ve been amused at the headlines over the last few days that statutory rape defender and Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz has left the Democrats and become Republican. First of all, because who cares? Secondly, because he’s mad that Democrats aren’t pro-Israel enough, which (unfortunately) isn’t true but also who cares? But mostly amusing because he already threw a temper tantrum and quit back in 2024. I guess it’s good for headlines or whatever though so maybe we’ll see him make the same announcement again in a few years? Turns out this is a thing, in a huff Sean Hannity announced that from this moment on he’s no longer Catholic. This of course spawned by the “tough situation” (spoiler: it’s not actually tough) that a lot of MAGA-Catholics are finding themselves in having to pick sides between Trump and The Pope. Again memories seem to be failing because Hannity already announced he’d left the Catholic Church back in 2019. It’s almost like these are just performative labels that can be applied when beneficial and thrown off when it makes a good headline. Speaking of MAGA and changing beliefs, it seems like a growing number of the Trump faithful are suddenly questioning if the Butler assassination attempt was staged.
Speaking of staged, social media is being flooded by tons of AI-generated influencers who really love Trump. And while this appears to be a concerted effort with a specific purpose, apparently it’s not hard to fool people and randos are realizing that making fake AI Bible loving MAGA devotees can be a very profitable grift. I looked around and seems like this is only really happening in one direction, which is a whole story in and of itself. It gets worse, people are now making fake testimonials from fake abuse victims to push regime change in other countries. Unless you know the person or are seeing it live, pretty hard to trust any video online at this point. To balance that out, somewhat, human influencers are apparently being hired to spread panic about AI bringing about the end of humanity. So that’s fun.
While the doomer narrative is everywhere, I thought this comment from 02UI about the newly released Claude Design was an interesting take: “People are saying designers are cooked, but I think the opposite – now designers can cook!” Design friends, that 12 minute video is worth watching. As new models and new products are shipping almost everyday now I think it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and if are in one of the fields that AI is likely to impact, or has already impacted (which is almost all of them) then trying to think of opportunities rather than sinking into fear is probably advisable. I think “I have an entire design and dev team working for me now” is going to help people sleep better than “this AI can do in 10 minutes the think that takes me a week, so I’m toast.” Taste is still yours and valuable, it’s execution which is losing it’s mystique.
Speaking of toast, the Iranian Lego trolling videos are just insane. I’m sure Lego is not happy about them, and I can’t even imagine what is going on behind closed doors at the White House but it’s relentless and at this point anytime something newsworthy happens theres a Lego parody music video circulating in a few hours. The point here which should be obvious is you can just do things now. Like, for real. The separation between having an idea and delivering it to the world has been reduced to just deciding to make it. Its really exciting and I feel like I should be doing more, what about you?