Dan Sinkler –

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.

Andrew Muir of The Art of Storytelling ranked the intro scenes of each of the nine movies in the Star Wars franchise from worst to best and offered solid cinematic reasons for each choice.

Surprisingly, I agreed with his list.

Kermit the Frog gave a truly inspiring commencement speech to the 2025 graduating class of the University of Maryland, noting that his creator, Jim Henson, and his wife, Jane, were both alumni of the school and fans of the Maryland Terrapins.

Emma Roth, writing in The Verge, has the story on Pocket shutting down.

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used to save articles and webpages for later. The organization announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025, as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

Following the shutdown, you’ll only be able to export saves until October 8th, 2025, which is when Mozilla will permanently delete user data. Mozilla says it will start automatically canceling subscriptions as well, and will issue prorated refunds to users subscribed to its annual plan on July 8th.

I’m guessing Pocket may not have many users, but I’d bet those who do are hardcore users. I used it for a short while. I prefer Instapaper.

Anil Dash has compiled a kind of “DVD extras” for Andor Season 2 from YouTube. What a cool idea!

Jason Koehler, writing at 404 Media, has a sad story about a writer who used AI to create a list of new Summer reads and it basically straight-up “hallucinated” books by the likes of Taylor Jenkins Reid, Rumaan Alam, and Andy Weir.

The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. “This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.” Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to.

The article is not bylined but was written by Marco Buscaglia, whose name is on most of the other articles in the 64-page section. Buscaglia told 404 Media via email and on the phone that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he said. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

John Scalzi—

The most charitable explanation of the Chicago Sun-Times insert fiasco is the CST assumed due diligence out of Hearst (who put together the insert), which in turn assumed due diligence from the writer, who clearly did no diligence at all. Again, in another era, this might have worked. Not this one.

Alan Jacobs —

If you ask any of the LLMs to summarize a book or article, they do so with some accuracy. If you ask them to provide relevant quotations from the text along with the summary, they make the quotations up.

Ethan Marcotte —

Everything — everything — that comes out of these “AI” platforms is a “hallucination.” Quite simply, these services are slot machines for content. They’re playing probabilities: when you ask a large language model a question, it returns answers aligned with the trends and patterns they’ve analyzed in their training data. These platforms do not know when they get things wrong; they certainly do not know when they get things right. Assuming an “artificial intelligence” platform knows the difference between true and false is like assuming a pigeon can play basketball. It just ain’t built for it.

I’m far from the first to make this point. But it seems to me that when we use a term put forward by the people subsidizing and selling these so-called tools — people who would very much like us to believe that these machines can distinguish true from false — we’re participating in a different kind of hallucination.

And a far worse one, at that.

Nicholas Bate –

1. Clear the desk: totally. If necessary, put everything in a box and put it on the floor.
2. Sharpen four pencils.
3. Get a pad of paper.
4. Start writing.
5. Nothing will appear until you write.
6. You are not stuck-you need to put pencil to paper.
7. You are not blocked-you need to put pencil to paper.
8. You don’t know whether it will be any good until you write.
9. Start. The car drew up. A shot rang out. She collapsed on platform 4. He was staggered to find the notebook. Whatever. Start.
10. No: it’s not the weather. Nor your mother. You need to put pencil to paper.
11. Nor do you really need a new printer nor to clear your e-mail; you actually need to put pencil to paper.
12. He couldn’t believe his luck. They pulled at each as they strolled the beach; would they, could they ever re-create this day? Whatever. Start.
13. Write fast.
14. Write 500 words.
15. Edit.
16. Add. Subtract.
17. Put pencil to paper.
18. It’ll be OK
19. You can write. It’s what you are meant to do.
20. So: write. Right now.

George Wendt, the actor and comedian best known for his role as Norm Peterson on NBC’s hit sitcom Cheers, died Tuesday in his home. He was 76.

I never really loved Cheers when it was on originally. I rarely watched it. Of course, the character of Norm was etched in pop culture.

Here’s an 18-minute supercut of every time Norm entered the bar and here’s a video of George Wendt reuniting with his Cheers co-stars Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson on their podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, in August 2024.

Kevin Hammer wonder why anyone is worrying about the future when we aren’t present in the moment.

I’ve realized I had been complaining that I don’t have time to do all the things I care about, while simultaneously wasting my time with all kinds of things, be it staring numbly at my phone, trying to play a corporate game I don’t care about, or generally just being a pain in the ass for my loved ones.

In the grand scheme of the universe, a human life is incredibly short. But from a human’s point of view, 80 years is a long time.

But none of this matters if we are unable to be fully present for these 80 years, if we spend all this limited time worrying about things outside of our locus of control.

Most of us want similar things: to have good social and romantic relationships; work on things that fulfill us; care about our bodies and our minds; learn new things; and have fun while doing them.

In essence, what we all want is to matter, to feel safe, to be seen, and to be free.

Being present takes work. You need to remind yourself not to be dead to the moment. But the more you do this, the more effortless it becomes.

And the more effortless it becomes, the less life happens to you and the more you happen to life. And then you are alive to the moment.

And that’s what we are all here for.

Matt Langford –

My son has recently gotten into keeping score (the old fashioned way) at baseball games. We found a few scorecards we liked, but none were perfect. So I made our own. We’re going to use it for a couple weeks then make any changes as we see fit.

Excellent.

Drew Magary, writing Funbag for Defector, answers an email sent in by some dude named Ben regarding Pete Rose and the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Whoever lies the loudest in 2025 America wins, and this is the result. I’m so used to being lied to now that I barely register it. Think about how many lies you and I encounter every day. We’re lied to by politicians, influencers, ads, sports leagues, the media, product packaging, random social media accounts, and customer service representatives. The default setting of this country is to spew bullshit, which reduces lying from a cardinal sin to background noise. It’s not that the American people admire liars. It’s just that they don’t care if people lie, so long as they enjoy whatever lie they’re being fed. Only Roger Goodell still adheres to the “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” approach to wrongdoing, and guess what? Everyone thinks he’s a dipshit for it. Even me.

This brings us to Pete Rose, whose offenses are so legion that “being Pete Rose” is more than enough of an offense to merit his banishment from OTB parlors, let alone the Baseball Hall of Fame. The gambling and the lying are now baked into his name, which is why Trump was so eager to free his ghost. I could go out of my way, like Ben here, to remind everyone about the extent of Rose’s lying, but I already know that most of us have exhausted our outrage reserves. Trump wanted Rose reinstated, and Manfred will do anything that anyone above him tells him to do. That doesn’t mean that you and I have to think of Rose as vindicated. He’s still the exact same Pete Rose he was before all of this, and I’d still piss on his corpse if there were five bucks in it for me.

Do you know the funny thing about all of this? If Pete Rose had never been banned by Paul Giamatti’s dad all those years ago, we’d have all been better off. I know that banning him was the right move, but it’s kept Pete Rose in the national conversation ever since. If he had been inducted into Cooperstown in 1991, his story would have died off, and him along with it. Ichiro Suzuki would have become the all-time hit king in the hearts of many (myself included), with Rose’s on-field accomplishments growing ever smaller in the public imagination.

That remains a possibility, especially now that Rose is eligible. Every year that man is kept out of the Hall—and I assume the BBWAA will deny him entrance even now, because they never let anyone not named Jeter in anymore—is another year that I have to hear about his sorry ass. Pete Rose was a world-class shitbag, and he’s dead now. Fuck him. Go ahead and induct him so that I all of us can stick a wad of used chewing gum on his plaque. This is a rare instance where justice hasn’t been worth it.

I find it unsurprising that I feel pretty much exactly the same way.

“My whole operating philosophy now is to just stack good days. If I had a good day, that’s a win. Then I get up the next morning and try to do it all over again. I had a good day today. Onward we go.” — Drew Magary

Tyler Pager and Gina Kolata, writing for The New York Times, have the unfortunate news.

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday.

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

I’m saddened to hear this. I expect he won’t last the year.

There is little doubt in my mind that Andor has been the best Star Wars show on Disney+. The Mandalorian’s first few seasons were exceptional and, luckily, were good enough to establish Disney+ as a place to find original Star Wars shows. However, the pinnacle is easily Andor’s two, and only two, seasons. Andor is, quite simply, the crowning achievement of Star Wars streaming shows.

That isn’t to say Ahsoka, Skeleton Crew, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even the Acolyte were not entertaining. The Star Wars universe is large enough to have a fun early-Spielbergian style show with Skeleton Crew and a hard-hitting, this-is-what-fascism-actually-is show like Andor, and that’s a good thing.

I was eight, about to turn nine in May 1977, when I saw the original Star Wars movie (without the “A New Hope” subtitle) twice in two days. It captured my young, impressionable imagination. It was a swashbuckling adventure with spaceships and laser swords. The bad guy wore black. The good guy wore white. I loved it. I understood it.

Three years later, The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters, but I was nearly finished with the novelization before I saw the movie. I was aware of some of the twists and turns. On the cusp of being a teenager, I was slightly more seasoned as a watcher of pop culture. As with Star Wars, I let the movie wash over me. The music, the visuals, and the characters elevated the experience. I was too young to understand why the story felt stronger, the dialogue sounded sharper, and the acting seemed better, but I knew everything had improved.

Over the next few decades, Star Wars practically didn’t exist. Of course, we got Return of the Jedi in 1983, and then there was pretty much nothing. I was in my early twenties and in graduate school when the Timothy Zahn books came out, and they were so well-written, massively entertaining, and felt like a natural extension of Star Wars. Over the years, I still loved Star Wars, but I also loved more sophisticated storytelling.

Soon after, there were more books, more comics, a new theatrical run of the original trilogy, now with updated technology, scenes, and “specializations.” Then the prequel trilogy happened, and all the character development and natural progression of the story and the universe turned Star Wars back into a kids’ movie.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a regression.

From the end of the prequel trilogy to the sale to Disney and the sequel trilogy, Star Wars was a dominant player in pop culture. Unfortunately, I never felt like the quality was up to the original Star Wars movie and Empire standards. I had high hopes, but it wasn’t great. If anything, Star Wars, this go around, featured okay storytelling with occasional bumps in entertainment value.

Then, somehow, we got Rogue One. This was a serious war movie with nary a space wizard in sight. It was Band of Brothers. It was a ragtag team of mostly regular people going up against a seemingly unstoppable force. The writing was real. It was nuanced and complex. The final 40 minutes were some of the most extraordinary Star Wars visuals ever filmed.

Most importantly, when we finally see Darth Vader and his red lightsaber, the scene is terrifying.

A Star Wars movie that moved me at age 48 was unexpected. Never in my wildest dreams did I think a Star Wars movie, 40 years after I saw the very first one, would evoke such strong emotions.

George Lucas selling Lucasfilm to Disney meant that original Star Wars shows would appear on their fledgling streaming service. At the time, the anticipation of The Mandalorian was palpable. More than any of the sequel trilogy movies, this new slice of Star Wars captured the early days of Star Wars fandom. The creators, Dave Filoni and John Favreau, grew up with Star Wars. Filoni had created his distinctive Star Wars story with the Rebels cartoon and added his singular creation, Ahsoka Tano, to the list of interesting Star Wars characters. The Mandalorian was good Star Wars. Inventive Star Wars. It had the perfect cast and a breakout star with “Baby Yoda.”

More original Star Wars programming started to appear on the service. If it were live action, I watched it. However, I noticed a decline in quality. It felt a little like the new directors, writers, and producers were playing in the sandbox, creating fan service shows, rather than trying to say something new or interesting.

Somehow, through all this original programming, we ended up with Andor—a prequel show to a prequel movie of the movie that started it all.

The guy who made Rogue One and Andor wasn’t a fanboy. Dave Filoni is a Star Wars fanboy who can write. Tony Gilroy won an Academy Award for writing Michael Clayton. They are both extremely talented, but one is clearly a better storyteller.

When Kathleen Kennedy finally steps down as President of Lucasfilm, Filoni is the apparent successor. Tony Gilroy just went ahead and made the best Star Wars “anything” since The Empire Strikes Back.

Gilroy would be the wrong choice to lead Lucasfilm. He is the right choice to write and direct more live-action Star Wars. Who knows if he wants to go down that path, though? I imagine he has other aspirations than playing in the Star Wars universe again.

But never say never.

In the meantime, we get the brilliance of Andor, a show I believe generations of media nerds will analyze repeatedly. Andor stands as nothing short of a masterpiece in television craftsmanship—a rare constellation of creative elements aligned with such perfect precision that we may never see something like it on our screens again. This isn’t hyperbole or fan exuberance; it’s an acknowledgment of lightning captured in a bottle.

Make no mistake, Andor isn’t merely excellent television; it’s the exception that illuminates the boundaries lesser works cannot cross.

Andor is the first Star Wars story written for me at my current age. Yes, eight-year-old me loved the original Star Wars, and to a large extent, it was written with me in mind at that time. But Star Wars can be more than just a kid’s movie, and Rogue One and Andor showed me that.

One of the ways Andor sets itself apart from other Star Wars projects is by removing the concept that it’s a Star Wars project from the beginning. I think the reverence for the original trilogy and George Lucas’ vision of Star Wars holds many projects back. Gilroy understands the universe but isn’t beholden to the trappings of what has come before.

When he was tasked with creating what was then known as the Expanded Universe, Timothy Zahn wasn’t thinking about staying true to a vision either. He was trying to craft an entertaining story that created a new generation of Star Wars fans. There wasn’t a creative constraint that locked his story into a nostalgia trip or devolved into fan service. Frankly, that constraint didn’t exist. The Expanded Universe, ahem, expanded and was loved by both new and old fans.

Like Zahn before, Gilroy made sure Andor wasn’t shackled by legacy. Watching Andor, it becomes impossible to ignore how liberating it feels as it dared to expand the boundaries of what a Star Wars story could be. The show’s willingness to break from tradition, to explore complex themes and nuanced characters, is a testament to the creative potential that emerges when a franchise is allowed to grow beyond its own legend.

Andor has raised expectations of what a Star Wars story can be. I can’t help but feel a little sad when the next project falls short of how great the last one was.

Writing at Public Notice, Stephen Robinson thinks Donald Trump’s brain has vanished.

Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms — especially in light of all the media attention and scrutiny Joe Biden received after his disastrous debate performance or when Special Counsel Robert Hur described him as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

I read these words, and I’m reminded that the best explanation of Donald Trump comes from Professor Timothy Snyder:

Timothy Snyder is spot-on about the fictional reality the serial lying psychopath inhabits. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/PulaxsUyUc

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) November 21, 2024

Mike Sass –

You should blog more—and no, I don’t mean posting on social media. “Blogging” can come in all manner of form too, it’s not all just standalone, novel posts. You can do some self-tracking-style posts, maintain a /now page or even keep a changelog of tweaks, both big and small, to your site. Sure, maybe it’ll be basic, but at least it’ll be you! Personal sites aren’t just blogs either. Think of them more as digital gardens for your thoughts, for the things you like, and for any other way you’d like to express yourself. The freedom to do so, in whatever manner you choose, is one of the standout features of having a website, rather than just a social media presence. Routine blogging is also a fantastic way to learn.

Bruce Springsteen started his “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” in Manchester in the UK. On stage, he said the following:

There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now.

In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.

In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction and abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure They’re in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just deplorable society. They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and without due process of law are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue governor. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American. The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real. And regardless of its faults, it’s a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment.

Now, I have hope because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, “in this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like. But there’s enough.” Let’s pray.

Powerful.

Riley MacLeod, writing at Aftermath, has my favorite opening three paragraphs on the HBO Max saga.

Today, Warner Bros Discovery announced that it’s changing the name of its streaming service, Max, back to HBO Max. You might think it already had “HBO” in the name, because it is HBO, except Warner Bros has gone through a multi-year debate over the extent to which the thing it owns, HBO, is actually HBO, only to land us here on, yeah no, it’s HBO.

Come with me on a journey: in 2010 HBO launched its streamer HBO Go, which was available to HBO subscribers. In 2015 the company launched HBO Now, a different streamer that could be paid for without an HBO subscription. In 2020, both of these got subsumed into HBO Max. In 2023, Warner changed the name of HBO Max to just Max, which necessitated the tagline “the one to watch for HBO,” a fact previously conveyed by having the word “HBO” in the name. More confusingly, sometimes the company just called it “the one to watch,” while other times it used both taglines in the same breath.

But now, in 2025, Max is HBO Max again. The announcement is and isn’t a surprise; at the end of March, Max changed its logo to a black and white palette evocative of the original HBO colors. As quoted by Variety, WB CEO David Zaslav said of today’s name change, “Today, we are bringing back HBO, the brand that represents the highest quality in media,” despite a two-year hand-wringing over that very idea.

The countdown to it simply being known as HBO starts in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Warren Ellis –

At the top of the year I turned off pretty much all my news app notifications on my phone. I read the surface of a dozen news providers in the morning over coffee and then put it all away til the evening, when I’ll catch up a bit, read a few longer pieces, then watch a bit of Bloomberg, Newsnight or Peston on television. This is very much an old person’s way of doing news. Read the paper in the morning, watch the analysis in the evening.

I read something the other day that characterises my practise as what is now being called “news avoidance.” Even journalists like Lyse Doucet have checked out of the churn.

(I read a piece in February containing the following quote: “For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire.”)

Personally, I just didn’t want my day to be punctuated every thirty seconds by a dozen news providers all sending the same headline about American politics.

But. I have a friend who’s been telling me she wants to talk politics with me but can’t because I’ve “gone zen.” Between that and being indirectly shamed for news avoidance, I think it’s probably time to reconnect with that part of life. A bit.

Go slow. Personally, I can only take a couple of hours of local news and maybe an hour of MSNBC before I get aggravated.