Charlie is back and ready to accurately see through everyone’s poker faces and lies. Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne, is gearing up for season two with an explosive and delightfully funny new trailer.

Poker Face was one of my favorite shows of 2023, and I can’t wait to see what season two has in store.

Wink Martindale, a TV game show icon who hosted “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “High Rollers” and “Gambit,” died on Tuesday at the age of 91.

Him and Bob Barker are now just childhood memories.

Joan Westerberg asks why almost two-thirds of the public has just left the political debate.

I love her conclusion:

They’ll come back when speech isn’t content, disagreement isn’t a liability, leadership isn’t just influence in a suit, and platforms are built for presence, not performance.

Dana Mattioli, reporting for The Wall Street Journal, explains that Elon Musk is a weird dude, and this takes the cake. Imagine having 14 acknowledged children, but your friends suspect the number is “much higher.”

If you want a breakdown of the highlights, Josh Marshall has a thread on BlueSky breaking down the reporting with screenshots.

Timothy Snyder on “…the beginning of an American policy of state terror.”

Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.

The Trump regime’s goal is to escape the law rather than follow it, and has been the point since before the election, when Trump ran to avoid the almost guaranteed jail time he was about to be sentenced to. It is a profound sadness and the ultimate failure of the Biden administration to not immediately arrest and permanently detain Donald Trump on January 21, 2021.

Heather Cox Richardson on where we are right now in terms of what type of government we currently have:

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

They are 100% going to try to do this with US citizens

Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.

This. Is. Bad.

With the economy still in high flux thanks to Donald Trump’s tariffs, it should not be surprising that Randy Rainbow is back, making said tariffs the target of his latest parody video.

JD Vance drops a piece of Ohio State’s CFP championship trophy during a White House visit after it splits in his hands.

Just so embarrassing.

Seth Godin on dealing with toddlers.

Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.

An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.

If you’re regularly having arguments with well-informed people of goodwill, you will probably ‘lose’ half of them–changing your mind based on what you’ve learned. If you’re not changing your mind, it’s likely you’re not actually having an argument (or you’re hanging out with the wrong people.) While it can be fun to change someone else’s position, it’s also a gift to learn enough to change ours.

The toddler puts on a show of having an argument, but they are holding a tantrum in reserve. If they ‘win’ the argument, no tantrum is needed. If they lose, they can tell themselves that they tried but the other person deserved the tantrum because they didn’t listen.

Seth Godin —

In a hurried world with infinite content, it’s worth considering that you’re no longer paid by the word when you write, in fact, you should pay for every extra word you use.

Be as brief as is useful.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes that when (if) this is all over, all of the officials responsible for human rights abuses, like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons, must be tried for crimes against humanity.

Warren Ellis —

THE METHOD

I’ve taught a few people this method over the years. The method has undergone a lot of addition and adaptation across the decades, pulling in useful stuff from other people. It doesn’t work for everything, and nor should it, but, when all else fails, it can be a handy foundation.

So you’ve had your idea. Grab a notebook or open a plain text file and empty out every thought you have about and around the idea. This can take a few hours, this can take weeks. This is fine. When you think you’re done, or nearly so, open up a word processor file and transcribe or copy it all over. It’s fine to rewrite or tweak as you go. You’ve just done all the hardest work in the method. From this point on, you will never have to start with a blank page. That’s the point of the method. You’re always writing over what you already have.

All your notes are copied down. Save them. Copy the whole lot and paste into a new file with a different name. Now start assembling them into a shape, deleting anything that doesn’t fit (you already saved it all), adding whatever you need, surrounding the whole thing.

Copy and paste into new file. Break it down into episodes. Again, rewriting as you go. Go as deep as you like. Some people like a skeleton framework, some people go full “scriptment” style and lay in dialogue and colour.

By the end of it, you should be able to see everything that happens in every episode, in order, having kicked out your timing errors and your broken connections.

When it comes to scripting, copy and paste the outline for your episode into a new document. Bang. You’ve got a complete breakdown of your episode right there, and all you have to do is expand it out into script. All the difficult work of, you know, having your story make sense is done, and you’ve left yourself the juicy work of actual writing, character and setting and action and dialogue.

Sometimes, the method is what saves a piece.

Austin Kleon offers some tips for finding creative freedom. I love his idea of a Bliss Station.

Bill Hammack, the engineerguy, explains the engineering behind your typical soda bottle, as well as juice and sports drink bottles. It’s a direct sequel to The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can.

Hammack is a Grainger Distinguished Chair at the University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign. It might be cool if he did something like this for Illinois sports. Don’t you want to learn the engineering behind a golf ball or throwing a spiral? The videos could be played during timeouts or pre-game.

Tanya Chen, writing for Slate, tells the story of watching and then revisiting the movie Her. After reading her article, I want to revisit the film myself.

Liza Featherstone, writing at The New Republic, has the appropriate take on the “Return of the Dire Wolf” story floating around.

Some of the media headlines have been breathless. Time magazine hailed “The Return of the Dire Wolf.” On the venerable news magazine’s cover, the word “Extinct” is crossed out. “This is Remus,” the cover declares, above the image of a large white canid. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in 10,000 years. Endangered species could be changed forever.” Rolling Stone was equally credulous: “12,000 years later, Dire Wolves are back.”

No. As The Washington Post and Scientific American ably pointed out, Remus is not really a dire wolf. They aren’t “back.” Dire wolves are still extinct. A company called Colossal Biosciences, backed by Peter Thiel, among other God-cosplaying billionaires, was able to breed grey wolves with some dire wolf DNA, creating some bigger and whiter creatures. In addition to a sister, Khaleesi, there are two wolf brothers, named Romulus and Remus, for the human twins who, according to mythology, were suckled by a wolf mother in a series of unlikely events leading to the founding of Rome.

You can’t make this stuff up: As the American empire teeters on the brink of collapse, the billionaires laying waste to what’s left of our natural world and human civilization are not only trying to bring back dangerous, long-extinct animals but naming them after the mythological founders of an empire that went extinct itself due to its rulers’ arrogance. These admittedly handsome critters could easily become symbols of our own imperial collapse.

The first three paragraphs are all you need. “God-cosplaying billionaires” is nice.

The rest is a strangled appeal regarding the Trump administration, oligarchs, regulations, and endangered species that I don’t really have time to care about all that much.

Matthew McConaughey, writing in his Lyrics for Livin’ newsletter, has an idea that I love.

Choreograph first, then dance. Create our own weather, then blow in the wind. You gotta learn to block and tackle before you learn to play wideout. Learn the dialogue before you improvise. Study the playbook, before you call the audible. Look at the blueprint before you take out your sledgehammer and take out the beams. Learn the rules, before you break ‘em. Make plans to be present, and maybe, find out what language it’s in before you speak it.

Most of the world’s most valuable ideas, art, and inventions came about from breaking the “unbreakable” rules. But they knew the rules FIRST.

Nicholas Bate –

Try becoming rock-star good at something. It could be playing loud music. It could also be making lasagne, delivering workshops, leading people, managing money, mowing the lawn, scuba diving….

But it is worth finding something to work at, to strive at, to graft at, in order to discover the particular pleasure deep expertise brings. It’s a deeper and longer-lasting and often accumulative enjoyment: one which is different to that resulting from a cold beer, a movie or Frisbee in the park which although hugely fun comes and then goes. This ‘rock-star’ pleasure is one which keeps you going day-to-day, which builds your moral, your confidence and makes you less dependent upon external factors to feel good.

If you get good at something you tend to enjoy it. If you enjoy something you tend to get good at it. Which comes first? Doesn’t matter too much…just know there’s plenty of free pleasure out there from developing an expertise.

And getting really, really good at something and enjoying doing it might give you a revenue stream which you could hardly call work. And that is worth putting a little effort into.

VelvetShark attempts to decipher why most AI companies have opted for a logo reminiscent of the human sphincter.

Chaoszine interviewed former KISS‬ guitarist Bruce Kulick about his discography with the legendary hard rock band during their unmasked era.

Bruce is an underrated player.