David Brooks thinks there needs to be a civic uprising to combat the Trump regime.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Who is going to lead it?

The next and final season of The Sandman is dropping this summer. And just like Cobra Kai and Stranger Things, it’s going out as a two-parter: six episodes will air on July 3, followed by the final five on July 24. The most recent trailer from Netflix tells the tale.

Last year, executive producer Neil Gaiman, who co-created the original Vertigo comic with Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg, was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women over the years. While it doesn’t matter what I believe to be the truth, Gaiman’s projects in various stages of development have been universally shut down. So, I think fans of Sandman are fortunate to be getting a second season.

Ivaylo Durmonski asks the question, Why can’t we quit social media? He draws many conclusions, and all of them are right. It just depends.

Marvel’s latest trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps digs deeper into the Fantastic Four’s lives and the movie’s plot.

I’m sure the fact that Sue is pregnant with, at least from the comics, Franklin , means that nothing reality-warping will happen. Nope. Not at all.

Seth Rogen’s attack on Trump was edited out of a science awards show coverage.

It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320m and RFK Jr, very fast.

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.