Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social)

"Conservatives *hate* complexity"

a superb post by @pluralistic that distills a core aspect of why right-wing ideas about how to manage things like the economy, immigration and our personal lives collide so rapidly with reality

key passage here, but do read the whole thing

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/

US border officials are so twitchy and paranoid that they detained and imprisoned two German teenagers ...

... even though they'd applied for -- and received -- their electronic approval for a five-week visit

Why were they detained? Because they hadn't booked accommodations for their full five weeks

they'd figured they'd travel around a bit and make decisions on the fly ... *like tourists do all the time, in most normal and free countries*

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/german-tourists-deported-hawaii-cbp-b2736655.html

I"m finally getting around to watching Daredevil: Born Again ...

... and it's making me reflect again how much pop culture is basically fixated on "the chaotic, crime-ridden streets of NYC / [big-cities-in-general]" ...

it's as if the cultural imagination got completely frozen in the crime peak of the early 80s, and can't move on

man alive, crime in NYC today is -- in the real world -- lower than in much of the city's history, and lower than the national average

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City

@lauren

I'm the same way -- I just type two dashes together, with a space before and after

I think it's a vestige of the fact that I first began doing word-processing using DOS software that was not yet WYSIWYG

no m-dash was possible -- two dashes was one's only alternative

the habit stuck

Apparently the use of m-dashes is now seen -- by some -- as a mark of genAI writing?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/

Man I dunno I use *ton* of m-dashes!

In fact a couple of years ago I created a little web tool that let you take a piece of your writing and strip out *just* the punctuation ...

1/x

@kims

glad you liked it!

same here with crowded house, they were absolutely huge amongst my friendship circle so I have always thought of them as absolute monster hits lol

@kims

yeah, that's what he ponders later in his calculation, so he does another crunch looking for bands that a) had two hits, but no more, while also b) never having a top-selling album

that second list is quite interesting! it's in my post, check it out

You know about one-hit wonders ...

... bands that charted a single hit, but never again

what about "two-hit wonders"? Are there bands that charted *two* hit singles, but never another?

Chris Dalla Riva dug into the data and found some ...

... surprising results

Pink Floyd?

Item #2 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-33-two-hit-wonders-moonglass-and-trees/

The Supreme Court has brutally enabled the Trump administration's "path of perfect lawlessness"

Adam Serwer nails it here: https://archive.is/eiFyj

Keyboard.io makes high-end angled and "split" keyboards

they wrote a letter to customers explaining how Trump's new tariffs will affect them

it's bad news for them -- prices have already shot up, and new tariffs Trump is threatening would *double* prices

their description of "why building something as complex as a keyboard is an inherently cross-border enterprise" is really interesting

they have to ship wood to China! that sort of wood isn't readily available there

https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/an-open-letter-to-u-s-customers

Despite the fact that I'm a Canadian who was a young teenager when Bob and Doug MacKenzie first went on the air ...

... I did not know

a) that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created the "Great White North" segments specifically to parody the CBC's demand for two more minutes of "Canadian content" on SCTV, and ...

... b) they expected that the segments -- improvised with zero preparation -- would bomb

via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_and_Doug_McKenzie

@band @GhostOnTheHalfShell

good one

who could have seen *this* coming

https://futurism.com/neoscope/23andme-selling-data

So it turns out that Michael "Reply All" Waltz, Trump's national-security advisor -- the guy who accidentally invited the editor of The Atlantic into a Signal chat to reveal top-secret military plans in realtime ...

... also had left his Venmo "friends" list comppletely public

Wired discovered this and reported it, whereupon the account went instantly private: https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

(in other news, Wired continues to kill it)

https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/G68KW

This story is *wild*

Michael Waltz, Trump's national security advisor, was using Signal to chat with high-up Trump officials like defense secretary Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Stephen Mille, a CIA operative, and JD Vance ...

... to co-ordinate the Mar 15 bombing of Houthi targets

Waltz added -- apparently by mistake -- Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, to the group

a wild, clownishly self-own of a leak

https://archive.is/JEYep

Hey Canadians:

I just heard about two Canadian friends of a friend who were driving into the US

the border agents demanded they unlock their phones; the agents searched the phones, found anti-Trump stuff on one ...

... then confiscated that phone and neither person was allowed into the US

These folks weren't activists or anything -- the search doesn't appear to have been triggered by that

so, govern yourselves accordingly

So: The linguistic practices of cows!

they're *complex*

for one thing, they're *slow* -- "when a mother calls to her calf, it sometimes takes 60 seconds for the calf to respond"

some researchers argue that the communications of cows might be more complex than that of whales

Item #4 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-32-technofossils-sticktok-and-a-web-site/

you don't say

Okay mastodonians 🐘

it's time for the opposite of doomscrolling

my latest "Linkfest" newsletter just dropped 📬

crammed full of gems pulled from the inky mineshafts of the internet

Free to read and subscribe to, right here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-31-tactile-graphics-alexinomnia-and-a-to/

This issue includes:

👉 tactile graphics from 1900
📇 "alexinomia"
☁️ fog harvesting
💖 dataviz on how romance is vanishing from movies
🎲 a to-do app controlled by dice
📱 WikiTok
🎒 solar backpacks
🐟 66 million year old fish vomit

and SO MUCH MORE

An argument: We need working-class media -- https://www.cjr.org/analysis/america-needs-working-class-media-end-catering-rich-audiences.php

co-sign