Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 2

Super piece by Adam Serwer, who reported on the everyday Minnesotans who are observing and protesting ICE's actions, while delivering food to their neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses

His key, bang-on point, is this: All assumptions the White House makes -- about how society works, how culture works, the nature of bravery and identity --- are completely wrong

it's why Trump's attack on Minnesota is foundering

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/TRsdI

@dhobern @anildash

yeah, I showed that paragraph to my wife -- it really resonated with my experiences with tech folks, even in silicon valley

a lot, probably most, are just trying to make useful warez

it's the guys at the tippy top who are wilding

What's it like applying for a job for ICE?

Over at Slate, a writer -- who's both a US veteran and has a long record of being very vocally anti-ICE online -- went to an ICE recruitment expo

Link if you subscribe to Slate: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html

Free link, if you don't: https://archive.is/791rH

the tl;dr is ...

... they hired her, in a process that seemed so haphazard and sloppy that she concludes they're not doing serious background checks

as she puts it ...

"Maduro in Minneapolis" ...

.... an excellent essay by Timothy Synder -- the scholar of authoritarian politics -- noting that when Maduro's death squads killed Venezuelans, they typically offered the same justifications that ICE did in killing Renee Nicole Good ...

... i.e. the agents were defending themselves against radical assailants

https://snyder.substack.com/p/maduro-in-minneapolis

behold the gorgeous "aerial embroidery" of Victoria Rose Richards

it's the landscape as seen from a plane, except as stitchwork

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read/subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-42-phytomining-adversarial-poetry-and/

so, this kid popped a wheelie for 93 miles

I've done lots of bike rides of 93 miles or more, but I used *both wheels*, which now feels like ... cheating?

this guy is metal

Item 2 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read/subscribe here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-42-phytomining-adversarial-poetry-and/

who needs LEGS amirite

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-teams-now-lets-you-host-immersive-metaverse-meetings

I am slowly arriving at the final phase, which is acceptance

now I realize and accept reality

people are just not gonna stop using the word “impactful”

I’ll just need to get used to it

I remember when that research dropped -- I read a Q&A with the student at The Atlantic (https://archive.is/Buttc ... with a warning now appended that the research has been retracted)

I was *astounded* at how much AI had boosted materials-science research

too good to be true, as it turns out

remember Jukt Micronics?

lol

let me introduce you to ...

... corningresearch.com

this is from a fascinating WSJ story (gift link here) about Aidan Toner-Rodgers, an MIT student who published a seemingly groundbreaking paper on AI and productivity -- on data that now seems utterly sketchy https://www.wsj.com/economy/aidan-toner-rodgers-mit-ai-research-78753243?st=1PFwdU&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

so apparently sea slugs eat a lot of algae ...

... and some have figured out how to incorporate the algae's plastids into their own bodies ...

... so the sea slugs *photosynthesize*

they can live for months off the sun -- an animal acting like a plant

weird and awesome

item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-40-the-chthulucene-doom-on-a-satellite/

parlor parlor parlor

parlor parlor

parlor parlor

parlor

It turns out iPhone voice dictation *really* does not do well with “parlance”

okay people, it's time ⏰

once again

for "the opposite of doomscrolling" 😎

the latest issue of my "Linkfest" newsletter just dropped 📬

free to read/subscribe here here here ☘️ : https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-40-the-chthulucene-doom-on-a-satellite/

Includes:

🌋 the "Chthulucene"
🎲 crosswords mixed with Tetris
🐦 a global birdsong map
🧠 "mind captioning"
✍️ making a font of your handwriting
📡 Doom running on a satellite
🍸 the evolutionary value of getting drunk
👻 the ethics of selling a haunted house

and SO MUCH MORE

Interestingly, younger Americans are significantly more likely to dislike data centers than older ones

and dislike is bipartisan

This from a Heatmap story (paywalled): https://heatmap.news/energy/data-centers-left-right-opposition

Want to travel to an exoplanet?

NASA made gorgeous retro-styled posters for seven

they're downloadable in high res for printing!

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest": https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-40-microlightning-quantum-navigation-and/

@henryfarrell

One of the original promises of social media, or more broadly, "posting stuff online that we're thinking about" ...

... was that it was a mechanism for creating shared knowledge, or for dispelling what sociologists would call "pluralistic ignorance", situations where we misjudge the public mood because we don't know what other people are thinking about major issues

posting stuff online was, and still can be, very useful for letting us see: what's everyone think?

2/x

@henryfarrell

but one problem has been too much online posting / socializing has been in big corporate sites ...

... which have tended to try and make money by boosting "engagement", which nearly always leads them to promote the most hotly-emotional posts -- i.e. stuff that's highly angering, or super funny, or super sad, or super spit-takey

these mechanism are very easy to hijack for clicks, obviously!

which can make corporate social media quite *bad* at reflecting "what people think"

3/x

Excellent @henryfarrell essay that begins by noting the problems Trump causes himself by being untrustworthy and reneging on promises ...

... then shifts to the coordinational challenges of the opposition

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/repost-absolute-power-can-be-a-terrible

worth reading in full, as with all his pieces

I was struck by his point about the challenge of amassing "shared knowledge" -- i.e. a sense of what each other are thinking: do our neighbors object to the administration's authoritarian moves as much as we do?

1/x

The latest in the Trump administration’s work to remove material that discusses American slavery

Now it’s in state parks, and specifically targeting the famous photo of the “scourged back”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/09/15/national-parks-slavery-information-removal/

So, in 1997, Microsoft quietly released a generative-music app

no fancy neural networks at work here, just kooky old hand-coded heuristics with some randomization

it produces some very fun game-MIDI style music, honestly!

And: there's a downloadable copy at the Internet Archive

Item #5 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-38-tk-tk-and-tk/