💣 Ja Morant Is Doing A New Thing, And That Thing Is Grenade /// Defector

I admire this tactic from Morant. What better way to demonstrate the subjective method through which celebration-related fines get doled out than to keep goading Silver with increasingly zany deployments of invisible weapons?

He’s so incredibly childish, but it’s honestly kind of funny at this point. It was ridiculous to single him out for finger guns in the first place when so many other players do it even despite his history, bu there we are.

📨 April 9, 2025 (Wednesday) /// Letters from an American

As more than $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans deflected attention from the hollowing out of the middle class by demonizing racial, religious, and gender minorities.

I’m no historian or expert in any way, but I always feel like all of our problems boil down to the Reagan presidency where the failed experiment of trickle down economics and the rising costs of higher education completely derailed democracy and we are still living with the results of that.

👚 Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE merch includes pizza, smoked salmon, and a signature scent /// The Fader

Some absolutely wild food collabs for Bon Iver’s new album release.

📉 Trump ignites ‘insider trading’ accusations after global tariffs U-turn /// The Guardian

When asked by US reporters on Wednesday evening when exactly he arrived at his decision to pause the tariffs on most countries for 90 days, Trump said: “For a period of a time. I would say this morning. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about it.”

I don’t know how this could be considered anything but market manipulation, which is not a presidential action. You cannot tell people to buy stocks and then take an action that makes those stocks go up immediately after. We saw him saying this would be good for certain people in the past and that’s exactly what happened.

🪧 Saturday’s Trump protests weren’t perfect. But they brought a glimmer of hope /// The Guardian

What emerged was a broad left-liberal coalition, with a slew of different priorities, united in opposition to what they see as an anti-constitutional assault on basic rights, civil society and human dignity.

We are going to need a lot more of this to keep happening. Whether it’s Cory Booker’s 25-hour stand or these mass protests. On their own, they aren’t enough. We need to keep our foot on the gas, making noise on a weekly basis so it’s too hard to ignore.

🌳 In the Year of a Tree /// Katherine Yang

LOVE THIS SO MUCH!

🌐 Time to pass the Blogroll.org baton /// Blogroll.org

Ray has created one of the best blogrolls out there (even if neither foofaraw or TIV made the cut… 😝) so it’s sad to see him move on, but there’s no better person to take over a project like this than Manu.

📺 TikTok’s hottest show, The Group Chat, thrives because of the gossip /// The Fader

I went ahead and downloaded TikTok just to check this out and it’s actually pretty great. This is one of the reasons I was bullish on Quibi, because I do think there is a place for short shows like this that aren’t the crappy, mind-numbing, clickbait crap that floods these apps.

🌅 Influencer Emily Dickinson’s Morning Routine /// McSweeney’s

4:45 a.m. — Tape mouth shut. This is not for health. It’s a vow of silence to preserve the sanctity of unspoken verse.

I really need to get my morning routine in order…

⚒️ The Withering Weight of Being Perceived. /// Exterminating Angel

True revulsion was common, of course, at the greed and the wealth and the malignant influence of all things Cavendish, metastasizing into the body politic.

If you pay attention to what I do over on foofaraw, then you are probably familiar with Joel’s Cavendish stories. He’s spreading the good word of Cavendish and foofaraw with this new short on Exterminating Angel.

🐊 Florida Gators Climb Ladder With Scissors To Circumcise Dick Vitale /// The Onion

I forgot to watch, probably because I was cheering for Auburn and Duke, who both blew it. But it’s still cool to see Florida win for the first time since the Noah/Horford squads.

🏀 Michael Malone And Calvin Booth Lose Their War Over The Soul Of The Nuggets /// Defector

What’s left is a roster in desperate need of spiritual and physical revitalization. Nikola Jokic is having the best season of his career, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as obviously unhappy playing basketball as he has been this year.

This shocked me quite a bit. I get that they had some struggles, but it was just two seasons ago that they looked unbeatable. I can see cutting ties with Booth, but Malone is a great coach and if they have a fully healthy Murray, they are still a title contender, and will always be a playoff contender with Jokic on the squad.

🤖 Shopify CEO says no new hires without proof AI can’t do the job /// The Verge

What a fucking idiot. What do they do if AI companies actually start charging enough to make a profit and cost as much as a person to run?

📰 What was Quartz? /// Zach Seward

Cool to see the reflection on what Quartz did well and where things didn’t.

📉 How Donald Trump Crushed the Stock Market /// The New Yorker

After the election, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, said bankers were “dancing in the street.” They were also willfully ignoring Trump’s long record of recklessness in his own business dealings and his repeated pledges to upend the global trading system, on which he has now followed through.

I think anyone with half a brain knew this idiot never knew what he was doing and just made reckless choice after reckless choice to try to appear tough and get people to like him.

📹 Murderbot /// Trailer

This is one I, and many others, have been quite excited for. I’m way behind on the series despite loving the first few and I feel like they are capturing the tone pretty outstandingly.

📹 Predator: Killer of Killers /// Trailer

New Predator animated anthology is coming June 5th on Hulu before Trachtenberg’s next movie, Predator: Badlands, hits theaters in November. Art style looks very cool and painterly.

📹 The Phoenician Scheme /// Trailer

New Wes Anderson alert! Feel like this could be his best since Grand Budapest—at least that’s my hope.

⌨️ The 7 writing apps I used to start and finish my book /// The Verge

Just as being in different locations can inspire or challenge new ideas, moving work through different writing environments can be that shift for your text.

Speaking my language here. I’ve got Drafts, Kinopio, Pagi, iA Writer, and Obsidian. Plus I draft some things directly in Pika and Ghost. And I save certain things in Things, Raindrop, and Arena.

📧 Thunderbird email is going pro to better compete with Gmail /// The Verge

This is me downloading Thunderbird for the first time in over a decade, I think.

📱 This ’90s-esque social media site only works for three hours a day /// The Verge

The ultimate goal is to explore if there’s another way to be social online, one that resembles how we used to be online before smartphones were a thing.

I actually love this idea. Really does bring me back to those AIM days after school. And social.lol // Mastodon is always a joy when everyone is active at the same time and having all sorts of conversations together.

🎮 Nintendo delays Switch 2 pre-orders in response to Trump tariffs /// Polygon

Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.

Real world effects already being seen here. Not only will the price likely go up for Americans, other companies have already started layoffs due to the tariffs. Seems like a super productive strategy. Raise prices, raise unemployment, lower moral. Winning.

🚧 Trump and DOGE Defund Program That Boosted American Manufacturing for Decades /// Wired

The Democratic congressional aides and heads of MEP centers in multiple states believe that abandoning support for the program runs counter to Trump’s long-standing goals of boosting domestic manufacturing and winning the ongoing trade war with China.

Alright! Almost done talking about the tariffs today… Sure does make a lot of sense to defund programs that help American manufacturing when your tariffs are supposedly going to help bring manufacturing back. It’s almost like these idiots can only hold one idea in their head at a time.

💰 Trump Assures Wall Street He’ll Go Back To Just Fucking Over Poor People Soon /// The Onion

Urging calm by insisting that big banks, hedge funds, and other major players should take a longer-term view to understand that his tariffs were necessary to increase widespread suffering among the impoverished.

Again, some spot-on satire. The people who have disposable cash are going to eat up stocks and make huge gains when all of this shit is over and done with and sanity eventually (hopefully) prevails.

🤖 Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s /// The Verge

Gemini, the most strident of them, will give you a page full of explanations as to why this oversimplified approach could backfire — “while this calculation offers a seemingly straightforward way to target bilateral trade deficits, the real-world economic implications are far more complex and could lead to substantial negative consequences,” it warns, adding that “many economists argue that tariffs are not an effective tool for balancing trade deficits.”

That explains it, this whole government is being run by a hallucinating AI. Cool.