📹 ‘How To With John Wilson’ Ending With Season 3 on HBO, Gets Release Date and Quirky Trailer — Variety

Bit of a bummer, but at least we get one more. This and Painting with John we’re two of my favorite things that came from HBO Max doing some weird things.

◼️ US cities to pay record $80m to people injured in 2020 racial justice protests — The Guardian

a figure experts believe is unprecedented and will rise further as many lawsuits are still playing out.

🤖 Universal Music Group Signs Deal With AI Startup Endel — Pitchfork

The generative elements of Endel’s tech are designed to enable musicians to use AI to scale their music ad infinitum, creating perpetually regenerating artworks in their own style.

As much as I poo-poo AI around here, I used Endel for awhile and quite enjoyed it as something to focus to rather than having to search and find the right music.

🗞️ 7 news outlets reimagining political journalism in smart ways — The Washington Post

Some solid sites in there. Love finding new places to dig into.

📺 The Bungled Max Rollout — Garbage Day

While some of the criticism is fair, there’s not a streaming service launch that hasn’t had issues—let’s cool our jets. Great issue of GD though.

🇺🇦 Ukraine’s secret weapon is an app. The U.S. wants to spread it — Semafor

Consider me all-in on an app I can keep my passport and pay taxes from.

🦖 Personal Longtermism — Dinosaur Comics

So you have to be unhappy, today, right now, in order that people who DON’T EVEN EXIST YET AND MAY NEVER EXIST have it slightly easier?

Good reminder about Dinosaur Comics from Today in Tabs.

🍔 Drew Carey, lunchtime hero for striking writers — Boing Boing

Some feel good news to course-correct the day a bit over here.

🤮 Charlie Kirk’s ‘Turning Point’ Pivots to Christian Nationalism — Rolling Stone

Unfortunately for me, I went to the same high school as this schmuck (I’m a few years older). I despise him.

🦚 Peacock’s Twitter Account Trolled The HBO Max Name Change With A Dirty Little Joke — Uproxx

Pretty clever.

📚 Book Publishers Are Trying to Destroy Public E-Book Access in Order to Increase Profits — Current Affairs

When a library hosts a book digitally, they do not simply pay what an ordinary consumer would pay for that book. Libraries pay additional licensing fees to publishing companies to host e-books through services like Libby and OverDrive, which can cost three to five times as much as the book itself and only last for a few years at a time.

According to Koeltl’s opinion, Penguin reaps $59 million per year just from e-book licensing to libraries, while HarperCollins makes nearly $47 million.

America already has a horrifying crisis of literacy: A majority of American adults—130 million people—cannot read at a 6th-grade level. The average American reads for personal interest just 16 minutes per day, and a 2018 survey found that 24 percent said they hadn’t read a single book in the prior year.

This article is focused on the lawsuit against the Internet Archive, but these numbers are heinous. Just sad, pathetic, and unsurprising behavior from the publishers.

🥤 TikTok’s “3 Drink Theory,” Explained — Bustle

I’ve been drinking multiple beverages for years—way before it was cool 🥸

🐦 Twitter will die of boredom — Boing Boing

Sounds about right.

📵 White House raises alarm on risks of social media for kids — Politico

Thanks captain obvious… (not that I’m bringing any ideas for solutions to the table…)

👨‍⚖️ Your Indictment news for May 23, 2023 — Dan Sinker

First update in awhile and it’s a quick one. Still, I always appreciate having these land in my inbox.

📱 Mona for Mastodon App icon(s) — Chamline

I typically don’t like to pile on in these situations, but the dev’s most recent update feels like an intentional “fuck you” to their biggest supporters when a simple “nah, I’m good” would’ve sufficed.

🧴 Bioré and Influencer Apologize After School Shooting Ad — NY Times

Not sure I’ve ever seen a headline capture the state of society better than this. You’ve got self-care, school shootings, cancel culture, mental health, social media, and ads. USA…

🚽 What do anti-trans activists think they want? — Indignity

How do restrooms work, in these people’s minds? Somehow, the setup is that restrooms are so carefully supervised at the door that a predator would need to obtain and present a government-issued gender certificate to enter—but once inside, anything goes?

🇺🇦 Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine — The New Yorker

General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told The Economist that it was “more important to focus on the accumulation of resources” for future battles. “May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me,” Zaluzhnyi said.

But Kaban, despite his dedication to the military, had sent his son to Germany. “I told him, ‘If you come back, I’ll kill you myself,’ ” he explained. “We all understand we’re going to die here.”

A harrowing look from the front line of the war. At the same time, the people you are introduced to give a small sense of optimism, as they attempt to keep spirits high, even as they are resigned to the fact they likely won’t make it out alive.

🏞️ A Breakthrough Deal to Keep the Colorado River From going Dry, for Now — NY Times

For now feels like a pretty critical part here , but something is obviously better than nothing. See also Last Week Tonight: Water for background.

🧞 Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence — Lithub

With punctuation, a sense of the rhythm of language could be imparted, an artfulness, a lyricism, a poetry. Within a long sentence—clause upon clause, the commas and semicolons, em-dashes and colons, parentheticals and appositions piling up—there can be a veritable maze of imagery, a labyrinth of connotation, a factory of concepts; the baroque and purple sentence is simultaneously an archive of consciousness at its most caffeinated and a dream of new worlds from words alone.

At their most excessive (which is to say their least excessive), the partisans of parsimony can be Puritans, white-washing the church walls and smashing the stained-glass windows; the militants of minimalism are managers of language concerned only with the bottom line.