iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 16/08/2026

I admit I was not expecting Harper to be one of them. (Unclear how much compassion he has for himself.) www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress.

Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 14/08/2026

The slot machine pays off in mysterious ways

Three visual Bluesky posts in a row: baseball player failing to catch a home run; still from Gumby, a close up, Nigel Farage voting

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 12/08/2026

This laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur... is an interesting article for more significant reasons, but this stopped me

Article excerpt screenshot with the words highlighted: the maths is unambiguous

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 24/07/2026

Maybe the best disclosure sentence I've ever seen www.wired.com/story/epstei...

reason to get out from under it," says Schneider, who had butted heads with school officials several times
that year over the Bark. (Schneider is also someone I've known for years; I'm a massage therapist in Marin County, and Schneider used to be an occasional client before I started working as a journalist.)

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 11/07/2026

But let's wait until the 13TH paragraph to say it's the United Arab Emirates. (Sudan, where it is happening, is in the lede.)

OPINION
NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Lets Name the Country That's
Financing Mass Murder

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 07/07/2026

I don't usually read these "how people live on x dollars a year" pieces www.nytimes.com/interactive/... but this one was about a security guard at the Met: 46, commutes an hour from Parkchester, lives with a roommate, makes $51K. The money quote, so to speak:

The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending
is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school.
The window for his deferment period closed, and even
with some money he inherited after his mother passed,
he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans.
“I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 07/07/2026

Plane lands early, usually a good thing but the TV feed froze in the 82nd minute 😤

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 07/07/2026

This flat tone, single-sentence paragraph, no-headline treatment feels appropriate for reporting the words of a politician-bullshitter

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 04/07/2026

From another Reuters photographer, a white woman on a Metro bench wearing a similar color scheme to the white supremacists

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 04/07/2026

“Patriotism“ should also be in scare quotes — and not just for parallel structure!

At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers
From Fatriotism to ‘Communism’

On the eve of July 4, President Trump extolled the nation’s
founders while branding his opponents as “communists” in what
seemed to be a warm-up for November.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 30/06/2026

This is a real person? I would have bet on this being the Father Guido Sarducci of the Sasha Baron Cohen era, wearing the superintendent's keychain on his sash

Highlighted screenshot of New York Times: Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan

hurting their own cause. But the crisis has generally become a way to second-guess or flat-out oppose the reforms of Vatican II.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, a global leader among conservatives, has said that excommunicating the society would be
"unjust" and that "the demand to accept

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 24/06/2026

And We Keep Reporting What He Claims As If It Has Any Relationship to the Truth, Even Though We Should Know Better

Screenshot from NYTimes.com:

War in the Middle East
The Latest
U.S.-Iran Talks
What Are th
Trump Is Making Big Claims About the Iran Talks. Iran Keeps Contradicting Him.
President Trump appears to be describing his preferences as fully negotiated deals,

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 22/06/2026

So my identity is embedded in the major large language models intheweights.com/p/blake-eskin mostly accurately but some errors of fact and hallucinations, one of which I also have fantasized about:

BLAKE ESKIN
AMERICAN JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
> 600 STRENGTH • TOP 7%
<
GPT-5.5 SAYS
AMERICAN EDITOR AND WRITER KNOWN FOR WORK AT THE NEW
YORKER AND AS A PUBLIC RADIO
PRODUCER
GPT-5.5
GPT -5.4 MINI
CLAUDE OPUS 4. S
CLAUDE HAIKU 4.5
GROK 4.20
GEMINI 3.1 LITE
KIMI KZ 0905
DEEPSEEK V4
LLAMA 3.3 70B
LLAMA 3.2 18
GLM 4.7 FLASH
MISTRAL 3.2 24B
QWEN3 SB
IN THE WEIGHTS • COM

BLAKE ESKIN
FORMER NBA BASKETBALL PLAYER
46 STRENGTH <
QWEN3 SB SAYS
BLAKE ESKIN IS A FORMER
PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL PLAYER KNOWN FOR HIS TIME IN THE NBA.
GPT-5.5
GPT-5.4 MINI
CLAUDE OPUS 4.S
CLAUDE HAIKU 4.5
GROK 4.20
GEMINI 3.1 LITE
KIMI KZ 0905
DEEPSEEK V4
LLAMA 3.3 70B
LLAMA 3.2 18
GLM 4.7 FLASH
MISTRAL 3.2 24B
QWEN3 SB
IN THE WEIGHTS . COM

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 16/06/2026

Born with a coaxial cable in his mouth, not sure where he gets off lecturing others about sacrifice

give it your all," Dolan said. "You're going to have to get more now than you've ever, ever before. For this team and to your careers. And the big word is sacrifice. You're going to have to sacrifice if you want to achieve this.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 15/06/2026

“In a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.“ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/u...

“I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming
up the street,” Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of
his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and
poured a whiskey. “The technology is getting so good. It takes me
to a dark place.”

“Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?” Cooper asked.

“Because nobody can,” Farid said. “I don’t trust anything. Every
image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in
my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a
year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”

“And then what? You give up? You retire?”

“T don’t know,” he said.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 13/06/2026

The Decline of Western Civilization, Part XLVII

The New York Times misspelled the Louvre

bodies as easily as our hair color."
Orlan's decades-long interrogation of the human form led the Louve museum in Paris to chose her as this year's guest lecturer for its "Artist Lessons," and she

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 07/06/2026

A pile of comfort worthy of the 👸 and the 🫛

The word comfortable, stacked

finally got to a point where he was comfortable, (where) I was comfortable, Jalen (Brunson) was comfortable, OG (Anunoby) was comfortable, Mikal (Bridges) was comfortable. And to me, that's what the regular season is about. The

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 03/06/2026

Will you be at SRCCON in Minneapolis next month? I'm facilitating a session on July 9 with @lancedixon.bsky.social about using email newsletters to help journalism students learn lots of relevant skills

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 16/05/2026

Celebrating Maz Pacheco’s game-winning goal in extra time on and off the field

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 16/05/2026

Never would've gotten this close in this Lower Gwladys End before the men moved on to Hill Dickinson

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 10/05/2026

Interesting proposal from @katecohen.bsky.social, one of “16 Washington Post veterans on what they would change about D.C. journalism“: www.notus.org/perspectives...

NOTUS
Treat lies like obscenities.
Kate Cohen
Former Post contributing columnist

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 09/05/2026

My favorite sentence of the year so far, from Joanna Geary of @bloomberglp.bsky.social's presentation at #MediaParty this morning

The news story is a human compression and orchestration protocol for computing meaning

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 01/05/2026

⚒️🇷🇸 www.espn.com/nba/story/_/...

necessary to be at a championship level. Does he believe changes
are needed?

"That's not my decision, to be honest,” Jokic said. "Definitely, if

This was arguably the worst playoff series of Jokic's career. He

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 30/04/2026

I’ve been missing @anakanaschofield.bsky.social’s NBA color commentary on here, and it turns out she’s been holding back and batching it open.substack.com/pub/bingerea...

More woolly hats in sunny places. I have predicted the Rockets will win this game by 6 points, because I like making barmy declarations. I try to avoid writing basketball tweets on Bluesky because I fear NOBODY will come to my book launch(s) if I sound like a mental sports bro.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 29/04/2026

Continuous news is difficult, and mistakes happen. But it would have been exceptionally easy to prewrite this paragraph!

An isolated unfinished sentence

Constitution with "an unconstitutional gerrymander" by aiming to create a new district with a majority of Black voters.

Justice Alito explained that

Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, countered that the practical effect of the decision would be to make it nearly

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 29/04/2026

My documentary about Camilo Brooks, the ball man of Prospect Park, will be screened at the @coneyislandusa.bsky.social Film Festival on Saturday at 1 p.m. Tickets at www.coneyisland.com/2026-ciff/pr...

Camilo Brooks in a red T-shirt walking toward a red playground ball as a cyclist and jogger move toward him

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 16/04/2026

Man, the passive voice here lets the New York Times avoid responsibility for unfairly tarring all of American higher education with the reputation of elite universities www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/u...

Most American schools are far removed from places like Yale, where the estimated annual cost of attendance for undergraduates exceeds $90,000 before financial aid. Administrators at many institutions, most of which cost far less and admit far more students, complain that their schools are unfairly tied to selective universities.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 11/04/2026

Watching Everton in enemy territory

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 01/04/2026

Maybe the ballroom accountability story will build momentum for the voter suppression thing

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 31/03/2026

“See how we hold power to account? Enough of your whingeing…”

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 30/03/2026

Surprised this piece on Jeffrey Epstein as "dark connector" did not refer back to Malcolm Gladwell's portrait of the writer's mother as "connector" www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/o...

Front page of Malcolm Gladwell's 1999 article Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, about Jacob Weisberg's mother

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 30/03/2026

Scuffle in Warriors-Nuggets results in 3 technicals www.espn.com/video/clip/_...

Draymond Green is completely away from it

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 28/03/2026

Eager to learn today at @schoolofdata.nyc If you're here, come over and say hello or reply to this message

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 26/03/2026

👆🏼 How it started 👇🏼 How it's going www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

Nearly one month into the war, the president has privately informed advisers he thinks the conflict is in its final stages, urging them to stick to the four-to-six-week timeline he has outlined publicly, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials planned a mid-May summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing with the expectation that the war would be concluded before the meeting begins, some of the people said.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 18/03/2026

Looks like it ended a fallow period, at least on the big screen

Screenshot of Joanna Lumley filmography from Wikipedia:

1971
Games That
Lovers Play
Fanny Hill

The House
That Dripped
Blood
Film Crew
Girl

The
Abominable
Dr. Phibes
Laboratory
Assistant
Scene deleted
1973
The Satanic
Rites of
Dracula
Jessica Van
Helsing

1974
Don't Just
Lie There,
Say
Something!
Miss
Parkyn

1982
Trail of the Pink Panther
Marie
Jouvet

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 13/03/2026

In every generation, there is a magazine writer born with the potential to become the Messiah

The Atlantic
Give a Gift
CULTURE
SUCKER
My year as a degenerate gambler
By McKay Coppins
Illustrations by Tyler Comrie

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 02/03/2026

More slippery, less savvy

Live: President Says Campaign
Could Last ‘Four to Five
Weeks’ or Longer

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 02/03/2026

Savvy reporting from June www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/w...

It is a slippery thing, this two weeks — not a
measurement of time so much as a placeholder. Two
weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at
all. It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the
same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time,
it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced
from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But
later can also mean never. Sometimes.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 19/02/2026

And I haven't had time to double-check this, but there seems to be significant overlap in Substack and Polymarket investors. And with investors like these…

Screenshot of Claude dialogue

Which investors have a stake in both Polymarket and Substack?

Searched the web >

Based on the search results, I can identify the investors who have stakes in both
Polymarket and Substack:

1. Naval Ravikant — Listed as an angel investor in Polymarket (seed round) and as an
investor in Substack.

2.1789 Capital — Invested in Polymarket's Series D round (August 2025) and is listed
among Substack's investors by PitchBook.

3. Nate Silver — Joined Polymarket as an adviser/investor in 2024, and participated in
Substack's ~$10 million strategic round in late 2024. Axios

4. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — While a16z is well-documented as a major Substack
backer (leading its Series A and B), it also appears among Polymarket's broader investor list
per Tracxn.

The most clearly documented overlap is 1789 Capital (Donald Trump Jr.'s firm), which
invested in both companies, and Nate Silver, who has financial ties to both platforms. Naval
Ravikant is another name appearing on both cap tables. If you'd like, I can dig deeper into
any specific investor relationship.

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 19/02/2026

Maybe their SEO for newsletters is already strong, but the page title and meta description do not use the word “newsletter”:

Substack

https://substack.com > about
Substack - A new economic engine for culture
Substack is a new media app that connects you with the creators, ideas, and communities you care
about most. Here, you can discover world-class video, podcasts, ...

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Blake Eskin @blakeeskin.com · 08/02/2026

The @apnews.com, @nytimes.com, @chicagomanual.bsky.social might sell more copies of their style guides if they packaged them as ick lists

To prevent the program from overusing its favorite words — including shiver, unravel, tangled and exploded - Ms.
Hart recommended compiling an "ick list" of phrases and prohibiting the chatbot from using them.

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