If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a completionist, or enjoy absurdity—or all three—I’m guessing you will too.

I found Donald Trump’s interview in Time to be both utterly maddening and deeply disturbing. Trump is seemingly incapable of completing a thought. He self-interrupts, backtracks, repeats himself, and goes off on digressions. Kudos to Time for allowing that to come through in the transcript. (And for fact-checking his

Apple, in a post to Developer News yesterday, announced it “will introduce additional controls” to Full Disk Access: We give developers powerful APIs to build incredible capabilities into their apps for Apple products, backed by a set of controls designed to protect users’ private data. Full Disk Access largely sidesteps

The opening of the Public Citizen report I noted in the aforelinked Trump Crypto Game (“‘Thin Air,’ Real Money: Donald Trump’s Crypto Products Have Left Investors at Least $4.7 Billion Underwater”): “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value

In “Thin Air, Real Money,” you attempt to make money from Donald Trump’s cryptoscams, playing either as Trump (“Difficulty: None”) or one of his sucker investors (“Difficulty: Impossible”) in an ’80s-style video game. It was created by Public Citizen and is based on its recently published “‘Thin Air,’ Real

Glenn Fleishman, Six Colors: ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin

Karl Bode: In case you missed it, and I envy you if you did, Facebook/Meta recently unveiled “Muse,” its new AI agent that’s supposed to help you do things like craft emails, make dinner reservations, sell products on Facebook Marketplace, and offload mundane tasks to a massive and

If you were wondering why the name Nikole Hannah-Jones was familiar, she’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind The 1619 Project: The 1619 Project argues that the 250 years of chattel slavery that followed were not an aberration or a footnote; they were the foundation upon which the nation’s

I know I already linked to “An Argument,” episode #898 of This American Life, in yesterday’s post about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ decision to send her daughter Najya to segregated, high-poverty schools, but the episode is so good, it deserves a post of its own. I was most struck by Najya’

Clare Duffy, CNN: Apple says its decision to remove ICEBlock and similar platforms from the app store last year was prompted by concerns — including those raised by the Trump administration — about agent safety following a fatal shooting that left two detainees dead at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

I’m finally getting around to reading this terrific but gut-wrenching essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, published last week in The New York Times Magazine. (Gift link.) Hannah-Jones sent her daughter, Najya, to “a segregated, high-poverty school” in an effort to upend the status quo that often resulted in Black students

Alexander Bruzual, Trinidad Express: Calypso legend Slinger Francisco, better known as the Mighty Sparrow, died on Sunday in New York at the age of 91. A statement issued by Karen Francisco on Sunday afternoon said the calypsonian died peacefully, surrounded by family, after a brief illness. “It is with great

Vidit Bhargava on Mastodon: Made an iPhone Duo Walkman. Duo-Man! Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and ‘insert’ the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening. And Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!

James Savage spent ten years at Apple as a software engineer on Safari, App Clips, and other technologies. He left last year “to focus on smaller and more personal work.” Last week he released Drops, his first app since going indie: Super excited (and only a little nervous) to say

Between this emotional farewell ceremony for Mike Krukow and his final KNBR Post-Game Wrap, I sobbed for nearly 90 minutes straight. I think I went through a quarter of a Kleenex box. I’ve been listening to Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper—Kruk and Kuip—call ballgames for 28 years,

There are many reasons why baseball is a beautiful sport, but none more than for moments like this. If this doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, you’re not hooked up right. Not a bad start either for Verlander’s final game: 5⅓ innings, 5 hits, 2 runs, 6

Melody Schreiber, reporting for The Guardian: The Trump administration is removing 760,000 people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace on allegations of fraud, officials said on Tuesday – adding to previous efforts to chip away at federally subsidized insurance programs and likely causing some of the lowest-income Americans

Chris Dalla Riva at Can’t Get Much Higher combs through music streaming data to determine a workable definition of a “one-hit wonder”: After crunching these numbers, I think a resolution to The One-Hit Wonder Paradox begins to emerge. A one-hit wonder doesn’t need to actually have a hit

We’ve reached Hump Day for Negroni Week, which runs September 21–27. For me, the week kicked off early—and quite coincidentally—with a Negroni tasting and history lesson on Sunday, hosted by my friend and former colleague Matt and presented by Richard Powers, dance historian turned cocktail historian

Jared Greenspan, MLB: Ichiro [Suzuki] was on the mound in an annual All-Star Game against the best high school girls baseball players in Japan. And he dominated. Ichiro pitched a complete game shutout on 127 pitches with a whopping 17 strikeouts to steer his team to victory. Ichiro has participated

Donald Trump, speaking to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday (C-SPAN): The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the

Today is Day 2 of Negroni Week, created by Imbibe Magazine (and sponsored by Campari): In 2013 Imbibe Magazine launched Negroni Week as a celebration of one of the world’s great cocktails and an effort to raise money for charitable causes around the world. Since then, Negroni Week has

Baldur Bjarnason, writing at Out of the Software Crisis under the headline “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con”: For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on an idea that I think explains the mechanism of this intelligence

Duane Kuiper, in a statement released on the San Francisco Giants X/Twitter account: I was recently diagnosed with throat cancer and began treatment last week with my doctors at Stanford Medicine. This cancer is unrelated to the one I experienced five years ago, and I’m optimistic that it

I love Susan Kare’s calm demeanor and obvious enthusiasm as she demonstrates what she calls her “baby.” (Timestamped link to 15:26; scroll back a bit to 12:51 to see the full segment, including product manager Jerry Manock describing the basic ergonomic design of Macintosh.) Don’t forget

David Pogue catalogs (on Substack, alas) 125 Siri AI tests he tried on the just-released OS 27: This Siri can see into your Apple apps: Mail, Messages, Notes, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Photos, Music, and so on. (Of course, all of this data is locked on the phone. Nobody, not

Apple today released Xcode 27.1 beta, which enables iPhone Duo development, along with Figma and Sketch design kits for iPhone Duo. Developers, get cracking!

Tyler Stalman compares the new camera against the iPhone 15 Pro, because he’s heard “that the average upgrade cycle for iPhone Pro […] is about three years.” I imagine that’s true for the general iPhone Pro customer, but I’d bet that the people buying an iPhone Pro for

Links’ video review (in Mandarin with English subtitles) is very human—polished, but less “produced,” for lack of a better descriptor. Links is a talented travel photographer, and that perspective comes through in his review. Several stunning photos and many comparisons between iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro provide

Jaron Schneider’s written review at PetaPixel—and especially the companion video featuring Schneider, Jordan Drake, and Jason Vong—provides more of the technical details professional (or at least professionally minded) photographers crave. The wealth of example photos, and comparisons between iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro, are especially

Stunning images and video, as always, by travel photographer Austin Mann, captured this year at Dunton River Camp in southwest Colorado. What I love about Mann’s review is that it captures the feel of the iPhone 18 Pro cameras, not just their technical specs.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter: Apple TV had its best ever showing at the Emmy Awards on Monday, topping its previous high mark … from a year ago. For the first time since it launched in 2019, Apple TV led all outlets at the Emmys with 28 awards (Apple, the parent

Jay Willis, writing at Balls and Strikes on the stridently “unhinged” dissent from Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) in USPS v. California: Alito and Thomas could not let this conclusion go unanswered. Alito began his opinion by recasting the rule not as an attempt by Trump to regulate

Richard L. Hansen, Slate: There are two ways of looking at the Supreme Court’s three-sentence ruling in USPS v. California Monday evening, which put an end to Donald Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise millions of elderly, disabled, military, rural, Native American, and other voters in the 2026 midterm elections

Justice delos Santos, Mercury News: The 1985 San Francisco Giants will not have company. With a 10–3 win over the St. Louis Cardinals on Tuesday night at Busch Stadium, the Giants won their 63rd game under rookie manager Tony Vitello, guaranteeing that they will not lose 100 games in

Wiley Hodges, writing (on Substack, alas) about Apple’s new, always-listening “Audio Intelligence” features available on Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4: Audio Intelligence appears to me to be the first case of a always-on feature with some of the qualities of surveillance we’ve seen in other products—

I missed this essay when it was published in The New Yorker on the day Gloria Steinem died: Whatever the name, words that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality. Opposition will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born into—

Mike Scarcella, Reuters: Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI said on Monday they have resolved their claims against Apple, in a lawsuit that alleged the iPhone maker conspired with OpenAI to unlawfully monopolize markets for smartphones ‌and generative AI chatbots. In a court filing, X and SpaceXAI, a division

XCancel: Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice. We can’t share more details. No details on that “new development.” Nitter, the software behind XCancel, is again archived and read-only on GitHub (as of September

David French, in an Opinion piece for The New York Times, dissects the complicated Missouri redistricting efforts and resulting lawsuits, from which “America just barely averted the first constitutional cris is of this year’s midterm election” (gift link): I wanted to walk through this situation in detail because it’

Lex Friedman on his new (annoyingly good) site, Lex on Tech: Streaks are evil. They’re evil because they work. I do Duolingo every damn day so that I don’t lose my streak, and there are times I absolutely don’t want to do Duolingo. I hate that I’

A. Bartlett Giamatti, on baseball: It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and

Dave Roos, History.com, earlier this week: As horrific as it is to watch the World Trade Center towers crumble to the ground, those indelible images were recorded from the relative safety of the streets below. The final phone calls and voicemails left by 9/11 victims, however, provide a

Apple: Watch a quick Apple Event recap to learn about iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5. Even Apple scrubbed right to the end for the iPhone Duo intro, and also found the “Fertile Window notification” sequence awkward.

Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels: Well, this little Easter Egg in Apple’s 27 OSes is fun. If you go into Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass and scroll down far enough in the example content, an old friend appears […] This is an absolute delight and I must now have a physical 3D

Nick Heer at Pixel Envy isn’t thrilled with Apple’s new “Live Rewind” feature coming to Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, which Apple describes thusly: Live Rewind recalls what was just said in the last 15 seconds by showing a text snippet on your Apple

Apple Worldwide Developer Relations now has videos, workshops, group labs, and other resources to help developers build apps for the new iPhone Duo. (Videos available now; the rest are coming soon.) “Design for iPhone Duo” is a good introduction. (There’s a distinct Schweddy Balls/Wayne’s World vibe to

Today Apple held its annual fall event, at which new iPhones and other accessories are unveiled, debuted, or otherwise announced. A couple of things were notably different this year. One, only the Pro and Pro Max versions of the new iPhone were announced; the iPhone 18, iPhone 18e, and iPhone

Ricky Mondello: Would you believe me if I told you that the best device to switch password managers on might be your iPhone or iPad? For many pairs (exporter and importer) of apps, it’s true! Mondello offers great advice for migrating from one password manager to another. (Mondello knows

All it took to get Marcia Griffith’s Electric Boogie immediately and irrevocably stuck in my head for three days was seeing the title of an episode of The Pitch podcast about an electric vehicle charging company called it’s electric. Seriously, three full days. The song—and the accompanying