iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 15h

Scientists who comprehend the pleasures of discovery—the human part of science—are the bringers of progress, as Nobel biologist P.B. Medawar showed so entertainingly and well, back in 1969 Had a lot of fun revisiting this favorite writer for @flaminghydra.com flaminghydra.com/issue-661/

“Critical reasoning, considered alone, is barren.” One might go farther still and say that critical reasoning considered alone is not in fact reasoning at all, but a mere simulacrum of reasoning—the thinking a machine would do—empty, directionless, asphyxiatingly meaningless calculation.

Medawar’s imagination reaches beyond science with an easy, graceful consideration of Aristotle’s “poetic truth,” which “enriches or replaces scientific truth by truth of a higher kind, that which represents the testimony of a deeper and more privileged insight—a truth so lofty that, if nature does not conform to it, why then, so much the worse for nature.”

Sir Peter Medawar in 1969, immaculate in a soft sack suit, he is elegantly greying, with very dark intense eyes, he is wearing a white shirt, slim tie, and a lovely watch

0327

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 02/10/2026

Never in a million years will you guess how @mkupperman.bsky.social's hero prevails over his enemy!!! flaminghydra.com/issue-661/

A 98-pound weakling at the beach vows his revenge ('The big bully! I'll get even some day'); 'The wedding is OFF,' pouts his bikini-clad lady friend

070

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 01/10/2026

Sociopolitical aspects of wild potato chip flavors considered by the inimitable (and omnivorous) @brianhioe.bsky.social READ IT you will NOT regret flaminghydra.com/issue-660/

Joe MacLeod photo illustration of wild snack foods (beer flavored Lay's, 'spicy crispy squid snack hot roast chicken flavor' and century egg Doritos) on a ground of Pizza Hut mochi pizza in turtle shape

Yes, but the question I find myself asking is: could Baudrillard have anticipated chicken-flavored squid? Or would that have been something even beyond Baudrillard’s imagination? I know literally nothing about the man except the one book, but if only Baudrillard had lived to experience Japanese chicken-flavored squid snacks in the year 2026. I’m sure you would have enjoyed it, Jean Baudrillard.

0124

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 01/10/2026

At @flaminghydra.com @raxkingisdead.bsky.social has a valuable perspective the Cornell rape case, and on the part of misogyny that happens between men flaminghydra.com/issue-659/

I wasn’t afraid these two men on the pedestrian bridge would assault me. When they believed I was out of earshot, I knew they’d whisper. They might laugh about what they’d just seen jiggling up the ramp to pass between them. Those were the things I would hear (and, eventually, did hear). The rest has always been mysterious to me. Might one of them make too lewd or sexist of a comment, and might the other let it pass, express no disgust, say nothing instead of shutting down the exchange? I’ve seen that happen many times among other men. If they were cowards when I could see and hear them, what were they like when I couldn’t?

35913

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 01/10/2026

U.S. publications edited by sane adults grow ever more scarce

Vanity Fair marketing email subject line:

Gavin Newsom Wants It. Do Democrats?

081

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 30/09/2026

might try to finish this book I started writing years ago (???) 'the scientist seeks answers; the humanist seeks meaning'

Sciences vs. Humanities represented by yin and yang; yin being mystery, faith, imagination, and yang being the human world

390

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 26/09/2026

(lol I have no idea how any of this even can be possible)

a haggard Thiel in a brown t-shirt sitting before a microphone in the NYT movie with subtitles:

'There is a great. I don't know.'

021

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 25/09/2026

Charlie Angus on the geopolitical mood in Canada

Again, it's not just the border that we're worried about. We do not want to give our values up to an American government run by gangsters.

064

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 25/09/2026

Corporate media is not telling you about the current mood in Canada, but @flaminghydra.com's Nathan Munn caught up with former Canadian MP @charlieangus104.bsky.social, in an interview very much worth reading flaminghydra.com/issue-655/

15414

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 24/09/2026

Aaron Swartz is no longer here to tell us what he saw like twenty years ago. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Swartz had been batchmates with Altman in the inaugural class of 2005 at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and warned his friends about Altman shortly before his passing.

“You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one confidante. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”

91391422

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 24/09/2026

Shout this until justice comes, like they are doing in Hungary

0164

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 22/09/2026

you could maybe add 'feigned earnestness' flaminghydra.com/movie-review...

Jony Ive behind Sam Altman, promo shot for 'Sam & Jony'

020

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 19/09/2026

'AI actor Tilly Norwood' is like 'cartoon actor Homer Simpson' or 'comic book actor Spider-Man' except that the latter cases are more realistic, insightful depictions of human beings and their motivations

3314

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 18/09/2026

Why AI will never be able to write, by Nathan Munn flaminghydra.com/issue-650

AI content cannot be, and will never be, real art, and no one has nailed the reason why as well as Madonna did in a recent interview:

“Algorithms and artificial intelligence are the opposite of taking risks, and to me, that is the opposite of making art.”

To risk expressing oneself, or to witness another person do it, in pursuit of a singular vision: that is inspiring, invigorating, life-affirming. It shows us we are real, and this is happening. Even a system as dismal as economics understands that when something is hard to attain and is scarce, it becomes more valuable.

35721

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 17/09/2026

oh yeah? what if they are very sure but don't care to talk about it since they are at fault in a nontrivial way

trending on bsky: 'JPMorgan unsure on Iran war outlook'

051

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 17/09/2026

p.s. do not miss @camoot.bsky.social's visual analysis of Ephron's classic story, it is priceless

Drawing of Ephron's apartment building incl. a cornucopia of literary-critical details

020

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 17/09/2026

A long relationship with how mortal beings fall short; with violence, and with thoughts of violence, and with kindness and care. Very short very beautiful work from @g-kwiatkowski.bsky.social today in @flaminghydra.com

blurry image of a boy's hand holding a stick , foliage in the background

196

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 15/09/2026

In today's Hydra please also enjoy @brianhioe.bsky.social being scammed at the orthodontist! What an extraordinary writer and person AND we have a cool new thing coming up at @flaminghydra.com it is called PHOENIX, a suite of products and projects for the human internet flaminghydra.com/issue-647/

092

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 13/09/2026

This essay blew me away totally, by a mathematician with a philosopher's or poet's sense of epistemological questions reeling. WOW!! thank you @bostonreview.bsky.social and Michael Harris (who quotes Bolaño on his home page!!) (so thrilled to see @ftrain.bsky.social quoted here!)

Like any other species of understanding, the mathematical variety can only be established on the basis of a shared culture. Substituting a monetizable ersatz culture for the one evolved through historical experience is a particularly insidious form of knowledge collapse.

2164

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 12/09/2026

Enjoyed talking digital archives with @banikarim.bsky.social for @columjournreview.bsky.social. Really good column thank you for reaching out!! www.cjr.org/laurels-and-...

“There’s a certain tension—big institutions and governments aren’t fully committed to creating digital libraries that are maintained with a view to preserving digital posterity,” Maria Bustillos, the editor of Flaming Hydra and an information activist, told me. “It’s a fight against entropy. All kinds of entropy: political entropy, academic entropy, cultural entropy, news entropy.”

There is some good news here, from the Internet Archive, the world’s largest digital library, which posted on X this week that it had “preserved more than 199,000 BET articles over the years,” accessible through the Wayback Machine, its website index. When MTV News shut down, in 2024, the Internet Archive created a searchable index of more than 470,000 pages.

142

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 11/09/2026

I wish I were Jenny Holzer and could project this onto many giant buildings (by @zeets.bsky.social)

We’ve seen a similar cycle play out with Gaza. The initial images and videos were so horrific that people all over the world took to the streets to denounce their own governments’ funding of and collusion with the Israeli government’s genocide. But rather than cede to the will of their own people, the governments of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany opted instead to criminalize and suppress any action or speech against Israel. They demonstrated quite clearly that they would sooner destroy the civil liberties of their own people, in their own lands, than move to stop the massacres. The images worked to awaken people, but it was not enough.

061

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 11/09/2026

Despite the efforts of commercial media to sanitize and flatten 25 years of disastrous U.S. foreign policy, the truth is right in front of us and it has been all the time. Please read @zeets.bsky.social 'On Looking Away' flaminghydra.com/issue-646/

The literature considering how effective images of suffering can be in provoking a reckoning is a long and storied one, and in almost every article or essay that contemplates the question there are the same references to Susan Sontag, John Berger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard. The same arguments appeared in 2015 in response to the images of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Photographs of suffering and starving people were central to Biafra’s fight for independence during the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s, images I’ve been familiar with since my childhood in an Igbo household. And images of the devastation of the Vietnam war were central to the protests that took place against it. It makes sense that those images of horror could have been so effective in the past, even images as recent as the ones of prisoners of Abu Ghraib in 2004—prisoners piled on top of each other and put into humiliating positions as American soldiers smile and point and laugh and thumbs-up at them.

05715

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 11/09/2026

Salad bar sneeze guards are older than I thought!! (fun blog restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/tag/sneeze-g...) Sizzler promo below is truly haunting, thank you @postmodernism.bsky.social

Although industry consultants advised that a salad bar using pre-prepared items could increase sales while eliminating a pantry worker, restaurant managers often found that maintaining a salad setup was actually a full-time task. Tomatoes and garbanzos had a tendency to roll across the floor, dressings splashed onto clear plastic sneeze-guards, and croutons inevitably fell into the olde-tyme soup kettle.

171

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 11/09/2026

The story of Pornhub's rise is largely a finance story; the story of the cornering of a market. Part 2 of Nathan Munn's account of so many, many shenanigans in Montreal and beyond continues at @flaminghydra.com flaminghydra.com/issue-645/

The first thing Thylmann did after taking control of Mansef was to rename the company Manwin. And for all the nuts-and-bolts technical work being done at the company, Thylmann was looking at the still bigger picture. He wanted to push porn into the popular conversation, to legitimize it in the wider culture, and to transform what he saw as an industry ready to be brought out of the gutter. He also needed to position Manwin as a safe harbor for investment money, since he would need a mountain of cash to pay off the Mansef crew when the note came due.

To these ends he started a twofold reputation-laundering operation. First, Manwin launched an aggressive PR campaign in the form of pro-condom PSAs and huge billboards in Times Square; next, in an attempt to curry favour among the old-school porn producers who loathed Manwin (especially the tubesites with their oceans of pirated content), Fabian spent $1 million to license content for Manwin sites. He also started building so-called “mainstream” sites—including a Funny or Die imitation called VideoBash, and the TMZ-wannabe Celebs.com—to diversify against Manwin’s hardcore porn offerings.

081

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 09/09/2026

no, for god's sake what on earth is wrong with you

email to subscribers of The New Yorker

Have Conservatives Taken Sexy Back?

1349

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 09/09/2026

DON'T BE EVIL, the new book on Google, has more compassion than usual toward young people trying to make a living and giving in to the golden handcuffs... and where that leads Valuable interview from @lauriewoolever.bsky.social with the author, Claire Stapleton flaminghydra.com/issue-643/

CS: Graeber named this problem, which is the soul injury—the moral injury—of having to perform a job that you know doesn’t really need to be done. What is the nature of this kind of employment?

The people who really keep society running—garbage collectors, nurses, teachers—fight so hard for nothing, the bupkis of the system. By contrast, not just at Google, but corporate lawyers, consultants, everyone in finance, we have these well-padded industries where people take tremendous salaries, because, to paraphrase Graeber, “Your salary is a reflection of the harm you’re doing to society.” You’re paid to look the other way and keep the system pumping for whoever’s at the top of it.

1258

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 07/09/2026

p.s. The coming horrors of the 'digital afterlife' were crystal clear 14 years ago web.archive.org/web/20130308...

"Oh — oh, your father was called to jury duty, and I sent the form back saying 'deceased'..."
"Yeah?"
"And they wrote him back."
"What?!"
"It says, 'Your excuse has been accepted.'"
The machinery of human affairs churns blindly on and on, no matter what, in a manner absurd enough to send even deeply grieving people into gales of uproarious laughter (years later, the phrase, "your excuse," etc., still has the power to reduce both my mom and me to helpless guffaws.) The system, the bureaucracy, the forms to fill out. The alarm clock rings, appointments to keep. The crazy futility of it all is a little bit sad, too, the way perhaps all truly hilarious things have to be.
That Kafkaesque sensation of tragicomic futility has now acquired a new and larger dimension of weirdness, because the seeming permanence of the Internet is so crisply, coldly digital, and therefore so entirely at odds with the messiness of real life. You might say that human beings are analog creatures with certain digital tendencies, and that the digital and analog parts of our nature are inevitably at war with one another.

0143

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 05/09/2026

Hell no, telling children they are 'special' is toxic. Everyone deserves a welcome into the world, and all can be taught to welcome others. There is no freaking owl that proves you are 'special' there is a better world to make These books are vile and always were www.theawl.com/2010/11/harr...

Bluesky post from Peter Sagal:

I've said it before, and I've said it again: the Harry Potter books are terrific, especially when read aloud. They appeal to any child who is told they are special, and great things are expected of them, and yet they have no idea how to live up to that.

I heard the author died. Not sure. Too bad.

3191

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 05/09/2026

In our final DOLLY WEEK entry by Harry Siegel, a meditation ranging from P.K. Dick to lyrics scrawled on drycleaning slips to an impromptu performance in an Irish pub I loved working on this with yr. co-host @annamerlan.bsky.social! Happy Labor Day!! Dolly Forever flaminghydra.com/issue-642/

Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt on the Dolly variety show, 1976

0113

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 05/09/2026

Carrie Frye on rewatching Dolly Parton's film debut, and the feminist messages coded therein. "He’s sympathetic—the two have an easy intimacy—but almost immediately, he starts asking her where her smile is: 'I want you to smile, okay?'” flaminghydra.com/issue-642/#g...

Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin in 9 TO 5

050

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 05/09/2026

Dolly the Sheep was cloned (and named after Dolly Parton) by Scottish scientists. Misha Angrist with a beautiful remembrance as DOLLY WEEK comes to a close at @flaminghydra.com 'There Will Never Be Another Ewe' flaminghydra.com/issue-642/

Exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland: Dolly the Sheep, taxidermized, in a lucite display

0103

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 04/09/2026

"I am not a crook" (2026 cover version)

'I can’t be bought,’ Nige tells Reform’s faithful – however different it may look

(Guardian opinion piece today)

293

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 03/09/2026

It's not easy to give a sense of the sexism of 1980 office life, but 9 TO 5 was very accurate on that score. Wrote about it, and about Dolly Parton's fashion genius, for @flaminghydra.com flaminghydra.com/issue-640/

This outlandish picture of a man in his gigantic private office, lording it over the women in his employ in all kinds of unseemly ways, is entirely accurate and not exaggerated, not even a little bit. I know because I was there, a secretary myself back then, keeping afloat during undergrad. Our bosses had enormous power over us, and quite a number of them (though by no means all) took advantage of it; the bad bosses were used to getting their way over men and women both, and they knew that they would face no repercussions for their behavior ever, no matter how horrible their lewd suggestions or their insane demands. The toxicity of office life skewered in 9 to 5—and the eye-rolling esprit de corps that went with it—were both grimly and gleefully familiar to movie audiences.

2243

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 03/09/2026

My contribution to DOLLY WEEK at @flaminghydra.com is about Dolly Parton's beneficent and freeing influence on fashion in the 80s. flaminghydra.com/issue-640/

Dolly sold this message as Doralee just as naturally and winningly as she did in her real life as a performer, though obviously her 9 to 5 wardrobe was way more restrained than the clothes she wore in her famously over-the-top, sparkly stage persona. Still, though, the meaning was the same: clothes can be playful, and silly, Dolly seemed to be saying, a sheer delight just for yourself to enjoy, the real expression of your own being in motion and sensation, moment by moment; fashion could be meant for you to just fully inhabit and love your own body in.

0339

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 02/09/2026

We like this show and now I like it MORE

David Suchet posting with David Mitchell in Xmas special promo for 'Ludwig'

070

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 01/09/2026

such a way about her, @raxkingisdead.bsky.social read her thoughtful and tender essay on Dolly Parton's 60-year marriage (among other things) flaminghydra.com/issue-638/

Dolly Parton was 32 when she posed for the cover of Playboy in 1978, wearing a rhinestone and sequins version of the Playboy bunny costume. After some probing questions about her style and “gaudy getup,” interviewer Lawrence Grobel began asking whether her husband Carl Dean was a “jealous person.” (She swore he was not.) The idea seemed to fascinate journalists of the day, including Grobel, who followed up by asking whether Dolly herself was the jealous type or whether either spouse dated other people while she was on the road. (Though she kept the details of their personal life fairly vague, she answered that she was not, they did not.)

04713

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 30/08/2026

My youngest is going to be doing the Time Warp shortly

A sign at the movie theatre showing Rocky Horror ! SOLD OUT ! with a quote from the late Tim Curry:

'The way the world is I think a silly evening in the theater is a good thing to take our minds off the terror.'

1172

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 29/08/2026

Giroux puts the focus where it belongs. The assault on Arday isn't even on DEI per se. It's on the idea that Black and postcolonial studies belong in the academy in the first place. I wrote a bit about it at @flaminghydra.com flaminghydra.com/issue-632

Here are some of the influential papers written by Jason Arday, whose subject was the sociology of education. It is not surprising in the least that a neuroatypical Black scholar was in an advantageous position to offer valuable perspectives on his area of research, which seems essentially to have been: How do we dismantle racial inequality in our institutions, so that everyone can learn, and teach, and contribute to society, to the best of their ability?

Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University? (The social science, 2018)
Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy (Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2020)
Same storm, different boats: the impact of COVID-19 on Black students and academic staff in UK and US higher education (Higher Education, 2022)

132

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 29/08/2026

Immaculate analysis of the media response to the Arday tragedy by education scholar Henry Giroux. THIS x infinity www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/28/t...

Race is central to this process, but racism must be understood as more than personal prejudice. Arday entered public life as a Black academic whose appointment at Cambridge had itself been invested with enormous symbolic significance. Once allegations emerged against him, his alleged failures could therefore be mobilized as evidence against diversity, racial equality, and the presence of Black scholars within elite institutions. His individual story became politically useful to forces already engaged in a broader assault on DEI, multiculturalism, immigration, and racial justice. The racist right understood this immediately.

But liberal journalism too often answers this problem by condemning the vulgar racism of the right while refusing to interrogate the structures through which racialized narratives acquire their extraordinary visibility and force. Racism today does not circulate solely through explicit slurs. It moves through moral panics, narratives of undeserving advancement, claims of declining standards, manufactured crises of merit, and spectacles in which Black and brown individuals are made to carry the burden of representing entire communities.

13010

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 27/08/2026

Gates 'sounding the alarm'?! Microsoft invested $13 bn in OpenAI. Is he protecting his own stake? Is this PR meant to pressure governments into spending $$ (to Save Us from Danger!) Does this (from Gates's blog yesterday) sound like a warning to you?? www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-pa...

In all these areas, the operative word is “can”—AI can improve life for people at every income level. But it won’t do that automatically. As with any new technology, we have to be deliberate about ensuring that it benefits everyone and not just a wealthy few. This will require governments and philanthropy to play a strong role so that less wealthy citizens and low-income countries are full beneficiaries.

97432

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 26/08/2026

What no, I've been opposing LLMs since 2023. Gates is pretending to 'sound the alarm' because Microsoft has invested ~$13 billion in OpenAI. They panic so that huge amounts of public $$ will go to their broken technology. Read Gates's blog (quoted/linked below) www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai...

Maximizing the benefits is just as important as minimizing the harms. If people see how AI makes their lives easier, it will help build the public trust that is necessary for managing the harder parts of the transition. If the first thing AI does in most people’s lives is take away their job, those who are already skeptical about it will outright reject it. This will make it harder to ever deliver on the benefits and it is another reason why governments, industries including the medical industry, and AI companies should be working together now.

With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more.

100

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 26/08/2026

I'm referring to Gates's post (link below). It's a defense of AI with caveats about addressing potential harms. Microsoft has invested like $13 billion in OpenAI. This is not a disinterested analysis. www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai...

000