iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 01/10/2026

feels like this is a more noteworthy detail than the leading "revisionist historian" descriptor www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”

The review comes at a moment of renewed interest in the Nixon legacy. Republicans see in the combative former president, who was loathed by the press and besieged by investigations, a historical analogue for Trump. During remarks at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., this summer, Vice President JD Vance made the comparison explicit.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 01/10/2026

watch out folks … now they're going ROUGE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 1, 2026

CONTACT: press@gallego.senate.gov | (202) 224-4521

WATCH: At HSGAC Subcommittee Hearing, Gallego Warns of Dangers Posed by AI, Especially as More Models Go Rouge

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 30/09/2026

yeah get their ass Wordle guy www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/t...

OpenAI gave $500 to the group for its work, which Mr. Wardle said was low compared with what he would expect from other companies given the severity of the flaw. OpenAI fixed the bug, he said, and acknowledged it this week in its public software release notes without disclosing details.

It was “not the mature security program you’d expect from a security-centric company,” Mr. Wardle said.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 28/09/2026

quick don't let your slurp juices go to waste

a bunch of bot tweets about "agentic NFTs"

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 22/09/2026

here's @calllmenadira.net with an invaluable dispatch from inside (and outside) the Ed Sheeran show in Philly slate.com/culture/2026...

Outside the show, Padilla told me she was one of a few people she knew who kept her ticket to try to disrupt from within, upgrading to a closer seat to unveil a Free Palestine shirt where Sheeran could actually see her (“He will definitely see me because I’m a Puerto Rican New Yorker. And I get seen,” she said.) Other protesters who had tickets returned them, including Hillary Steinberg, 34, who bought tickets with her boyfriend a year ago, for what would have been her first Sheeran concert despite formerly being a fan. She worked hard to get a refund because, she said, “we should not let corporate entities and wealthy people dictate what people can and cannot say”: “If it’s just about money, why are we here?” At one point, a protestor walked over and proudly exclaimed “I got one!” after he convinced a woman to get a refund instead of attending.

A father, ushering his young daughter into the stadium, fist bumped the protestors as they walked by. Another man, Adam, a 31-year-old of Irish and Palestinian descent, said he hoped that the bad press indicated that “they’re most likely going to cancel this if there isn’t a solid turnout because people don’t want to show up and essentially be complicit in supporting genocide by showing up and paying for a ticket.”

But inside the stadium, the opposite proved to be true. Sheeran took the stage in front of what appeared to be a full house (though it’s worth nothing resale ticket prices had plummeted). My section was full of tweens, children, and middle-aged couples out on date night. They did the wave before the show began. (This still happens?) I overheard my next-seat neighbor mentioning having seen Pink. When I asked her if artists’ views have any bearing on how she enjoys their music, she was quick to say no. One of her best friends is transgender, she told me, and she eats at Chick-fil-A.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 15/09/2026

I don't *want* to keep paying attention to Boosie's meltdowns … but I can't look away …

A Boosie Badazz tweet from Sept. 13, 2026:

"I DID A HOUR INTERVIEW WITH 60 MINUTES ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY LAWSUIT BUT ONLY A FEW THINGS GOT PUT OUT.I TALKED ABOUT HOW BEFORE THIS SITUATION HAPPENED THAT I SAT DOWN WITH THE PARDON CZAR AT THE WHITE HOUSE DISCUSSING WHY I FELT I NEEDED A PARDON.I TOLD THEM THAT I FELT MS ALICE WOULD HELP ME BUT THE JUDGE ENDED UP DISMISSING THE CASE A FEW MONTHS LATER SO SHE DIDNT NEED TOO .A MONTH LATER THEY PICKED MY CASE BACK UP N GAVE ME THE SAME CHARGES N ADDED A CHARGE OF ME BEING A ATTACK AROUND A FIREARM. HOW AM I A ATTACK WHEN I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO REHAB. I WAS SENTENCED TO 10 YEARS N STATE PRISON FOR 3RD OFFENSE MARIJAUNA N NEVER OFFERED REHAB. WE HAD PROOF THAT THESE THIEVES SAID THE PRESIDENT SIGNED THE PARDON.I WAS ASKED WHAT I WANTED OUT OF THIS SITUATION N I SAID “ I WANTED THE PRESIDENT TO LOOK AT MY CASE WITH MS ALICE N SEE IF ITS WORTH A PARDON ‼️I ALSO SAID I WANTED HIM TO TAKE N CONSIDERATION HOW I WAS DONE WRONG BY THESE PEOPLE WHO LIED ON HIM TO DO SO‼️MY STORY WASNT TOLD FULLY BUT HOPEFULLY THIS INTERVIEW WILL PROVE MY POINT CLEARLY N CIVIL COURT THAT I NEED TO BE COMPENSATED X 10."

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 15/09/2026

they called her or sent an email I assume?

Emmy Producers Reveal How They Pulled Off That Taylor Swift Cameo

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 08/09/2026

NFT hawk Jason Derulo gloms onto latest tech trend in desperate bid for relevance, example 93029023

Jason Derulo Turns Viral AI Track "Let Me Be" Into a Fully Human Record

Listen / Watch the Official Lyric Video HERE

Jason Derulo first discovered "Let Me Be" on TikTok, where The Second Voice's AI-vocal version had already become a global phenomenon. Rather than leaning further into AI, Jason flipped the narrative, re-recording every vocal with real voices, adding his own verses and songwriting, and reworking the beat from the ground up. Full details can be found HERE.

AI created the spark. Human emotion made it real. Jason Derulo made it Human.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 19/08/2026

I see www.theguardian.com/media/ng-int...

While Carr may not be keen to detail his relations with the Trump administration, a trove of FCC documents – obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward, and provided to the Guardian – shed light on the close working relationship between Carr, his top staffers and members of Trump’s White House team.

Between 12 March 2025 and 11 February 2026, Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, according to the records, and had at least three scheduled calls with administration officials, including two conversations with the chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He also spoke by phone with administration officials such as the controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In addition, the files provide insight into Carr’s media strategy, including communications with producers at Fox News, and make public previously undisclosed meetings he has held with media titans such as the Fox Corp chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, and Sinclair Broadcast Group chair, David Smith.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 18/08/2026

forever jammin in Hank Hill's room

a scene from King of the Hill depicting ZZ Top performing for some TV cameras inside Hank Hill's bedroom

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 17/08/2026

indeed, as @pablo.show just shared on the other site: x.com/PabloTorre/s...

Pablo Torre

When the time is right:

I am extremely, extremely excited for our episode about this.

👀

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 31/07/2026

and what's he been up to today, you ask

Bryan Johnson
@bryan_johnson

today's training to dunk a basketball

what's good:
> i'm committed

what's bad:
> little fast twitch muscle
> slow force development
> stiff tendons
> poor coordination
> limited ankle dorsiflexion
> low relative power-to-weight
> high achilles risk

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 31/07/2026

that being said, seems fitting she can't even bring herself to use the word "racist"

I was, and am, genuinely baffled by the gap between the extraordinarily expansive view of humanity that he shows when he’s talking about the future, and interstellar travel, and being a multiplanetary civilization, and all that stuff and then the kind of tribalism cesspit of social media that he’s in. He says that the most important thing with AI is to ensure that it is truth seeking and curious. Then you look at the stuff that he propagates on X and it’s not truth seeking, a lot of it. It’s caricature. It’s dystopia.

There’s a disjuncture.

It’s what’s so fascinating about him. But it’s also really alarming because he does have 240 million followers and he has a whole bunch of followers basically for whom he can do no wrong and who believe everything that he posts. As a result, many people’s views of Europe or political views are shaped by what Elon says.

I find it really disturbing. That’s partly why that last part of the interview became a bit heated. I wasn’t pushing an agenda. I disagreed with his characterization of Europe. I don’t think the facts back it up.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 31/07/2026

genuinely hilarious that the Economist's editor in chief pissed off Elon so much that she inadvertently learned about "NPCs" nymag.com/intelligence...

After the interview, Musk persisted on X, calling Beddoes “an unthinking NPC” (“non-player character” in gamerspeak) and a “traitor to the West.” Beddoes says she has been “genuinely bemused” by Musk’s reaction and had to find out what an NPC is. “Not a video-game player,” she admits.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 31/07/2026

made their way to my inbox as well, with some VERY booster-y "ideas," lol (I did not respond to any, but did forward one to a friend out of mere amusement. little did I know!)

a list of A.I.-boosting emails from a fake A.I.-powered PR agency

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 30/07/2026

only one man could've pulled it off …

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 30/07/2026

takes a real special kinda hubris to think you can resist editorial interference when literal Scott Pelley could not

Their concerns are heartfelt and understandable, given the troubling events at 60 Minutes over the last months. But I would like to address those concerns, particularly because they go straight to the heart of journalistic ethics and independence. I am a lifelong democratic voter and liberal and have mostly written for left wing publications. Some of those – I won’t embarrass them by revealing who they are – tried to pressure me into changing my reporting because the facts fell outside their ideological goals. I refused, and one publication canceled my assignment. I have also written for conservative publications, including a piece assigned by the National Review entitled, “When Journalism Dies,” about the peril that awaits us if we lose touch with objective reality. The article contained right-wing heresies that prompted angry responses from their MAGA-aligned readers – but the Review didn’t care. And they didn’t touch a word of my prose, but if they had, I would have simply walked away. Its exceedingly easy to stand up to editorial pressure if you want to. I’ve reproduced the article in my Substack if you care to read it:

https://sebastianjunger.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-journalists-are

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 30/07/2026

"Twitter is not real life"—Narendra Modi decodemail.boomlive.in/p/bjp-s-mach...

It was Narendra Modi's first public comment after weeks of silence on the protests convulsing the capital, and he'd chosen to break it in their language. He called the paper leak "not a trivial matter" and promised fast-track courts to prosecute those responsible.

Within hours, the internet had taken it apart. One parody kept Modi's opening line — he'd addressed the protesters as "friends" — and cut to three young women staring into the camera: "No, we are not." Other edits spliced his pauses and hand gestures into meme templates, set to trending audio, dragging up promises they said he'd never kept.

Twenty-four hours later, Modi posted a reel again. Same format, same hour — this time thanking "the youngsters" for watching the first one and sending "insightful suggestions."

That same day, at a Cabinet meeting called to toughen penalties for paper leaks, he turned to his ministers and asked how many of them ran active Instagram accounts. Not enough, apparently — because he then told them, according to people in the room, to stop treating X as the whole internet and start making reels of their own.

Watching the man who built one of the most sophisticated political social media machines in the country — a decade of WhatsApp forwards, X armies, an IT cell trained to move fast — get outpaced on a platform, was one of the stranger subplots of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 30/07/2026

thank u Andrew Garfield www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...

At the New York premiere of his new movie The Magic Faraway Tree, Garfield told The Hollywood Reporter, “This business is in an interesting place and I’m fascinated by how things work. I’m really grateful to Amazon for making the film with us and I’m also really grateful to Amazon for helping it find a new home. And I think Neon’s a really, really exciting home for it. I think it’s a really good fit and I’m really excited to release it with them,” calling Neon, “a daring studio doing daring films so I’m very, very excited to be partnering with them on it.”

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 27/07/2026

I can think of a few other reasons why investors might significantly discount Grok www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

“Most investors we speak with significantly discount Grok & Cursor,” Jonas wrote. “Many ascribe zero or even negative value for AI given the high capex requirements relative to Space & Connectivity, largely uncertain economics, and the high degree of management time devoted to the business.”

The selloff in SpaceX comes as investors have broadly rotated away from technology firms that have committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI and the infrastructure needed to support it. A shaky macroeconomic backdrop, and elevated tensions between the US and Iran, have boosted oil prices, fueling concerns about inflation and souring the sentiment for risk assets.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 20/07/2026

I'm sorry but lmao www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/t...

On social media, Mr. Coplan dismissed the raid as a politically motivated attack by the Biden administration. But privately, he and his advisers voiced suspicions about a different culprit, whom they blame for many of Polymarket’s problems: Tarek Mansour, the chief executive of Kalshi, Mr. Coplan’s biggest rival in the booming business of prediction markets.

Mr. Mansour’s company had indeed played a role. In the months before the F.B.I. raid, Kalshi’s lawyers met with federal prosecutors in Manhattan to raise concerns about Polymarket, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions, which have not been previously reported. The lawyers explained how Polymarket’s platform worked, one of the people said, and highlighted an important fact — that customers could use it from the United States, where it was supposed to be banned.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 16/07/2026

like boss like direct report abcnews.com/US/white-hou...

When President Donald Trump approached the podium to deliver his State of the Union address in February, one of the few people who knew what he was about to say was allegedly setting himself up to profit from the president's words.

Trump's longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on that speech and more than a dozen others on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has been operating Trump's teleprompter since 2016, is in talks with federal regulators to settle allegations he used his inside knowledge of the president's speeches to win more than $100,000, the sources said.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 15/07/2026

I mean … not even that much rn! www.bloomberg.com/billionaires...

A Bloomberg chart showing the growth and plunge in Elon's net worth over the past year

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 08/07/2026

dog lmao www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/b...

What’s happening? Hedge funds and other large investors who got in early on the SpaceX trade may have done so with an aim to quickly sell, or flip, their shares to index funds, Sammon said. Millennium Management is said to have made $3.7 billion last month with “index-rebalancing” trades that sought to capitalize on forced buying moments involving index funds, Bloomberg reports.

Investors are also focused on other hot assets. Those looking to cash in on the artificial intelligence trade are increasingly focused on the stocks of memory chip makers. A big event this week is the U.S. trading debut of SK Hynix, the Korean chip giant whose existing shares have soared 238 percent in Seoul trading this year.

SpaceX “is a mere side note,” Ivan Cosovic, the managing director of Breakout Point, a market data firm that tracks investor sentiment, told DealBook.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 28/06/2026

wild for all this info to come out just as Pooh Shiesty's collab with GloRilla finally drops www.xxlmag.com/pooh-shiesty...

Pooh Shiesty is being accused of having an "inappropriate relationship" with one of his supervisors while on home confinement, which directly led to his movements on the day Gucci Mane was allegedly robbed and kidnapped.

According to court documents obtained by XXL on Friday (June 26), federal prosecutors say the rapper was involved in a personal relationship with at least one case supervisor at Volunteers of America (VOA), the nonprofit organization tasked with monitoring his home confinement following his 2022 federal conviction on conspiracy and drug trafficking charges.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 25/06/2026

(tbf Yap left the institute not long after that tweet but hoo boy are the MI folks still a racist bunch) slate.com/news-and-pol...

Over the past couple of years, though, quite a few Manhattan Institute affiliates have progressed from hand-wringing over diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to arguable expressions of full-blown bigotry. The openly misogynistic professor Scott Yenor, who’s still a contributor, was revealed earlier this year to have run an Idaho website that employed openly antisemitic and racist writers and targeted local Pride activists as “groomers.” Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro has a lengthy history of smearing distinguished jurists of color—most pointedly Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—as “lesser” judicial appointees and as examples of “identity politics” over merit. Heather Mac Donald, the institute’s Thomas W. Smith fellow, has lamented that “white civilization has decided to engage in the Great Replacement Theory,” claimed that anti-Asian hate crimes are “overwhelmingly committed by ghetto blacks,” and written, in leaked emails, that the “nannies of color” in her Manhattan neighborhood came from “the low IQ 3rd world.”

And then there is Rufo, who has boosted eugenicist writers, and whose latest “reporting” on the Dayton chicken grillers was carried out in collaboration with the online magazine IM-1776, which has previously platformed the French white nationalist Renaud Camus and praised the Unabomber. (More recently, the website ran a piece defending the “historian” Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper, who recently claimed on Tucker Carlson’s show that Germany’s concentration camps were “humane.”) Rufo, of course, came to prominence by framing virtually all institutional pro-diversity efforts as “anti-white” discrimination, and his other initiatives—like his relentless, successful push to oust Harvard president Claudine Gay, nailing her on plagiarism charges after failing to frame her as an unqualified “diversity hire”—won him notoriety and, seemingly, no guardrails.

The only institute affiliate who seems to have received any sort of retribution for racism, in fact, is Diane Yap, who stopped contributing to the institute after posting a tweet where she referred to a Black user’s “ancestors” as “farm equipment.”

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 20/06/2026

incidentally, I once got to ask Danny McBride about this in re:Righteous Gemstones slate.com/culture/2025...

NITISH PAHWA: Was that similarly how you decided to give Baby Billy his Cybertruck, and the mini-Cybertruck toy for his kids?

DANNY MCBRIDE: When we were going through cars, to me, the idea of someone who looks like Baby Billy driving a Cybertruck just made me laugh. The Cybertruck looks like it’s from the fucking future, and Baby Billy definitely doesn’t look like he’s from the future. He seemed like the last person you’d see getting in and out of that truck. When we put it in the show, it was not such a lightning-rod symbol as it is now.

PAHWA: It speaks to the inherent ridiculousness of these things, right? You had the big monster-truck scene in the Season 3 finale, and that was a bit of catharsis. Whereas for Baby Billy, the Cybertruck seems so stressful. He’s worried about how much charge he’s going to have before he takes off.

MCBRIDE: Baby Billy don’t like charging shit. He likes to run them batteries out.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 17/06/2026

name a TV show you're positive no one remembers but you (RIP Lee Thompson Young)

The Famous Jett Jackson: Disney Channel

He's a famous TV star living in a small town, and when the cameras go off, the real adventure begins!

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 16/06/2026

anyway congrats to everyone who bought in I guess

Polymarket
@Polymarket
JUST IN: Spain reveals 900,000 undocumented migrants have applied for legal status under its mass naturalization program — nearly double initial expectations.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
May as well add the rest of Earth

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
It is humbling to consider that if we harness just 1 millionth of the Sun’s power for AI, that will be much more than a million times the intelligence of all of humanity

James Stephenson
@ICannot_Enough
Can you get to 1 millionth of the sun’s energy with sun synchronous Earth orbit alone?

… or will you need to launch many satellites into solar orbit outside Earth’s gravity well to accomplish that? 🤔

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
It would require manufacturing solar panels & radiators on the Moon and

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 12/06/2026

yeah that checks out www.status.news/p/nick-bilto...

OFF THE WIRE

Bari Weiss has hired Sir Trevor Phillips as CBS News’ senior global affairs correspondent, Lachlan Cartwright reported. [Breaker]

Flashback: Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party in 2020 over allegations of Islamophobia. [BBC]

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 08/06/2026

………………………………………………

Arash Azizi, a historian who writes about Iran for The Atlantic and received at least $3,000 from Moddaber, wrote in October 2025: “It’s fascinating how Polymarket numbers are a good guide for the direction of events. Before any polls, it saw the rise of Mamdani for instance!”

Neither Kaufman nor Azizi responded to requests for comment about whether they were paid to post about the mayoral election.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 08/06/2026

also Pratt most likely got paid by Kalshi for this post right: www.politico.com/news/2026/06...

Spencer Pratt
@spencerpratt
Anytime people say I’m bad with money, remember…there were people who bet on Nithya Raman

(Not financial advice)

quote-tweeting:

Kalshi Politics

@KalshiPolitics
BREAKING: Nithya Raman has a 6% chance to win the Los Angeles Mayor election, down from 54% 1 month ago

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 29/05/2026

it's a great question! he doesn't get into copyright/IP, but he does have a bit on the importance of human-created art; I think the word "authentic" is very deliberate here, coming right after insisting on seeing human "limits" not as something to be corrected:

122. Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others. In this same experience, we remain capable of intuiting a fraternity greater than ourselves and of perceiving injustice as a scandal. Authentic culture and art preserve this spark, resisting the normalization of evil. For this reason, certain works have taken on an almost prophetic significance: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can be seen as a desire for unity; Guernica as a denunciation of dehumanization; Schindler’s List as a call not to consign the past to oblivion.

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Nitish Pahwa @nitishpahwa.com · 29/05/2026

BREAKING: Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes have also withdrawn from the Freedom 250 celebration

Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, from Star Wars

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