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SB

@sbridger.bsky.social
566 followers 605 following 292 posts

Tired history prof, #histsci writer of sorts, font of regrets. Author of Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (www.amazon.com/Scientists-War-Ethic…) Was @bridgebot at the other place.

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Rich Burroughs @somewhattolerable.com · 23h
OMG I was sorting through some old bookmarks and clicked on the Smithsonian Zoo's Cheetah Cam link which I hadn't active in a long time. It turns out they have a cheetah who just had cubs on 10/5 and they are so cute. They're on the Den 1 stream right now.
nationalzoo.si.edu
Cheetah Cub Cam
The Cheetah Cub Cam streams live from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia.
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Lucretia Baskin @lucretiab.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
Newly created digital copy available at Boston Public Library here: www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commo... BPL also welcomes the public to view this (or other editions, including the one pub’d by Henry Highland Garnet) in person at BPL Special Collections: www.bpl.org/special-coll...
digitalcommonwealth.org
Walker's appeal : in four articles, together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world : but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America
An online library of photographs, manuscripts, audio recordings, and other materials of historical interest from libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies across Massachusetts.
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DC Council @councilofdc.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
This is clearly not acceptable
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Yael Schacher @yaelschacher.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I am in Cap Haitien interviewing people deported from the United States. I have been doing this kind of work for almost a decade and it literally does not get more dire than this. People have lost everything they built in the U.S. and are terrified and have no place to go or way to live.
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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
"President Donald Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million in debt issued by SpaceX just days before the White House announced a new space-travel policy"
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Fascism is grounded in creating in and out groups in which rights and protections and spoils and even life itself is the property of the former while the latter can be degraded and abused and murdered without consequence at any moment. This execution is a milestone along the road to that.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Public executions, including lynchings and mob violence, are always focused on larger messages about control and power, and what we are experiencing, both with this firing squad and daylight killings by ICE, is the normalization of fascistic state power owning the right to life and death.
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EMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
On a personal level, I feel honored that I've met Carson. On a different personal level, I'm glad that the Nobel is celebrating someone shy, peculiar, intense. May all the weird/funny/creative/dark/introverted people of the world live long and prosper.
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Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
You are probably wondering where Canadian Anne Carson ranks among recent Nobel Laureates for Literature *for the northerliness of her birthplace*. Below Bob Dylan! (1/2)
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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
"I can do whatever I want, if I want." Today is the 10th anniversary of the public revelation of Trump's 'Access Hollywood' comments.
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.
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Totally Valid Handle @azgict.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Jesus, Columbia.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 29/09/2026
Norway has solution to this actually, stay at home parents can get their share of the public daycare subsidy as cash, that way parents are not pushed one way or the other. the problem of course is virtually no one on the center or right actually gives a shit about parents
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Nils Gilman @nilsgilman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This year’s El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years #NothingToSeeHere #MoveRightAlong www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
‘Jaw-dropping’ El Niño bursts through temperature record months before peak
‘Godzilla-level’ phenomenon is supercharging the climate crisis and will have a huge impact on communities across the world
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Maybe there'll be a street fight between Ari Emanuel and the worm-eaters vs Joe Rogan and the ivermectin-antiworm-eaters and they'll cancel each other out
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cmrn knzlmn @ckunzelman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
They do! And you, too, can join the Paulinella Consortium: www.vanettenlab.org/paulinella-c...
vanettenlab.org
Paulinella Consortium — Van Etten lab at UMD
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Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Making the US dirtier and less globally competitive www.reuters.com/world/trump-...
reuters.com
US to finalize sharply lower vehicle fuel economy standards
The US Transportation Department on Monday will finalize sharply lower vehicle fuel economy standards through 2031, reversing a push by the Biden administration to force automakers to build more elect...
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
As of today, the CDC has changed (reverted) their Covid guidance to make the vaccine recommended for all people over 18. In addition to being a smart public health move, this recommendation also means insurance must cover it. Read more here: www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/va... Listen to a breakdown here:
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
there is so much fascinating work on "cute" especially in the past decade, but especially how much it permits us to ignore and facilitate
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Wyrd Science Magazine @wyrdscience.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
new favourite Smaug dropped
the 1968 "pleasure in reading" edition of the hobbit featuring an adorable bright pink Smaug torching the inhabitants of lake town
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Sam Barlow 🔥 @mrsambarlow.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Can we please go back to the old internet where Search was a bunch of efficient SQL queries? Please, I'm so done with this
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/09/2026
When you look at what Hamilton has done, you see how tiresome and pointless the “why is nobody majoring in the humanities” handwringing is. You need to invest and create a vibrant, research-forward humanities ecosystem on campus. Nobody’s going to want to major in disciplines that act dead.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/09/2026
Democrats control the entirety of the state government of Massachusetts. Why aren’t they funding the humanities at MA public universities? Why aren’t they doing what Republicans in Florida did with the Hamilton School?
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Yair Wallach @yairwallach.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
The Knesset barred today the only two Palestinian led parties from running in the coming election. According to an overwhelming majority in the Knesset, the constitutional meaning of a Jewish State is a state where Palestinian citizens cannot run for parliament.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I don’t think most people realize how bad this will be for the world.
bbc.co.uk
El Niño set to be 'strongest in living memory', says Met Office
Scientists say the growing El Niño weather pattern is an "unprecedented event" and means 2027 is likely to be the world's hottest year on record.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Everything the pro-Trump billionaire Ellison family will now own: Paramount+ CBS CNN Showtime HBO Warner Bros TNT TBS MTV DC Studios Nickelodeon Comedy Central And more... With this comes the power to decide which stories get told, but more importantly, which stories DON'T get told. Shameful.
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R Subramanian (he/him) @rsubramanian.com · 17/09/2026
"NPR tracked down equipment and found that some of it was auctioned, donated or thrown in the trash... NASA donated hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of radio communications equipment to Capitol Technology University without the knowledge of the scientists who used it"
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Mary Lewis @profmarylewis.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Excellent oped in @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social by my @harvard.edu colleague Jill Lepore. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
But of course, the machine conversation is not free. It comes at the cost of our common life together as teachers, learners, and researchers, colleagues, mentors, and friends. Not to mention, supervising student researchers is our job.
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Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff @concernedjfaculty.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Over 300 Haverford College students and alumni signed a letter criticizing Haverford's legal settlement with the Deborah Project, which appears to single out "Zionism" as a protected religious identity. www.haaretz.com/us-news/2026...
haaretz.com
Haverford College's policy stifles criticism of Israel, open letter warns
Haverford College's new policies following an antisemitism lawsuit seem to treat Zionism as a protected identity, signatories say
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Katie Bergh @katiebergh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Food insecurity didn't go away just because they stopped collecting the data. (Our chart will not be going away, either.)
Chart showing the prevalence of food insecurity among all households and households with children over time, with no data shown for 2025. Title: Food Insecurity Data Not Released for 2025; USDA Canceled Data Collection After 2025 Republican Reconciliation Law's Historic SNAP Cuts
Subtitle: USDA canceled the nation's longest running and most consistent measure of food insecurity, taking away a crucial measure to track the mounting impacts of the harmful 2025 Republican reconciliation law
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
BREAKING: Boston University's English department (my dept) recently voted to approve new learning outcomes for the English major, including an anti-AI provision that requires students to “craft and revise writing that is sustained, original, and generated without the assistance of AI."
bu.edu
New Learning Outcomes Announced | English
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Still from the movie Lady Bird in which Laurie Metcalf's character says "Money is not life's report card"
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Volunteer moderators are a big part of why some corners of the internet still feel human, writes Sarah Gilbert of Cornell's Citizens and Technology Lab. Without them, she argues, we face intertwined crises of knowledge and community.
techpolicy.press
Millions of Volunteers Are Keeping the Internet Human. For Now.
We’re never going back to the human internet we had. But we can hope for a better internet than the AI-dominated one that is emerging, writes Sarah Gilbert.
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Seth Rockman @sethrockman.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This is a big one: Brown University is searching for the next director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Please help us identify excellent candidates to lead this signature program into the future. Please write me with ideas; please share in your networks; please apply.
networks.h-net.org
Brown University - Professor and Director of the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice | H-Net
1. Academic Accomplishment. We seek a scholar with a strong scholarly record, including excellence in both research and teaching, appropriate for appointment at the level of full professor in a social science, humanities, or arts department at Brown.
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Or not that weird, given that AI does not solve these problems through familiar logic or by simulating human brain function but through other flawed & unreliable mechanisms. In the 3rd example below, AI answers correctly by lifting info from relevant websites. But when the same prompt is repeated...
Google AI incorrectly states that "There are 3 "y"s in strawberry"Google AI incorrectly states that "There are 3 letters "t" in the word strawberry"Google AI correctly states that "There is exactly 1 "b" in the word strawberry" and provides links to websites addressing this exact issue, noting "While AI models historically struggled to count the three "r"s in "strawberry due to tokenization, finding the single "b" is a much simpler task!"Google AI incorrectly states that "There are 2 "b"s in the word strawberry"
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Anyway, as of this morning, this little identify-and-count-the-letters-in-a-word problem still hasn't been solved. AI still has fundamental engineering problems and very basic dysfunctionality:
Google AI text answering the prompt "how many rs in raspberry" with "There are 2 "r"s in the word raspberry (rasrberry)"
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PM2.5 Kills ~9 Million People Each Year Worldwide @tkovach.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
"OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot."
404media.co
Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats
Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 M...
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Blunt, earnest, & thoughtful MIT report on numerous deleterious effects of AI on student learning, with recommendations for teachers and universities (more in-person activities and assignments, rethinking grades, etc.). aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 14/09/2026
Breaking News: The E.P.A. is said to be planning to announce that the U.S. will no longer limit climate pollution from power plants.
nyti.ms
E.P.A. Will Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants
Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 14/09/2026
The only person in public service who has consistently made 100% sense on issues of "AI," which is why they hate her so much.
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point 
@FTC
 emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-issues-staff-report-ai-partnerships-investments-study). 

Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my 
@FTC
 tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/dozens-of-americas-largest-companies-have-no-simple-way-to-report-security-flaws/

https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/10/ftc-takes-action-against-drizly-its-ceo-james-cory-rellas-security-failures-exposed-data-25-million

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.
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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
They're exposing our secrets! Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar said Sunday he will work to revoke the citizenship of Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor after their documentary “NAZA” won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. The film examines what it describes
haaretz.com
Israel's culture minister threatens to revoke citizenship of Gaza doc filmmakers
The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. It reveals 'in detail the systems behind Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza' following the e...
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche (1978) www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49862/...
The Colonel

Play Audio
By Carolyn Forché
WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
                                                                                     May 1978
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche 1978
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
An apt poet for the grimness and grief today. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/b...
nytimes.com
Carolyn Forché on Her Favorite Books and New Poetry Collection, ‘Otherwhere’
“I haven’t finished it yet,” she says of the 20-volume gift from her husband. A new book, “Otherwhere,” collects 50 years of her poetry.
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SB @sbridger.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
There is so much to "never forget." costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human?...
From Brown University's Cost of War: "Costs of War research examines the human toll of U.S. military operations and spending, for U.S. service members, veterans, military contractors, and allies; and for civilians killed and displaced.

An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting."
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Dave Weigel @daveweigel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Summer is over but I want to vent about an old man peeve: Sunscreen should be cream, not spray. I shouldn’t be inhaling your spray from five towels away. Spread that white gunk on, like our ancestors did.
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Dave Itzkoff @ditzkoff.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
how is this real
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Dave Itzkoff @ditzkoff.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
there's a teaser trailer and everything youtube.com/watch?v=GGJSRFWALTI&feature=youtu.be
youtube.com
You Can See Everything | Official Teaser HD | A24
YouTube video by A24
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