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Tom Scocca

@tomscocca.bsky.social
68K followers 228 following 8K posts

Executive editor, features, CNN. Serial fiction and archives of nonfiction at Indignity.net. This Bluesky is about the Machines.

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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 1h
The thing to bear in mind when she goes in on novels being mechanically churned out is that her Wikipedia page has a "Productivity" section
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 11h
CARTOON MOVE: Moving the fence out to protect the bad pitchers. ORNITHOLOGICALLY CORRECT MOVE: Tearing the upper-deck seating out to protect the bad franchise management.
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
A lot of media personalities seem mixed up about the difference between a senator making an easily disproven criminal accusation under the shelter of the Speech and Debate Clause and an ordinary person choosing to repeat that disproven criminal accusation in public!
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Through eight years in Baltimore, Mike Elias is now 73 games under .500
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nora "the tea kobold" rude (they/them ze/hir) @nora.zone · 27/09/2026
its also inaccurate. dental hygienists wear surgicals
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
This is every bit as fragile, judgmental, and hostile as anything anyone said in the Globe piece!
Screenshot of text: 

Patrons were required to wear KN95 or better masks, the face coverings ubiquitous during the heights of Covid-19, and which most of the country had left long ago to dental hygienists and [Highlighting begins] people who don’t want anyone to sit next to them on the train. [Highlighting ends]
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
To reframe the literal violence of throwing a body to the ground by following it with a mime-show of urnination, transforming aggression and conflict into performance and spectacle, is in some sense the most "sportsmanlike conduct," and its very relationship to the artifice of the game is what requi
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Do not carry a cold beverage in their presence. Politely decline any drinks or sweetmeats they may offer. Keep a plain iron nail in your left trouser pocket and a sachet or paper twist of coarse salt in your right shoe. Enter and leave your chair moving clockwise. Follow up with a thank-you note.
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“Are machines becoming just like humans?” keeps being a skill issue posing as an existential conundrum
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
When pundits or media personalities announce they were totally wrong about something, or about lots of things, that doesn't mean they admit their judgment is defective and nobody needs to listen to them anymore, it means what they say now is extra valid and important to hear
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
If you're going to argue that major prizes are "deforming and hollowing out literary culture" because of the demographics and chosen topics of the winners, you need to go ahead and name exactly which books wrongly beat which books
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Some pretty uncharitable and less than realistic readings going on out there today!
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Bobbi Wickham @bobbiwickham.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The technical stuff about how he is blending the two genres is really interesting too!
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Amrit Singh was working phone support for a trail-cam company and wondering why none of the music he was working on felt quite right, till he started chatting with the rural American customers on the line about what they were listening to www.cnn.com/2026/09/19/e...
cnn.com
The border-busting birth of Punjabi country music | CNN
The fertile plains of Punjab are a world apart from the Appalachian Mountains, to which country music traces its roots. But as artists Assassyn and Jaggseer have discovered, the two cultures aren’t so...
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Please rate your customer service experience with the very nice person who called up and instantly resolved your problem after you filed a government complaint after two months of refusal and runaround from our customer service department
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Amrit Singh was working phone support for a trail-cam company and wondering why none of the music he was working on felt quite right, till he started chatting with the rural American customers on the line about what they were listening to www.cnn.com/2026/09/19/e...
cnn.com
The border-busting birth of Punjabi country music | CNN
The fertile plains of Punjab are a world apart from the Appalachian Mountains, to which country music traces its roots. But as artists Assassyn and Jaggseer have discovered, the two cultures aren’t so...
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INDIGNITY @indignity.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 6, No. 73, MR WRONG: Happy Enough Birthday to Me www.indignity.net/mr-wrong-nat...
indignity.net
MR WRONG: Natal gazing
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 73
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
People who call the polio vaccine a "fraud" are not "skeptics" toward vaccines, they are people with fixed views toward vaccines! (The name for that fixed view is "denial.")
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Right, so that screenshot of the famous person saying the obnoxious quote? The screenshot with the awkward zoom and crop that leaves no visible sourcing?
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Striking how the LLM totally craters on the instruction to not be obvious about the significance of an object, just harping oafishly on how insignificant and unnoticeable the object is
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
People seem to think when they yank the cord it calls Superman
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Every syllable of this segment is a transparent one-for-one rhetorical and psychological substitute for saying or doing anything about global warming
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Gregor Samosa @lenschiff.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Petrarch wrote about climbing a mountain for the hell of it in 1336
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Literally touch some grass buddy
Screenshot of text under "The Washington Post / Democracy Dies in Darkness" banner and "Opinion Columns" header:

As I took in the views and breathed the fresh air, I also appreciated what has made hiking possible: industrialization. Hiking is often seen as a natural activity, but there’s nothing natural about it, and almost nobody did it before the industrial revolution.

There weren’t even words for it in English. According to Merriam-Webster, the word “hike” was first used as a noun meaning “a long walk especially for pleasure or exercise” in 1865. Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks word usage in English-language books beginning in 1800, shows that the words “hike” and “hiking” did not appear in writing with any kind of frequency until around 1900.Screenshot of text:

'Teach me still more to wonder, more to know:
'Seed-time and Harvest let me see again;
'[Highlighted word] Wander 
the leaf-strewn wood, frozen plain:
'Let the first Flower, corn-waving Field, Plain, Tree,
'Here round my home, still lift my soul to THEE;
'And let me ever, midst thy bounties, raise
'An humble note of thankfulness and praise!'—

APRIL 22, 1798.Screenshot of Oxford English Dictionary entry

c1450 (?c1408)
To walke and romen vp and doun, In the forest.
J. Lydgate, Reson & Sensuallyte (1901) l. 3006
[Composed ?c1408]
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
This does not accurately describe the posts that come up when you click on the trending link
Screenshot from Bluesky trending list:

[Up-graph arrow] Trending

1. El-Sayed dodges Watters' sports question
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
The Twin Towers were knocked down by two of Charlie Brown's ladies fighting over me
Screenshot of text:

I remember when Gawker started the unforced path to self destruction by installing a disfunctional comment system explicitly intended to get rid of the existing reading/commenting communties and replace them w people who would click on ads all day, resulting in PROFIT!!!

They managed Step One…
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Very strange for a bunch of people who profess to believe this AND who profess to be large-numbers extreme-case ultra-utilitarian philosophers not to be embracing the obvious and necessary solution
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What if nutpicking a few trolls and randos to claim that there's widespread enthusiasm for political violence is a bigger threat to liberal democracy than the trolls and randos are
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Shocked by the implication here that the Baltimore Orioles front office may have brought down disaster on themselves by trying to hack a nuanced, complicated, and essential baseball development process with a one-dimensional gimmick www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/pol...
cbssports.com
How a polarizing hitting approach took over MLB, and what happened when it stopped working for a top prospect
Driveline Baseball helped turn Kristian Campbell into a $60 million player, but now he's stuck in Triple-A, trying to rediscover his swing
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The paragraph before seems equally detached from events—this would-be stumper of a question about the Court overturning executive orders is a lot less of a stumper when the executive orders keep violating laws passed by Congress!
Screenshot of text: 

The Supreme Court’s self-granted power to declare executive actions unconstitutional hardly appears in Bowie and Renan’s history. But [highlighting begins] it’s hard to see how this power could be legitimate by their logic. If the Court is trammelling democracy when it overturns acts of Congress, isn’t it doing the same when it overrules a popularly elected President? [highlighting ends]
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INDIGNITY @indignity.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Facebook friends, here's Indignity Vol. 6, No. 71, They Put the President's Face on the Money and They Didn't Even Do a Good Job of It www.indignity.net/heads-you-lo...
indignity.net
Heads, you lose
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 71
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Remember when the Raiders met John Gruden and the Bucs in the Super Bowl after not changing their signals from the ones they'd used when he was their coach
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Wait are there possible consequences to trading your star catcher to a division rival besides just having him play well for them
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
People say a lot about Mike Elias but you can't argue with the results
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Wow, and now Adley Rutschman scores the go-ahead run in the eighth inning! What a night for Rutschman and the Baltimore Orioles!
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Another one! When it counts, Rutschman is doing exactly what the Orioles needed their franchise cornerstone to do!
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The Orioles, despite their early season struggles, are hanging around in the wild card race and—great news! Adley Rutschman just hit a big home run!
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Miriam Elder @miriamelder.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Amazing Steinem quote here: “not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.” www.cnn.com/2026/09/03/u...
cnn.com
Remembering Dolly and Gloria, child-free icons | CNN
Neither Dolly Parton nor Gloria Steinem had children — and worked to make life better for children overall.
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Ninety-five percent of discourse about moderation is people doing the dril wise-man tweet but it does seem really tough to distinguish between "getting dogpiled" and "doing a post that goes viral for how bad it is"
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It's OK at doing code for you? Great. What does that have to do with how it keeps popping up to demand to rewrite a paragraph that's already written and edited?
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Weird how expertise didn't figure when experts at writing and art were saying the machines were bad at doing writing and art
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Negative polarization plus cleverer-than-thou basketblog brain is a hell of a thing
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
IDK I'm gonna stick with "the all-time leading college scorer is very good at playing basketball"
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INDIGNITY @indignity.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Facebook friends, the MR WRONG column is on Vacation. Indignity Vol. 6, No. 69, MR WRONG: Sit Back and Let the Pine Trees Fill Your Mind www.indignity.net/evergreen-co...
indignity.net
Evergreen column
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 69
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
It is literally de-humanizing for people to disparage inanimate “clankers” when who they’re mad at is “sloppers”
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
You keep telling your toddler to put its poop in the potty and flush, now imagine if instead of poop it was puppies, what kind of values would you be teaching your child then
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
A Brother HL-L2405 typed a page faster than Albert Tangora
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Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
A Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R outran Usain Bolt
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