iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Josh Zingher @zingherpolisci.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

We've probably learned more about American politics from the ANES than any other single data source. The same is true for the GSS and sociology. Both of these are gone if Congress acquiesces to these NSF cuts.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I’m somewhat wary of letting Musk near schoolchildren.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Let me tell you about another guy who hired people to stage a mock assault…

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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Like at this stage I see no reason to engage Samuel Alito intellectually. We are way past the point where any of that matters.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

There’s a serious selection bias problem with the Great Men of history — there are a thousand Musks and Hitlers of whom we’ve never heard because they failed miserably and died alone.

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Just a reminder: Tillis persuaded the woman Hegseth allegedly raped to come forward with her story, and told her that if she did, it would sink the nomination. She did. At great risk to herself. Tillis then cast the deciding vote for Hegseth. Because he’s a goddamned coward.

ms.now

Outgoing Sen. Tillis regrets pivotal vote for Hegseth: ‘He’s an actor. He’s not a manager’

Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis spoke to MS NOW about regretting his vote to confirm Pete Hegseth and his strained relationship with Trump.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

* plague but points to my thumbs for the typo

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

* I guess this was pneumonic ague rather than bubonic? I guess I’ll have to learn about yet another terrible thing.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Because he’s President of the United States, unfortunately. That was a straight question about a newsworthy matter, his response (worthless as it is) should be a matter of record if only so that historians in the apocalyptic future can note his apathy while their buboes pop.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Still, it would be nice if Google hadn’t destroyed its traditional search engine along the way.

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Charles Boehm ⚽️ @cboehm.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Normal person: Damn what a gorgeous, innovative building, amazing how it maximizes outdoor spaces for its residents Me: I wonder how many balls get kicked into those canals, maybe this helps explain why the Dutch prefer to ping it around on the floor

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

How closely correlated is team quality with placement in a night game?

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Bill Connelly @espnbillc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Millions of reasons why I hate this (and most of real life right now), but everyone acting like they have no free will might make me the angriest. "We can't simply make MORE money, we have no choice but to make the MOST money even if we're screwing our future selves. It's out of our hands!"

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

That’s the law firm representing Man City in this matter.

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Melissa Johnson, PhD @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

We should let people dream of something besides labor

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Student journalists still believe that it’s more important to hold powerful people to account than it is to hold on to access to those powerful people. They haven’t become Savvy Insiders yet

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

He’d be well-advised to apologize live on air right now, but that’s not the script

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Nothing, in principle — but state AGs have been following court orders afaik. I trust Norm Eisen to have the right perspective on this stuff. (I’m absolutely with you on not assuming court decisions and laws fix/avoid problems — but sometimes they do.)

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

He can’t purge voter lists. That’s a state prerogative, and subject to state courts.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Glad about the result, but I don’t think it speaks well of us as a country that after two years of human rights violations, war crimes, naked gangster corruption, and contempt for the Constitution, he’s finally unpopular because gas got expensive.

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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...

So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.

And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 24/09/2026

Xi Jinping Impressed With How Much Trump’s English Has Improved Since Last Visit theonion.com/xi-jinping-impressed-w…

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I think it’s sad that dressing up like a tiger rules out working for the FBI but boning a real one doesn’t.

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Adam Rogers @jetjocko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A lot of things make me feel kind of dumb, including how to take at face value the logic of “we are a multibillion dollar transnational industry building a vengeful elder god, and we definitely won’t stop unless you regulate us the way we want, which is a secret.”

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Sexy Malcolm Gladwell on the cover twirling a globe on his finger like a basketball.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Seams are bursting on that strawman.

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Shout it from the rooftops

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Whitney McIntosh @whitneymcintosh.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Reorganizing the cabinets and I think they should scan your ID at Stonewall Kitchen like you’re trying to buy Sudafed for the fourth time in a week

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

If someone posted this about a Jewish Senator, it would be rightly condemned as anti-semitism. El-Sayed was born and raised in Michigan, but because he is Muslim he is perpetually foreign and under suspicion.

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Xero now with 100% more 🎃 @artificer-ind.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Still patiently waiting to be "left behind" by AI rather than it chasing me across every damn space like a slasher in a low budget flick.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Prefired in year 3 absolutely. The rah-rah schtick wore thin when the results didn’t follow.

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

He had a solid honeymoon period — his vibes and his past commitment to UF meant that even his detractors hoped he’d do well.

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Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) @cliniclegal.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

A prominent former Ecuadorean government official was deported from the United States last month. The former official, José Serrano, is now being held in a maximum-security prison in Ecuador. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/u...

nytimes.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/us/politics/trump-noem-fast-track-deportation-ecuador.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B1E.cciK.cQBO0qlxhiA4&smid=url-share

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Microplastics Sommelier @leastactionhero.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

“why do you refuse to respect right wing scholarship?!” i demand, waving around the chart i made up

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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 17/09/2026

When will the people who argued in April 2025 that Democrats should stay silent on immigration own up to being frankly just disastrously wrong about the politics of mass deportations? Their punditry basically bordered on enablement

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John Muller @johnspacemuller.com · 17/09/2026

After four years of no real change, the USMNT can finally get back to what it does best: getting our hopes up that these are the kids who will finally make us good at soccer

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the babahuck @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

god this is good

flight of the concords scene with murray, brit and jemaine.

"How's this, then? Ed Sheeran, beloved by all, left without an opening band at present. Enter you two."

"What if we want a free Palestine, Murray?"

"I reckon you'll get lots of things for free when you're proper rockstars. This might be your ticket."

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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

the custom previously was to wait until someone threw a subway sandwich at you and ran

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Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

As a professional punter, I’m in absolute awe at the masterclass put on by this Congress. Just punt after punt after punt, it’s like rewatching the 0-16 Lions.

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Michael Fry @bigdirtyfry.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Your Grandad Cyclops talks about his school days

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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I keep seeing ChatGPT ads about Olds having chatty convos with the voice to text feature to help them do stuff on their phone and every single use case is just a thing you used to be able to just google before AI ruined Google

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We’re Susan Collins levels of concerned, good sir. Take your revealed preferences elsewhere.

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Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Kinda funny that almost all of sports TV is about DEBATE But a piece of federal legislation — something which is, almost definitionally, meant to be debated about — gets presented uncritically as Good

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Ian Campbell @iwcampbell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

NDSU’s punter might hold the record for kinds of cultural experience in a six year span

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John Walson @walsonbot.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

At which point the three countries will merge to form one team

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