The Darkest Day: A fantasy Doctor Who season

I can’t help myself. I’ve loved every moment of the rebooted Doctor Who on Disney+, but it appears to have hit a bit of a pause while Disney considers whether to renew its co-production. With its future unclear (although I’m certain it’s coming back before too

Letter to Arc members 2025

[The Browser Company] Arc is my primary browser, and I'm feeling like that's a choice I should never have made: "The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

[Ava Kofman in The New Yorker] Curtis Yarvin is a pathetic little man: "As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months

Building a newsroom technology culture

A quick note before we begin: This post reflects my own views on newsroom technology leadership, not necessarily those of my employer. I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for

What I've Learned from Ten Years with Coral

[Andrew Losowsky] Running an open source community platform for a decade is no small feat - particularly one as storied and supported as Coral. Andrew Losowsky's reflections on its first decade are inspiring. "Among so many conversations, we brought commenters into newsrooms to speak with journalists, moderators

Sahil Lavingia's DOGE diary

[Sahil Lavingia] I personally don't think his decision to join DOGE was defensible, but there are lots of interesting details in Sahil Lavingia's diary of the 55 days he worked there. For example: "I was excited to help in-source VA's software, but I

The Substack Election

[Lauren Egan at The Bulwark] If I was Substack, this is exactly what I'd be doing. But then again, if I was Substack, I wouldn't have paid Nazis to post on my network. "The company sees an opportunity. Its employees have been meeting with congressional

12 years of Ghost

[John O' Nolan at Ghost] This is a lovely reflection on 12 years of Ghost, the non-profit, open source publishing platform that powers independent publishers and allows them to make a living on their own terms. "Over the years, we've focused consistently on building the best

Mastodon updating some legal features

[Mastodon] Mastodon's legal updates are an important way to support different kinds of communities. It's great to see the Mastodon team grow to support these features. I'd love to see CC-licensed terms of service for communities to use. Those features: * "Mastodon servers already

Focusing on speculative futures

If you’ve enjoyed my recent series about the open social web, great! There were four parts, which I think are collectively some of my best work: * What the future of Bluesky might look like * How Mastodon could be the future of online communities * What I’d do if I

Let's fund the open social web

If the open social web is going to grow and thrive, people need to be able to build new platforms and services sustainably. But that’s not what the email I was reading was telling me. The message in my inbox captured a persistent and problematic idea in open tech

Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet

[Kate Knibbs at WIRED] This is an insightful interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. The headline here overreaches quite a bit, and needlessly describes what Bluesky is doing in monopolistic terms; I left excited about what's next for the open social web, which I've believed for