BuzzyMandias

“Even for someone who is kind of cynical, it was shocking… You do a little scratching, and there was just rot underneath.”

November 16th, 2022

It’s Wednesday, and these longs aren’t going to read themselves.

  • “It’s a place where good people go to die.” —Penrose “Parney” Albright

  • “It’s like an agency no one wanted and everyone is stuck with.” —Juliette Kayyem

  • “Even for someone who is kind of cynical, it was shocking… You do a little scratching, and there was just rot underneath.” —John Roth

  • “It was a walking nightmare from the very beginning.” —John Magaw

  • “…” —Current DHS Spokesperson Luis Miranda1

I could go on and on, and ACL does just that, delightfully. Truly, DHS is a misbegotten bureaucratic horror that is begging for a loving God to put it out of its misery.

Also Today In Verge #Longreads:

“…My name is BuzzyMandias, King of Kings;Lol and WTF, ye Mighty, OMG!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Mia Sato’s “What Was BuzzFeed?” retrospective proves that if the past is a foreign country, 2015 was a whole lost continent.

My “Not Involved In Rampant Amphetamine Use” T-shirt is raising a lot of questions…

FTX’s “company therapist” claims he was more of a “coach” helping staff with “dating options,” who also happened to be prescribing meds for about twenty of them. Maxwell Strachan interviewed Silicon Valley psychiatrist George Lerner for Motherboard, in a story that the NY Post aggregated under the bewildering headline “FTX shrink says executives were ‘undersexed,’ denies rampant amphetamine use.” And it brings me no pleasure to report that the Slate Star Codex guy has a pretty good post about “The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash,” which, as a psychiatrist, is his actual area of training.2 

Speaking of the worst people you know, the NY Post reports: “Florida Man Makes Announcement (pg. 26).” They got plenty of earned media for this stunt, but also posted several normal stories about Trump’s announcement that he’s running for protection from indictment again, so let’s not get carried away.

HELLO FELLOW HUMAN TEENS I HEARD THE COOLEST PLACE FOR US TEENS TO HANG OUT IS T h e M a t t H a n c o c k A p p LETS GO DO NOT BRING WEAPONS

The first time I had dinner with our actors, the way they just started talking to each other, and to me, I was in stunned silence. I was like, “Oh my god. Nobody ever spoke to me this way.” What an idiot I was! I would always think that, after the third meeting, I wore them down. And no — I never wore anybody down. Nobody ever told me anything real.

“Caterpillar employee ‘immediately incinerated’ after falling into pot of molten iron, OSHA says.” The cost to Caterpillar for the life of a 39 year old employee vaporized on his ninth day of work for the lack of a safety railing: $145,027.

Yes, Elon Musk is still up to shenanigans, but we tire of him, Precious. He bores us, he does. Instead read Olivia Messer in Slate on a lifetime of ups and downs in the DMs.

The first time a DM on Twitter changed my life, I was in crisis. I was working for a small Texas newspaper, out of sick days, and needing gallbladder surgery. But about 24 hours after I gave my two weeks’ notice, the universe handed me a parachute…

Nov. 10, 2015, at 4:13 p.m: “Olivia—this is John Avlon, EIC of The Daily Beast. Got time for a quick call re: an open position here? If interested, send your best cell and email.”

I have also gotten a job offer just in the nick of time via the DMs! It’s easy to forget how many people’s lives the hellsite has changed for the better.

Today’s Song: Asian Kung-Fu Generation, “Rewrite”

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