Having A Grip At An All-Time Low

Sara Fischer reports that Microsoft enhanced a Guardian article about a water polo coach “found dead at a school in central Sydney” with this helpful and engaging AI-generated reader poll:

According to Cheyenne Roundtree in Rolling Stone, HBO’s twitter-poisoned CEO Casey Bloys spent his time directing an assistant to tweet weak clapbacks at TV critics, such as: “Alan [Sepinwall] is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions.” Heyooo! The Bloys are back in town. A UC Berkeley professor spent five years stalking and harassing a UC Davis professor because of her persistent delusion that he had hacked her phone in order to subtweet her, but now a group of Berkeley students are threatening a hunger strike if the school doesn’t reinstate her. And Crazy ass moments in nu metal history has been “indicted for securities fraud?” I guess? As they so often do, Mattie Lubchansky elegantly expressed today’s vibe:

Griplessness is perennially rampant in media, where somehow “dusty heap of chins” Piers Morgan (Piers Morgan!) is one of the few pundits exhibiting any kind of moral clarity on whether it’s ok to repeatedly bomb a refugee camp. I’m also hearing that the Financial Times editorial board is woke? Strange days.

Having a grip also isn’t widespread in politics at the best of times, which these are certainly not. Politico briefly hauled the Twitter Menswear Guy off everyone’s For You feed to analyze just how sweaty and incompetent Ron DeSantis’ boot lifts are, while new Speaker of the House and Head Minister of the New Founding Fathers of America Mike Johnson (blessed be the Purge, and blessed be America, a nation reborn) believes that the existence of trans people makes white Christians like him an oppressed minority. Insider’s Brent D. Griffiths reported that Johnson’s covenant rib mate Kelly practices “Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple,” Richard and Phyllis Arno. Temperament counseling is a Jesusey update of Ancient Greek “humorism,” where the original four types: Melancholy, Sanguine, Choleric, and Phlegmatic have been augmented with “a fifth temperament. The fifth temperament is called the Supine.” I wonder what bodily fluid it’s associated with.1 

Of course the current reigning king of not having a grip is Elon Musk, who has spent the last several years ratcheting down his ambitions from “doing things no human has ever done before” to “failing at things MySpace Tom accomplished effortlessly in 2005.”

Twitter now values itself at $19 billion according to Kylie Robison, which is a moderate decline from the $44 billion Musk paid for it a year ago, and “Tesla Inc. shares have wiped out nearly one-fifth of their value in less than two weeks,” reported Bloomberg’s Esha Dey. So naturally the spokesmodel and chaos Muppet at the head of both companies is laser-focused on smoking a giant phallic stogy and sipping from some kind of titanium chalice while Joe Rogan blasts arrows at his dumb new truck with a compound bow in an echoing, low-production-value white garage.2 Musk’s bizarre promotional campaign for the Cybertruck, an ugly vehicle no one may ever actually be able to buy, is relentlessly focused on the truck’s ability to protect its occupants from obsolete ranged weapons. Yesterday Musk tweeted that the seven thousand pound cheese grater is “an armored personnel carrier from the future – what Bladerunner would have driven.” “Read” Max Read, never one to sneer at an opportunity for some easy Content, clarified whether Harrison Ford’s character in “Bladerunner” is named Bladerunner. (He is not.)

And while X isn’t even good at being Twitter anymore, Musk is nevertheless pushing the company’s six remaining developers to also make it a bank, and a dating app, and a horrific combination of YouTube, LinkedIn, and FaceTime; all things that notably already exist. I obviously don’t like Elon Musk, who has always been a dummy, but at least he used to talk about taking humanity into space, and solving the climate crisis, and… whatever the Hyperloop was supposed to be. Now his most grandiose ideas are the equivalent of announcing that SpaceX is going to develop a van that can drive all the way to Cincinnati.

Wow I just blacked out for an hour, I sure hope I didn’t write 332 words about Elon Musk. Anyway:

If You Like Giña Kolata: A new genetic therapy for sickle cell disease is “safe enough for clinical use.” It also will cost millions of dollars per patient and require them to kill all of their bone marrow cells while a sample is sent off to be CRISPRed at a lab, where:

Small risk of a genetic whoopsie aside, this is encouraging news for the millions who suffer from sickle cell disease. Or at least the dozens who will eventually get through the health insurance screening.

And Finally: GIANT SPIDER INNOCENT !!!!!!!! 

Today’s Song: Y2K & BBNO$ “Lalala” Remix with Carly Rae Jepsen and Enrique Iglesias

The Season Nine playlist is long enough to cover a reasonable workout now and it slaps, imo. Thanks to Music Intern Sam for keeping it fresh, keeping it real and keeping it real fresh. If you’re just about to get to the footnotes, I’m sorry in advance. Wait please subscribe first—

Ok now you can read them.