Brief Interviews With Hideous Tabs

Oh hey! It’s been a few days, I hope you had a good—

Q.

Did we set the ocean on fire!? What a weirdly specific question.

Q.

Well, yes, we did, in fact, set a small part of the ocean on fire. Almost a negligible amount of burning ocean, when you consider that non-burning oceans still cover nearly 70% of the planet’s surface. And it only burned for about five hours.

Q.

According to my friend Bloomberg News, it was from “Pemex’s Ku-Maloob-Zaap offshore platform complex.”

Q.

Yes, I suppose “Pacific Rim x Eye of Sauron rising from the black depths to cast a dreadful judgment on humanity for our crimes” is an accurate, if rather florid description of what it looked like.

Q.

No, that’s ridiculous. I won’t say it. “Ku-Maloob-Zapp” wasn’t even a kaiju.

Q!

Fine: “Today we’re un-canceling the apocalypse.” Are you happy?

Private equity vampires Atlas Holdings are running a whole natural gas power plant on Seneca Lake in upstate New York primarily to mine Bitcoin. NBC’s Gretchen Morgenson reports that:

I don’t mean to be alarmist but a nearly 1200% return, combined with the exodus of half the world’s Bitcoin mining gear from China hints that we are about to see a huge boom in this kind of crypto mining using surplus fossil-fuel power plants that aren’t necessary to serve U.S. power demand, and would otherwise be idled or shut down. Atlas Holdings is also the parent company of Wizard’s Nuts. That’s not related, I just thought it was funny. “Wizard’s Nuts.” Lol.

Today in Opaque Crypto Tweets: “Katy Perry to offer NFTs via Theta Labs, a blockchain-based P2P video streaming network with 1M MAUs that gives out rewards in exchange for unused bandwidth,” from Mediagazer. I read the Bloomberg article about this and I still don’t have any idea what it means.

“Introgression dynamics from invasive pigs into wild boar following the March 2011 natural and anthropogenic disasters at Fukushima” is the also fairly opaque title of a new article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which The Register helpfully translates as: “Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone.”

You Used To Call Me On My Self-Own: Pivot podcast co-host and NYU Marketing Department embarrassment Scott Galloway needed a promo for his still theoretically upcoming Bloomberg Quibi show, so he took his shirt off and talked about his dick. Meanwhile in Maine, they’re trying to cancel the MILF Mobile. And the CDC woke up on July 1st and chose violence.

Weather: it’s the last subject where your parents have any grasp on reality, but Fox will launch a 24 hour streaming weather channel later this year in an effort to correct that oversight. Today in Tabs has an exclusive screenshot from early Fox Weather Channel test coverage of last week’s unprecedented western Canadian pyrocumulonimbus lightning storms:

Insider bad-take machine Josh Barro couldn’t even let the Fourth of July weekend pass without being aggressively wrong about something unimportant. This is the kind of dedication required to be a legend, kids. Meanwhile Ronan Farrow is out there trying to order a plate of plain lox, like if Frank Sinatra had a son who was also a sexy cat. But what Farrow was apparently working on in that hectic, poorly-fed deadline week was this outstanding story on Britney Spears’ abusive conservatorship, co-bylined with Jia Tolentino. I know there’s been a lot of Britney news lately, but this is the one story to read, if you skipped all the rest of it. Also in the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka’s second column, on Great Jones and the hollowness of Instagram brands, and the debut of Kyle’s truly exceptional New Yorker cartoon avatar.

Tabs spiritual home country of Iceland cut working time by five hours a week for the same pay with no productivity loss. Input’s Jessica Lucas wrote about the dissociative identity disorder community on Tiktok. “The beaver on land is like a chicken nugget walking through the landscape for predators,” is just one of the outstanding quotes in this Sacramento Bee story on nature’s fat little furry engineer restoring a CA creek bed. Alexey Kovalev documented the comprehensive failure of Russia’s Covid response, for Foreign Policy. Fleur Macdonald talked to French performance artist Abraham Poincheval, who most recently climbed into an aluminum shell of himself in order to look at a painting for seven straight days (he pooped in the block he was sitting on). Trumpy social media platform Gettr was hacked on its launch day, because it is yet another cheap half-assed cash grab, like everything Trump related. And Caroline Calloway, the George Washington of Instagram scammers, announced that she’s selling a “skin potion” literally called Snake Oil.

Today’s Song: Frank Ocean (feat. Earl Sweatshirt) “Super Rich Kids”

~ A million one, a million two. A hundred tabs will never do ~

It feels weird to do this all alone again. The intern program is off for the summer, but I’ll probably be looking for new applicants in late August, so keep an eye out. Until then, I’m @fka_tabs and this is the energy we’re bringing for the week: