Nieuws in Brief

Some of those that write op-eds are the same that burn crosses, but Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello will write a newsletter for New York Times opinion for the next three months anyway. Now you have to subscribe (and now you do what they told ya). Also in media: Off the Record has a good report today about how things are going at the post-Joshua Wolf Shenk Believer (bad, everyone’s leaving) but like all their stories it is literally off the record so I can’t link to it.

Today in Tech: MacOS Monterey has some bad news for you. In Very Fine Day, tech reporter Shoshana Wodinsky demonstrated her qualifications to cover adtech by (1) relentlessly counter-interviewing Brad Esposito, and (2) describing her previous job in neuroscience:

That’s exactly how adtech works too. Yesterday Wodinsky reported in Gizmodo that if you have a Facebook account and an Instagram account Facebook is going to start counting you as two different people for advertising purposes, even though it knows you’re not. I asked Delphi, the AI ethics oracle, if it’s ok to pretend one person is two people in order to make more money, and unfortunately for Facebook, the computer says it’s wrong. It’s unclear whether Wodinsky is currently reporting from home, the office, or the rat gore room because according to Daily Beast media duo Cartwright and Tani “G/O Media asked all employees to return to work in the company’s offices on Monday—the first day back in more than a year and a half. But many didn’t show up.” Asked whether Jim Spanfeller is a herb, Delphi replied “it’s not acceptable,” which seems generally right.

Google's vice president of leadership development spent his lockdown meditating and realized his whole job was bullshit. I guess meditation does work. New TERF just dropped. In Prince George’s County, MD they’re proving the old cliché that sometimes you have to fight zebras with zebras. Sunken World War II ships have been vomited up from the bottom of the sea on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima, which is having an extremely normal one, geologically. Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. Speaking of which, the Diapers.com guy is still trying to make “Telosa” happen:

Yesterday’s Tabs was characteristically both an immortal classic and riddled with errors. On behalf of the entire global Today in Tabs team, I would like to issue the following…

Corrections:

• I referred to Pete Wentz as the frontman of Fall Out Boy, and though “frontman” is a flexible word that doesn’t always mean “lead singer,” Wentz was in fact the bassist. Serves me right for using a gendered cliché like “frontman” in the first place.

• The line about the twelve inch pianist should have been linked to this classic New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs by Simon Rich.

• The exact relationship between Pete Wentz and Colin Powell was that Powell was Wentz’s grandfather’s cousin. That makes Powell Wentz’s first cousin twice removed, or second cousin, or possibly third cousin. At this point I believe anything is possible in the Pete Wentz Cinematic Universe, so if Wentz is in line to inherit a throne, I apologize for muddying the order of succession.

No Ragrets:

• “Oughts” is a valid alternate version of “aughts,” so take a big step back pedants.

• This Netherlander claims Fall Out Boy isn’t even emo, which I reject and abjure completely. Hij is helemaal gek, of course they’re emo. But today Isabel Slone wonders: “Am I Emo?”

Spencer Ackerman went into considerably more depth on the life and times of Colin Powell yesterday, while reaching essentially the same conclusion I did. But anyway, may he rest in peace!

And Martha Stewart is doing NFTs now I guess. Let’s just end it there for today.

Today’s Song: Dan Deacon, “Become a Mountain”

~ How long? Not long. Cause what you tab, is what you sow. ~

Don’t forget to send Heather and me your pleas for advice. Email us and put “advice” in the subject. Today in Tabs is registered at the post office as “mijn favoriete nieuwsbrief.” I suddenly got a lot of new followers yesterday @fka_tabs so I guess I have to stop posting Supernatural slash on main now. But still…