- Today in Tabs
- Posts
- Men Behaving Badly
Bill Ackman was back on Twitter this morning with another full diaper to unload, expending thirteen hundred words to say what this guy fit on a garage door:
But Ackman is not the only man starting off the new year by being the most extra he can possibly be. For example: “Nude man nabbed by police after ‘cannonball’ plunge into giant aquarium at Bass Pro Shop in Alabama” reported the AP on Friday. Yes, there is video, but you can’t unwatch it so choose wisely. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in the hospital for three days with “complications following a recent elective medical procedure” and just didn’t mention it to anyone. “One of the DOD officials said their office was told by Austin’s aides that the secretary was working from home for the week,” reported Politico’s Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman and Jonathan Lemire. He was apparently moved out of intensive work-from-home yesterday and “remains under doctors’ supervision at Walter Reed National Military [Coworking Space].”
Emily Glazer and Kirsten Grind finally dropped their long-awaited investigative report into Elon Musk’s drug use in The Wall St. Journal:
The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it. Musk has previously smoked marijuana in public and has said he has a prescription for the psychedelic-like ketamine.
Matt Levine pointed out that “if you email Elon Musk to say ‘we hear you use ketamine, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,’ and his lawyer writes back to say he is ‘regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test’ — that’s just legalese for ‘lol yeah so many drugs,’ right?” which is correct, and also no one will do anything about it. Over at Formerly Twitter, Musk celebrated the new year and his famous commitment to free speech by banning a bunch of journalists he doesn’t like with no explanation.
PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton reports that “Logan Paul's NFT zoo catastrophe takes an unexpected turn: He's buying back the eggs and suing his co-founders.” The eggs! Did you hear? He’s buying them back. Pharrell Williams phailled to pharrallell pharrk his Cybertruck in Miami so he just kinda left it in the street. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ New York Mayor Eric Adams disputed the accuracy and existence of his own self-published autobiography. And Donald Trump made some great points about the civil war and slavery? The world is infinitely strange and any attempt to impose a coherent narrative on it is doomed. Not to even mention the Chabad tunnel in Crown Heights.
But in all this hailstorm of nonsense, there is one guy acting extra in the best possible way: Oregon high school physics teacher Bob Sauer, who found the door plug that fell off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 in his backyard and immediately started talking about momentum and impulse, confusing the heck out of The New York Times’ Katia Riddle and Michael Levenson. Now as we all know, impulse is just the integral under the curve of force acting on an object over time (which simplifies to FΔt in the case of a constant force) but it isn’t strictly necessary to have those equations at your fingertips to understand that an airplane part would slow down when it fell through some cedar branches. Nevertheless, we must stan Bob. Thank you, Bob.
News From The Western Front
The front lines in the battle against Substack Nazis moved a bit yesterday, with Casey Newton reporting that Substack has agreed to terminate “the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week,” which is awkward since on December twenty first Hamish McKenzie wrote that this wouldn’t “[make] the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.” So I guess now they’re ok with making it worse? Weird!
Organizer Marisa Kabas said “we did it” and not everyone was happy about that, predictably enough. Kabas explained that:
The “it” here is eliciting an acknowledgment from Substack leadership that they had a content moderation issue, and they were forced to publicly change course—something they have never done before
…which honestly shouldn’t have needed explaining. And Dave Karpf explained how Substack failed so dramatically in this dispute by ignoring the one simple rule of strategic comms. It’s a good post but in criticizing Substack’s comms professionals Karpf seems to be under the mistaken impression that Substack has comms professionals. At press time, Substack was standing at the big dial that says “Racism” on it and looking back at its clientele of just-asking-questions edgelords and transphobes for approval, and everyone who was planning to get off that doomed ship is still planning to get off. Oh and before all of that happened I got a pretty good quote into an NBC News story about it. Thanks David Ingram!
And Finally: Jenn Schiffer looked back at yesteryear in “10 years since i warned you's about bitcoin.” It’s a rare talent that can revisit a ten year old blog post that’s still funny with a brand new blog post that’s also funny.
i didn't study humor writing, i'm just a funny lil babe who reads a lot of tech blogs, and i read a lot of boring white papers in college. through that experience i learned that to trap the reader into feeling safe about your writing being sincere, you need to start off sincere, serious and stating why you have authority, or lack thereof, and leave a bit of the truth out - like all i knew about bitcoin at this point was that someone i was casually dating talked about it a bit and they were perpetually late to every single date because they insisted on buying a new shirt before every time we had a meal.
Today’s Song: ATARASHII GAKKO!, “Intergalactic”
If you like Today in Tabs, please tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell your co-workers! But don’t email my wife!