The Mad Bomber of Astoria Park’s Aaron Swartz Conspiracy Theory

NPM libraries colors.js and faker.js were both intentionally sabotaged by their maintainer, a Queens resident named Marak Squires who was most recently in the news in 2020 for giving himself second degree burns in a bomb-making experiment gone wrong. You wanted some fake data to test your web app, or pretty colors in your console logs? Sorry, you have to engage with the mad bomber of Astoria Park’s Aaron Swartz conspiracy theory, that’s just software development now. Also it’s an emergency because your app is completely dead. While you’re waiting for your bundles to rebuild, you might click over to Twitter and find that “Urine” and “Nazism” are trending. Bob Saget died and now nothing makes sense anymore, the center does not hold.

Bizarre science-ish French twins Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff died of Covid, and Robert Durst has also unexpectedly completed his prison sentence. Slate talked to the N.Y. high school kid who wrote the viral Reddit post about what school is like during omicron and he seems like he has a better grasp on practical public health interventions than anyone making policy right now. Elmo is still mad at a rock and the New York Times is On It. A “paper on ‘language reclamation’” reclaimed a bit too much language. The FBI says that Filippo Bernardini “stole unpublished manuscripts of hundreds of authors by impersonating editors and agents, hoping to claim the authors' literary ideas as his own” which doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. And no offense cat people but this kind of thing is why we make fun of you.

On Thursday the Oregon Secretary of State rejected New York Times columnist and Yamhill cherry farmer manqué Nicholas Kristof’s controversial claim that he has lived in Oregon for “three sweater-years” and is therefore eligible to run for governor. In response Kristof held a press conference alone in front of his patio door, accompanied by mournfully sparse foley of camera shutters, where he said that his campaign is not about “living in any particular state,” but instead about “homelessness, opportunity, addiction, school lunch, the opportunity for school lunch, lunch for the homeless, addiction to opportunity, and above all the opportunity to run for governor of… a state. The one where I live.” When asked what state he was running for governor of, he declared “No further questions!” and walked out the patio door, where he stood alone in the rain for 36 minutes, or 90 sweater-minutes.

In Bloomberg, Lucas Shaw argued that “podcasting hasn’t produced a new hit in years.” Ten years ago everyone listened to “This American Life” and Joe Rogan, then Spotify spent eleventy billion krona on podcasting, and today everyone listens to “This American Life” and (Spotify exclusive) Joe Rogan.

The Wordle Club Scene Was Filmed on 9/11: If you find that Wordle isn’t taking up enough time by itself, you can pad it out by checking yesterday’s Wordle stats, enjoying good Wordle memes, or picking just the right emojis to customize your grid in the Wordle styler. We’ve got about two more weeks of interest in this game, let’s not waste it people.

Julia Fox, “the Kim Kardashian of Caroline Calloways” wrote the year’s most unsettling piece of speculative fiction for Interview. Hunter Harris declared it “Julia Fox’s Manhattan:”

Canadaland’s Jesse Brown asked the woke mob’s latest self-proclaimed victim Tara Henley to “tell me about stories you wanted to tell that you couldn’t tell and how the ‘radical political agenda’ stopped you,” and you’ll never guess what she was unable to do. D. T. Max returned to the difficult self-mythologizing writers well for a profile of Hanya Yanagihara and it will certainly fulfill his contractual word count, if only with lists of her furniture. And Emily VanDerWerff investigated a question that has also troubled me: what the hell happened to colors in movies?

Finally: hippopottoman.

Today’s Song: P.M. Dawn, “Reality Used To Be A Friend Of Mine”

~ what really happened with tabs? ~

I’m sorry this doesn’t have any narrative structure today, I did the best I could. It is only newsletter. Hey I tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs, you can follow one, or both, or neither. That’s the complete list of your options.