Arbon Tokay

@PAHoyeck I refer to them as “orcs. Generic term for subhuman hominids.

Is there a good slur for people who play media out loud in public?

@mrjeffknox Lovely resource. Thank you!

Just a reminder that the UFOs and Intelligence timeline is updated on an extremely regular basis. Sometimes daily. 1,445 pages right now. You can always find the freshest version at this link: cufos.org/PDFs/pdfs/UFOs… #ufotwitter #ufox #uaptwitter #uapx #history #ufohistory

@PAHoyeck You can’t make this up.

Has forced diversity and inclusion gone too far?

@ppas1895 @mattyglesias No, he deserves the last-name treatment. Like “Patton” or “Ghandi.”

@mattyglesias Next film franchise: "Matt Yglesias". Guaranteed blockbuster megafranchise.

I like it when the title is just a guy’s name — John Wick, Adam Bede, Michael Clayton.

@JasonColavito Elemental gold is biologically inert, so it’s much likelier to have been something else that did him in. And he’s not even that hot. I mean, he would be hot for a dentist. But one expects better from a looksmaxer.

I wouldn't normally link to a tabloid, but apparently an American looksmaxxer who recently died in Thailand was injecting himself with liquid gold because he believed it gave him superpowers, opened new consciousness, and was being hidden by "authorities." dailystar.co.uk/news/world-new…

@gettinviggy She seems almost in denial that a journalist could ever dare to expose her.

Kerri K. Greenidge appeared to lose her professorship at Tufts University after scholars began scrutinizing her 2022 book, “The Grimkes,” which is no longer listed on its publisher’s website. nytimes.com/2026/07/10/boo…

@RichardHanania Typo, maybe?

What happens when you get rid of the SAT: "More than half of entering Berkeley students who took a math placement test incorrectly answered basic questions (such as solving for x in x²> 4)."

@SarahTheHaider @wesyang “Vicious” is an interesting word choice in the context of a harmless game. Aren’t you just saying they’re more competitive than you?

The need for women's chess (and there is a need) is a little more fraught to explain

@ATabarrok I’d heard of Krushchev’s shoe episode, but always assumed he would have had sense enough to hold it by the toe and use the heel to pound the table. This is really making me reassess the man.

Economics does not say maximize GDP and never has. The only people who thought this way were Soviet central planners chasing output targets.

@greg16676935420 Don’t forget the jolly old Belgian Congo!

I can’t think of a single thing Belgium is known for besides their waffles

@greg16676935420 It’s a cute game for little girls and boys with dimpled knees. But this “world cup” thing on TV is like watching grown men play hopscotch or patty-cake. It’s embarassing and it can’t end soon enough.

I guess we can all stop pretending to care about soccer now

@avidseries Be that as it may, you might want to congratulate the kid and wish him well before making him a poster boy for your grievances.

@JasonColavito Well, you’re not *not* persona non grata.

Guess I'm not persona non grata anymore.

@misandristtears @glukianoff @BeezyManzell Touché! The two topmost counterexamples I could think of would be Neil Young/Buffalo Springfield and Kraftwerk.

@ArbonTokay @glukianoff @BeezyManzell Remind me where Neil Young is from

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing. I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at: • The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty. • A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere. • The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. • Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.) • Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight. • The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there. • The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius. • The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world. • Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life. • Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives. • Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe. • Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American. That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it. What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸

@glukianoff @BeezyManzell UK is the only other country besides the US to produce any truly great rock and roll acts — and several of them, at that. And please don’t say U2. They were big, and not bad, but the art form would be recognizably the same if they’d never existed.

My mom’s British, and I definitely don’t underestimate the British contribution to popular music. They took an American art form, ran with it, and improved it in a number of ways. But it is still very much an American art form. Rock and roll is like blues and jazz: it drew from an almost absurdly rich mixture of influences that could only have come together in America. There was Celtic fiddle music and British balladry, yes, but also Scots-Irish folk traditions, German and Central European dance music, French and Spanish strains moving through Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, Caribbean rhythms, African polyrhythms and call-and-response, Black church music, work songs, spirituals, ragtime, brass-band marches, country, western swing, boogie-woogie, jump blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel. Somehow all of that got poured into the strange American cauldron and came out as several streams of sound that were created nowhere else. And if you ask the Beatles where the lightning first came from, the names they reach for are overwhelmingly American. Not Americans from the distant past, either, but people who were alive, famous, and still shaping the culture as the Beatles were learning how to become the Beatles: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, Carl Perkins, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Arthur Alexander, and the girl groups and Motown acts they openly loved and covered. Even when they reached a little further back—to Lead Belly, Fats Waller, or the older blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley traditions—they were still drawing from American sources. The Beatles did something astonishingly original with those ingredients, but the ingredients themselves were not mysterious. They were shipped across the Atlantic on American records. The Brits were able to innovate from a distinctively American sound. And one of the things I really love about the Rolling Stones is that they never really found their way until they started doing faithful takes on Southern rock and roll. They didn’t really innovate or improve on it that much. They just tried to do it authentically, as if it really came from the bayou. And the world is better for it. Without the U.S., they probably would have been innovating on classical music instead of imbuing classical elements into rock and roll, as the Beatles did so effectively.

@MickWest @ProfAviLoeb Who is this “they” of whom you speak?

No, @ProfAviLoeb, it means that they can’t tell what some things are. Because they lack information. UFOs exist in the LIZ, the Low Information Zone. Suggesting a lack of information means they think it might be aliens is just silly.

@wesyang It’s so milquetoast one wonders why anyone would pen a dissent to say that.

There is no intellectually respectable, grown-up version of gender ideology that survives the basic tests of fact and logic better than the propaganda books they give to first graders. A Supreme Court justice has just confirmed this. "I'm a girl brain in a boy body!" says the I AM JAZZ picture book -- and so does Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

@rison99 @mechanical_4u It’s just that getting the skewer in is so uncomfortable for them.

@mechanical_4u Has anyone every thought it would be a lot simpler to just spin the patient?

This is how dangerous a CT scan machine looks without its outer casing

@jk_rowling They will preferentially jump directly onto your eyeball, given half a chance. It’s a miracle we’re not all blind yet with those things in the world.

What kind of maniac lists 'often watches before it jumps' as a mitigating circumstance? You think I find it cute that it might be peering at me from a dark hole, calculating the best moment to make its big entrance?

@wesyang True — but neither is tap water.

Of course urine is not sterile