ellory smith

Hannah won her 2nd Pulitzer reporting on the hundreds of thousands of migrant kids exploited during @XavierBecerra’s term as HHS Secretary. She’s a reputable source, to say the very least. x.com/hannahdreier/s…

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: nymag.visitlink.me/w6Bu9N

Jane Schoenbrun on their history with the Cannes Film Festival after a previous visit: “Um, I used to be a boy, and I used to have a shitty job that I didn’t like. I used to come to Cannes with that job, and I was at Cannes when I decided to quit my job. I was like, ‘I’m depressed at Cannes.’ That was exactly 10 years ago, and now I’m not depressed at Cannes.”

The artist behind this painting, Criselda Vasquez, painted this portrait of her parents in 2017. The man in this painting, her father, was recently taken by ICE. He has lived in the United States for forty years. This loss has made it hard for the family to support themselves. If you want to support them, you can go to their GoFundMe here: gofund.me/456d8a193

I barely survived “telling writers they have to read is gatekeeping,” I don’t think I can live through “telling writers they have to write is gatekeeping”

If you see a helicopter towing one of these over your neighborhood, bad news: your town is getting a data center. They’re running airborne electromagnetic surveys to map groundwater in the area. TRANSLATION: figuring out how much water they can divert before people notice.

OF COURSE it turns out Pratt's whole mayoral campaign is a publicity stunt for a reality show he's been filming. We can't let this circus go on beyond June 2nd.

paying $50 for a tank of gas while the pump plays ads for gambling companies

Spencer, I wasn’t going to do this. It’s not worth my time. Seriously. But your dinner check the other night was $682 . Hope that helps. Don’t be a dick to the service staff where you stay. I’ve got your breakfast order, and the list of made up food allergies you claim. You’re just lying; stop. @TMZ

I attended the Cinerama Dome hearing, where the Hollywood community expressed very little faith that the Forman family will actually re-open the iconic venue. pagesix.com/2026/05/13/hol…

“Well I don’t live in California so this isn’t my problem” Okay, well, your food does.

ICE will be at every match of the world cup harassing street vendors and targeting Black and Brown people. This is what the World Cup brings. This is what the Olympics brings. You can't host these events without inviting the federal government to surveil and cage your people.

Nearly 50,000 people in the Lake Tahoe area have been told that their utility will stop providing power to them, because it's redirecting that power to data centers. NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied most of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, says that next year it will stop servicing homes in the area, and instead direct that electricity to the growing demand from Nevada data centers. Northern Nevada is one of the fastest-growing data-center corridors in the country. fortune.com/2026/05/12/lak…

He did this without cutting any social services, btw.

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Cinerama Dome Advocates Take Rare Chance to Put Public Pressure on Owners to Reopen indiewire.com/news/breaking-…

It’s so painfully clear all these people went to some stupid pro-AI luncheon recently and were fed bullshit talking points. Depressing stuff.

spencer pratt wants to throw LA's homeless into prisons at a cost of $105,000 per year per person when a studio apartment runs about $22,000.

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet 404media.co/your-ai-use-is…

Can’t accept gifts like this if you’re Mayor.