WASHINGTON—Smiling vacantly while the FBI director rattled off classified information over thumping EDM music, local bottle girl Tanya Page reportedly nodded along early Friday morning as Kash Patel screamed state secrets in her ear. “Yeah so we’re actually invading Pakistan soon! Nobody is supposed to know that, pretty cool, right?” said Patel, spilling his Don Julio as the bottle girl feigned interest in his long, rambling story. “I can tell you’re trustworthy, so I’m going to show you some videos of how the FBI actually killed Martin Luther King Jr., check it out! God, you’re so pretty. Do you want to get out of here and go somewhere more private, how about the real Area 51? Here, take the FBI corporate card, go get us another round, and when you come back I’ll tell you all the people in the world who are secretly pedophiles that nobody else knows about. It can be our little secret.” At press time, Page was reportedly thinking about what she was going to have for dinner later as Patel was explaining how the government has been funneling money into the KKK.

The post Bottle Girl Nods As Kash Patel Screams State Secrets In Ear appeared first on The Onion.

Masks, panels, and other red light therapy devices are selling better than ever. The Onion examines the myths and facts surrounding red light therapy.

MYTH: Only light with a wavelength of 630–670 nm has proven clinical efficacy.

FACT: It’s okay to sneak a few 671 nm wavelengths on cheat days.

MYTH: Red light therapy can restore hair.

FACT: Wig therapy has been proven to be far more effective.

MYTH: Red light therapy can cause burns.

FACT: It can alleviate excessive skin coolness.

MYTH: Red light accelerates cell turnover.

FACT: Cell turnover is largely caused by cell dissatisfaction with poor working conditions.

MYTH: Green light will make you uglier.

FACT: It’s the opposite of red, so yes.

MYTH: Red light therapy can cause long-term damage.

FACT: We are still at least 10 years out from that class-action lawsuit.

The post Red Light Therapy: Myth Vs. Fact appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Lowering their sunglasses for a better look at the massive honkin’ caboose, the entire U.S. populace was reportedly enthralled Friday by an adult man with a huge, juicy ass. “That middle-aged man has an absolute bakery back there,” said Harlan Davis, 33, echoing the sentiments of 340 million Americans who could not look away from the prodigious dumper. “My God, that curvaceous rear is hypnotic. There’s no way he can buy his pants off the rack. Forget about a quarter—you could bounce a full half dollar off that thing. I want to cry that rump is so beautifully plump.” At press time, the nation began to drool as the man bent over to pick up a pen.

The post Nation Enthralled By Adult Man With Huge Juicy Ass appeared first on The Onion.

COLUMBIA, MO—Growing increasingly irate that the new customer base had actually made the place profitable, regulars of local dive bar The Drunken Rooster were reportedly upset Friday after the business had become popular enough to be financially solvent. “This place used to be cool and underground, man. Now they have so many people in here they’re probably going to be in the black this quarter,” said regular Emily Knapp, lamenting that the watering hole had become so in fashion that the bathrooms were no longer the disgusting and filthy as she had grown to love all these years. “Now that it’s not a huge economic drag on the owners, the place has lost all its character. Sure there were code violations everywhere, and there were massive fire hazards all over the place, but now the life is completely gone. I don’t even have to keep an eye on my drink with this new clientele. What a bummer.” Knapp went on to bemoan the fact that the bar had become successful enough to actually start paying the bartenders a livable wage.

The post Regulars Angry Dive Bar Now Popular Enough To Be Financially Solvent appeared first on The Onion.

From April 25–27, certain emergency supplies are tax-free if their total cost (including shipping and handling) stays below set limits.

“Hi, my name is [NAME], and I’m a constituent from [CITY, ZIP].”

Here, you will let out an extremely long, exasperated sigh. Really milk it, like you can’t even believe you have to make this call. Like, your reps should be doing something about stuff already, without you having to take time out of your busy day to tell them that you’re a voter who votes and will vote for somebody else if they don’t get off their ass already. You’ll vote for anybody, as long as it’s not them. Maybe you’ll even primary them yourself; that’s how deep and exasperated this sigh should be. You should sigh for about as long as it takes to read this entire paragraph. I should have warned you to take a really deep breath. If you’re light in the head or dizzy or your vision is going black or something, I’m sorry. If you’re done reading and also still conscious, you can move on to the next part of this script.

“I mean…”

You’re just going to let this sit for a while. Silence is a powerful weapon when making your voice heard. It’s almost as much about what you don’t say as what you do say. This allows your listener to fill in the blanks with their own information from their subconscious mind. When your rep starts filling things in with their own subconscious, they start using examples that actually mean something to them instead of just tuning you out and pretending to listen while thinking about the hot insider-trading tip they just got. If you say something out loud, you may accidentally mention one of the terrible things going on in the world that they agree with (or have received donations that force them to act like they agree with). After all, they didn’t become a member of Congress by not agreeing with / being paid to pretend they agree with at least a few terrible things. You don’t want to do that, because then they will dismiss you and your opinions (unless you have a lot of money to donate to them, but if that were the case, you wouldn’t need this script). Still, if you don’t say anything at all and just act pissed off, and like it’s obvious that they should know why you’re pissed off, they’re going to start thinking about all the bad things they know they should be doing something about, and then they’re going to start feeling bad. And that’s what we want, for them to feel bad.

“… come on.”

“Come on” is a real gut punch when dealing with the specific type of asshole who thinks they’re important enough to represent a whole constituency of varied individuals with vastly different needs. “Come on” implies that they know better, that they are better, and that they’re performing beneath their full capabilities. Are they actually “better” than their current performance would indicate? Of course not. If they were, we wouldn’t be making this call. What we’re doing here is activating their mommy or daddy issues and making them think long and hard about living up to the potential they believe they have because one of their parents planted it in their minds long ago as a way to make up for not living up to their own potential and passing that down to the next generation.

“I thank you for your time and for your service to the United States of America.”

It is important to practice your delivery of this line before making your call. You want to land in the sweet spot of sounding a little sarcastic but also somewhat sincere. Again, we want them to be questioning themselves, their motives, their actions, and most of the decisions they’ve made in their lives that lead them to this point. Try to channel that one friend you have who tells you that you can pull off wild outfits or accessories, and you believe them in the moment, but then, when you wear that stuff out in public, you feel like a fool who has been pranked by someone who is not really their friend. Thanking them for their “service to the United States of America” should make them feel proud at first, like they think, “Yeah, I do serve the United States of America, that is me, I serve my country,” but then after a few minutes, the weight of that responsibility starts to bear down on their shoulders and they start to think about what that really means and whether they are living up to the promises they have made to themselves and others.

“I love you.”

We want to keep them on their toes, so say this like you mean it, not like you just accidentally called your supervisor at work “mom.”

Finally, with whatever time you have remaining in your message, sing the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” with all your heart. If you get cut off before you finish, call back and sing whatever you had left to complete, even if it’s just a few words, even if it’s just the letter “A” in the final “God Bless the USA.”

The post Steve Jobs’ Fist Bursts Through Grave Clutching Crude Drawing Of Something Called ‘The Octomac’ appeared first on The Onion.

A newly passed law will prohibit the sale of tobacco products to U.K. residents who are under 18 and anyone born in the future, raising the minimum age of purchase by one year every year going forward. What do you think?

The post U.K. Passes Lifetime Smoking Ban For People Born After 2008 appeared first on The Onion.

VATICAN CITY—In a wild and sacred competition attended by a screaming, raucous crowd of Catholic religious leaders at Saint Peter’s Basilica, hot young priests were soaked in holy water Friday during the Vatican’s annual Wet Vestment Contest. “All these hunky, muscular clergymen, who are just absolutely drenched in Holy Water and showing everything through those thin cassocks, prove that God is calling us and opening our hearts,” said 93-year-old Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, adding that the young priests’ usually concealed, rock-hard six-packs were on full display to the grateful crowd. “When Father Thomas ripped open his see-through frock then dropped to his knees and started sucking on his crucifix, the place just went nuts. The Lord is working through Father Thomas to raise our spirits and a whole lot more. His rock-hard, glistening body is a precious gift from God.” At press time, Cardinal Bertone was taking a body shot of the Blood of Christ from a competitor’s navel.

The post Hot Young Priests Soaked In Holy Water During Vatican’s Annual Wet Vestment Contest appeared first on The Onion.

Today's links

• A free, open visual identity for enshittification: No mere poop emoji!
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: RIAA v little girl; Portal turret Easter egg; Atari v indie games; Chabon's Phantom Tollbooth intro; The 0.1%; Well-labeled inns; "More Everything Forever."
• Upcoming appearances: London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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A free, open visual identity for enshittification (permalink)

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).

For nearly 25 years, I've worked with my comrades at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise the salience of these abstract, technical ideas. I've come up with metaphors, parables, framing devices, narratives, and then…a dirty little word: enshittification. It turned out that this word, and the minor license to vulgarity it confers, was the secret to unleashing a tide of interest in these issues, to my immense surprise and gratification.

But I don't confine my efforts to coming up with words to engage people on these matters. For several years now, I have been developing myself as a collagist, combining public domain images with Creative Commons-licensed materials to create several collages every week that aim to illustrate these abstract, technical issues in an engaging, visual way:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

This got a lot easier with the 2025 publication of my international bestseller Enshittification, and not just because a lot of people read that book. It was also because the US edition, from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux had a gorgeous cover:

https://mpd-biblio-covers.imgix.net/9780374619329.jpg

That cover featured a (literally and figuratively) iconic variation of the "pile of poo" emoji, with angry eyebrows and a grawlix-scrawled black censor's bar over its mouth. It was designed by the brilliant Devin Washburn of No Ideas studio:

https://www.noideas.website/

Devin's poop emoji became my go-to visual shorthand for illustrating stories about enshittification, an instantly recognizable way to identify my subject matter:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54957634601/in/album-72177720316719208

I remixed it over and over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54962122121/in/album-72177720316719208

And over:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54992219613/in/album-72177720316719208

I liked it so much I ordered a couple hundred enamel pins and a couple thousand vinyl stickers featuring the design, and handed them out for free to people I met on my 33-city book tour. Everywhere I went – and every time a video went out showing me wearing the pin – I was inundated with requests to buy this stuff. But my pins and stickers weren't merch (stuff you could buy) – they were swag (stuff I gave away). I had no interest in getting into the merch business!

But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

And I made sure that my EFF comrades had first crack at this design, and they've made merch of it. You can get a $5 sticker:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-sticker

Or a $10 pin:

https://shop.eff.org/products/enshittification-pin

With all proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most profound and powerful disenshittifying force on the planet Earth!

But because this is CC licensed, you can make your own merch and swag! I made this great print-on-demand lawn flag my for front garden so I could let my enshittification flag fly:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55025045602/

My goal here is to create a free, open, remixable visual language for talking about platform decay, not owned by me or anyone, a part of the commons. Use it to illustrate anything you want, especially if you want to analogize enshittification to other phenomena, like politics or other non-digital phenomena. Semantic drift is good, actually!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toilet-has-no-central-nervous-system

You can get the high-rez of Devin's enshittification poop emoji from the internet's three most important repositories of Creative Commons licensed work.

There's a copy on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Enshittification_poop_emoji_logo.png

And on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/55225631563/

And of course on the Internet Archive, along with a PSD that includes an ink-density adjustment layer:

https://archive.org/details/enshittification-poop-emoji-logo

I've supported Creative Commons literally since the very beginning. I worked with Larry Lessig, Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein on the launch of the original licenses in 2002/3, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book released under a CC license:

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonprofit that depends on individual donors to keep its work going. The org turned 25 this year (along with my career as a novelist), and they've launched a giant fundraiser to carry their work forward.

As my contribution to the fundraiser, I've provided them with 375 signed, numbered copies of Canny Valley, my (otherwise) not-for-sale, extremely limited edition book of my collages, with an intro by Bruce Sterling. The book was designed by type legend John D Berry and printed at Pasadena's Typeworks, a century-old, family-owned print shop, on 100lb Mohawk paper, with a PVC binding that will last for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/10/canny-valley/

CC tells me there's still some copies of Canny Valley left in the fundraiser. If you're intrigued by my collaging and want to own this very strange and beautiful little artifact, here's where to go:

https://mailchi.mp/creativecommons/were-turning-25-book-giveaway

And if you want to try your own hand at collaging – or making merch (or swag!) – help yourself to Devin's wondrous piece of poo and go to town.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• trying to do something you probably shouldn't https://backofmind.substack.com/p/trying-to-do-something-you-probably

• What Is the Point of California’s Privacy Laws if Big Tech Ignores Them? https://www.kqed.org/news/12079887/what-is-the-point-of-californias-privacy-laws-if-big-tech-ignores-them

• An Open Letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr https://chkbal.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-fcc-chairman-brendan

• A Simple Model of Online Platform Enshittification https://apoorvalal.github.io/lalgorithms/eternalizing_septembers

• At the New School: Against Money https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-the-new-school-against-money/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Court throws out RIAA attempt to sue little girl https://web.archive.org/web/20060422232323/https://p2pnet.net/story/8603

#15yrsago Android secretly stores location data too — though less of it, and with less detail https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/android-phones-keep-location-cache-too-but-its-harder-to-access/

#15yrsago Portal turret Easter egg https://www.flickr.com/photos/57617475@N00/5638462322/

#15yrsago Michael Chabon’s introduction to The Phantom Tollbooth 50th anniversary edition https://web.archive.org/web/20110424055621/http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/apr/21/michael-chabon-phantom-tollbooth-wonder-words/

#10yrsago UK spy agencies store sensitive data on millions of innocent people, with no safeguards from abuse https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/uk-secret-police-surveillance-bulk-personal-datasets/

#10yrsago Zombie company Atari wants exclusive right to make haunted house games https://www.techdirt.com/2016/04/21/ex-game-maker-atari-to-argue-to-us-pto-that-only-it-can-make-haunted-house-games/

#10yrsago Hackers take $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank by pwning its $10 second-hand routers https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36110421

#10yrsago Forget the one percent, it’s the 0.1% who run the show https://web.archive.org/web/20160416022112/https://www.alternet.org/economy/1-really-problem

#10yrsago The quest for the well-labeled inn https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/22/the-quest-for-the-well-labeled-inn/

#5yrsago EFF sues Proctorio over copyfraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Fighting FLoC is compatible with fighting monopoly https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

#5yrsago Moxie hacks Cellebrite https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#petard

#5yrsago Banks made bank on covid overdraft charges https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#usurers

#5yrsago The awesome destructive power of a billionaire https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#force-multiplier

#1yrago More Everything Forever https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyebuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Each week, the Standard reaches out to Austin’s Typewriter Rodeo for a custom poem on Texas topics.

7 Brew will soon move into the former Salad & Go located at 3000 N Durham Dr, Houston, TX 77018, according to permits filed by the drive-thru coffee shop. The Arkansas-based company, founded in 2017, first expanded to Texas in 2023 and has used a careful approach to selecting smaller towns and the outskirts of cities to establish itself against better-known competitors like Starbucks and Dutch Bros. This new location will be a slight departure ...

The post ‘7 Days,’ Hisses Little Girl On Phone Call Welcoming Draft Pick To Jets appeared first on The Onion.

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. How do I fire someone humanely when management ignored years of underperformance?

I’m a manager at a small product company and I’m facing a role elimination that’s keeping me up at night.

I joined this org a bit less than a year ago and inherited a team, including one person who has been here for eight years — the only job he’s ever had since college. The role has always required strategic thinking, synthesis, and independent problem framing. He has never fully met that bar, but when I arrived, the work happened to be more execution-focused and predefined, so the gap was less visible. Now that the work requires what the role always demanded, the gap is undeniable. Some of what he does can also now be handled by AI, which makes the role increasingly hard to justify.

He has no professional network and has never job searched as an adult. When I try to picture him navigating interviews or knowing where to even start, I genuinely can’t. I think he’d struggle a lot with the social performance aspects of interviewing. Beyond that, this type of role, which is the only one he’s had his whole career, is dwindling across the industry, and he doesn’t have the fundamental skills to do the job elsewhere. On top of that, I know enough about his personal situation to know that losing this job would be devastating.

The people who hired him and let this go on for years are still at the org. They all agree something needs to change, but the work of handling it has fallen to me, the newest person in the room. My boss told me that this employee has been underperforming for years, and when I asked if the employee knew that, my boss said, “Probably not.” I’m angry at my predecessors for not addressing this when the job market was stronger. Now he’s facing this in a brutal market, and I feel like he’s going to pay the price for their inaction.

What’s the right path forward for someone in his situation — how much notice, what kind of severance, and what support? And is it appropriate that I’m the one doing this when the people who created the situation are still here — and should I be pushing back on that?

Yeah, that’s horrible. Your organization’s management let this go on for years and is now poised to let him go in a particularly awful market. That doesn’t mean you should keep him on (there are other people who need work, perhaps just as desperately, and could do the work you need done) but it does mean that the organization has a very strong obligation to act with care. That means talking to him as soon as possible about the deficiencies in his work so that he’s not blindsided, offering him any training and support that might be reasonable (if any exists; realistically, it may not), and being prepared to offer sizable severance to help give him a softer landing. Exactly how long that process should take depends on specifics I don’t have, but if he’s never heard before now that he hasn’t been performing at the level needed, I’d say at least a few months from when you first talk to him about the issues or a severance package large enough that it makes up for less notice.

It would be a kindness to make it a layoff rather than a firing, framing it as “the needs of the job have changed” (which is arguably true — if nothing else, he’s being held to a different bar now, even if it’s the bar he always should have been held to).

It’s unfair that you’re the one getting stuck with it, but it also sounds like he’s better off with you handling it, because you can be direct when other people there apparently won’t be.

2. Coworkers ignore my availability and then get angry when I’m not around

I’m the shipper/receiver for my university campus, and I’m regularly the only one who works the dock on any given day. There is the occasional part-time help that comes in two or three times a week in the afternoons to help prevent me from drowning in the volume of stuff I receive for my campus every day. My day generally consists of receiving in the morning and distributing everything I receive in the afternoon. Due to some limitations from the health and safety department, I’m not allowed to distribute some of the items (think liquid nitrogen, compressed gasses, new large appliances, etc.). For those items, I have to email or call the person to come pick them up from me. And some items that I usually deliver have to be picked up as their recipients are located in secure areas I don’t have access to.

When I send those emails, I specifically say to come by the dock during my morning operating hours before lunch, as I need them to sign out their stuff from me for tracking purposes. And the deliveries I do in the afternoon keep me away from the dock all afternoon. I only return for a few minutes at a time to get a new cart of deliveries, so I spend maybe 15 minutes of my four hours in the afternoon at the dock.

There’s been a large uptick in people who are just straight-up ignoring my availability. Lately, all the pickup requests I do are met with a decisive response of some variation of “I’ll be there at X time in the afternoon” and nothing else. I reiterate that I’m not available to sign out their items to them in the afternoon and to come by in the morning. But lately they just show up in the afternoon regardless, then get extremely annoyed, and sometimes bananapants mad, that I’m not there to sign their stuff out to them when I very clearly said that I will not be around to do so.

I’ve even had complaints to my boss that were essentially, “Receiver wasn’t at dock to sign stuff out to me, do something to correct it.” My boss has dismissed them as pointless. But when those complaints go nowhere, they get escalated if these people are feeling vindictive enough. Thankfully nothing has ever come of it, at least not yet. So while my bosses know of the issue, I think I need to ask them to help me deal with it in a formal request. How would I even go about that?

First, if you don’t already have it, ask for some type of official and very visible signage at the dock that clearly states what the pick-up hours are, so that people who come by in the afternoon see that rather than assuming you’re just AWOL (and so it looks like the dock’s official policy rather than your own). And similarly, you might revisit how you’re relaying those hours in your email; it clearly needs to be big, bold, and set off from the other text so it’s harder to miss.

But behind that, just lay it out for your boss: “As you know, there’s been a large uptick in people ignoring my availability and, even though I clearly tell people that they need to pick up their shipments before noon or I’ll be away on deliveries, they show up anyway and then some of them complain that I’m not here. Sometimes those complaints have been escalated and, while nothing has come of it so far, I’m concerned about having complaints filed against me. Can you help me figure out how to fix this?”

3. My coworker keeps falling asleep while I’m waiting on work from him

I have a coworker who is going through it. Like, just one hit after another. I feel bad, and our team has really stepped up to support him.

However, I notice that he’s been falling asleep a lot during the day. If I message him at 2 pm, he will respond at 6 saying “Sorry, I fell asleep.” I am assuming there is not much I should do here, my manager is well aware of what’s going on in his life. However, he also took last week off to deal with some personal matters and left a bunch of time sensitive work unfinished. And when he falls asleep, I’m also usually waiting for a response for something I need to close the loop.

Do I just chalk this up to “Dang, this guy is going through it” and work around that? Do we need to have a larger conversation with the team about what to do when this happens? I want to be sensitive to what’s going on in his life, but I also don’t want work to fall through the cracks if it doesn’t have to.

Can you talk to him about it directly? For example: “I know you’re having a rough time right now. What’s the best thing for me to do when I’m waiting on a response from you in order to move forward with something and can’t reach you for a good chunk of the day, or when something looks like it might have gotten overlooked?” Even just asking that might nudge him into realizing he’s got to do something differently (which obviously wouldn’t be making his life magically fall into place but might be setting alarms during the day so he’s not sleeping for four hours while people are waiting on him or talking to his boss about managing his workload differently during this time).

If that doesn’t work and it’s causing problems in your work, at that point there’s not much more you can do besides talking to your boss about managing the team’s workload differently while your coworker is (presumably temporarily) less available.

4. Should I ask for a promotion?

I’ve been with my company since 2013. In 2021, I made a deliberate shift out of an area where I was a well-established subject matter expert to join a different division. I started as an entry-level associate in Tech Ops and, within about 18 months, moved into Business Operations Analytics.

Since then, I’ve consistently rebuilt my reputation as a go-to expert. I’ve created processes, documentation, and training materials that were originally designed for a team of about 20, but are still in use today as the organization has scaled to 200 employees. After several reorganizations, I was placed into a smaller, specialized team of eight. For about a year, I operated in what was essentially a “Lead” capacity without the official title. Eventually, I was formally given the Lead title, but I’m compensated at the Business Operations Analyst II level, higher than the traditional lead role.

Over the past three years, I’ve received “exceeds expectations” on every performance review, which is extremely rare at my company. While that has come with merit increases, I’m still positioned around the mid-range of the pay band for my role.

From a results standpoint, I’ve driven measurable impact. The work I’ve led has contributed to an approximately 84% increase in resolution success across my department (my team plus two others). During my last review, my previous director stated in front of my current manager that my performance is “bar none” and that I’m more than ready for the next step in my career.

Given all of this, do I have a strong case to formally push for a promotion? Is it better to wait and see if my manager advocates for me organically, or should I take a more direct route and clearly communicate that I’m seeking advancement (and may need to explore other opportunities if that’s not possible)? I want to handle this professionally and strategically, not emotionally or impulsively. At the same time, I don’t want to continue operating at a higher level without corresponding title and compensation if there’s no path forward.

It sure sounds like you have a strong case for promotion. You should talk to your manager about it proactively rather than waiting to see if she advocates for it on her own. She might, but not every manager is good at doing that, and some don’t even think about it until an employee explicitly raises it. So yes, talk to her! Say that you have a track record of excellent results in your current role and you’d like to talk about what a path to promotion would look like.

You don’t need to spell out that you’d consider job searching if you’re not promoted; that’s always the subtext to conversations like this, without needing to be explicitly stated.

The post firing someone after years of underperformance, coworker keeps falling asleep, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Ah, the tears of a clown.

The post RFK Jr. Spins Brain On Finger appeared first on The Onion.

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Later it works out because the man is a masochist.

Today's News:

Student attendance for the Turning Point USA and “All Are Neighbors” events Wednesday each numbered in the hundreds. The conservative organization said Baylor forced it to turn away non-Baylor attendees, but the university said that was the original agreement.

The post Baylor’s dueling events peaceful as Turning Point casts blame over turnout appeared first on The Waco Bridge.

The final part of Solver volume 2 starts on Monday. Subscribers to my Patreon (in the Early Reader tier and above) will be able to read it as a PDF on Sunday morning. This chapter completes a little trilogy and has plenty for long time readers as well as newcomers to the franchise.

feeling INSPIRED to teach a stranger (*cough cough greyson hoelzel cough*😉) about edible plants after watching @Netflix ‘s THIS IS A GARDENING SHOW!  #NetflixPartner

If you wanna make a movie, you gotta break some eggs.

Today's links

• The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software: You can't add ANY license to a public domain work.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Pimp My Snack; Abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash; MPAA v 'democratizing culture'; 3,000 page garbage Kindle books; London's lost postal tunnels; Internet voting is stupid; Congress lobotomized itself; GWB v 'truth in politics'; Trump's FTC x tariff profiteering.
• Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (permalink)

Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.

As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a legal precedent set in 1982, in which IBM brought a copyright suit against a small upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its code – the copyrightable part of a work of software – in order to reimplement the functionality of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions. The idea of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is not copyrightable, but the code that turns that idea into a computer program is copyrightable.

Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation. The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for another program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team did handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team did create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.

This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.

The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

This business about "attribution" and "copyleft" is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The purpose of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve, and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, but you have to let other people do the same.

Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes. This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people not to restrict that use.

Companies love to use free software, but they don't like to share free software. Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to acknowledge the original software project that you knocked off!

This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.

This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We already have this situation, and it's really bad. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the distribution of the software – that is, when I send you a copy of the code.

But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons. In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github – itself a division of Microsoft):

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't quite invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers. Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse. What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a felony to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a crime to use modified software on your own device:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's something to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.

That's because copyleft licenses – and indeed, all software licenses – are copyright licenses, and software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright, because nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Copyright is awarded solely to works of human authorship. This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.

Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has no licensing, because it is born in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.

In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount. There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to pretend that your public domain software is copyrighted – that's also not allowed under copyright.

Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation does create some risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing. Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.

But reimplementation itself is not a risk to free software. Reimplementation is the bedrock of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix. Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:

https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253

Reimplementation is good, actually. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast new commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?

(Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU FDL; modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Liquidating an "Empire": China's Strategy to Capitalise on US Hegemonic Strain https://www.sinification.org/p/liquidating-an-empire-chinas-strategy

• Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/copyright-and-dmca-best-practices-fediverse-operators

• ASL sign for "enshittification" https://glitch.social/@Gotterdammerung/116444006959963175

• Framework Laptop 13 Pro and highlights from the Framework [Next Gen] Event https://frame.work/blog

• Apple keeps challenging its interoperability obligations under the DMA https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260420-01.html

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PimpMySnack: homemade, gigantic versions of snack food https://web.archive.org/web/20060421034050/http://www.pimpmysnack.com/gallery.php

#20yrsago Thieves discover abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash https://web.archive.org/web/20060411021047/http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/07/moneyfound.shtml

#15yrsago Victorian house’s facade converted to a folding garage-door https://web.archive.org/web/20110423213819/https://www.blog.beausoleil-architects.com/2011/03/architectural-magic.html

#15yrsago Xerox’s first successful copier burst into flame so often it came with a fire-extinguisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

#15yrsago MPAA: “democratizing culture is not in our interest” https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-democratizing-culture-is-not-in-our-interest-110420/

#15yrsago Mail Rail: London’s long-lost underground postal railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20110805130854/http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792

#10yrsago Kindle Unlimited is being flooded with 3,000-page garbage books that suck money out of the system https://web.archive.org/web/20160421055052/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/20/amazon-unintentionally-paying-scammers-to-hand-you-1000-pages-of-crap-you-dont-read/

#10yrsago America’s wealth gap has created an ever-increasing longevity gap https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/21/the-death-gap/

#10yrsago Why is Congress so clueless about tech? Because they fired all their experts 20 years ago https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/

#10yrsago Why Internet voting is a terrible idea, explained in small words anyone can understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

#10yrsago VW offers to buy back 500K demon-haunted diesels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX/?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

#10yrsago Printer ink wars may make private property the exclusive domain of corporations https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/eff-asks-supreme-court-overturn-dangerous-ruling-allowing-patent-owners-undermine

#5yrsago Some thoughts on GWB's call for truth in politics https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago What's wrong with EU's trustbusters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

#5yrsago Hawley and Taylor Greene faked their donor-surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#jan-6-fraud

#5yrsago The Observatory of Anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#pseudonymity

#1yrago Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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Excuse me, are you wearing a lot of makeup? #CowboyWho

Between a rock and a hard planet.

In brief: Our rain chances are not entirely going away over the next several days, but they will take a back seat to increasing temperatures. By Sunday or Monday, most of the region is likely to record their first 90-degree day of the year. Please clap.

90 degrees, soon?

After a rainy period over the last five days, which has brought 2 to 5 inches of much needed precipitation to most locations, Houston’s days will now become a little sunnier and quite a bit hotter. How hot? It is likely by Sunday or Monday that the Houston region will see its first 90-degree day.

Yes, a few spots in Houston have already hit that mark this year, but officially the region’s hottest day came on March 21 when the high temperature at Bush Intercontinental Airport reached 88 degrees. So far, our average high temperature this month has been below 80 degrees. The bottom line is that, after today, Houston is going to experience is longest, and hottest period so far of the year, as well as a foretaste of what is to come next month and beyond as summer slides into the region.

Thursday

After several mostly cloudy days, Houston will see at least partly sunny skies today, and this will allow for temperatures to generally warm into the mid-80s. As will be the case for the next week, our dewpoints will be at a level (about 70 degrees) such that our air is very humid. Get used to it. Winds during the afternoon will gust up to 20 mph or so from the south. Rain chances are not zero today, but they are close to it, with only a few very isolated, short-lived showers possible. Low temperatures tonight will only drop into the vicinity of 70 degrees.

Friday

A frontal boundary will approach the region from the north, but stall out well before moving into the Houston metro area. The question is whether instability from this front can spark any showers or thunderstorms in the Houston area. It’s a low-end possibility throughout the weekend, but perhaps the highest chance (10 to 20 percent) will occur on Friday afternoon and evening. Otherwise this should be a partly to mostly cloudy day with high temperatures in the mid- to upper 80s. Nights remain warm and muggy.

Saturday and Sunday

Both weekend days should see a mixture of sunshine and clouds. It remains to be seen whether lingering instability and daytime heating can spark any showers or thunderstorms. My sense is probably not, but it will be something to consider should you be outdoors on the MS 150 ride. Be aware of your surroundings. Otherwise, high temperatures should approach 90 degrees on Saturday, and quite possibly reach it on Sunday for large parts of Houston. Winds will be from the south, gusting up to 20 mph or so during the afternoon hours. Overnight lows probably will only reach the lower 70s.

Next week

Right now it appears our hottest weather of the year, to date, will come early next week when Monday and Tuesday bring highs of 90 degrees or thereabouts across much of the region. Each afternoon will have a slight chance of showers, driven in part by the sea breeze. Better rain chances arrive by Thursday or Friday, when some sort of a front is likely to move into the area. This should bring at least temporary relief from very warm highs and the humidity.

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