In brief: We’re watching for Pacific development again later this week, while the Atlantic remains quiet. We dive into absolutely obscene humidity levels in the Northeast yesterday, the continuation of the heat wave, and the latest on flooding risk in New Mexico today. We also look at how all these things are related.

Atlantic update

Invest 90L is just about out of time in the open Atlantic. It has about 12 hours left before it basically gets absorbed into the overall pattern and ushered east with the window for development closing.

The satellite presentation of 90L this morning is actually fairly feisty looking. Whether it’s enough to get it over the hump and classify it as a depression is really a matter of technicalities at this point. We’ve certainly seen worse looking tropical systems in recent years, so I wouldn’t be shocked if this gets revisited in the postseason analysis. Regardless, this is heading out to sea and is no threat to land. The rest of the Atlantic looks quiet at this point.

Pacific update

On the other side of the continent, we are likely to see the next disturbance emerge off Mexico and into the East Pacific later this week. Right now, the NHC assigns about 70 percent odds of development for this system but probably not til the weekend.

Most modeling suggests this will slide out into the open Pacific, but there remains some subset of model data keeping it fairly close to the coast of Mexico south of Baja. We’ll see if that comes into clearer focus in the coming days.

Absurd Upstate New York/Vermont humidity

Meanwhile, hoooo boy. I worked for 5 years in Central New York in the Mohawk Valley, not far from the foothills of the Adirondacks. We experienced some hot weather every summer just like any other place. But the level of absurdity of dewpoints yesterday in western New England and Upstate New York was wild. Dewpoint is a measure of the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, or the temperature you’d have to cool the atmosphere to for it to be saturated. Essentially, the higher the dewpoint, the worse it feels outside.

When you combine the temperature and dewpoint, that’s generally how you measure the “feels like” or “real feel” or “heat index” value. Yesterday, Whitehall, NY, which mind you is not exactly some urban heat island on the Gulf Coast measured a heat index of 117° from the New York State Mesonet. That is…absurd. Since the year 2000 (LaBamba from Conan O’Brien voice), Burlington, Vermont has recorded exactly 1 hour with a heat index of 110 degrees back in July 2002. To the south, Albany has had a couple hours up to 109° back in 2011 and 2018. The highest heat index value to date in 2025 here in Houston has been 107° on June 20th. Hourly records for things like heat index are often hard to track, but I think it’s pretty clear that what happened yesterday in Upstate New York and Vermont was an exceptional weather event.

At one point, dewpoints got over 80 degrees at Whitehall, which I can’t recall really seeing up that way. Even Montreal had a dewpoint as high as 77° and a heat index of 105° yesterday! I went back through hourly data since 2000. Albany, Burlington, Syracuse, and Montpelier have never touched an 80 degree dewpoint in that time. Having lived there and grown up in South Jersey on the Jersey Shore, which can get rather muggy, it’s somewhat astonishing to me that it got this humid. Heat isn’t uncommon in New England or the Northeast. This sort of humidity, however, is either exceptionally rare or almost unheard of.

Heat outlook

The heat will roll on. Another round of numerous daily temperature records will be threatened today, from 100s in the Northeast Corridor to upper-90s in the interior, and plenty of humidity to boot once again.

In fact, the amount of available moisture tomorrow, especially in northern New England and Upstate New York will be very high. Precipitable water, or how much moisture is available is expected to run about an inch above normal in those areas. A really, really impressive setup continues.

New Mexico

Heavy rain is expected today across much of New Mexico, leading to flood watches and a moderate risk (3/4) of excessive rainfall leading to flooding.

Rain totals of 1 to 4 inches are possible today, which will produce pockets of flash flooding in parts of the state affected by recent heavy rains. Some places have seen 2 to 4 inches in the last 72 hours. This becomes of serious concern near and below burn scars that dot portions of the state from recent wildfires.

The forecast amounts are highest in the southeast, but it won’t take much for some of those higher amounts to show up elsewhere, including some risk of urban flash flooding in the Albuquerque metro. The flood watch in New Mexico remains until Wednesday morning in most spots, but through tomorrow evening in the South Central Mountains in the state.

Connecting the dots

Why is this happening? It all ties into how the weather pattern is interplaying at a large scale. With near-record high pressure over the Mid-South and Appalachia, as well as a deep trough over California, the flow pattern is drawing in Pacific moisture, including tropical moisture. That moisture funnels between the ridge and trough, taking aim at New Mexico, hence today’s flooding risk, as well as into the Upper Midwest, Lakes, southeast Canada, and U.S. Northeast. This provides higher than usual humidity, more thunderstorm chances, and some severe weather around the periphery of the ridge of high pressure.

In addition, thunderstorm chances on the Gulf Coast have also increased this week due to east to west winds due to the clockwise flow around the high pressure system, with more Gulf and Atlantic moisture pressing across the Deep South and into Texas. Some of that Gulf, Gulf Stream, and even Caribbean air is getting dragged into this whole thing too. With this high pressure being near-record intensity, it underscores that extreme patterns tend to produce extreme outcomes.

Everything is connected in some way on this planet. We’re experiencing a microcosm of this now in the U.S. and Canada.

In brief: Showers and thunderstorms are likely across the greater Houston region today, starting near the coast and spreading inland, and Wednesday. We don’t expect them to be too disruptive. We should then dry out for a few days before another round of showers on Sunday or Monday.

Tuesday and Wednesday

The Houston region will experience slightly cooler weather, along with widespread showers and thunderstorms, during the next two days as the region’s atmosphere becomes unsettled. Although these showers will be most prominent during the daytime hours, some rain will also be possible during the overnight hours.

If you’ve lived in Houston for any period of time, you know generally what to expect. These storms will be hit or miss, with some areas seeing gusty winds and briefly heavy rainfall (and possibly small hail) whereas two neighborhoods over may only see dark skies. Most of these showers should be quick to move through, so we don’t expect widespread flooding issues. On average, most locations should pick up about 0.5 inch of rain over the next two days, but rain totals will vary widely.

Depending on the timing of rainfall at your locations, high temperatures are likely to range between the mid-80s and lower-90s. Skies will be partly sunny with generally light winds (outside of thunderstorms) at 5 to 10 mph. Nights remain warm and muggy.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday

A slug of drier air moves in to the region during the second half of the week, and while this won’t entirely end rain chances, it should knock them down to about 30 percent each day. Consequently these three days should have mostly sunny skies and high temperatures in the lower 90s. If you have outdoor plans bring an umbrella, but I think showers each day will be more miss than hit. Overnight lows are in the upper 70s.

Sunday and Monday

Our model guidance indicates that another healthy chance of showers and thunderstorms will push into the area on Sunday and stick around through Monday. Overall accumulations may be on the order of another 0.5 inch for most locations, but I can’t really stress enough that totals will be inconsistent across the Houston region. On average I expect a bit higher rainfall amounts closer to the coast. Highs should be in the vicinity of 90 degrees.

Next week

At some point next week I expect high pressure to more firmly establish itself. As a result we can expect rain chances to decrease significantly. I would also anticipate highs in the mid-90s next week by Tuesday or Wednesday, with a risk of upper-90s before the weekend. Hello, July!

A message from Eric, on behalf of Reliant

As you probably know, Reliant is a long-time partner of Space City Weather. As part of our relationship, I will occasionally share information about the products and services they offer. This is not a hard sell by any means, and I want to be sure these products are high quality. So, anything I write about here, I’ve tried. In this case, I’m excited to share that we’re in the process of installing Reliant’s new Smarter Home Bundle package, which is a free add-on for Reliant customers that makes home energy management smarter and our lives easier.

My family and I will be testing out the technology and features and sharing a review with you in the next month or so. But in the meantime, I wanted to share the basics for current and new Reliant customers. Qualifying customers receive a free Vivint Doorbell Camera Pro and Vivint Smart Thermostat paired with complimentary white-glove installation. In addition to these freebies, enrolling in this offer also gives you access to the Vivint app that provides personalized energy insights by Reliant and control of the Vivint devices in one spot. In other words, you should not need multiple apps to manage all the smart technology in your home.

I’ll report back soon on what the experience was really like for me. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, click here.

From iyO’s home page:

The iyo one is a revolutionary new kind of computer without a screen. it can run apps just like your smartphone. The key difference is you talk to it through a natural language interface.

Like I wrote yesterday, I’d never heard of iyO before. But from the description above, you can obviously see how they’d feel like the new OpenAI/LoveFrom io name stomps on their trademark. (One minor curiosity: iyO itself seems unsure how to capitalize the letters in its own name: a single cropped screenshot of their own home page shows “iyO”, “IyO”, and “iyo”.)

iyO “graduated” from X (which is entirely separate from Elon Musk’s X), Google’s “moonshot factory”, in 2021. The description there:

iyO is on a mission to bring natural language computing to billions of people. The team has created the world’s first audio computer that you can talk to like a friend. While at X, the team developed their initial prototypes. Now an independent company, iyO is creating screenless, natural language computing with mixed audio reality.

Despite having “graduated” four years ago, iyO is still only taking pre-orders for the iyO One, their ungainly-looking ear computer. ($100 seems too good to be true for what they’re promising. Update: Ah-ha, turns out $100 is just the pre-order deposit. They’re going to cost $1,000 to $1,200 if they ever actually ship, which I think is a big if — this thing has vaporware written all over it.)

Lastly, last April, iyO founder and CEO Jason Rugolo demonstrated prototypes in a 13-minute TED talk. Seems cool, but some of the features already exist with AirPods, and all of the feature could exist with AirPods. I don’t see the future of a dedicated audio computer — especially ones as ugly as these — when the entire feature set can be duplicated with smart earbuds paired to your phone.

#Kento #RoninWarriors

Today's links

• Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth: From each according his ability (to pay).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• 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.

Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (permalink)

Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.

That's not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There's a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is "a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in" while the $50 room is "a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it's not available, you're sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station."

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you're in chemotherapy, so you don't have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you'll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there's a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of "room you booked two weeks ago" as a different product from "room you're trying to book right now" break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. "Surveillance pricing" is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you're willing to spend – because you're wealthy, because you're desperate, because you're distracted, because it's payday – and charging you more:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

For example, a McDonald's ventures portfolio company called Plexure offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck. They're just one of many "personalized pricing" companies that have attracted investor capital to figure out how to charge you more for the things you need, or merely for the small pleasures of life.

Personalized pricing (that is, "surveillance pricing") is part of the "pricing revolution" that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the "price clearinghouses" that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then "offer advice" on the optimum pricing. This advice – given to all the suppliers of a good or service – inevitably boils down to "everyone should raise their prices in unison." So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.

This is a pretty thin pretext. Price-fixing is illegal, after all. These companies pretend that when all the meat-packers in America send their pricing data to a "neutral" body like Agri-Stats, which then tells them all to jack up the price of meat, that this isn't a price-fixing conspiracy, since the actual conspiracy takes the form of strongly worded suggestions from an entity that isn't formally part of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Same goes for when all the landlords in town send their rental data to a company like Realpage, which then offers "advice" about the optimum price, along with stern warnings not to rent below that price: apparently that's not price-fixing either:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

It's not just sellers who engage in this kind of price-fixing – it's also buyers. Specifically buyers of labor, AKA "bosses." Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector. They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is surveillance pricing for buyers, and as with the sell-side pricing revolution, buyers also make use of a third party as an accountability sink (a term coined by Dan Davies): the apps that they use to buy nursing labor are a convenient way for hospitals to pretend that they're not engaged in price-fixing for labor.

Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination." Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage. Drivers who are less picky about which rides they accept are treated as more desperate, and offered lower wages than their pickier colleagues:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But this gets much creepier and more powerful when combined with aggregated surveillance data. This is one of the real labor consequences of AI: not the hypothetical millions of people who will become technologically unemployed, numbers that AI bosses pull out of their asses and hand to dutiful stenographers in the tech press who help them extol the power of their products; but rather the millions of people whose wages are suppressed by algorithms that continuously recalculate how desperate a worker is apt to be and lower their wages accordingly.

This is as good a candidate for AI regulation as any, but it's also a very good reason to regulate data brokers, who operate with total impunity. Thankfully, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that made data brokers effectively illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that rule, giving data brokers carte blanche to spy on you and sell your data, effectively without restriction:

https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-data-brokers/

(womp-womp)

Also, Biden's FTC was in the middle of an antitrust investigation into surveillance pricing on the eve of the election, a prelude to banning the practice in America:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that investigation and instead created a snitch line where FTC employees could complain about colleagues who were "woke":

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf

(Womp.)

(Womp.)

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger proposes a "mirror world" that the fever-swamp right lives in – a world where concern for children takes the form of Pizzagate conspiracies, while ignoring the starving babies in Gaza and the kids whose parents are being kidnapped by ICE:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in "From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A recent episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast featured an interview with Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer who is on the front lines of the pricing revolution (on the side of workers and buyers) (not bosses):

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-wild-world-of-surveillance-pricing

Hepner is the one who proposed the formulation that personalized pricing is a way for corporations to decide that your dollars are worth less than your neighbors' dollars – a form of economic discrimination that treats the poorest, most desperate, and most precarious among us as the people who should pay the most, because we are the people whose dollars are worth the least.

Now, this isn't always true. Earlier this month, Delta, United and American were caught charging more for single travelers than they charged pairs of groups:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/

That's a way to charge business travelers extra – for valuing their dollars less than the dollars of families, not because business travelers are desperate, but because they are, on average, richer than holidaymakers (because their bosses are presumed to be buying their tickets). Sometimes, price discrimination really does charge richer people more to subsidize everyone else.

But here's the difference: when the news about the business-traveler's premium broke, its victims – powerful people with social capital and also regular capital – rose up in outrage, and the airlines reversed the policy:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/delta-rethinks-higher-fares-solo-travelers/

If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price. This is something British Airways is already teeing up, by offering essentially zero reward miles to frequent travelers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:

https://onemileatatime.com/news/the-british-airways-club/

But BA operates in the UK, where most of the pre-Brexit, EU-based privacy regime is still intact, despite the best efforts of Keir Starmer to destroy it, something that neither Boris Johnson, nor Theresa May, nor Rishi Sunak, nor Liz Truss could manage:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/uk-privacy-erosion-sparks-eu-civil-society-call-to-review-adequacy-data-deal/

So for now, BA travelers might be safe from surveillance pricing, at least in the UK and EU. And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations – centuries – before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.

The future of the fight against corporate power and oligarchy is something for the rest of the world to carry on, as the American hermit kingdom sinks into ever-deeper collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

And as it happens, Canada's Competition Bureau, newly equipped with muscular enforcement powers thanks to a 2024 law, is seeking public comment on surveillance pricing and whether Canada should do something about it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/competition-bureau/news/2025/06/competition-bureau-seeks-feedback-on-algorithmic-pricing-and-competition.html

I'm writing comments for this one. If you're in Canada, or a Canadian abroad (like me), perhaps you could, too. If you're looking for an excellent Canadian perspective to crib from, check out this episode of The Globe and Mail's Lately podcast on the subject:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Just because America jumped off the Empire State Building, that's no reason for Canada to jump off the CN Tower, after all.

(Eh?)

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Stark Fist of Removal (1982) in book form with many new extras https://www.subgenius.com/scatalog/books.htm

• Scrambled Eggs and Paralyzed Policy: Breaking Up Consummated Mergers and Dominant Firms https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3736613

• The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise https://www.patreon.com/posts/mcmansionization-126873692

• SnapNotSell https://snapnotsell.netlify.app

• Engineered Estrangement https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/engineered-estrangement-an-interview

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Notes from fight to turn WIPO into a humanitarian agency https://web.archive.org/web/20050903072827/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003722.php

#20yrsago Software patents are bad for coders like literary patents would be for writers https://web.archive.org/web/20050622023635/http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html

#20yrsago WIPO Development Agenda meeting docs photographed and posted https://web.archive.org/web/20051127092845/http://homes.eff.org/~renbucholz/wipo/

#20yrsago Dear Kansas: Why stop at “Intelligent Design?” What about Spaghetti Monsters? https://web.archive.org/web/20050626010148/http://www.venganza.org/

#15yrsago Blacksad: hardboiled detective fiction about anthropomorphic animals (no, really) https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/21/blacksad-hardboiled-detective-fiction-about-anthropomorphic-animals-no-really/

#15yrsago White House guts bill that would rein in CEO salaries; you can stop them http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/proxyreform

#15yrsago New Apple terms allow them to collect and share your “precise, real-time location” https://web.archive.org/web/20100622165913/https://consumerist.com/2010/06/privacy-change-apple-knows-your-phone-is-and-is-telling-people.html

#10yrsago Doctoral dissertation in graphic novel form https://spinweaveandcut.com/unflattening/

#10yrsago EU set to kill street photography https://medium.com/vantage/freedom-of-panorama-is-under-attack-6cc5353b4f65

#5yrsago The politicization of K-pop stans https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#kpop-stans

#5yrsago Yahoo is a deadbeat billionaire zombie https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/21/stans/#altaba

#1yrago Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don't https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

• FediForum Keynote
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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 (the-bezzle.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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• 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/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

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

1. Should I have called campus police?

I’ve retired for a while now, but I have a question about the past. I worked in a science laboratory that didn’t interact with the public, in a field that attracts individuals who seek confirmation of their diagnoses and treatments.

One day, I was having lunch when a peculiar man entered our lunchroom, looking for our laboratory. Our building has robust security measures, including guards and visitor vetting, so I assumed he was there for official business. He requested to speak to my principal investigator, who was out of the office. He appeared restless, evasive, and somewhat uneasy. He asked if I could relay any questions since I wasn’t sure when she would return.

As it turned out, he was one of those individuals who firmly believed they were “infected” and sought “treatment.” I explained that our laboratory conducted only pure research and did not handle patients. I collected his contact information and he left. Other people in the lunchroom soon approached me to inquire about him.

When my boss returned, I informed her about the incident. She expressed some concern and suggested that I should have called the campus police on him. I explained that I had considered that, but he was polite and I felt no threat and I believed it would have been excessive to involve the police on someone who was polite and compliant. I felt I was physically stronger and faster than him, and as the son of a law enforcement officer, I was more than capable and determined enough to protect myself from an unarmed individual.

Now, I should add a few more factors: I was a rare Black researcher in science. In 35 years, I never met my racial counterpart in another lab. As I mentioned, my late father was in law enforcement, and my brother and I had a distressing experience walking to our elementary school. Two policemen stopped us and made us stand with our hands on a fence while our classmates walked by until a woman arrived to identify us. She looked at us puzzled and told the policemen we were kids and didn’t match the description at all. We were gruffly let go. My dad contacted the police department, found out who the officers were, and made them come to our house and apologize. My brother and I spent the rest of the year fearfully walking to school, afraid of revenge. I think of calling the police like drawing a gun: you only do it when you fear enough that you’ll ensure the other person has a very bad day.

Another wrinkle was that the lab was predominantly female, and I understand that safety is a top priority for women. Hence, I understand her caution, but I’m not sure she fully comprehends my own caution. Calling the cops is the ultimate option for me, but is it the most prudent business decision?

I’m not going to second-guess your decision; you were the one who was there and had to assess the situation based on everything you were picking up about it. For all we know, your calm, respectful response even could have been what kept things from escalating. I will quibble with “I was stronger and faster and could protect myself from an unarmed individual” since you presumably couldn’t know for sure that he was unarmed. But it ended peacefully, so I’m not going to say you made the wrong call.

That said, I do think your employer’s security procedures matter and generally should be followed. For example, if it was a secure area and an outsider shouldn’t have been able to gain access at all, that’s something I’d report (even if for no other reason than that they need to know it happened so it can be better prevented in the future).

2. How can I stop feeling resentful about all the vacation time my coworker takes?

My coworker Annika and I are the only two full-time employees on our team, and one of us will cover for the other when needed. My issue is that Annika always seems to be on leave and I’m left trying to juggle everything.

Annika is currently in her home country. She was supposed to be back this week but requested an extension of her leave from our manager, Kathryn. Kathryn approved the request but said she did tell her it wasn’t ideal given she was also away for a conference the week prior to her leave and has taken leave several times this year.

We do have quite generous leave entitlements, but feel like I can never take mine. Annika demands detailed handover notes from me if I’m away for two days (even though I don’t think she reads them properly) but I don’t get any from her when she’s away for six weeks. I’ve often gone to work while feeling sick because I know she’s away. When I had Covid, she gave me two minutes’ notice that I would need to run a Zoom meeting she had scheduled because she was busy and lost track of time (she “forgot” I was unwell and I did say I could keep working from home since I wasn’t bedridden, so that’s probably my fault). There have been several times where I’ve mentioned wanting to take a week off at a particular time, and she’s told me I can’t because she’ll be away.

Annika is obviously entitled to take her leave, but how do I get over my resentment?

By advocating more assertively for what you need!

First and foremost, take your leave. Annika doesn’t get to tell you that you can’t; take whatever leave you want to take, just as she does. If you can’t both be gone at once and she books the whole year up early, start booking yours earlier too … and if that doesn’t solve it, tell your manager you’re unable to take your own leave because of Annika’s schedule and ask for her to help so you can use the time off that’s part of your compensation.

Second, if your workload is too high because Annika is gone so frequently, dump that squarely in the lap of your manager: “I’m not able to do my own job plus Annika’s this frequently. I can do X and Y, or Y and Z, but not all of it. How do you want me to prioritize?” You don’t need to just do it all.

And if you want detailed handover notes from Annika the way she gets from you, ask for them! Or if you don’t want them and don’t think it’s a good use of your time to provide them to her, take that to your boss as well.

Right now you’re letting Annika call all the shots without speaking up for what you want and need. Start speaking up!

3. When should I tell my boss I’ll be resigning after my maternity leave?

I’m pregnant and due this fall, and my employer offers 12 weeks of paid parental leave. Recently my husband and I have been researching daycare options and reviewing our budget and have realized it will make the most sense financially and logistically for me to leave my job and take a few years off to care for our child until they’re eligible for preschool. Childcare is really expensive in our area, and while my organization offers good benefits, the pay isn’t great.

I’d really like to utilize my paid leave, so I’m struggling to decide when I should notify my supervisor that I’m not planning to return. I’m a crucial member of my team, and I feel guilty allowing them to think I’ll be back to work after my leave and make plans accordingly. However, I’ve been warned by my family that if I tell them ahead of time, they might terminate my employment preemptively to avoid having to pay out leave for an employee who isn’t coming back. I’ve worked really hard at this company for subpar pay for eight years and have never taken leave before or even used all my sick days, so I sort of feel like I’ve earned this paid leave. Is it better to let my supervisor know in advance that I’m planning to resign after my leave is up so they can adjust their plans and start looking for my replacement, or should I come back to work briefly after my leave expires to formally give notice and tie up any loose ends?

Don’t tell them you’re not planning to come back after your maternity leave. First, it’s always possible that your plans could change between now and then (your husband’s work situation could change, you could find you dislike staying at home, all sorts of things); there’s no point in locking yourself in early. Second, at some companies if you don’t come back after parental leave, you’ll be responsible for paying your health insurance costs from those three months, and the paid leave itself may be contingent on agreeing to return for some length of time. (Check your employee handbook on this.)

Employers are aware people don’t always choose to come back after leave. Prioritize protecting yourself and your family.

4. 60% of my team are family members and they all want to go on vacation together

I am a manager of a five-person parts department (split between two office staff, two warehouse staff, and myself).

Three staff members (both warehouse people and one office person) who are all family, and they have all asked for the same dates off to go on a family holiday. This will leave only me and one other person. What should I do? Do I refuse the holiday?

It really depends on what the impact will be on the ability of your department to function. Will it leave you with enough coverage? Will it bring work to a complete halt / leave important functions undone / leave customer needs unfilled, or just be slightly less convenient? If it’s more toward the “less convenient but doable” end of the scale, I’d try to make it work (while also telling them it might not be something you can approve again), but if it’s more toward the “truly unworkable” end of things, it’s okay to explain that you can’t approve it because of coverage needs. If there are modifications that would make it work, like a shorter time away, mention that.

For what it’s worth, having three members of a five-person department be family members is not ideal, for a whole bunch of reasons. This is definitely one of them.

5. Citizenship delay has cost me a job offer for the second time

Thanks to the triplicate bureaucracy here in Germany, my citizenship application has taken years. Finally, last month I had my second to last meeting and was told I could in good faith apply to the jobs I wanted to (at the only big employer within an hour’s drive, across the border in Austria). I was given a date to reach back out to the foreigner office to make my last appointment and wrap everything up, five weeks ago. Today was that date, and in the meantime I secured a job offer at the big company.

Except, of course, today I was told “it could be two weeks more … or a month.” And, the kicker is, this is the second time I’ve had to do this to this employer in six months, having had another offer before. This time I believed my citizenship officer who said, “I am 99% sure everything is fine, this looks great, I’m sending positive energy for your job interview!” Fool me twice, right?

Now I can’t think of a script that won’t burn the last bridge with the only employer around, and I want to put the blame squarely where it belongs: “Hi, I can’t believe I have to share this, but my immigration officer encouraged me to apply, stating it was a certainty that everything would be processed by this week. I’ve now been told it could be another month.”

They can’t hold that job, I’m sure, and while there are others, I worked in recruiting myself and wouldn’t hire myself based on this. I needed this job so bad that once my citizenship does come through I’m having to consider moving to another EU country with a lower cost of living if this company won’t be able to hire me.

Ugh, I’m sorry. All you can do is be straightforward, and your proposed script would be fine to use. I might add, “I of course understand you may not be able to hold the job until then, particularly when they’ve shown we can’t rely on their estimated timelines, and I’m so sorry about this.”

They might be perfectly used to dealing with this and not surprised or put off at all. Either way, though, just explaining what happened and apologizing is the only way to go.

The post should I have called campus police, my coworker is constantly away, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Sunlight seeps in from the street, pooling across the polished threshold. Before a single painting resolves from the soft haze of first encounter, the air inside Sleight of Hand thickens — charged with the prickle of being watched by the watched. The old promise — illusion as world-making, surface as window — hovers, but beneath the polish, a subtle tremor betrays the game. Nothing here settles for trickery or painterly bravado. Instead, each canvas rehearses its role: not just showing, but performing the act of being seen. The picture plane registers a pulse of self-awareness. Am I making you see, it whispers, or making you notice yourself seeing?

The exhibition breathes a double air — a lucid dreaming where every artwork studies its own reflection. This is meta-cognition as theater: art, awake inside its own spell, stages the moment the dreamer recognizes the dream. Here, nothing cheapens itself with mere spectacle. Instead, a sly, generous invitation extends: witness not only what each work reveals, but how it quietly confesses the mechanics of looking at itself.

I. The Soloists: Command Performance

Terrell James, “Grouping of 20 Field Studies,” 2009-2025, oil on vellum, 44 1/2 x 200 inches

A grid of panels — Terrell James’ Grouping of 20 Field Studies — tunes the space to the slow rhythm of careful looking. At a glance, they suggest meteorological variety, shifting conditions, the day’s moods mapped in color and gesture. Yet up close, “study” becomes a misnomer. Each panel thrums with arrival. Turquoise blooms in one, an ochre updraft interrupts another. Color claims its territory, brushwork composes and unravels. These are not preliminary sketches, but complete events — solos, not rehearsals, performed with a knowing delight in the limits of their scale. The intimacy of each composition, so perfectly composed to its frame, would flatten if transposed. Here, the illusion holds its shape, alert to the risks of ambition.

Sol LeWitt’s Flat Top Pyramid with Colors Superimposed radiates an angular hush. Bands of color corral space with crisp intent until the gaze finds the truncated peak, where expectation drops off. LeWitt’s structure feigns stability, yet everything tilts. Color fields vie for attention; boundaries grow porous. The artist’s legendary rigor feels provisional, even theatrical, as the piece enacts completion and incompletion in a single gesture. Doubt creeps through the skylight — certainty as performance, order as a role played for an audience that knows the lines.

Jay Shinn, “Rotatoria 2,” 2025, gouache on illustration board, 16 x 16 inches

A circle bisected in turquoise and dusk, Jay Shinn’s Rotatoria 2 spins a quiet hypnosis. Stare, and the painting auditions for animation, goading the eye into the sensation of motion. It lures you in, then leaves you circling yourself, returned from the loop a little more alert to the way the picture commands and defers.

II. The Improvisers: Body as Script

Elsewhere, the exhibition’s self-consciousness stirs through the wrist and elbow. Luke Harnden’s K 4.32 G emerges from a field of near-collisions. Lines jostle, hesitate, then forge ahead, each intersection mapping a truce between intention and a delightful accident. Vulnerability appears in every quiver, every correction — the mechanics of memory written across the page. Harnden performs not perfection, but a living rehearsal.

John Pomara, “Daytripper,” 2016, oil enamel and spray paint on aluminum, 72 x 46 1/2 inches

John Pomara’s Daytripper brings military order to the stripe — until it doesn’t. One line staggers, another hesitates. Each disciplined sequence courts error, the algorithm longing for the flesh. The piece stages its own minor rebellions against itself, a subtle drama of control yielding to desire.

Maria Valenzuela’s embroidered Dark Purple pulses with the tactile wisdom of repetition, each stitch a small negotiation with time. Nearby, Leslie Wilkes’s 25.04 vibrates at the threshold of pattern and improvisation. These works propose that meta-cognition might lodge in the muscles as much as in the mind, a quiet intelligence that gathers in the practice of making.

III. The Meta-Dramas: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Sometimes, the work pulls the curtain back and lays bare the violence of its own making. Casey Leone’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington slices the photographic field with a thick red bar, silencing a monument, rewriting access as absence. What first appears as censorship sharpens into a lesson: you want the scene, you get the surface. The very act of blocking becomes its own subject — a directorial gesture as much as an occlusion.

Jessica Sinks, “The Conversationalists,” 2025, pencil on paper, 6 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches

Jessica Sinks’ The Conversationalists stages a grotesque pair of hands, eyes, and mouths: tools of perception and expression locked in discourse. Here, the feedback loop becomes literal, mouths devouring, hands gesturing, eyes exchanged as currency. Sinks finds self-awareness in mutation, not in transparency — a feverish honesty that feels as vulnerable as it does exacting.

Comic relief arrives in the form of Ed Blackburn’s neon David and Goliath, where solemnity surrenders to cartoon spectacle. Myth struts and mugs, the painting letting its trick frolic with a knowing grin. Sleight of Hand never insists on uniformity; even here, meta-cognition finds its echo in parody, delight, and play.

IV. The Ghosts: Haunting the Wings

Kristen Macy, “After the Things we Keep,” 2017, oil enamel on canvas, 30 x 36 inches

Kirsten Macy’s abstracted landscape, After the Things We Keep, stretches across the wall — a low horizon rendered in undulating black, rimmed by spectral light. The work conjures a territory where reflection and shadow blur into one another, erasing detail and depth until only the broad sweep of terrain remains. On certain passages, a ghost of the viewer’s own silhouette hovers above the scene, then fades, gone before one can quite grasp it. Where James’ panels savor their material presence, Macy’s landscape offers a requiem for everything slipping beyond illusion’s reach — haunting both the gallery and the mind.

V. Curtain: The Audience as Understudy

As evening gathers, Sleight of Hand resolves not as doctrine, but as a living colloquy — artists proposing, doubting, and slyly reshaping the pact of art and attention. LeWitt enacts doubt; Leone interrupts; Blackburn jokes from the wings. What binds them? The double thrill: illusion’s seduction paired with the quicksilver disclosure of its means.

Leaving the gallery, certainty slips through your hands. In its place: the pyramid’s deliberate hesitation, the red bar’s audacious silence, the circle’s invitation to endless return. You exit holding not conclusions, but a new role — both audience and understudy, part of the performance and keepers of the secret. Here, the real magic lies not in what art makes visible, but in what it lets you see about your own looking.

Sleight of Hand is on view through August 2, 2025, at
Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas.

The post When Paintings Watch Themselves Perform: “Sleight of Hand” at
Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas appeared first on Glasstire.

WASHINGTON—Growing increasingly contemplative as he fantasized about a stiff drink after a long day at work, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly wondered Monday whether uranium might make a good mixer. “I feel like it could bring out the more chemical notes of gin in a really nice way without overpowering it,” said the Pentagon chief, conceding that it might be difficult to blend the substances due to the metallic element’s density being about 20 times greater than most liquors. “I hate when a drink separates, and the mixer just sits on the bottom, and then you get a big glob of it at the end. That’s what happened in that thorium mai tai I made last week. But I think in this case it might be worth it, because the cocktail would have a cool glowing color—especially if we went somewhere with a black light. I have an idea: When we take it from Iran, let’s drop a shot glass full of uranium into a pint glass of beer and chug it.” At press time, Hegseth was said to have concluded that the radioactive substance made a decent chaser.

The post Pete Hegseth Wondering Whether Uranium Would Be A Good Mixer appeared first on The Onion.

I’m afraid we’ve lost them to an alternate universe. Fortunately, I saved my alternate universe manual from college. Actually, it was a vo-tech, but still, the manual is our only chance.

Brooks Barnes, writing for The New York Times:

Pixar knew that Elio, an original space adventure, would most likely struggle in its first weekend at the box office.

Animated movies based on original stories have become harder sells in theaters, even for the once-unstoppable Pixar. At a time when streaming services have proliferated and the broader economy is unsettled, families want assurance that spending the money for tickets will be worth it.

But the turnout for Elio was worse — much worse — than even Pixar had expected. The film, which cost at least $250 million to make and market, collected an estimated $21 million from Thursday evening through Sunday at theaters in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. It was Pixar’s worst opening-weekend result ever. The previous bottom was Elemental, which arrived to $30 million in 2023.

Harry McCracken:

I wasn’t aware this movie had come out, and still can’t tell you what it’s about. And I’ve been a Pixar fan since before they made movies. That seems like a problem.

I hadn’t heard of this movie until today either. Disney and Pixar have a marketing problem. One part of the problem is that Pixar has made some decidedly meh movies in recent years. “Pixar” used to stand for nothing less than excellence. Now it stands for “somewhere in the range of OK to great”. But another is that even when they make a good one — which Elio might be — they suck at getting word out.

The post Cuomo Makes 11th-Hour Pass At Female New Yorkers appeared first on The Onion.

“Vance says U.S. ‘not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.’” — NBC News

You heard the news straight from the Neimoidian’s mouth. We, the Trade Federation, have indeed made tactical strikes against the planet of Naboo. We’ve heard through the galactic grapevine that sentient creatures across the galaxy—Outer Rim included—have expressed concerns. And to that we say: Deal with it. Naboo’s brooding has kind of ticked us off; we’ve never really understood them, and they have natural resources we want (their plasma is unparalleled), so really, it was a foregone conclusion. Boom-boom, bang-bang, lasers go zwip-zwip-zwip. Roger-roger: We did the thing, now it’s done, and you’re welcome.

A few years ago, we had a trade deal with Naboo called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Trade—worst name, the abbreviation is not catchy—and while it wasn’t perfect for each side, we all agreed on it because that’s what civilized planets do. But then Viceroy Nute Gunray came to power and decided, with zero context, that it was quite possibly the worst deal ever digitally penned, if only because his predecessor brokered it (we don’t even remember that guy’s name anymore, we disliked him so much). Now, years later, we’re punishing Naboo because we left that trade deal.

Is this tracking for you? Because it makes perfect sense to us, the ones who are currently blowing things up.

You may have also heard the news that we are trying to assassinate the Queen. These claims are woefully unfounded. The truth is, we have already attempted to assassinate the Queen. We’re just trying to set the record straight. We would have been successful, but they’re all dressing alike with the white face paint and kissy lips, and we blew up the wrong chick. No biggie, we’ll get her next time, you have our slimy, reptilian word. Now, if we’re talking accomplishments, we did want to brag about the fact that we’ve attacked their capital, the seat of their military power. It has been completely obliterated.

Go on, fact-check us, we dare you.

We can very easily explain this violent shift in interplanetary policy; it’s all part of a larger plan to blow more things up and seize power. We were, as of late, bullying planets into trade deals that some have described as “Bantha poo-doo,” but then… that got dull, and we got sick of waiting.

Listen, if we really want to spill some blue milk, our secret patron hates Naboo, too, and we have to back that dude. So, yes, we threw the first—and only—stones, in the shape of droid ships swooping down from the stars.

We still think Naboo needs more of a thrashing, but we’re just waiting to see how they respond. Okay, actually that’s a lie. No matter what they do, whether it’s sending Jedi emissaries (lame) or a completely warranted counter-strike, we’re gonna go all pew-pew-pew, bwowwww force field, Roger-Roger on their well-dressed booties and probably destroy the Gungans—they make us uncomfortable.

Here’s what the broader galactic citizenry isn’t understanding: We are trying to achieve peace… through an ill-advised, unlawful show of strength. Think about it: Why broker peace, when you can give in to your basest urges and plunge a whole system into war?

Okay, wait… that sounded better at our board meeting.

WASHINGTON D.C. – With Trump’s order to bomb Middle Eastern nuclear sites potentially drawing the United States into a war with Iran, the President urged all Americans to recall whatever rationalizations allowed them to support the US Invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Many Americans are reportedly worried that my targeted strikes on Iran mean that […]

The post Trump urges Americans to just remember whatever bullshit let them support Iraq War appeared first on The Beaverton.

A reader writes:

I’ve been at my current workplace a little less than two years – about six months more than our CEO, Ryan. We are a small arts charity in which I have a significant expert-type role, working part-time and freelance. Ryan comes across as an energetic and pleasant person, keen to make a success of the organization. As they settled into their role, our initially frequent contact has tailed off – especially as the work I do involves closer liaison with a middle manager and not much time in the office.

The atmosphere is very informal: “Hey, we’re all friends here.” Maybe because of that, I’ve had to be clear about my workplace boundaries (when I’m available, what my hours are, and so on) and when I was new, had to be very assertive about being included and consulted – and about direct and clear communication generally. There’s a bit of a gossipy culture and some colleagues circumvent each other when in disagreement about a project’s outcomes.

My mother died four months ago and I was overwhelmed at the time by the kindness of my colleagues. I received a lovely self-care-type gift and lots of encouragement to take all the time I needed.

I didn’t know who had organized it, so when I returned to work, I made sure to stop by the office and thank the full-time staff. They told me it was actually Ryan. I asked them to pass on my thanks. I repeated those thanks a few times in passing conversations after my return. I haven’t seen Ryan one on one since before my bereavement.

Yesterday, I received the following message in my personal – not work – inbox, which I’m giving to you verbatim, because … I just …. what? Which was pretty much my initial reaction.

Hi, Please could you send me an email confirming you received a care package from me on behalf of the team after your bereavement, detailing how you felt when you received it? Many thanks.

This strikes me as a really weird thing to require of an employee. I’ve never before been asked to confirm receipt of a gift in writing, nor to “detail” my feelings about it.

To be honest, I felt …. upset? offended? Something like that. It’s only four months since my mother died, so my feelings are definitely Feelings right now and I’m trying to get beyond my High Dudgeon, but this has left me really unsettled and wondering if this workplace is an okay place.

Have I misunderstood something? Given that communication issues have troubled me there before – plus, you know, dead mum – is it just me, finding this message weird and intrusive and somehow transactional about what I thought was a spontaneous gift?

And more to the point, how on earth do I handle it? Pretending I haven’t received it (current strategy) – and stewing about it so much I write to you – isn’t going to cut the mustard for long. I’d like to be professional and direct in the way I address it, but part of me is just very very GET IN THE SEA about the whole thing.

This is very, very weird!

It would be fine for Ryan to confirm that you received the care package, if the thanks you passed along happened not to have reached him. A little awkward so long after the fact, but not a huge deal.

But “detailing how you felt when you received it”?? What on earth was he hoping for there — “Well, Ryan, I felt awful because my mom had just died but I was bowled over by your beneficence?

It feels transactional to you now because Ryan’s message feels like he’s fishing for gratitude — like he only sent the gift for the payoff of being thanked or making you perceive him a certain way.

As for what to do, the only appropriate response to the email is, “Yes, I did receive it — thank you! When I came back to work, I asked Janine and Rocco to pass on my thanks to you, but it sounds like that might not have reached you. It was thoughtful of you and the team to send.”

You do not need to “detail how you felt when you received it.” You can decide that Ryan obviously didn’t mean to demand that and just answer as if he’d said something more normal.

Beyond that … does this fit into any troubling patterns about Ryan or the office culture more broadly? If it’s just a weird one-off, you don’t necessarily need to read a ton into it; people have awkward moments. On the other hand, maybe there have been a bunch of other weird things too, and this helps crystallize the pattern for you. (For example, maybe this is part of a pattern of demanding people perform particular emotions when they shouldn’t have to, or kowtow to Ryan’s ego.) If that’s the case, then the next step would be about less about reacting to this one odd email and more about deciding how you feel about the broader pattern.

But yes, it’s weird.

Also, thank you for teaching me “get in the sea,” which the internet tells me is a British expression used to express contempt or tell someone to go away.

I’m sorry about your mom.

The post my boss sent me a bereavement gift, then demanded to know how I felt when I received it appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Last week Eric offered a tip for Houston-area newbies for surviving Houston’s fearsome heat and houmidity. (And no, that’s not a typo.) That inspired many of you to offer your own suggestions for dealing with summer. We’ve compiled the best of the best so you can work on your climatological coping skills.

As a native of SE Texas, summer is hot and that’s the fact, Jack! But…I have found that, if I talk or complain about the heat in June or July, that just seems to prolong the summer unnecessarily. Instead, I avoid those water cooler conversations about the heat…until August, then I let it all hang out! Because sometimes fronts start making their way into H-Town a few weeks into September, and it cools down to like 88 degrees and everyone starts thinking it’s fall and pulls out their sweaters! This strategy of denial means you only have a month in a half of hot weather…August and maybe half of September! All our our newly arrived neighbors thank me when I share this strategy with them!

– Sharron Cox

I don’t know if it truly helps any, but my psychological trick to get through the summers recently has been to count the weeks instead of the days. 9 weeks til September just on some psychological level feels better than 74 days. Maybe it’s because by this point, we’re typically mowing once a week, and I really don’t wanna by the time August comes around. And I know we’re getting close to only needing to do single digit cuts left.

– Josh Sorensen

Face the heat head on. Go outside for a walk at 3 PM. Go for a run in the morning and greet the rising sun. Lay in the grass at 2 PM. Feel the radiation. Sweat through the humidity. Learn to love that which we cannot change. This is the best way to deal with summer heat in Houston. Before you know it, you will think 90 degrees feels moderate. A slight breeze and you will have goose bumps. September starts to feel chilly.

– Humidity connoisseur

I am a native, and have lived in two other places, Los Angeles and Saudi Arabia. When I start to feel as though summer will never end (and honestly, it’s hot through sometimes mid November here) I remember how I felt when I stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in Dhahran, and the humidity slapped me in the face. It was 110F in the summer there with 80 to 90% humidity. I will never forget that. Houston is absolutely awful, but that was just a smidge worse (at the time – we’ll see how things change )

– Ashley

I also try not to complain too much until August, go swimming at night to reset my body temperature, and my new summer hack is hanging out in the cheese aisle at HEB. Even colder than a movie theater and can grocery shop too.

– Cheryl Detten

My Summer Survival Strategies:

1. Sit outside sometimes, to become acclimated, as another commenter said. The following two steps will help with this.

2. Cold iced Cafe du Monde made with tons of brown sugar and milk at 2 pm, outside. It’s the worst part of the day but you get to have coffee!

3. Wine and Chips O’Clock at 4 pm, outside. The worst part of the day’s heat is over! (I prefer white wine and potato chips.)

4. August 14: official Changing of the Morning Light Day. The sunlight in the morning changes from harsh blue-white to a softer yellow-white.

5. August 28 CHANGING OF THE LIGHT DAY!!! The light is noticably softer and golden. You have made it thru the worst. Only a month until the moveable feast that is COOL FRONT DAY!!!

Oh, and visit the gem and mineral section of the Science Museum. Like being in an ice cold glittery sparkly cave.

– Bea

One thing that gets me through the Houston summer is just knowing that for 8 months of the year between mid September and mid May the weather is actually quite decent and tolerable. Just gotta get through July and August and Fall will be right around the corner. 

– Anthony Stott

A trick I do is make it a point to get out for 20 or 30 minutes during the peak heat of the day. 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. I’ll get out and go for a motorcycle ride or do a little bit of work in the yard. Maybe just 15 minutes! lol. What this does is allows me to be absolutely scorched during that time and comparatively it makes the mornings and evenings feel much better.

– Scott Smith

Lived in Texas most of my life, especially the Houston area. Long enough to grasp the Biblical nature of this area: Dust to Dust, or Noah’s Ark.

– Shawn Harrison

If these pearls of heat-related wisdom inspire you to offer tips of your own, please do so in the comments!

A reader writes:

My office has an exercise leave program that allows us to stack our two 15-minute breaks to leave early, arrive late, or use the time midday for exercise. This benefit may be used three times per week, and may be combined with our flexible schedule and lunch break to allow for longer midday exercise periods. We complete an annual form, signed by the employee, our boss, and our one-person HR department.

I am a woman on the larger end of the mid-sized range who works out five days a week at barre/Pilates classes, two to three times a week using exercise leave (generally by leaving half an hour early). As of this morning, our executive director (my manager’s boss) states I have to provide verification of every single class I attend from now on and from the past four months. According to his email, he doubts I’ve “used the program appropriately as there is no improvement in your appearance.” Neither my boss nor HR were included in the email, which I have forwarded to my personal email address. He gave me until close of business Friday to submit evidence.

This is the first time I’ve been asked to verify my attendance at my exercise classes. My relationship with my manager is characterized by a high level of mutual trust. I have been here four years and have had no performance issues, including attendance problems, in that time; I have four years of excellent annual and quarterly reviews to back this up. When we all completed our exercise program forms at our recent all staff meeting, our boss even noted that she’s never had to ask for verification.

Thankfully, I have my studio membership receipt and the studio manager was kind enough to run a software report of my electronic sign-ins for the past six months. Though I can verify I have not misused the program, I am disturbed by his email and wonder what advice you have for addressing the fact that his request is based on my size and appearance, and not my work performance.

Wow, that’s offensive.

He shouldn’t be assessing your body to decide whether there’s been “improvement” or not — that’s wildly out of line and pretty damn gross.

It’s also not up to him to decide whether exercise should affect someone’s body in a particular way at all. Exercise can be good for you without always leading to the sort of physical change that would be visible in work clothes (like a daily walk, for example — someone might lose weight or change their muscle composition by doing that, but it wouldn’t be remarkable if colleagues didn’t see visible changes, nor should they be checking for any in the first place).

And it’s utterly boundary-crossing (and I would imagine violating and demoralizing) to be assessed this way and told to prove yourself when no one else has been asked for similar evidence. If your workplaces wants to change their program to require documentation, they certainly can — but singling out a single person on the basis of physical appearance is not okay.

I would strongly consider saying this to your boss, executive director, and HR: “I am deeply uncomfortable that I’ve been singled out and asked to provide documentation that hasn’t been requested from anyone else, apparently on the sole basis of an assessment of my appearance — an assessment that’s not appropriate for anyone at work to be conducting. I’d like an acknowledgement that this was mishandled and won’t happen again.” If you’d be more comfortable just talking to HR and asking them to handle it on your behalf, you can do that too.

You could also look into local and state laws on weight discrimination. Federal law doesn’t prohibit discrimination based on appearance or weight (and the ADA doesn’t cover weight in most cases), but Michigan and some cities (including New York City and Washington, D.C.) have laws prohibiting weight discrimination, and Washington courts have ruled that weight is protected under their discrimination law. If you live in a jurisdiction that provides that protection, you should cite that as well (“I believe this puts us in violation of X law”).

Your executive director is an ass.

The post my boss made me verify that I’m really exercising appeared first on Ask a Manager.

OTTAWA – Facing a massive financial shortfall and dwindling popular support after April’s election, the NDP proudly announced the launch of a new campaign on crowdfunding site Patreon. “We’re extremely excited by all the new avenues to cloy for donations that this platform opens up for us,” said interim NDP leader Don Davies. “Like all […]

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Hey, you drove under the living room set!

#Ryo #RoninWarriors

I don't know ... where does a 7ft, 450 pound cowboy sleep? #CowboyWho

In brief: Our first investigative area of hurricane season has formed in the Atlantic, but Invest 90L will not threaten any land. Meanwhile, heat roasts the East this week, while flooding threatens New Mexico.

Subtropical mischief from Invest 90L

It’s easy to get so caught up in looking at the corridor between the Gulf, Caribbean, and Africa that mid-latitude systems out in the open Atlantic can sometimes just get lumped in with background noise. Indeed, it appears that this may be one of those cases.

Invest 90L, our first “area of investigation” this season won’t be winning any hurricane look-a-like contests, but conditions may briefly be favorable for a burst of quick development before it launches out to sea. There is zero threat to land from 90L. It’s more of a curiosity than anything.

This one would firmly fall into the stat padding category for the season should it develop, though it would contribute virtually nothing to the overall depiction of the season beyond perhaps a name off the board. But it’s a sign that even in a generally unfavorable overall pattern, something can still spin up.

Rest of this week in the tropics

Quiet. There’s no sign that the overarching dominant pattern of “hostile” will change anytime soon. The medium range models which go out 10 to 14 days generally look quiet as well. We do expect the Pacific to continue somewhat active with another system likely later this week. But for the Atlantic, the best you’ll get out of this pattern in all likelihood is something either like we see in the North Atlantic right now, or some currently un-forecast complex of thunderstorms that ends up in the Gulf or off the Southeast coast. Good news for those of us that want calm.

Heat bakes on

The Eastern U.S. heatwave is going to continue onward. Some notable numbers from this weekend: Prior to Saturday, only 31 nights on record in Minneapolis had failed to drop below 80 degrees. Saturday was 32 and Sunday was 33. Sunday’s 82 degrees ties for the fourth warmest low temperature on record and first time since the Dust Bowl era that Minneapolis has been so warm at night. Yesterday was also the first time since 2019 that Chicago failed to drop below 80 degrees.

Heading into the next couple days, the heat will begin to peak in the Eastern U.S., with numerous records likely to be threatened or fall. The most impressive on the list below for some selected major cities is probably the 1888 record in New York City that should fall tomorrow or the 1923 record in Philly.

Whatever the case, there is a massive swath of the country under heat advisories and warnings. Models continue to suggest that upper level “heights” in the atmosphere have a fairly decent chance at breaking all-time records in parts of Virginia based on the historical data we have. And there’s a very good chance they’ll be setting new June records. Heights can help us determine the intensity of a ridge or trough in the atmosphere. The higher the values, the stronger the heat can be this time of year.

The good news is that as the week progresses, the ridge should break down, slowly. This will accelerate over the weekend and next week, allowing heat to rebuild in places to the west, like the Plains and Texas and possibly Southwest.

Southwest flooding risk

This pattern setup is allowing for a feed of monsoonal moisture from the Pacific into New Mexico and parts of West Texas. This, combined with a number of favorable factors for significant rain is likely to put a pretty substantial flooding risk into New Mexico and perhaps portions of western Texas tomorrow.

Burn scar flooding and mudslide risk is a major concern in New Mexico. But all forms of flooding look to be in high supply tomorrow. Conditions should ease up some in the back half of the week.