Sideswipe: Neoliberalism be like…
Two blokes we can do without, cringe fashion, Everybody-Gets-A-Prize philosophy backfires, AI interview on th4e streets of Rome, where are all those critical minerals? And pies of the 70s.
Climate scientists are ‘worthies’ but billionaire are great. The cash will trickle down into your back pocket any day now. This guy is a simpleton, and illiterate when it comes to reading the room.
Minute Mike’s Sexist Slagfest
When talking about women, a true wanker and stoker of division has a few boxes to tick to rile up their audience — weight, over emotional-ness, fashion and cooking to belittle. And in his excruciatingly long minute, Mike didn’t disappoint. Kate showed him the Arden snippet with Oprah and he went rogue, saying of the talk show icon, “let’s face it, post Weight Watchers and Ozempic, not exactly reputationally untouched herself.” TICK. “She said, probably in tears… Jacinda Markel” TICK. “…only thing missing is some Ardern jam or some cake recipes…” TICK. “…she was a narcissist dressed in Kate Sylvester pretending she writes back to all the kids.”
Watch below for the full rage- bait experience.
“Instead of critiquing decisions Ardern made in office, Hosking reduces her leadership to manipulation and self-interest,” tweets @evangelist_eco. “He mocks her supposed motivations, implying her memoir is an effort to rewrite history for personal gain. This mirrors a broader trend in political discourse where progressive women in power are dismissed as disingenuous or performative—where empathy or consensus-building are painted as marketing rather than leadership.”
Cringe Fashion and other links of national significance
“Vintage shopping is most exhilarating after two cocktails. Time is precious when traveling, and a drink helps cut the anxiety and the hidden cost of overthinking. Embracing rash decisions and listening to your lubricated intuition is part of the fun.”
— Alfonso Fernández Navas, senior fashion and market editor of Esquire
Is that an owl or are you just happy to see me? The Big Owl watches over Macquarie, Australia and while the certainly looks alert, it’s not in the way that the artist intended.
Big unit: Man in Norway wakes up to find a massive container ship in his garden.
Everybody gets a prize has backfired: The so-called self-esteem movement of the 1980s and 1990s backfired—badly. It functioned less as a self-esteem movement and more as a narcissism movement. Showering children with constant, indiscriminate praise may foster not healthy confidence, but grandiose narcissism. (source: Rise Above by Scott Barry Kaufman).
A different kind of Mile High Club: Mercedes Street hadn’t really thought about air sickness bags for perhaps more than 10 seconds over her entire life. But a sudden-sickness and one flight later, the “puke purse” or emesis bag (as they're formally known) was a new subject of fascination for her. Read more at The Autopian
You’re BLOCKED IRL: In New Zealand restraining orders are designed to protect victims of sexual harassment or assault, Protection orders are used for heavy domestic situations. The equivalent on US college campus is a Non Contact Order which are now being widely used by Gen Z students to avoid interpersonal conflict, often over minor disputes or awkward social run-ins. According to the WSJ, requests for NCOs have surged over the past decade, fuelled by a generation described as “conflict-averse” and heavily shaped by online behaviours like blocking and muting. As one sociologist put it, students are importing “platform logic” into real life, treating universities like IRL social media feeds where unwanted contact is institutionally filtered out.”
Living near golf courses and the link to Parkinsons: From Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious about Everything: “This case-control study found that you have the greatest risk of later being diagnosed with Parkinson’s if you live within one to three miles of a golf course, with that risk decreasing with distance from the course. The effect was largest for people living in vulnerable groundwater regions. The correlation here isn't golf itself, but rather the pesticides used to maintain a golf course, especially if drinking water from municipal wells are involved. Environmental exposure matters in many neurodegenerative cases; we've seen that with early onset PD with 9/11 first responders.”
AI Interviews in Rome:
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Critical minerals scoreboard
“Most important is not who owns them. It's who refines them,” says Micheal Dunne. “China is No. 1 in all categories, except nickel. Other countries are mostly footnotes. USA does not even get an honorable mention.”
Recomended TV
Brassic on Netflix: A group of lads and petty thieves in a fictional small town in northern England is the perfect balance of lol comedy and pathos. Something I would normally look past, but I’m glad I didn’t. (Brassic is slang for broke).
Department Q on Netflix: A Scottish noir with a Slow Horses vibe. As good as everybody says it is.
Mountainhead on Neon: A group of billionaires meet up at an alpine retreat for a poker game during an international crisis. Succession’s Jesse Armstrong skewers the super-rich in this deliciously nasty send up peppered with cringey tech-bro banter and faux-intellectual debate. Stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef. The laughs come but the heady cocktail of power, capital and the manosphere also rings terrifyingly true.
Meat Pie Prices
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Thanks for the laughs Ana.
I’ve been thinking recently that we need some sort of alternate Kings Birthday Honours. Good on you for calling Hosking a wanker. But seriously he has gone well beyond your common and garden variety. He needs to be elevated to the Peerage of Wankers. A baron even.
I don’t know how you manage to make such engaging and entertaining reading with often such dire raw material.