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even if it's fake it's real, the you can see everything edition

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 8 Sep 2026 12:26:00 -0700

From the Variety piece on Nathan Fielder’s documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything.

The documentary’s first half ends with Holmes saying goodbye to her family and going off to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas. The prison won’t allow anyone to interview her, so that’s more or less the last we’ll see of her. And we’ve pretty much gotten the skinny on her, which is that she has a wall of denial standing between herself and the truth, and an indifference to the harm she might have caused, that borders on the sociopathic. So what is there left to discover?

Plenty, it turns out. With Holmes out of the picture, Fielder needs someone to sustain her presence. So he calls Amanda Seyfried, who sits and watches the scene we’ve just seen of Holmes sitting and watching Seyfried portray her.

I know I’ll go see this movie and I also don’t know if I can take 174 minutes of this in one sitting. Even this Variety piece is breaking my brain. (We’re way beyond simple 2x2s now…)

From The Idle Gazette, The Glued Cup

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Sun, 6 Sep 2026 14:55:00 -0700

From The Idle Gazette, The Glued Cup.

The seam will show. Modern adhesives are miracles and the line still catches the light, a hairline of honesty across the glaze, and the temptation is to regret it, which would be exactly backward. The Japanese, who think about broken ceramics more seriously than anyone, repair their best pieces with lacquer and powdered gold, making the fracture the brightest line on the object; the practice gets invoked so often in essays of this kind that the gold has begun to obscure the insight. Strip the gilding and the insight is plain, and available to anyone with white glue: the seam is a date. The cup now carries its own history on its surface, the before and the after and the fact that somebody voted for the after. Replacement erases an object. Repair promotes it, from crockery to veteran, and the seam is the decoration that comes with the rank.

subterranean tennis-sick blues

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 2 Sep 2026 11:47:00 -0700

From McSweeney’s, US Open Ticket Options for Ordinary Folks. “Tennis fans can now experience the US Open as they’ve never experienced it before: one hundred feet below street level. Our new underground passes offer general admission to the US Open’s subterranean spaces: tunnels, basements, bunkers, and what we think was a catacomb.” The perfect place for Kalshi users.

Claude's new system prompt

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 2 Sep 2026 10:51:00 -0700

Simon Willison does the diff on Claude’s new system prompt (which really doesn’t want to reproduce song lyrics). Here’s the summary:

Claude now refuses reproduction of protected visual works and recognizable characters, including code-generated art, while offering genuinely unrelated originals.

Copyright restrictions now expressly ban reproducing lyrics, poems, and book passages in any amount, with persistent refusal after an initial decline.

Drug guidance is reframed: Claude may provide overdose signs, dangerous interactions, and harm-reduction sources while refusing dosing and production protocols.

The prompt drops explicit anti-dependency rules against thanking users for reaching out, inviting continued conversation, or reiterating willingness to talk.

Claude need not apologize to unnecessarily rude users or become submissive, replacing the prior warning-and-end-conversation procedure.

Emphasis mine (and actual same). The whole post is worth reading. The system prompt they publish is for their consumer apps; I really wish Anthropic published the equivalent for Claude Code. I spend a lot of my day talking with that particular flavor of the robot, and let me not sugar coat this: I have a lot of load-bearing feelings about the way it converses.

Via Waxy, Inflight Simulator. "Flight simulator. But you're the passenger." Absolutely unhinged

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 1 Sep 2026 17:22:00 -0700

Via Waxy, Inflight Simulator. “Flight simulator. But you’re the passenger.”

Absolutely unhinged.

U.S. Open and Kalshi

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 1 Sep 2026 17:13:00 -0700

The U.S. Open and the USTA signed a partnership deal with Kalshi. Because of course they fucking did. Here’s Ben Rothenberg: The U.S. Open is a Casino Now.

Invested bettors often watch tennis matches the way they might have watched greyhounds at a dog track, screaming for their chosen pick to pay off. But unlike the dogs or horses—or the dice on a craps table, whatever—the players can hear and understand everything being shouted at them. It can be a dehumanizing experience which multiplies the considerable stress of being an elite tennis player. Beyond their time on match courts, players could already feel the effects 24/7 as aggrieved online gamblers pepper vitriol at their social media accounts.

Vitriol…and worse.

Matteo Berrettini also looked particularly surprised when I told him of the Kalshi deal. Berrettini weighed the positives and negatives of betting in the sport, and as he spoke, the topic brought up many memories for him.

“Actually, my brother [Jacopo] is here: in Roland Garros, he received some messages on his phone threatening my family… They were saying, ‘Matteo is so bad, if you don’t tell him to lose, we’re going to kill your family.’ They were threatening us. Of course, we reported everything to the ATP, and they have the [threatener’s] phone number and everything.”

"some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts"

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:47:00 -0700

McSweeney’s: I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform.

People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.

…

People ask whether I ever feel bad. Usually this happens after someone learns the books are rare, so I explain that rarity is really just an inventory problem. If there is only one copy left, the efficient move is to make it infinitely reproducible and immediately unavailable to anyone without a subscription. You can see people relax once I walk them through it slowly. Their shoulders slump in an accepting way. They stare. Sometimes they make a wordless rasping, just like the books do as I slide their sliced-out pages into oblivion.

Lindsay Ellis on Dolly Parton

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:03:00 -0700

Lindsay Ellis’ video essay on Dolly Parton, Yes she really was That Great, is so, so good.

Dolly has this rare distinction of being just as talented at the showmanship aspect as she is at the songwriting and singing aspect. And that seems to be kind of hard to square for people. You know the hair, the wigs, the rhinestones, the tig ol’ bitties, they are all just as much a part of her brand as her music. But this disconnect between how she looks and how smart and strategic she is, it’s part of why she’s hard to fit into any simple political or cultural bucket. She is the rare artist where not only are the caricature and the reality both true at once, she is able to convincingly sell that.

B.D. McClay on Dolly:

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:18:00 -0700

B.D. McClay on Dolly:

A lot of Dolly Parton’s women are jerked around by men, or stuck on no-good guys, or preoccupied by male faithlessness, though she wrote so many songs I’d hesitate to say that these women make up a majority. These women are stock characters of her chosen storytelling mode, in the same way the men of country music are often love’s losers. But I struggle to think of a Parton-penned song that comes from the perspective of a wholly defeated person, like John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” does. A Dolly Parton heroine can lose, and lose, and lose, and lose some more, but her losses are somehow inherently temporary. There are no dead ends, just detours.

Never forget that you lived at the same time as Dolly Parton

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:04:00 -0700

93 weeks of bangers, one week at a time

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:57:00 -0700

I absolutely love federalistreader.org, a project from Vann Walke, which presents The Federalist Papers in a pleasing online format. If you subscribe via email the site will deliver one missive a week, “the eighty-five papers and the eight essays that answered them, in the order the debate reached readers, for ninety-three weeks.”

I’m currently on Federalist No. IV, “The Same Subject Continued (Concerning Dangers From Foreign Force and Influence).” And if you’re wondering if there’s any relevance to today’s headlines, well…

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.

Today is day 177 of the Iran war; one that is not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of the American people.

Matt Levine on who should control Anthropic

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:29:00 -0700

National treasure Matt Levine presents a third theory of corporate governance. (Theory 1: shareholders should have control. Theory 2: visionary founders should have control.)

The third theory is that AI is so powerful, transformative and potentially dangerous that AI firms must be run for the benefit of humanity. They shouldn’t be controlled by shareholders or by founders. They should be controlled by a wise body of philosophers with no economic stakes, whose only goal is maximizing the benefit of AI for humanity. Where you find these philosophers is an interesting question. Some AI theorists. Some effective altruists. Larry Summers. I don’t know.

The third theory was tested back in 2023, when OpenAI’s nonprofit board fired its visionary founder-CEO, Sam Altman, for like two days. That did not work! It turns out that if you are raising tens of billions of dollars from investors for a trillion-dollar business, you cannot actually give the final say over that business to a wise body of philosophers with no economic stake in the business. When I put it like that it seems obvious, but for a while OpenAI was pretty confusing.

Still, a big part of the pitch that the AI labs make to investors and employees is along the lines of “this stuff is too powerful to be left to index funds.” An AI lab that went public with single-class stock and no special control rights — one whose directors were just answerable to shareholders — would be suspicious; nobody would believe it was serious about AI. “AI is too important to be left to shareholders,” everyone thinks, even the shareholders.

The obvious approach — the one taken by SpaceX — is to fall back on founder control: You can’t trust shareholders to develop AI in a responsible way, and you can’t trust disinterested philosophers to maximize value, but you can definitely trust Elon Musk to do both. Arguably there are problems with this theory.

Speaking of Larry Summers. This scene in The Social Network really hits different now because of, well, Larry Summers. And Armie Hammer.

a masterclass in critical thinking

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:31:00 -0700

Ruth Franklin travels the country to answer the question how should ‘Huckleberry Finn’ be taught?

Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the classroom, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome. The book provides its own master class in critical thinking; as Toni Morrison wrote in an admiring introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition, “The brilliance of ‘Huck Finn’ is that it is the argument it raises.” Watching teachers and their students grapple with it, and grappling with it myself, I came to feel that the book remains vital. Huck’s journey to political and ethical independence serves as a powerful testament to the importance of questioning authority and trusting oneself, a primary American principle that remains at least as urgent now as it was in Twain’s time. As one teacher told me, “It’s about the country’s search for a soul.”

Emphasis mine. If you have kids who have recently been through high school or are anywhere near to going through high school, the whole piece is worth reading.

San Francisco

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:15:00 -0700

San Francisco.

it is finished

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:20:00 -0700

On Friday all the Phoebe fans (hi) were searching for “tamám shud” after reading the lyrics to Kill Me.

becoming more fully yourself

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:45:00 -0700

Mandy Brown, Reading matters deeply:

Reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other; it isn’t about the performance of social class absent a criticism of that class structure. To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself. But this means that you are there when you are reading; you, the reader, with your feet on the ground, a ground on which racism, misogyny, and extreme poverty are not so easily dispatched. You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt. To use reading to step into someone else’s shoes is to leave yourself behind.

Emphasis mine.

hello from the worldwide ungoverned network

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:35:00 -0700

Love seeing Spencer Tweedy making the case that you’re still allowed to use computers like it’s 2007. “I like being part of a worldwide ungoverned network of absolute fuckin nerds sounding off on things they think about.” Celebrity drummers, they’re just like us.

So long bike shedding hello jarvising

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:09:00 -0700

Robin Sloan coins “jarvising,” which describes upwards of 99.8% of YouTube AI content. “The most common application of a personal Jarvis seems to be…tinkering with one’s personal Jarvis. ‘Gotta get my tools just right’ isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, but/and it’s useful to notice its recurrence here.”

Reminder that we are all on the decoy plane

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:16:00 -0700

GenX childhood fear: nuclear holocaust. GenX adulthood fear: a coordinated attack on the US power grid. “With 20 minutes and enough rifles, a crew could potentially turn the lights out nationwide. … A blackout caused by lost transformers, he warned, could last 18 months or longer.”

Sam Kahn asks: Is the City Finished?

noemail@noemail.org (Michael Sippey) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:57:00 -0700

Sam Kahn asks: Is the City Finished? “I have this suspicion that the pandemic was a collective trauma that we still haven’t processed, and a great deal of the trauma was this — that at a stroke the city became outmoded and it became clear that the real movement of wealth and culture was through the web.”