"With subtitles on, I find myself being able to quickly gather what one character has said, look down at my phone, react to a message..."

"... then look up before that character has even finished their line. The viewing experience thus becomes multifaceted and efficient. The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show....  And social media itself has encouraged the use of subtitles across the board. It is now a given that most creators add text captions to their videos – without the option to turn them off.... This isn’t simply a trend but a feature anchored in the algorithm itself. Text captions, rather than dialogue, encourage the video to crop up in the TikTok search engine.... It began as an accessibility improvement, but the rapidity with which it has caught on suggests it’s business-oriented and crucial to getting that sweet algorithm boost. The fact that 85% of social media visual content is now watched on mute... coupled with the ease with which AI can generate subtitles without the need for human transcription, means we’re living in a subtitled world – one that is often poorly translated, low-quality and error-ridden...."

Writes Isabel Brooks, in "Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why" (The Guardian).

"I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel.... And I do give perspective to the precedent. But… the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition..."

"... and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.... I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.... [If it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided."

Said Clarence Thomas, quoted in "Clarence Thomas says precedent might not determine cases on upcoming supreme court docket/The court is expected to weigh in next session on same-sex marriage, which it legalized in 2015" (The Guardian).

I picture him gesturing at the shelves of case reports and scoffing These are full of things somebody dreamt up and others just went along with.

That calls an old anecdote up in my mind — a distant memory. What was it? Who was the judge? I'm seeing that it was Learned Hand, the famous 2d Circuit judge. He supposedly said: "The reports are full of cases that were wrongly decided, and the only way to avoid making a fool of yourself is to be humble about it."

"Trump’s brand of politics feeds on the lie that multicultural cities are frightening and chaotic. If he follows through on his threats to deploy National Guard troops..."

"... to Portland, it won’t be for the benefit of the people who call the city home. The intent will be to incite a spectacle of chaos, manufacturing a crisis to retroactively justify the belief that Democrat-run cities are in need of forceful takeover. The provocation will be the point. Don’t fall for it. The Portland of right-wing imagination is a city engulfed by flames and violence, a vivid warning of what will befall other places if they vote for Democrats. 'Unimaginably bad things would happen to America' if Biden were elected, Trump posted in 2020, specifically citing the 'anarchy' of Portland.... The reality is that the problems facing Portland and other cities are nothing that can’t be addressed through normal governance, and that these are on the whole vibrant and quite pleasant places to live. 'Real America' can mean things like biking to get a vegan ube latte from a purple-haired barista, and if you’d like a taste of what makes America truly great, you can find it in a coffee shop—in Portland, certainly, and probably a short ride from where you live."

Writes Jacob Grier, in "100 Cups of Coffee in a City on Fire/President Trump keeps saying Portland is an anarchic hellscape in need of the National Guard. With the help of my bike and a serious caffeine addiction, I set out to discover the truth" (Slate).

It's nice to hear progressives paying respect to the virtues of federalism.

And what's ube? It's just hair-colored yam, I mean, purple yam. I take it you just buy the yam extract — commission earned — and mix it into your milky — vegan milky — coffee.

"What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who..."

"... either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.... The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else."

Writes Nate Silver, purporting to read the collective mind of Democrats, in "Is America ready for a gay president? Kamala Harris and a subscriber have questions about Mayor Pete, and I have annoyingly nuanced answers."

I've already blogged about what Harris said in her book about not picking Pete for VP — here, 10 days ago — and I don't want to redo that. I'm blogging Silver's piece because of the idea of "Demthink" and I liked these examples of how wrong it can go:

"The MAHA movement’s war on glyphosate is part of a broader war on modern farming... It reflects a fantasy of agricultural purity..."

"... where less intensive food production can heal the land and reverse climate change, even though less intensive farms that make less food per acre need more acres and more deforestation to make the same amount of food. Many liberals repulsed by Mr. Kennedy’s unscientific bias against vaccines and Tylenol share his unscientific bias against agri-chemicals, genetically modified organisms and industrial agriculture.... This is a scientific truism that MAHA misses: The dose makes the poison. You shouldn’t swallow an entire bottle of Tylenol, but it’s a safe product, and it would take a higher dose of glyphosate than Tylenol to kill someone. Some rats might — might! — have gotten sick from ingesting glyphosate, but the proportion of it in their diets was almost certainly thousands and maybe millions of times higher than the proportion in yours. In any case, it’s much less damaging than the alternatives...."

From "Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really" (NYT).

There's an interesting political reshuffling going on here. I think there are a lot of people who are devoted to the improvement of American food who are going to feel slighted by the accusation that they're caught in a "fantasy of agricultural purity" and too dumb to understand the old saw "The dose makes the poison." Don't focus on what may have happened to some rats. Let the scientists balance the good and the bad and tell you the conclusion: Roundup is fine. Now, shut up and resume microdosing. 

This is another way Democrats can drive its natural constituents into the arms of Republicans. They could have had Kennedy on their side. They didn't want him. 

"If Congress fails to fund the government next week, the White House is preparing for a shutdown that would reflect the purest version of President Donald Trump’s vision for the federal government..."

"... guided by White House budget director Russell Vought, an architect of the controversial Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term. Federal funds expire when the fiscal year ends Tuesday night, and Congress appears deadlocked over a stopgap measure that would keep agencies online for seven weeks while long-term negotiations continue. Under the Vought plan, the only agencies that would remain operating apace are those that received money in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the $4.1 trillion tax and immigration package that Congress passed in July. The Defense and Homeland Security departments were the main beneficiaries.The result, both during and potentially after a shutdown, could be a federal government dramatically reoriented to defense, immigration and law enforcement — and not much else...."

I'm reading "Trump’s shutdown plans: Mass layoffs, deregulation, military deployments/The White House’s call for mass layoffs in a looming shutdown tracks with past administration efforts to defang much of the federal government" (WaPo)(gift link).

Is this something like a return to DOGE? DOGE had "Musk’s high-visibility 'move fast and break things' ethos. But Vought, people in and around the administration say, has been quietly potent, drawing on four years out of government to surgically plan measures that overhaul the executive branch and Trump’s power."

So Vought is low-visibility, move slow, and wait for Congress to break everything, then put it together in the way you've been quietly calculating for decades.