Author, researcher. Pop culture, science, & history. Bylines @esquire, @NewRepublic, @CNN, @Slate, etc. My new book, "Jimmy," about James Dean out now!

Delmar, New York
Joined February 2011
NewsNation is not a serious news outlet. It is astonishing though that they will platform any lunatic who appears on Ancient Aliens. Nexstar, which owns the channel and also employs George Knapp, should be ashamed, but will never be.
In this week's "Unreported": Host @Producer_Meagan and @TimothyAlberino sit down for Part 2 of their conversation about modern-day claims of giants, alleged cover-ups by the Smithsonian and Sardinia's "tombs of giants." Premiering now: youtu.be/bmy2-D8wwjw
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Not sure I'm understanding the problem here. Harry Reid was well-known as a believer who was enmeshed with the very people who ghostwrote the memo and were also believers. As we have also seen, none of them could tell industrial waste from UFO spare parts. – at Delmar, NY
Skeptics must explain how/why Reid’s highly unusual SAP request aligns perfectly with the Stratton/Elizondo/Grusch/Lacatski/Puthoff/Davis narrative of a (Ryder-proposed) transfer of a retrieved UAP from Lockheed to AAWSAP. @michaelshermer @MiddleOfMayhem @JasonColavito @MickWest
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The most we can say for certain is that the story of the transfer request--though not of *what* that included--was circulating among the Puthoff/Elizondo circle a decade later but was not widespread, as BAASS's Mike Gold had not heard of it. – at Delmar, NY
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It feels like there is something symbolic about winning an award and landing a book deal for writing about dudes jerking off. I guess it says something about our time, but I'm not sure if it says more about dudes, publishing, or reading. – at Delmar, NY
From last night’s Breaker: Daniel Kolitz, whose Harper’s piece “The Goon Squad” won a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, has landed a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to write “GOONWORLD.” breakermedia.com/p/the-infor…
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Is this what they call getting high off your own supply? – at Delmar, NY
Man some of the stuff in Anthropic's IPO S-1 is wild... 'sufficiently advanced systems could discover methods of transmitting information, matter or autonomous systems backward in time, potentially allowing future AI systems to influence events preceding their own creation.'
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The quoted text and screenshot are not from Anthropic's S-1; media reviews of the confidential filing describe existential risks and model behaviors like resisting shutdown but not time travel, and no public S-1 has been filed on EDGAR. theverge.com/ai-artificial-… iposcouter.com/anthropic-ipo-…
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Turns out the tweet was a hoax. – at Delmar, NY
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I'm not sure today's Final Jeopardy clue was entirely fair since the geographical feature in question hasn't existed since 2003. – at Delmar, NY
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It's picture day this week at my son's school, and in addition to the overpriced photos, the photographer now adds a 5% "convenience fee" for ordering them. – at Delmar, NY
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Some scam service has gotten hold of my personal (not publicly available) phone number and figured out it belongs to me, and now I get daily solicitation texts and phone calls wanting to talk about one of my books and offering media and publicity services for an "investment" fee. – at Delmar, NY
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They all want to talk about the same book from 2020, which is weird, but also strongly suggests where the information leak came from. – at Delmar, NY
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Nobody fact checks anymore. If something is written in a book, journalists take it as vetted and true, but in truth, most nonfiction has very little fact checking to start with--and Stratton's book is officially a memoir, which typically involves no fact checking at all. – at Delmar, NY
Popular Mechanics claims Jay Stratton led a classified mission using nuclear submarines to lure in UAP — but the article never verified that. “It was an efficient expedition and our strategy was built on our educated opinion that UAP were drawn to nuclear energy. Our bait ****could**** be a nuclear submarine. Its reactor running hot ****would**** create a huge nuclear signature, and it ****would**** suffice as a pre-selected area within US waters known for past UAP activity. The goal, exploit a decades-old pattern. Draw a UAP close enough to monitor, track, or if possible, capture or recover.” Important notes: - Let’s start with the mentioning of a classified operation as sensitive as U.S. nuclear submarines being used. This would not be possible to mention in Jay Stratton’s (@jaystratton) book as he would have had to have gone through the DOPSR process. Any mention of classified material, operations, or information that could lead to the confirmation of operations, missions, tactics, strategy, etc. would be caught and removed, potentially reported as well. If the book mentions it and it was allowed, that gives more credibility to the claim being not classified, therefore not factual. - Then there is the notion that someone like Stratton, which was the supposed “Director” of of previous task force(s) that investigated UAP, would be the decision maker on putting extremely sensitive assets like nuclear submarines in mission with Navy personnel onboard, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars just to summon in UAP (aka drones,satellites, and other ISR capabilities), putting sensitive capabilities in the views of adversary ISR assets to track, monitor, and examine the submarines capabilities and SOPs, is EXTREMELY unlikely. This isn’t how military operations work. You don’t use sensitive systems such as nuclear submarines as bait, risking the uncovering of technological capabilities and movements of such assets. - This article, written by Elizabeth Rayne, wouldn’t be able to verify any of Stratton’s claims and it’s just nothing more than a highlight reel (if you call it that) of unverifiable claims made by Stratton in his book, again which is cleared by DOPSR (not an authority of factual information; just a watchdog to ensure no classified information is leaked), and like Stratton, can’t be taken serious.
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Once again, we have a problem because Disclosure advocates use Hal Puthoff's eccentric idea that "reverse engineering" means "imagining how something could work if it existed," while everyone else takes it to mean "taking apart a UFO to understand its specs." – at Delmar, NY
Jay Stratton says during AAWSAP they discovered a 'legacy program' reverse engineering UFOs run by the Air Force, CIA, DoE, and defense contractors. He's not lying but he's also not really trying to expose it. I am.
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Most of the claims about a "legacy program" and "reverse engineering" come down to this linguistic problem. Yes, there were people in the government who tried to imagine how to build tech to mimic their fantasies about UFO flight capabilities. No, they did not disassemble UFOs. – at Delmar, NY
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Detective Comics, Halloween 1975 (cover date January 1976): Batman encounters his first vampire. – at Delmar, NY
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In 2023, I reviewed Nicholas Binge's novel "Ascension" and called it "a derivative remix of familiar tropes, married to paper-thin characters." Hollywood says that kind of writing is just what they're looking for, paying him millions to adapt his books. msn.com/en-us/entertainment/… – at Delmar, NY
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Binge's whole schtick is to write derivative stories that remix two or more well-known works into a passable pastiche. It's telling that Hollywood's new golden boy writer is basically producing instant remakes. – at Delmar, NY
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Do you really trust them to define what counts as "the public benefit"? – at Delmar, NY
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion. In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding. In the post below, we share more details about our new fund. anthropic.com/news/public-be…
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Leaving aside the paternalistic tone of suggesting most people need a corporation to control their lives (which wasn't the case for most of human history), he's really advocating for socialization and social routines, which corporations took away by killing third places. – at Delmar, NY
Replying to @_MichaelBooth_
Once a month sounds annoying and without benefits. The point is that you should be expected to go in basically every day and structure your whole life around this expectation.
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It's kind of wild for a journalist frame a profile as an apology for someone choosing an "interesting" career that doesn't maximize profit, unless of course you happen to be in a family of elite journalists at the most prestigious and most lucrative magazines in the world. – at Delmar, NY
Somehow, in certain quarters, it has come to be seen as a personal failing to devote one’s life to improving the world around you. It isn’t “downwardly mobile” to choose, after college, to be a teacher, a city councilor or an artist. It’s just a different kind of ambition.
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It's such an odd framing, and one that smacks of coastal elites. I don't think you'd see the same framing in a less tony publication that would expect to count the working class and middle class among its core readers. – at Delmar, NY
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