Powderhorn

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"You're going to write about it, aren't you?" Ra asked as I got back into the car. It was a resigned tone rather than excited.

We ended up in the parking lot for some 20 minutes, as the first problem on her end was that she was ordering too many calories via the app.

She was going to cover my lunch, but as she had one of the boys in the car, that caloric limit needed to apply to them. I reluctantly download the app, and after navigating the labyrinthine process to order a fucking burger, when it comes time to check out, my only active card is not accepted by the app.

We're already there, so I go in. I try ordering exactly what I just had at the counter. Fuck the kiosk; if your app doesn't work, that about all I need to know about your tech stack. The cashier seemed surprised that McDonald's sells McDoubles and repeated my order back to me as a Quarter Pounder. An Abbot and Costello routine ensues, but at least the order was correct.

Meanwhile, back in the car, Ra has placed a second order to obviate the caloric limit, which, let's be reasonable, is absurd coming from the establishment it does. What if, just hypothetically, you're buying hamburders for an entire football team?

Needless to say, I deleted the app.

That's roughly four hours ago as I type this sentence (I have no idea how long this is going to turn out, but I have a week to cover, and it took this long to explain 20 minutes).

We're in Temple, Texas, where I've just spent two nights after five with my ex-wife in Killeen, but the destination is Austin this time ... thankfully, I park surprisingly close to the Atheist Community of Austin, which is her destination, so dropping me off was far less of a delay than it could have been (the McDonald's fiasco made her late to the lecture).

I will say, indoor plumbing and real meals for a full week was rather nice.

So as not to be redundant, the basic setup is this: We had a wild temperature swing forecast for last Saturday that I was trying to figure out how to mitigate when I got a text from my ex, to whom I'm now been doing monthly sojourns since December, saying she's unexpectedly free for the weekend.

The unusual thing on this trip was ... there wasn't really an end date. We eventually settled on Tuesday, but then Amazon double-charged her for an order that left her unable to cover my ride home until her check clears Thursday.

This opens up an unusual opportunity. Temple and Killeen are far closer together than Austin is to either, and Ra wanted me to come back and do another round of interviews with Mike, a former journalist in desperate need of donations for medical bills.

Ra saved half the cost, and my ex paid nothing, so, really, win-win.

So I settle in at her place and hang out in the garage with her husband so I can vape while he smokes. There may have been weed involved; I definitely cracked a beer.

Ra's husband, whom I'd met once before, is genuinely one of the more interesting people I've crossed paths with in years. Another one was who I was waiting on a ride to go see.

My first round with Mike was fascinating on the conversation front, but left me with no clear narrative on how to convince strangers to donate money to the cause. He got some heavy-hitters in journalism to donate for his last campaign and that well is dry.

I thought we had an angle with "longtime queer activist" (this is how he was sold to me at the start of the project), but he wants to leave that out. I fully respect that, but as I told Ra, who is high up in Temple Pride, that would have been an angle I can work with far easier than "grizzled veteran journalist suffers two brain hemorrhages and a stroke, ends up severely immunodeficient."

This time, I switch tacks. I bring a six-pack and just try to shoot the shit. It works.

We talk about his childhood (it wasn't pleasant) and his career (it was) more fully, and about my life -- to establish rapport. I've finally broken down the wall, and we're talking as equals.

But two hours in, he's due his pain meds and muscle relaxer, and I feel I've sort of expended his energy (he'd had physical therapy just before we arrived). And he's been meandering and incoherent frequently without those.

I text Ra for a pickup, and we all agree that I'll come back Friday so we can continue.

Putting me back in the garage with Ra's husband, with occasional cameos from Ra. The conversation flows for hours, as though we've been doing this for years. As the atheist seminar was his idea to attend, in addition to being a leftist anarchist, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

The funny thing is, he isn't a burner. I'm sitting in that garage solely because Ra and I are. He always has reasons behind surprises, and in this case, it's that the animist in him wants to commune with nature when camping, not be subjected to amped electronica and flashing lights.

I can't argue that point.

Speaking of communes, that quickly becomes a topic of discussion, as he's looking for acreage to start one -- right then, on his phone. I mention that I've had vegetable gardens and raised rabbits, and I sure as fuck know how to set up and maintain offgrid solar (though Ra's electrician goddaughter is still insisting she'd be much happier if she could fully go through my system).

I'm immediately invited to join.

The timeline is murky, as they have to sell their house in addition to finding the right patch of land. And he's doing due diligence, much preferring an unimproved site that already has a well and septic tank (these are oddly surprisingly frequent ... I guess people get that done and then run out of money?) and a decent forest canopy.

"Chickens," he says. "Rabbits are great, but that's going to get old for every meal."

Thus begins the tale of how I got my rabbit from a farm where they cohabitated with chickens, so this is clearly not going to be an issue.

The remainder of the evening is sociology, geopolitics, political theory, linguistics, the adventures of being homeless ... every time the topic veers somewhere new, both of us are ready to engage.

It was fantastic! I was able to go into my preferred register for vocabulary and still be understood without a single question as to what I was talking about. As much as I love my ex, she cannot provide such mental stimulation.

Things wind down, and the next morning, I'm up way too early, as I'm sleeping in the living room and they have two boys.

Turns out, Ra has to work today, so now I'm going to be in the garage until at least 5 p.m. The conversation proceeds apace, and we just chat when he's available (he's a stay-at-home dad to two special-needs kids).

Finally, it's time to head to Mike's. Thankfully, his prognostication is correct, and he's of sounder mind than yesterday. With yesterday's chat, I was just trying to establish rapport.

This time, it's an interview.

Much of what we talked about is in confidence, so I can't really spill the tea ahead of whatever we settle on for fundraising copy. Thankfully, Ra is handling the back end; I just need to write.

Suffice to say, I think I have enough to craft something decent. And, oh, this is actually a paid gig: $100 on delivery for maybe three or four grafs. That's the immediate one. There will be another that's much larger so he can go to one of the clinics that specializes in brain stuff (think Mayo).

Two prominent (I'm taking his word for it) local neurologists have said he still has a chance of full recovery with the right treatment, and he's been working on a book documenting the hell he's been through in the U.S. medical system. Oh, he also could use an editor.

At this point, I point him to Beehaw on his phone and pull up a random recent post, putting it to him: This is my writing style; does this work for you? Anything past "yes" would sound like narcissism, but he assented.

So I promised him, then Ra, that I'd have something ready by Monday at the latest. Her goddaughter is going to try to come by tomorrow.

Of course, I'd set myself a Monday deadline in that moment. When we talked last night about heading down to Austin, she said she wanted to be out of the house by 1 p.m. Then one of the boys started acting up, so her husband didn't end up coming along.

"Just for the record," I said at 1:03, "I had everything packed and ready to go at 12:59."

"By 1!" Ra said.

"And you said it to someone who works off deadline."

I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but there are significant opportunities here with people who, you know, actually follow through on plans, so my hopes aren't exactly at baseline.

This month I will conclude my tenure as the commissioner-general of Unrwa – the United Nations agency that has provided essential, public-like services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East for more than 75 years. As the world struggles to emerge from the quagmire of Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran threatens to engulf the entire region, I am profoundly concerned about the future of Palestinian refugees and the multilateral system at large.

Having endured more than two years of relentless physical, political and legal attacks, most fiercely in Palestine, Unrwa has reached breaking point. The risks to Palestinians’ rights and the stability of the region are immense.

In December 2023, amid the escalating brutality of the war in Gaza, I wrote to the president of the UN general assembly that in my 35 years of working in complex emergencies, I had never had cause to report the killing of 130 personnel, nor to predict the killing of many more. I did not imagine then that the number of colleagues killed would triple – the death toll is now more than 390 – or that so many others would sustain life-changing injuries, or be arbitrarily detained and tortured.

Hundreds of Unrwa premises in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The parliament of Israel adopted legislation to end the agency’s presence in occupied East Jerusalem, including by forcibly shutting schools and health clinics, and cutting off the supply of water and electricity to our premises. The Unrwa headquarters in East Jerusalem was seized, looted and set on fire, with senior Israeli officials celebrating the destruction on site and online. A deputy mayor of Jerusalem even threatened to “annihilate and kill all members of Unrwa”.

I'll just leave this here.

Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to deploy federal immigration agents to US airports on Monday if Democrats do not agree to measures aimed at strengthening security and immigration enforcement.

“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Airport security is currently handled by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), while ICE handles immigration enforcement. Both are under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). ICE has been a pillar of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, drawing criticism from Democrats, civil liberties advocates and immigration advocacy groups.

Trump added that ICE “will do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our country” and pointed to a “heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, who have totally destroyed, with the approval of a corrupt Governor, Attorney General, and Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, the once Great State of Minnesota”.

I hate even platforming his verbal diarrhea, but this is what we've ended up with.

One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.

The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.

Thousands of miles away in Ranchi, India, Sahil Tigga, a 22-year-old student, regularly earns money by letting Silencio, which crowdsources audio data for AI training, access his phone’s microphone to capture ambient city noise, such as inside a restaurant or traffic at a busy junction. He also uploads recordings of his voice. Sahil travels to capture unique settings, like hotel lobbies not yet documented on Silencio’s map. He earns over $100 a month doing this, enough to cover all his food expenses.

And in Chicago, Ramelio Hill, an 18-year-old welding apprentice, made a couple hundred dollars by selling his private phone chats with friends and family to Neon Mobile, a conversational AI training platform that pays $0.50 per minute. For Hill, the calculation was simple: he figured tech companies already capture so much of his private data, so he might as well get a cut of the profit.

These gig AI trainers – who upload everything from scenes around them to photos, videos and audio of themselves – are at the frontlines of a new global data gold rush. As Silicon Valley’s hunger for high-quality, human-grade data outpaces what can be scraped from the open internet, a thriving industry of data marketplaces has emerged to bridge the gap. From Cape Town to Chicago, thousands of people are now micro-licensing their biometric identities and intimate data to train the next generation of AI.

This ends well.

When Donald Trump revealed that Republican congressman Neal Dunn would have been “dead by June” if not for White House doctors who treated the representative’s reportedly terminal condition, many were shocked by his disclosure.

The president’s comments last week, which unfolded during a meandering presser with Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Kennedy Center leaders, came after Trump prodded the top politician for details on Dunn’s health.

The response from Johnson, who weeks ago reportedly told donors that Dunn might have a fatal health condition, suggested that he was taken aback by Trump’s comment. He responded: “OK, that wasn’t public, but yeah, OK. It was grim, that’s what I was going to say.”

Trump’s statement prompted criticism and even surprised some observers who have grown used to his shock-jock-like antics when it comes to other political figures. But Trump for years has bragged about his physical and mental vitality – and made fun of others’ physical conditions – despite what some have described as intense caginess about his own health, including a recent neck rash.

His statement about White House doctors also coincides with fallout from the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, resulting in surging healthcare costs for millions of Americans who could only dream of world-class care under the best of circumstances. And then there’s the matter of US political culture: what is America to make of a gossipy head of state with no filters?

I have some words, but they're not particularly pleasant.

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

“I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously broad—broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

Shy Girl, a horror novel by Mia Ballard, was one of those buzzy books that leapt from self-published prominence into full-on trade publication. Until yesterday, that is, when publisher Hachette pulled the book from the UK market and canceled plans to bring it to the US.

The move came after a New York Times investigation suggested that AI had been used in significant parts of the work.

Shy Girl was self-published in 2025 and quickly found an audience on social media. The novel follows a depressed, OCD woman named Gia who, down on her luck, encounters a “sugar daddy” who pays off her debts. All she has to do? Live as his literal pet. Eventually, of course, living like an animal makes her into an animal, and things apparently get nasty.

Creepy. And the prose? “I’m obsessed with the way Mia Ballard writes,” said one reviewer on Goodreads.

Not everyone thought the book was good, though, or even well-written. Another reviewer on the site called the book “absolute f—ing garbage. overwritten, repetitive, poorly executed, atrocious formatting. nothing to do with actual feminine rage and revenge.”

Just another domino.

This is admittedly somewhat redundant to the earlier post about the taskbar, but there's enough additional information that I find it worth posting.

If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?

That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the record several times since the start of the year to insist that Microsoft is committed to Windows 11’s quality, most recently in a post today titled “our commitment to Windows quality.” Windows 11 is an operating system that many people use but that few enthusiasts seem to love, either because of recent high-profile bugs or the steadily increasing flow of annoying add-ons, notifications, “helpful” “reminders,” and ads for other Microsoft products and services that coat most of the operating system’s virtual surfaces.

“Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows,” Davuluri wrote. “And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”

Today’s post at least shows Microsoft attempting to put its money where its mouth is, as it included a short list of specific changes the company will begin rolling out to Windows Insider Program testers between now and the end of April.

There’s a virus you may have never heard of before that is estimated to infect up to 90 percent of people and lurks quietly in your cells for life—but if it becomes activated, it will destroy your brain. If that’s not startling enough, researchers reported this week that there may be a new way for this virus to activate—one that affects up to 10 percent of adults worldwide.

The virus is the human polyomavirus 2, commonly called either the JC virus or John Cunningham virus, named after the poor patient from whom it was first isolated in 1971. It shows up in the urine and stool of infected people and spreads via the fecal-oral route. Many people are thought to be infected early in life, and blood testing surveys have suggested that 50–90 percent of adults have been exposed at some point.

Researchers hypothesize that the initial site of infection is the tonsils, or perhaps the gastrointestinal tract. But wherever it happens, that initial infection is asymptomatic. At that point, a person is infected with what’s called the archetype JC virus, which quietly sets up a persistent but utterly silent lifelong infection.

For the vast majority of people, that is all their JC virus infection will be—silent. But for an unlucky few, the JC virus will seemingly awaken, rearrange its genetic material, and morph into a brain-demolishing nightmare that causes a disease called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML.

The first six days of Donald Trump’s war against Iran cost a whopping $11.3 billion, according to a report from the Pentagon given to Congress earlier this month. The pricetag is expected to continue climbing — exponentially.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the Department of Defense will be seeking $200 billion in supplementary funding from Congress for the Iran war effort. The offensive is already exacting a toll on Americans at home. Thirteen service members have been killed with hundreds more injured, and the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has caused global oil prices to skyrocket, and is expected to affect other commodities such as fertilizers and medical-use chemicals.

The war has already left large swaths of Republicans feeling betrayed, after Trump campaigned on an anti-war, anti- interventionist, America First presidency. An open-ended quagmire costing billions of dollars runs directly counter to his supposed brand — especially as he and his administration have preached the need to cut back “wasteful spending” and reduce bloat in the federal government.

There are several scalpels left in the story, so ignore the shit editing.

Sohrab Faqiri spent Eid, the Muslim festival to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, looking for the grave of his brother, killed in a massive Pakistan airstrike on Kabul this week.

Pakistan’s bombardment campaign, on what it says is terrorist and military infrastructure in neighbouring Afghanistan, appeared to have gone catastrophically wrong. A rehabilitation centre for drug addicts was hit on Monday night, according to the United Nations and the Afghan authorities. The UN’s preliminary death toll is 143 people, while the Taliban administration puts the figure at more than 400 dead.

Faqiri’s brother, Qais, a tailor and father of a 10-year-old boy, was being treated for the last three months at the facility, called Omid or “Hope”. Faqiri rushed there after the airstrike, but could not find him among the survivors. He spent the next two days visiting hospitals in Kabul, but there was no sign of Qais. Then, by chance, he saw a video of a mass burial by the authorities of the airstrike victims and spotted his brother.

On Thursday – marked as Eid in Afghanistan – he went to the hillside graveyard on the edge of Kabul, where the burial took place. There, he found rows of stones planted along lines of upturned earth. But there were no names to identify any of the bodies.

“Worst of all is that his grave is not known to us,” Faqiri said, speaking at the cemetery, bursting into tears. “This is the saddest moment, for a person on Eid day to search for the body of his brother.” He has not had the heart yet to tell their mother.