Life and Times of Ogn Dulk

Vivek Ramaswamy Is Uninvited From My Sleepover 100+The Atlantic by David Brooks / Dec 30, 2024 at 12:54 PM//keep unread//hide I could have been a tech entrepreneur, but my parents let me go to sleepovers. I could have been a billionaire, but I used to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. I could have been Vivek Ramaswamy, if not for the ways I’ve been corrupted by the mediocrity of American culture. I’m sad when I contemplate my lazy, pathetic, non-Ramaswamy life. These ruminations were triggered by a statement that Ramaswamy, the noted cultural critic, made on X on Thursday. He was explaining why tech companies prefer to hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers instead of native-born American ones: It has to do with the utter mediocrity of American culture. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the Valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he observed. Then he laid out his vision of how America needs to change: “More ...

10 Stunning Things We Learned From Trump’s Time Interview Portrait of Margaret Hartmann By Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012 President-elect Donald Trump rings the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after being named 2024 “Person of the Year” by Time. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Time magazine has named Donald Trump 2024 “Person of the Year,” finally giving the president-elect some much-needed attention. This is a big deal for Trump, who has a long-standing, retro obsession with the magazine: He’s previously lied about how often he’s been on Time’s cover, put himself on fake covers displayed in his golf clubs, and lashed out at Taylor Swift when she won “Person of the Year” in 2023. The Trump Time interview is also a big deal for the American people. Sure, after years of campaigning, other major post-election interviews, and constant social-media updates, most of us are pretty clear on Trump’s views. Bu...

Crypto’s Legacy Is Finally Clear The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel / Dec 11, 2024 at 9:33 AM//keep unread//hide For years, crypto skeptics have asked, What is this for? And for years, boosters have struggled to offer up a satisfactory answer. They argue that the blockchain—the technology upon which cryptocurrencies and other such applications are built—is itself a genius technological invention, an elegant mechanism for documenting ownership online and fostering digital community. Or they say that it is a foundation on which to build and fund a third, hyperfinancialized iteration of the internet where you don’t need human intermediaries to buy a cartoon image of an ape for $3.4 million. Then there are the currencies themselves: bitcoin and ether and the endless series of memecoins and start-up tokens. These are largely volatile, speculative assets that some people trade, shitpost about, use to store value, and, sometimes, get incredibly rich or go bankrupt from. They are also infamousl...

The Medicare Advantage trap: What they don’t tell you 300+Alternet.org by Thom Hartmann / Dec 6, 2024 at 4:35 AM//keep unread//hide Feedly AI found 3 Companies View All You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc. The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year. If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover. Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what ...

Conservatives Won’t Like What X Could Become The Atlantic by Ali Breland / Nov 23, 2024 at 5:11 AM//keep unread//hide Feedly AI found 2 Companies View All Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse. But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these use...

Here’s How We Know RFK Jr. Is Wrong About Vaccines 36The Atlantic by Sarah Zhang / Nov 19, 2024 at 8:42 AM//keep unread//hide When I was taking German in college in the early years of this millennium, I once stumbled upon a word that appeared foreign even when translated into English: Diphtherie, or diphtheria. “What’s diphtheria?” I wondered, having never encountered a single soul afflicted by this disease. Diphtheria, once known as the “strangling angel,” was a leading killer of children into the early 20th century. The bacterial infection destroys the lining of the throat, forming a layer of dead, leathery tissue that can cause death by suffocation. The disease left no corner of society untouched: Diphtheria killed Queen Victoria’s daughter, and the children of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and Cleveland. Parents used to speak of their first and second families, an elderly woman in Ottawa recalled, because diphtheria had swept through and all their children died. Today, diphtheria...

Don’t Give Up on America The Atlantic by Arash Azizi / Nov 8, 2024 at 5:39 AM//keep unread//hide Is this article about Immigration? Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness. But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or expl...

This Is a Test The Atlantic by David A. Graham / Nov 5, 2024 at 5:12 AM//keep unread//hide This is an election about elections. One of the two leading candidates in the race, Donald Trump, has not only demonstrated a long-running skepticism of rule of law; he is also the only president in American history to attempt to remain in office after losing an election. This election is a test: Can the American public resoundingly reject a man who has not merely been a chaotic extremist but has also attacked the American system of republican government itself? Less than four years ago, this question would have seemed preposterous—not because Trump’s antidemocratic impulses were any secret, but because they seemed to have ended his career. Trump summoned supporters to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress was set to certify the election’s results. Then he instigated an assault on the Capitol, during which insurrectionists waged hand-to-hand combat against law-enforcement ...

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is 81The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel / Oct 10, 2024 at 5:30 PM//keep unread//hide https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/ View All The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure ma...

Politics / October 10, 2024 A Lesson in Basic Civics for People Who Stubbornly Defend the Electoral College https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-electoral-college-is-bad/ All the problems with all the reasons some people claim the Electoral College is a good thing. Elie Mystal Share Attendees at the 2024 Republican National Convention look at a map of the US Electoral College. Attendees at the 2024 Republican National Convention look at a map of the US Electoral College. (Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images) Recently, I was doomscrolling Twitter, reading the Republican-aligned election polls Elon Musk forces into my feed in an effort to make me die from alcohol poisoning. I decided to express my rage (which is the only thing Twitter is good for anymore) at the silent enemy of democracy in this and every election: the Electoral College. Here is what I tweeted: As you can see, the thing has 3.8 million views (so far) and generated 13,000 comments. Most peopl...