Writes about culture, tech, waste, skyscrapers | @TheAtlantic, @newrepublic, @thebafflermag | Host of Talking Trash Podcast

CHI ➡️ NYC ➡️ BAL
Joined September 2010
Some news! For the past year, I've been building a podcast 🎙️ It's called TALKING TRASH. Episode 1 just went live.
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Matt King retweeted
In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web. motherjones.com/environment/…
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Matt King retweeted
Our reporters @odonnell_jm & @eileenguo spent the past 15 months investigating deaths along the virtual wall of the southern border. Their investigation reveals that a humanitarian crisis at the border has unfolded in view of the government’s own cameras technologyreview.com/2026/09…
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Matt King retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
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Hello friends, it's been awhile as I worked on my memoir & taught memoir writing. Today I'm thrilled to share the PW review of "The River Drowns the Able Swimmer"! Check it out ! publishersweekly.com/9781646…
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Matt King retweeted
“business schools don’t just reflect our economic system — they actively manufacture its priorities and normalize its harms, training the future leaders who will design and defend the structures driving our overlapping global crises” nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opini…
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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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New piece in @techreview: when startups die, their Slack messages, emails, and code bases increasingly have a new afterlife — as training data for AI companies. technologyreview.com/2026/10…
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This is 100% what’s happening in Maryland, especially in the state house, where new press rules seem to appear out of thin air: poynter.org/reporting-editin…
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Matt King retweeted
some of us watched Girls from the beginning and knew it was a work of genius the whole time 🤷‍♀️
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Matt King retweeted
Palantir's merch feels like the endpoint in streetwear's evolution, which started with young kids in urban areas — mostly ethnic minorities from low-income families — creating their own style from the ground up. Over time, that aesthetic was co-opted by luxury brands seeking "authenticity." And now, by a surveillance company seeking cultural capital. Streetwear used to be an aesthetic defined by the ground-up by people were disempowered in political and economic life, but engaged in actual street culture. Now it's an aesthetic dictated from the top down by giant corporations with no conenction to such cultures. And used by political and economic elites who want to appear as outsiders.
be courageous because cowardice kills [10.15.2026 • 12pm EST • Palantir Store]
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What College Football program played here from 1926-2023
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New piece in @techreview: when startups die, their Slack messages, emails, and code bases increasingly have a new afterlife — as training data for AI companies. technologyreview.com/2026/10…
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“Startup death” is a topic I’ve been digging into this year. Failure is the most likely outcome for any business, but that fact — and the grief that comes with it — remains taboo in tech. And until recently, there has hardly been the technical or emotional support infrastructure.
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Grateful to the founders, operators, and legal experts who have been generous with their time in talking me through it. More to come on this topic, and if you or someone you know has experience to share, I'd love to connect.
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WIRED has partnered with Neal Agarwal of Neal.fun to create a visualization of Elon Musk’s massive wealth. Here’s how it came together. buff.ly/WIOEoGE
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there is no better feeling on earth than publishing a story and closing all the tabs you had open when reporting it
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Sorry, I love promo. Have these screenshots in my phone already so here are four amazing, sequential grafs from this incredible piece:
Spent a few weeks earlier this year roaming a Hollywood almost entirely reoriented around the production of “microdramas,” which are kind of like soap operas except they’re short and completely demented and optimized for your phone. Started as one kind of sad story and ended as another, differently sad kind of story. You can read it now in @NYTmag nytimes.com/2026/10/06/magaz…
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