New York City before the skyscrapers--an aerial view of Manhattan in 1931.
Jason Colavito
48.4K posts
Author, researcher. Pop culture, science, & history. Bylines @esquire, @NewRepublic, @CNN, @Slate, etc. My new book, "Jimmy," about James Dean out now!
- A client informed me that he will no longer pay me to write content for his website because A.I. can write it for free, but he wants to pay me a fraction of my usual rate to "rewrite it" in different words so it can pass Google's A.I. detection screening.
- Replying to @JasonColavitoThis is the same A.I. that the assholes in charge trained on my writing, since it spits back lightly rewritten versions of my own words.
- Replying to @CheckmiteIn his mind, it means I am getting better value by getting money for "easier" work, so in theory I'd make it up in volume. Businesspeople don't understand how writing works. They see it as words per minute.
- Listening to Bill Maher talk with Megyn Kelly and Ezra Klein makes a good case that one of the biggest problems with our political discourse is mistaking being on TV for being insightful or thoughtful or knowledgeable.
- Replying to @aribenderskyI told him that rewriting it is still writing, so it will still cost the same as a full edit/rewrite of human-generated text (which I also do). He wasn't too happy about that but seems to think that A.I. generates more perfect (i.e. generic) text than humans.
- I hope when the Supreme Court conservatives go out to eat, every restaurant in D.C. turns them away and tells them that serving judges is against their religion (Matthew 7:1-2).
- Forbidden from saying the word "gay," a Florida teen gives a graduation speech about the struggles of curly-haired youth in Florida's climate of humidity. Apparently we are at the "malicious compliance" stage of political oppression. msn.com/en-us/news/us/โฆ
- Replying to @JasonColavitoApparently I need to spell this out because everyone online is pedantically literal: As I assumed was obvious, this is before skyscrapers took over Manhattan, not before any were built. You can see the Empire State Building in the photo, for Pete's sake. Don't be so literal.
- The publishing figures for 2022 were rather depressing. In a country of 332 million people, only 28 books out of ~300,000 titles sold more than 500,000 copies. Eight were by one author, Colleen Hoover, and no book of history or politics sold more than 295,000 copies.
- Conservatives' masculinity panic has been a constant as far back as we care to look, back to Antiquity. Tucker Carlson's version of shrewish harpies feminizing men is straight out of a misogynist '50s comedy, either the 1950s or the 350s BCE. msn.com/en-us/news/us/โฆ
- I'm sorry, but @bariweiss and @billmaher can talk all they want about being "over" COVID and calling public health measures a "moral crime," but some of us have kids too young to vaccinate, and I'm sorry that their health is "inconvenient" to your clubbing and partying.
- The Romans moved Egyptian obelisks out of Egypt, across the Mediterranean, and into Rome and Constantinople. Corsetti does not claim that the Romans had Atlantean technology.Additional mind-blowing context: Statue of Liberty: 225TONS Egyptian Obelisk: 1,200TONS ๐คฏ The mystery is real. A lost ancient advanced civilization was hereโฆ
- Replying to @JasonColavitoPast the top 100 books, the numbers are dire. The average book sells 200 copies. An average "bestseller" sells about 2,000 copies. Almost all significant book sales are to "communities," typically book clubs, authors' social media followers, or interest groups (like true crime).





