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Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea — Peter Shamshiri, String in a Maze

Shamshiri's piece is about the four-month cyclospora outbreak, and it does the necessary work of tracing the funding cuts, the optional reporting, the White House sitting on Taylor Farms' recall deadline while naming only Taco Bell. But the line that stuck with me is the one that isn't about blame at all:

You'll see the illness, but you won't know its source.

A crank got put in charge of health policy and now people are sick. But cranks come and go. What Shamshiri is describing is the dismantling of the machinery that lets a society notice things about itself.

We know measles cases have exploded — more since 2025 than in the previous twenty-five years combined. We know that because someone built the thing that counts measles. That number isn't a fact of nature sitting out in the world waiting to be observed. It's the output of a surveillance system, staffed and funded, that has to be maintained the way a bridge has to be maintained. Take away the counting and the cases don't stop. They just stop being a number. They become a feeling. A bad season. Something going around.

A problem can be argued about. A mystery can only be endured. And an administration that would rather be endured than argued with has an obvious interest in converting the first thing into the second — not by lying, exactly, but by defunding the instruments that make lying necessary.

Which is why anti-transparency isn't a side effect of this politics. It's load-bearing. Shamshiri points at Clarence Thomas spending decades arguing that disclosure laws are unconstitutional, worried that transparency invites "reprisals" from an angry public. Reprisals meaning: people finding out, and then having opinions about it.

Worth reading in full.

I Hate The Way We Talk Online — Jason Toney

Jason Toney asked a simple question on Threads: without googling, do you know the top songs in your favorite genre right now? Could you hum one? No agenda, no side to pick. What he got back was defensiveness, conspiracy theories about the charts, and people bragging about how far their taste sits from anything popular. The post widens from there into "main character" mentality and algorithm-speak, and ends with a plea I'll happily co-sign: "Have something real to say? Write a blog."

Rudeness online is nothing new, but nobody in those replies seemed to consider that Toney was asking because he wanted to know. When winning is the goal, a sincere question is read as a setup, as bait, the first move in an argument nobody agreed to have.

I don't know what it costs a culture when asking becomes suspicious. But we're clearly running the experiment online.

The Lost Joy of Music Piracy

An oral history of What.CD, the illegal free-music site with stricter standards than most legal businesses. The pirates ran the tightest ship on the Internet.