Tom Scocca

@tomscocca.bsky.social

67904 Followers 225 Following

Executive editor, features, CNN. Serial fiction and archives of nonfiction at Indignity.net. This Bluesky is about the Machines.

Screenshot of Google AI Overview with star logo: The all-time record for the most points scored in a single game at Madison Square Garden (MSG) belongs to [highlighted and bold] Wilt Chamberlain [highlighting and bold ends], who scored an astonishing [bold] 100 points [bold ends] against the Knicks on March 2, 1962
Screenshot of 82-0 roster: OR PG Oscar Robertson SAC · 1960s 29.7 PPG 8.7 RPG 10.5 APG 0.0 SPG 0.0 BPG LJ SG LeBron James CLE · 2010s 26.9 PPG 7.6 RPG 8.2 APG 1.4 SPG 0.8 BPG TM SF Tracy McGrady ORL · 2000s 28.1 PPG 7.0 RPG 5.2 APG 1.6 SPG 1.0 BPG DN PF Dirk Nowitzki DAL · 2000s 23.6 PPG 8.9 RPG 2.8 APG 1.0 SPG 1.0 BPG BR C Bill Russell BOS · 1960s 14.8 PPG 22.6 RPG 4.6 APG 0.0 SPG 0.0 BPG 123.1 PPG 54.8 RPG 31.3 APG 4.0 SPG 2.8 BPG
Screenshot of list of 5 basketball players: PG Luka Dončić DAL · 2020s 30.6 PPG 8.7 RPG 8.8 APG 1.2 SPG 0.5 BPG PM SG Pete Maravich UTA · 1970s 25.7 PPG 4.4 RPG 5.8 APG 1.4 SPG 0.3 BPG JT SF Jayson Tatum BOS · 2020s 26.5 PPG 8.5 RPG 4.9 APG 1.1 SPG 0.5 BPG KM PF Karl Malone UTA · 1990s 27.2 PPG 10.7 RPG 3.7 APG 1.4 SPG 0.9 BPG W C Wilt Chamberlain PHI · 1960s 27.6 PPG 24.0 RPG 6.8 APG 0.0 SPG 0.0 With totals of: 137.6 PPG 56.3 RPG 29.9 APG 5.2 SPG 2.1 BPG
Screenshot of text: In meetings, Mr. Vance frequently scrolls his phone, and he uses social media to fight with his critics. The president frequently posts to Truth Social, but he does not spend time replying to people online, as Mr. Vance does.
Victor Wembanyama sitting on the bench in warmups looking off to his left with a brooding glare.
Screenshot of Trending sidebar reading 1. Luke Kornet 2. Chet Holmgren
A photograph of a can of New Coke, with white on red "Coke" lettering running up the can and a diagonal silver banner reading "NEW!"
A showcase at the Basketball Hall of Fame. Along with sone other memorabilia, the case features a placard with the title “Righteous Rivals” and beside it hang a white No. 32 Boston Celtics jersey and a gold Los Angeles Lakers No. 32 jersey. Below that duo, given the same treatment, is a pairing of a blue New York Knicks No. 33 jersey and a white Houston Rockets No. 34 jersey.
Screenshot of webpage displaying Supreme Court decision. The page reads: SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Syllabus LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS ET AL. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA No. 24–109. Argued October 15, 2025—Decided April 29, 2026* Above it is a search box reading "purcell 0/0"
Screenshot of story banner, text, and inline ad. Banner reads: Intelligencer / Screen Time / My Adventures With 'The AI That Actually Does Things' Text reads: story: Here, they said, was a way to make AI do what you want, on your terms, using your devices and data; a tool for giving increasingly capable AI models the ability and permission to carry out real-world actions on your behalf and for your benefit. Ad, a blue box from CapitalOne, has a black inset with white text reading "CapitalOne / We built a multi-agentic AI system to help buyers find their dream car / THAT'S HOW WE STACK"
Screenshot of Google information box: United States Postal Service 1.8 stars 501 Google reviews Post office in New York Website Directions Reviews Save Share Call [Highlighting begins] Government chain [highlighting ends] providing mail and package delivery services, money orders, and passports.
Screenshot of headline: ‘It Was Survival Mode’: The 1970 Lunar Mission That Nearly Ended in Disaster
Screenshot of text: Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic author of The Devil's Dictionary, [highlighting begins] might have observed [highlighting ends] that a "regime" is any government that one doesn't like. Those
Screenshot of iPhone notes app with text reading “Hey get out of my face” followed by a cursor. Below is the virtual keyboard and above the keys, circled in red, is a line reading “faces face’s facebook”
Screenshot of a New York Times Spelling Bee board with the letters O, A, T, C, H, and R around a central I. Above it is the word TROCHAIC, and above that is the message "Not in word list"
Screenshot of a New York Times Spelling Bee board with the letters R, A, T, N, O, and C around a central M, with the word MOTORMAN above it and the message "Not in word list" above that
Screenshot of the New York Times Spelling Bee board with the letters R, A, T, C, O, and N around a central M. Above the board is the word AMARO, and above that is a box saying "Not in word list"
A Peanuts strip. Panel one: Rerun stands on Charlie Brown's doorstep holding up a piece of paper as Charlie Brown sticks his head out the door. "How would you like to buy a picture I drew of your dog?" Rerun asks. "Are you a salesman?" Charlie Brown replies. Panel two, same scene: "A what?" Rerun says. "Salesmen are a dying breed," Charlie Brown says. Panel three: Lucy and Rerun sit side by side in a big armchair. "Did you sell your drawing?" Lucy asks. "I couldn't," Rerun says. "I'm a dying breed."
Screenshot of text: First, it’s a mistake to say that Trump got America into war on Saturday. What he did was respond to a war that Iran has been waging against the United States since 1979.
Screenshot of headlines: The Secret to Keeping My Toilet Stain-Free Is in the Kitchen 11 Surprising Things You Can Put in Your Dishwasher
Screenshot from a video of Victor Wembanyama, seen from behind, striding along a tunnel in Madison Square Garden and towering above everyone else in the frame. He wears a jacket and blue jeans. A superimposed caption says "OH MY" in white and "GOOD LORD" in yellow.
Screenshot under the Harvard Crimson online banner of the headline "Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties," over a file photo of a younger Larry Summers, wearing a dark suit and tie and blue shirt, facing off camera and loosely grinning while slouching sideways in a tan leather wingback chair, with a crimson-painted wall behind him.
Screenshot of text: There has been 1.35" of wintry mix in the last 6 hours. Today's total wintry mix will be 6.3" In the next 24 hours, 15" is expected.
The cover of William Gibson's NEUROMANCER, a green paperback with black text reading WILLIAM GIBSON over the shape of a head and shoulder rendered in what looks like a tangle of black magnetic tape, wearing a pair of white goggles spanned by the black text "NEUROMANCER," which repeates five times vertically
Graph with years on the X axis and numbers on the Y, in which a green shaded area under the legend "Jeremy" goes from near zero in the 1930s to a near vertical rise past 4,000 between the 1960s and the 1970s, then plunges almost as steeply down to below 1,000 from the 1980s to the 2000s, after which it continues to decline along a shallower slope to fall below 400 as it ends at 2024.
Screenshot of Wikipedia page header reading "Blue Hole (Red Sea)"
Kendrick Lamar on the stage at the Super Bowl, in baggy flared jeans, with backup dancers behind him, grinning immediately after uttering the words "Say, Drake..."
Three renderings of the Wawa logo of red lettering and yellow flying goose silhouette, with the text styled differently and a small black text caption floating above each one: [caption] Wrong! WaWa [caption] Even worse! Wa Wa [caption] Yay, you got it! Wawa
A plump, dark, glossy pumpernickel bagel fills up most of a small blue willow china plate on a white tabletop
[Highlighting begins] Over Trump’s past year, what originally looked like an effort to make the government his personal plaything has drifted distinctly toward doctrinal and operational fascism. [Highlighting ends] Trump’s appetite for lebensraum, his claim of unlimited power, his support for the global far right, his politicization of the justice system, his deployment of performative brutality, his ostentatious violation of rights, his creation of a national paramilitary police—all of those developments bespeak something more purposeful and sinister than run-of-the-mill greed or gangsterism.
Screenshot of text: Singer then asked the jury if prosecutors proved that $10,000 was offered for Bovino’s murder. “Was it true? Who knows. But you can’t guess. Because they have to answer those questions,” Singer said. “And if they can’t answer those questions — which they can’t — Juan is not guilty.” [Highlighting begins] Singer also said prosecutors didn’t highlight an “lol” message from Espinoza Martinez, which goes against their claim that he never indicated he was joking. [Highlighting ends]
Screenshot from the New York Times Spelling Bee of the word DORKWAD, in black text on white background with the D's in yellow, above which is a black box with white letters reading "Not in word list"
Screenshot of a post from the Horse ebooks @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, with galloping-horse avi, reading: Everything happens so much 4:23 PM - Jun 28, 2012
Graph of a blue line moving down and then steeply up, almost as steeply down, and then jaggedly up and down afterward. A tag a bit below the halfway point of the big sharp upward spike reads "Homicide Rate / May-20: 1.51."
Screenshot of text: By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist It may seem hard to believe when you’re inside the social media cascade, but American society actually stabilized meaningfully across 2025. The homicide and crime rates dropped, finally erasing the [Highlighting begins] surge that began with the George Floyd protests in 2020 [Highlighting ends]. Life
An LED bulb lies on a paper towel. The white plastic middle section between the base and the globe is dingy-looking and has at least two jagged cracks, one running almost its full length.
An LED bulb lies on a paper towel. The white plastic middle section between the base and the globe is dingy-looking and has a jagged crack running almost its full length. The logo on it reads PHILIPS.
Nicolas Cage (as John Travolta wearing Nicolas Cage's face) and John Travolta (as Nicolas Cage wearing John Travolta's face) point large automatic pistols at one another in a symmetrical standoff on opposite sides of a freestanding mirror. Cage, on the left in bluish light, wears a leather jacket and his pistol, held in both hands, is gold-plated; Travolta, on the right in warm-toned light, wears a three-piece suit and his pistol is normal steel.
Screenshot of Onion headline under "Commentary" tag: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five 1B/DHs ("1B/DHs" is in a mismatched font)
Green Doritos chip bag leaning against a rice cooker on a gray granite counter. The bag had an image of a green Dorito chip and images of coriander leaves. The bag text reads: Doritos 香菜口味 CORIANDER FLAVOR
Screenshot of section of Baseball Reference table: 120. Magglio Ordóñez (15) .3090 7745 R 121. Branch Russell (11) .3087 3297 L Jack Tobin (13) .3087 6879 L 123. Virgil Davis (16) .3083 4718 R 124. Harvey Hendrick (11) .3079 3221 L 125. Mike Piazza+ (16) .3078 7745 R 126. Richie Ashburn+ (15) .3077 9737 L 127. Jake Beckley+ (20) .3076 10518 L 128. Johnny Frederick (6) .3075 3364 L King Kelly+ (16) .3075 6457 R Stuffy McInnis (19) .3075 8642 R Jimmy Ryan (18) .3075 9127 R 132. Don Mattingly (14) .3074 7722 L Joe Vosmik (13) .3074 6087 R
Screenshot of text: Which—OK, this was, in its categorical wrongness, the perfect summary of the ersatz generational experience. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, by Douglas Coupland, was the one incontestable constituent of Generation X. It started the whole thing. Writing Douglas Coupland’s Generation X out of Generation X is like writing Queen Victoria out of the Victorian Era. [Italics] But the Victorian Era was an era of rapid technological and industrial advancement, and she just sat around being queen without designing a single railway engine [end italics]—nope. It’s her era. Generation X is Generation X.
Douglas Coupland, with thinning gray hair and a close-cropped gray beard, wearing a bluish-green T-shirt and dark pants, sits on a stool in front of a wood-paneled drop with a crumpled-paper title superimposed on him reading: "GENERATION X: Individuals born between 1964 and 1980* * more or less"
An immensely bloated olive Kia Telluride, seen from in front of its monstrous bludgeoning grille with a glimpse of the passenger side, double-parked on a street strewn with leaves
Screenshot of URL bar saying "wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1989" with list below No. Title Artist(s) 1 "Look Away" Chicago 2 "My Prerogative" Bobby Brown 3 "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" Poison 4 "Straight Up" Paula Abdul 5 "Miss You Much" Janet Jackson 6 "Cold Hearted" Paula Abdul 7 "Wind Beneath My Wings" Bette Midler 8 "Girl You Know It's True" Milli Vanilli 9 "Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley" Will to Power 10 "Giving You the Best That I Got" Anita Baker 11 "Right Here Waiting" Richard Marx 12 "Waiting For a Star to Fall" Boy Meets Girl 13 "Lost in Your Eyes" Debbie Gibson 14 "Don't Wanna Lose You" Gloria Estefan 15 "Heaven" Warrant 16 "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You" Milli Vanilli 17 "The Look" Roxette 18 "She Drives Me Crazy" Fine Young Cannibals 19 "On Our Own" Bobby Brown 20 "Two Hearts" Phil Collins
Screenshot of Amazon button reading "Tomorrow / 4 AM - 8 AM"
Screenshot of text: Giunta claimed the release of the chat is part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club” — an allusion to a once obscured internecine war that has now spilled into the open.
Screenshot of text reading "The 2,900 pages of chats"
Screenshot of text: Students who object to policies of the Trump administration or oppose Israel’s war in Gaza or who advocate abortion rights rarely have to worry that their campus speakers will be disrupted by protesters or generate security concerns related to the backlash of a student mob. Security concerns, real or fabricated, arise when a
Screenshot of text: doctor thumping a nerve, to have those expectations met so exactly. The Bari Weiss story does not depend on content; it is a form that has existed from the beginning and never needs to change. Bari Weiss has friends, and she has enemies, and to her friends the existence of her enemies is proof that the world is vicious and unreasonable. Every controversy is the same, and all of them are unfair. This liberates her supporters from ever having to talk about anything the intellectual provocateur actually says or writes. Here is a roundup of the case for Weiss, as
Screenshot of text: Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
Screenshot of text: Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
Screenshot of text: build a culture of ideas. This is exactly what she’s done at The Free Press, which covers a variety of stories, the most popular of which—[Highlighting begins] Uri Berliner’s explanation of NPR’s decline, for example [Highlighting ends]—are those that hold powerful institutions to account.
Screenshot of text: It’s a business story. [Highlighting begins] Everyone in journalism has known for years that there’s been a huge opportunity for a publication that employs the traditional methods of U.S. journalism—reporting, deep sourcing, fact-checking, fearlessness—to subjects that either don’t get covered enough or get covered only from a certain perspective. [Highlighting ends] If creating such an enterprise seems simple
Screenshot from Gmail of a "Happening soon" box with a tiny photo of a bottle of orange juice and the message "39 items from Fresh Direct / Expected tomorrow," directly above an email line with the sender "FreshDirect" and the subject line beginning "Your order for Sunday,"
Screenshot of text: In Washington, some have adopted a laissez-faire attitude to all the activity in a sector viewed as vital to competing with geopolitical rival China. “It’s up to them,” White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks told Bloomberg on Monday. “We want American companies to be successful.” The Trump administration, for its part, is also connected to the sprawling web of AI investments through its stake in Intel Corp., not to mention its plans to take a cut of Nvidia and AMD’s chip sales to China.
Screenshot of text: The insistent emptiness of it all, after a while, began to seem like the true point of the profile, and of Bari Weiss. Weiss is a success because she has dissolved the boundaries between online and offline, to apply the pure transactional logic of social media to meatspace. She doesn’t convince people, she gets them to give her likes—likes from verified people, within the network of the verified. And here I am, so disgusted by it all that I’m quote-tweeting her.
Screenshot of text: And next to that, just above the fold on the right hand side of the page, is a piece about Russell Vought of Project 2025, “Ticking Boxes on His Checklist To Make Trump All-Powerful,” a long look at how Vought, the White House budget director, has implemented a scheme to vest unprecedented power, including the power to rewrite spending on the fly, in the unitary executive. Early on, this story also contains the revelation that while the power may be unitary, the executive is not. Again, in the absence of a lucid and engaged president, there's a free-for-all as to who gets to use those powers in his name. And so the story begins with the revelation that Vought “was preparing the Trump administration's 2026 budget proposal this spring when his staff got some surprising news. Elon Musk's cost-cutting team was unilaterally axing items that Mr. Vought had intended to keep. Mr. Vought, in numbers wonk, who rarely raises his voice, could barely contain his frustration, telling colleagues that he felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. According to six people with knowledge of his comments, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.”
Photo of a Moog Modular 55 synthesizer: a wood-trimmed piano keyboard below a two-part console replete with dozens of knobs and even more jacks
Screenshot of text: But like in Lyons, plaintiffs have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future based on the prohibited factors—and certainly no good basis for believing that any stop of the plaintiffs is imminent. Therefore, they lack Article III standing: “Absent a sufficient likelihood” that the plaintiffs “will again be wronged in a similar way,” they are “no more entitled to an injunction than any other citizen of Los Angeles; and a federal court may not entertain a claim by any or all citizens who no more than assert that certain practices of law enforcement officers are unconstitutional.”