sometimes you read a piece so haunting that you think “who is going to hire this guy”
From last night’s Breaker: Daniel Kolitz, whose Harper’s piece “The Goon Squad” won a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, has landed a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to write “GOONWORLD.”
breakermedia.com/p/the-infor…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
Incredible scoop by my @WSJ colleagues: Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration. wsj.com/world/ukraine-starli…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
As Trump weighed endorsing Ken Paxton, he was told that damaging revelations were likely to surface, people familiar with the conversations say. Now, the decision to endorse the Texas attorney general looks like Trump’s biggest gamble of the midterms. on.wsj.com/4yh77Hk
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
“I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money,” Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle told a businessman at Davos this year as she was trying to get into a party, according to a recording reviewed by
@WSJ
Read the latest from @rebeccaballhaus @drewhinshaw @JoeWSJ and me
wsj.com/politics/policy/at-d…
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Kelcie Pegher retweeted
Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece when she reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Please.”
w/@DanaMattioli @drewhinshaw @JoeWSJ
wsj.com/politics/policy/guil…
I could talk about Yesteryear for at least 30 min but it got stuck in discourse about Whether Tradwives Are Good or Bad, which is arguably the least important thing about the book.
I covered education for several years prior to leaning more into my current career path. When I was hired, a great mentor told me that I had the opportunity to cover school lunches and first day of school or to look at education through a cultural, political, socioeconomic lens.
As a product of mediocre public schools myself, I relitigated my own education at the time and came to the uncomfortable conclusion that my school success had to do with parental involvement, insane ambition with nowhere to go, and frankly my parents right sizing that ambition.
This is…how it used to be pre 9/11 lol
abcnews.com/travel/story/tsa…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
this story is absolutely crazy. @maxwelltani uncovered a network of paid actors posing as conservative political pundits and disseminating AI-generated, anti-Dem misinformation on YouTube
semafor.com/article/09/02/20…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
Oreogate is a hugely viral series of videos on Instagram of (allegedly) a mom group chat bickering over Oreos in lunches. But it’s really an ad for Suno, the generative AI music app. (Suno confirmed to me that this is a paid partnership - Oreo denied involvement).
Where it gets more confusing is: did this even happen at all, or is it totally fiction? The creator initially responded to my request to talk about it, but didn’t want to get “into the specifics of the people/messages behind Oreogate”. But wouldn’t anger if it was real or fake, and then stopped responding. The account only started posting 3 weeks ago, and only posts videos tagged #sunopartner. No personal photos or any other content.
Seems like it’s part of a new trend of fake “storytime” videos meant to be relatably enraging but are secretly ads. Kate Lindsay wrote about this for @milkkarten’s great newsletter recently.
Here’s my story on it: businessinsider.com/oreogate…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: Federal authorities are preparing charges against a U.S. servicemember suspected of placing Polymarket bets on military operations that earned him more than $1 million, part of a coming batch of insider trading cases.
The serviceman, who has been under scrutiny since the spring, made successful bets related to military strikes in Iran and Venezuela
wsj.com/finance/regulation/u… @davidamichaels
my secret truth is i only drink water when feeling thirsty and don't stress about my water consumption. bring back the 90s
wsj.com/health/wellness/ditc…
Every time I’ve used AI as a thought partner, I’ve thought “What if they just wrote this boring strategy doc/etc?” And every time I have found it to be so droll that I write my own thing. I’m sure one day I can upload my whole brain to a LLM — and I will pass
In the early days of AI, I used it to edit/condense a 3k word piece, a process that normally would have taken me days.
I thought, "Wow, great! What a time saver!" Only later did I realise what many now do: AI doesn't just "condense" your work. It has a distinct writing style that makes it look like you just rocked up to a computer, entered a prompt, and called it a day.
A lot of people get caught out by this. But it goes to show that AI will not replace writers, because readers value the human attention and detail, and AI writing connotes their absence.
oh!
NEW: Forbes fired its top editor, Randall Lane, in July after learning he had received a secret $6 million payment from the founder of one of the magazine's business partners.
nytimes.com/2026/08/12/busin…
Kelcie Pegher retweeted
I'm beginning to feel that many people do not know what reading actually is
This @axios piece is so so so sooo humiliating 😆 we are witnessing a truly catastrophic level of societal brain rot right now
ALT I really got into using AI while reading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." The text was far too dense for casual vacation reading. My first prompt asked: "I'd like a guide as I read The Last of the Mohicans who can help me understand what I've read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress. Can you do this, chapter by chapter?" The robot agreed: "Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic." It promised to give me "a recap of what's happened so far and clarify anything confusing. ... I'll stick strictly to what you've read. No hints about what's coming." 🔖 That's now become part of my reading routine: Tell AI where you stopped and ask for a spoiler-free recap so far, which often surfaces details I'd missed or forgotten.