keep this newsletter in your pocket for november: trump just voted by mail

ALSO: the rise of the DinerGoth, another Strava oops, Big Tech AI leadership boards, and more

Mar 24, 2026

Happy Tuesday, March 24th!

FYSA, every Tuesday and Friday, I’ll be in your inbox with the latest in politics, tech & social media, culture, and other relevant topics – and I’ll share some notes and tips on what I’m keeping my eye on.

And don’t forget to head to the bottom of the newsletter for the GCC JOBS CORNER! Today, we’ve got Battleground Alliance, Abdul for Senate, Bend the Arc, and Punchbowl News.

I’M ALSO LOOKING FOR MORE PEOPLE TO DO MINI INTERVIEWS FOR OPEN TABS :) Tips, thoughts, concerns, good jokes, bad jokes, tea, etc?

And finally, if you enjoy this newsletter and want to share it with your network (and/or your chronically online friends), or buy me a matcha, that would be so appreciated 🙏

Trump voted by mail in Florida special election despite his rhetoric opposing it

Public records show that President Donald Trump voted by mail in the special election occurring Tuesday for the statehouse district that includes his Mar-a-Lago estate in spite of his longstanding rhetoric against voting by mail and his efforts to push through the SAVE America Act, which includes restrictions on mail-in voting. (ABC News, 3/24)

TSA lines stretch for hours as Trump deploys ICE agents to US airports

The president claimed over the weekend that immigration agents could help manage long lines, but in Atlanta, little immediate impact of their presence could be observed. Meanwhile, airport staff were getting creative trying to herd thousands of discontent passengers. (The Guardian, 3/23)

The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By

Every day, an estimated 215,000 people donate plasma, the yellowish liquid component of blood. Mr. Briseño is among them. He is not jobless or facing eviction, but, like many in the American middle class, he is caught in the vise of rising expenses and wages that aren’t growing fast enough to cover them. (NYT gift link, 3/20)

Lucy’s note: are we great yet?

More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.

At some tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, employees compete on internal leaderboards that show how many tokens — the atomic unit of A.I. use, roughly equivalent to a word fragment — each worker consumes, two people familiar with those companies’ practices said. Generous “token budgets” are becoming a job perk for coders, like dental insurance or free lunch, and some are spending thousands of dollars a month trying to automate as much of their own work as possible. (NYT gift link, 3/20)

Why AI chatbots are getting more political

Anthropic adopted positions likely to be popular with a user base of educated professionals, Abelson said, a demographic that leans Democratic. OpenAI made a different calculation, in his view, concluding that users didn’t care about its relationship with the Pentagon. (Salon, 3/23)

Cancel culture is bad for business. Bluesky is learning why. (OPINION)

Well, Bluesky isn’t trying to build a walled garden like Facebook or X. It’s trying to create something more like email: an open system that lets developers build their own Twitter or Substack-like apps atop a shared network of users who would have one identity across all those applications. Users, not the developers, would own their identity and internet presence, and it would be portable across applications. (WaPo, 3/22 – free version)

This eerily accurate ‘LinkedIn Speak’ translation tool will help you sound like an instant thinkfluencer

For instance, when I inputted the phrase “I’m writing a story about this translator for Fast Company,” the platform blurted out corporate-sounding prose filled with LinkedIn jargon. And yes, it even threw some emojis and hashtags into the mix: “🚀 Thrilled to share that I’m currently crafting a deep-dive feature for Fast Company on the future of translation technology! ✍️✨ (Fast Company, 3/18)

American Diner Gothic

Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac. (The New Atlantis, Winter 2026 edition)

Lucy’s note: as I’m sure you’ve seen, this has been allll over X/Twitter

Publisher pulls horror novel ‘Shy Girl’ over AI concerns

Although the publisher claimed the decision came after a thorough review of the text, reviewers on GoodReads and YouTube had been speculating that the book was likely AI-generated. And The New York Times said it asked Hachette about the “Shy Girl” concerns the day before the announcement. (TechCrunch, 3/21)

‘Project Hail Mary’ Shatters Box Office Expectations With $140.9 Million Globally

The story is adapted from the best-selling novel by author Andy Weir, whose other astronaut adventure “The Martian” was the basis for Ridley Scott’s 2015 blockbuster, starring Matt Damon. That film ignited to $54 million domestically and ended its box office run with a mighty $630 million globally, not adjusted for inflation. (Variety, 3/22)

Not Much Situation Monitoring Happened on the Opening Night of Polymarket’s Pop-Up Bar

Dozens of journalists who showed up to the prediction market bar’s opening night for a media preview waited under canopies in the rain for an hour and a half. Polymarket employees said the space, taken over temporarily from the K Street bar Proper 21, was having power and internet issues. (Washingtonian, 3/20)

Lucy’s note: god, I wish Veep was still around for this

Bachelorette suitor from Taylor Frankie Paul’s canceled season drove car in wreck that paralyzed former congressman Madison Cawthorn

Cawthorn, who left Congress in January 2023 after losing the previous year’s Republican primary, recounted the moments immediately following the crash in a 2017 speech, saying of Ledford “my brother... my best friend, he leaves me in a car to die in a fiery tomb.” However, Ledford has disputed that claim, telling The Washington Post that “it hurt very badly that he would say something as false as that.” (Entertainment Weekly, 3/23)

Lucy’s note: genuinely… who is doing casting for The Bachelor these days

Strava fitness app reportedly reveals location of France aircraft carrier at sea

Le Monde newspaper reported that the runner jogged in circles on a ship in movement on 13 March in the middle of the sea northwest of Cyprus, according to his public profile on the Strava fitness tracking app, while satellite images showed the aircraft carrier was in the immediate vicinity at the time. (Euronews, 3/20)