Comparison: But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance. . . . Rubin told me that the internet is entering a ‘valley of pain.‘ Matteo Wong, writing about recent cyber-attacks on various parts of the internet quotes a silicon valley exec who invokes a trance and a place of danger to suggest what the internet is becoming. Context: But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance. AI agents can now be deplo

Comparison: Regardless, the basic units of an AI model having seemingly arbitrary, multitudinous functions would make it very difficult to understand what is going on under the hood. . . . If generative-AI models are actually legible under the hood, that would undoubtedly help make the technology safer. Matteo Wong, writing about a tech essay written by AI researcher Nick Cammarata—and about AI-world responses to that essay—reaches back to the 20th Century tech that changed l

Comparison: President Trump walked into history dragging a long tail of litigation, accusation and lawsuits behind him. Conservative writer Peggy Noonan notes that Donald J. Trump's years as chief executive has taken the presidency into unknown territory. And she's not hopeful that U.S. culture can work through the corrupt implications to public life and service. For word nerds observe in the context below that Noonan does a mash-up of two stealth metaphors (threshold, and sk

Comparison: Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. Annie Dillard creates an analogy for celestial dynamics that allow us to quickly sort out the impact of a partial eclipse compared to experiencing a total eclipse. Kissing and falling from an airplane step u

Comparison: ‘The [airplane] seating charts are a house of cards. They’re just waiting to collapse,‘ says veteran airline consumer advocate William McGee. WSJ reporter Dawn Gilbertson addresses the growing problem of airlines arbitrarily changing seats for passengers, who have paid for upgraded seats, back to cattle-class seats—with no certain compensation for either money or loss of seat choice. “House of Cards,“ of course is a stealth metaphor used in innumerable different l

Comparison: ‘We're going through a second farm crisis right now, Farmageddon,‘ said Turek, the Democratic state lawmaker running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) for an open Senate seat. Politico writer Jonathan Martin snags a potent portmantaeu from Josh Turek that reverberates through the midwest and beyond. Some portmantaeu creations carry metaphoric themes or focal points. The combination of weather and political disruption in the midwest do much to carry metaphor-lik

Comparison: People are talking about Melania, Natalie, and Trump like it's some modern day ‘Dangerous Liaisons‘ when it's more like two insane seagulls fighting over a rotting piece of chicken in the Dollar Store parking lot. Writer, humorist Wendi Aarons on persistent rumors of a feud between Natalie Harp and Melania Trump. Note that some similes can travel 1000 miles before other comparisons can even find their car keys. Do tell. Context: Threads post by Wendi Aarons: Peopl

Comparison: The conductor is a con artist. Or: The conductor is God. Musicians frequently encounter both of these extreme views of music’s most mysterious profession. It’s not surprising that conductors elicit suspicion as well as adulation. The very act of conducting—waving a wand to summon ravishing or ethereal or earsplitting sounds—can look like either inexplicable magic or embarrassing nonsense, a kind of tuxedoed air guitar. Composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin writes

Comparison: We’re really putting a lot of money into building a pipeline for nursing, but if nurses are leaving after a year or two of getting into employment, the problem isn’t so much a pipeline problem as a leaking gas tank. Karen Lasater, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, is quoted in Time as she attempts to counteract the common perception of a nursing shortage in the United States and the world. We frequently use a “pipeline“ as a stealth

Comparison: . . . Trump, his children and their hangers-on started using his current stint in the White House as a bejeweled A.T.M. vomiting crisp million-dollar bills into their greedy hands Frank Bruni writing with Bret Stevens in a New York Times op-ed notes that opportunities offered to those associated with Donald Trump via family or administration ties seems to result in higher totals in various bank accounts. Do tell! Many thanks to P. Amick for sharing the comparison.

Comparison: As the evidence mounts that terrible answers and jailbreaks are an inevitable part of the technology, the industry’s focus has lately shifted to building digital cages, essentially more deterministic, symbolic harnesses to contain the generative A.I. engine and check its results. Zeynep Tufekci writing in the New York Times suggests that our worry over AI stealing jobs, while not unfounded, is overblown in much media coverage. How then to control jailbreaks and ot

Comparison: [Vancouver, BC . . .] has a formidable downtown skyline but, seen from the sky, the vast majority of the land is devoted to houses with moats of grass. Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times writes about how one major North American city has, perhaps, found a way to create more housing. Yet he notes that Vancouver, BC may have created the conditions leading to their housing crisis by encouraging certain types of housing to the exclusion of others. Hence, his cle

Comparison: Steven Soderbergh films are like buses: There’s always another one coming. David Sims while writing a movie review of Black Bag takes a swipe at Steven Soderberg's movies--or at least at the frequency with which they are released. Think, while you're waiting for next one, about how this simile works. If Sims had stopped short of the tag-on observation, we'd be left wondering what about buses we should use to better understand Soderberg's movies. With the tag-on re

Comparison: So the two sides are now performing the same ritual in different costumes: Tehran says no talks without relief, Trump says no relief without surrender, and everyone else gets to watch oil prices, shipping lanes, and global nerves do interpretive dance. Mary Geddry wonders if interpretive dance is appropriate for this moment in world history in place of sober negotiation. Context: Iran is insisting talks cannot move forward unless the U.S. lifts the blockade, while

Comparison: Trump keeps trying to sell the war as tidy, decisive, ‘done and dusted,‘ the geopolitical equivalent of a cheap contractor slapping paint over a cracked wall and calling it renovated. Oregon's Bay Area suggests that renovation may take more than slapping paint on a wall. Context: That threat is already visible in Iran, where even mainstream U.S. media is growing more blunt about the widening gap between Trump’s declarations and reality. Trump keeps trying to sell

Comparison: . . . the legal architecture is one of those cursed American contraptions with twelve brass levers and a smoking boiler. In February, the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. That was the big one. The Court basically looked at this whole setup and said, no, sorry, this item is not unlocked. You cannot just rummage around in the statutory attic, find a wrench, and declare it a crown. Shanley Hurt legally takes readers

Comparison: Trump seems to have his own set of deflector shields: his cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whom he uses to absorb some of the blowback from his most contentious policies. . . . When the shields are at reasonable strength, they can keep taking fire, and the ship of state continues flying. But when the shields are battered and begin to malfunction, the entire enterprise is exposed. And right now, a lot of Trump’s shields seem to be faltering at once. Car

Comparison: . . . picture the campaign playlist as a kind of retail theft. Not the glamorous kind, not the ‘Ocean’s Eleven‘ kind, just the plain kind where someone strolls out with something small because they assume no one is going to stop them. That is how political campaigns sometimes treat music, like it is a communal resource, a public utility, a mood-setting spray bottle you can mist over the crowd. You want triumph, you want swagger, you want nostalgia, and you want th

Comparison: Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer. . . . With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, It is so ORDERED. On January 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas ordered the immediate release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his

Comparison: Creators are the coal shovelers who have allowed YouTube to move so far so fast, except the railroads used to pay their boilermen a wage. Creators work for free . . . Time magazine writer Belinda Luscombe reaches in her comparison to 19th Century rail life to describe the importance of video creators to YouTube's wild success story of late. YouTube creators--especially the exceptionally successful ones--may not notice the unrewarded sweat. Time for a whistle-stop