Monday: Three Morning Takes
girlboss interrupted / leave me bee / prease accept our aporogy
PW Daily
May 18, 2026
Girlboss interrupted
Don’t even THINK about learning a new skill. In a long, poorly-written op-ed in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is for some reason educating your children at UNC Chapel Hill, excoriated “girl boss” influencers like Reese Witherspoon (???) for the unthinkable crime of… suggesting their female fans should learn how to use AI for such purposes as career improvement and keeping track of their personal finances. This, the good professor argued, was a form of class solidarity with “plutocrats” trying to destroy the world, and a failure to “read the room.” After all, AI is being used at war, and a suicidal teen once spoke to a chat bot. Have these women even “bothered to read the news”? It’s quite the argument, and I almost feel myself persuaded. Is learning things and making money bad, actually? A frightening thought. Better to just read the NYT. Thanks, Tressie.
Leave me Bee
“We are evolving into our next chapter,” Bumble’s CEO told The Axios Show earlier this month. In lieu of swiping, Bumble’s AI dating assistant (“Bee”), starting in Q4 for certain premium users, will suggest potential matches and help people optimize their profiles. But um. All this corp-speak was code for, as an anonymous interlocutor put it to me on X, “everyone is burned out” and “no one wants to pay,” so dating apps have resorted to squeezing more and more out of the dwindling huddled masses that haven’t quite given up. Sorry. Yes, AI matchmakers could work. But when you watch this interview, which was drawn up at HQ to make you believe in dating apps again at a time when Bumble is trading at $3.18 on the ole NASDAQ, you just kind of find yourself thinking “huh, I think I’d rather die alone than let ‘Bee’ ‘optimize’ my ‘thirst traps.’”
Prease accept our aporogy
[The following take was written with assistance from Pirate Wires’ in-house counsel]. Readers: we’re sorry. On May 13, 2026, we covered the story of Eileen Wang, the California mayor who confessed to working as a Chinese foreign agent, and in doing so, we made a grave error — we failed to acknowledge that accurately reporting on CCP spies running entire American towns was, in fact… racist. You see, NBC News published an article last week explaining the real problem with the Chinese spy mayor story was that it has “reignited fears of anti-Asian discrimination,” which totally doesn’t read like a Norm Macdonald joke come to life, and definitely serves as a helpful reminder that words, even accurate ones about bombshell espionage scandals, can carry violence. The next time an American mayor is caught working for the PRC? We urge you to sit your racist ass down and instead reflect upon what you can do to Stop Asian Hate.
