I really like what Razaak Eniola has to say here about human difference. Before Prince was Prince, Prince was weird. And that goes the same for probably any of your favorite artists. Before Erykah Badu was Erykah Badu, Erykah Badu was weird. Before Marc Rebillet was Marc Rebille … | Continue reading
Walmart is busy building out their fast EV charger network in the US…currently 73 locations in 17 states. Their eventual goal is install chargers at “thousands of its locations by 2030”. | Continue reading
A terrarium iPhone case that houses actual growing plants and moss. | Continue reading
“Zugunruhe is a German term describing the restless, twitching urge migratory birds feel when caged — and the same primal restlessness humans feel when trapped.” | Continue reading
Something that still blows my mind is that every apple seed produces a new variety. Every single one. This is a lovely short documentary about a project called Some Interesting Apples, which aims to find apples growing in unusual places (i.e. not commercial orchards but in place … | Continue reading
Participants in a recently published study spoke 28% fewer words per day in 2019 than they did in 2005. (People are spending more time alone and more time digitally communicating.) | Continue reading
The Thomas Crown Affair? Directed by and starring Michael B. Jordan? Ok, I’m in. | Continue reading
This is an extremely 2026 story (derogatory): because of the Trump regime’s assualt on scientific funding, a group of scientists who has been studying marmot populations in Colorado since 1962 turned to OnlyFans to fund their research this year. From The NY Times: In June, Da … | Continue reading
Study: Dinosaurs Were Charbroiled After Chicxulub Impact. “The impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.” | Continue reading
Why Do We Tolerate Elon Musk’s Racist Commentary? “Musk’s virulent racism and vicious, disturbing views are no secret. He does not hide them. They sit in plain view, easily accessible on the social media website he owns…” | Continue reading
On the experience of the long haul flight. “The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna.” | Continue reading
“The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced…” Among the authors nominated are Marlon James, M. John Harrison, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout. | Continue reading
Please Use AI. “Be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail…” | Continue reading
Word nerd Rob Watts explains where the names of all the European countries come from. Which country is the “land of the rabbits”? Why does Germany have so many different names? Where do the Dutch actually live? What links Croatians and neckties? (via open culture) Tags: Euro … | Continue reading
30 notable sales of rare books by AbeBooks over the past 30 years, including first editions of Moby-Dick, Winnie-The-Pooh, and Leaves of Grass. | Continue reading
19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body. Love these. | Continue reading
Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century. The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis … | Continue reading
How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us. “The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food…; more tied to global institutions, categories, systems…” | Continue reading
Don’t use AI until you’re 40. “We have been so quick to treat access to new technology as an inevitability that we have failed to question whether every powerful tool should be placed in the hands of every developing mind the moment it becomes available.” | Continue reading
We Used to Be Able to Buy Things in This Country. “Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy.” | Continue reading
The European Central Bank is providing a sneak peek at the next design of the Euro banknotes. From a shortlist of 10 designs created by artists and designers from across the EU, one will be selected as the basis of how Euro banknotes from €5 to €200 will look in the future. Here … | Continue reading
“Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype’s ligature substitution does the rest.” | Continue reading
The Batman Effect: people in an experiment acted more altruisticly when the caped crusader was present. | Continue reading
From the filmmakers who made the excellent Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland comes a four-part series on space exploration, Once Upon a Time in Space. A short trailer is above; here’s a synopsis: Drawing on intimate, unseen archive and powerful first-hand testimony, this land … | Continue reading
An Uncomplicated Man, Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s The Odyssey. “I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script. Sadly, Damon’s Odysseus isn’t complicated or wily or artful.” | Continue reading
Astronauts returning from long missions report a “jet lag of the self”: “a sense of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame”. | Continue reading
I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues. When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am sometime … | Continue reading
Welp, right at the top of the CDC page on autism and vaccines: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” 🫨 | Continue reading
New orca behavior unlocked. They’ve been known to sink boats and wear salmon for hats; now they’re ramming fish so hard they explode. “Orcas were observed to hold sunfish in their jaws while a second whale smashed into the target at high speed…” | Continue reading
It’s our ethical duty to understand large numbers. “Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. We can’t tackle them if we can’t wrap our heads around [them].” | Continue reading
A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked Out. “Once everyone was back at school on Tuesday, the high schoolers lawyered up during their lunch hour.” | Continue reading
“A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.” (AI bots and prediction market dipshits.) | Continue reading
“In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” On the good and bad types of nostalgia. | Continue reading
Rebecca Solnit on the Tate brothers, The Odyssey, and the misogyny of classical literature & the contemporary world. “Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture.” | Continue reading
Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo… The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual? I love a classic BLT, banh mi, or jambon beurre, b … | Continue reading
Why are American ambulances so expensive? In part because Medicare pays only a fraction of the actual cost of an ambulance ride and the uninsured often don’t pay at all, so the privately insured get bills of $13,000 for a $2600 ride. | Continue reading
We’re Squandering LEDs’ Potential to Save Our Night Skies. “Our main failure isn’t a technical one. It’s that we have yet to revise our thinking about lighting at night. We use LED technology just as we did the old sources of light.” | Continue reading
In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984. Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Military March, this an … | Continue reading
An online edition of all 85 of the Federalist Papers, presented as they were originally serialized in newspapers, with on eye on good typography and readability. | Continue reading
“This map shows the predicted density of underground networks created by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These networks form one of Earth’s circulatory systems, moving massive amounts of carbon, nutrients, and water across plant communities.” | Continue reading
Oh wow, The Verge made a 70-minute video on how The Clapper became a viral sensation. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Clapper, no one I knew had one, and I couldn’t understand why every single household didn’t have one of these magical devices. | Continue reading
Well, this is just absolutely lovely: photographer and artist Jan Erik Waider shot these videos of cracked-but-unbroken Baltic Sea ice undulating with the gentle motion of the sea. Mesmerizing…I could watch these for hours. Tags: Jan Erik Waider · mesmerizing · video | Continue reading
What do America’s earliest restaurant menus teach us about America? “A menu describes what a restaurant serves — but a menu also describes who is being served. They reflect the class, gender, political, technological, and environmental shifts of history.” | Continue reading
A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!” | Continue reading
There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy. | Continue reading
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce. What you’re seeing her … | Continue reading
A digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft. | Continue reading
I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Smithsonian (and five overall). | Continue reading