Missed this earlier in the week: The Tournament of Books is underway! “Every March, the Tournament of Books is a month-long battle royale among the year’s best novels.” | Continue reading
This photo of an Icelandic glacier is really something. | Continue reading
The People Who Shun Super-Popular Pop Culture. “Some people are early adopters; others are late adopters. I’m simply a weirdly resistant one.” | Continue reading
There are at least 60 Pizza Hut Classics (red roofs, checkered tablecloths, salad bar) in the US…but the company does nothing to promote them. “They are like wormholes in the chain restaurant galaxy, portals to the past found by serendipity.” | Continue reading
From There I Ruined It, a version of Toto’s Africa but the lyrics are a listing of every country in Africa. They should teach this in American middle schools, not even joking. See also Coach from Cheers singing Al-ban-i-a (a song that pops into my head every time I read or hear … | Continue reading
Steve Scherer was a Reuters’ bureau chief in Canada. Then he got laid off, had to leave the country, and now drives for Uber in Virginia, in a country he doesn’t recognize anymore after working for 28 years abroad. | Continue reading
Wow, KDO pal and explorer Ariel Waldman has her own show on PBS! “LIFE UNEARTHED with Ariel Waldman is a science-driven docu-series revealing Earth’s ecosystems through radical shifts in scale…” | Continue reading
Georg Cantor is celebrated for revolutionizing mathematics by proving that there are different levels of infinity. But he didn’t do it alone and evidence has emerged that he plagiarized the work of a collaborator. | Continue reading
“8 in 10 AI chatbots were regularly willing to assist users in planning violent attacks including school shootings, religious bombings, and high-profile assassinations. DeepSeek went as far as wishing the would-be attacker a ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’” | Continue reading
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE has an interview series called Work is Four Letters he describes like this: Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don’t; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that’s really interesting to … | Continue reading
Draw your own constellations. | Continue reading
John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches1 used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos of them avai … | Continue reading
Amount Of Water Man Just Used To Wash Dish To Be Prize Of Hand-To-Hand Combat Match In 2065. | Continue reading
Jessica Burbank: A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital.Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as legal or … | Continue reading
Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin was the first person to go to space. What this article presupposes is…maybe he wasn’t? It all boils down to what your definition of space is. | Continue reading
Another recent HyperCard discovery (that isn’t somehow in the Internet Archive): an “expanded book” version of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive). | Continue reading
“Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues invented a new vaccine that protects mice from respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens — the closest yet to a universal vaccine.” | Continue reading
Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer. For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in th … | Continue reading
Github’s uptime lately seems…..concerning? | Continue reading
“Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections.” The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics. | Continue reading
The Shape of Paris is a balletic short film of skateboarder Andy Anderson zooming, grinding, spinning, and floating around Paris in the summertime. It is also beautifully shot by Brett Novak; Paris has never looked better. As a YT commenter put it: “bro wtf this is the cleanest f … | Continue reading
The Modern Times cafe moved to a pay-what-you-want model during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. Now the cafe is making it permanent (and pivoting to a nonprofit). “Some had come for a free meal; others were there to pay double or triple their tab.” | Continue reading
“A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up ‘lonely,’ or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds?” | Continue reading
Jay Graber is stepping down as CEO of Bluesky to “transition to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer”. And they’re looking for a new permanent CEO. | Continue reading
“What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they’re using it to cheat?” asks college freshman Maximilian Milovidov. “Students will reach for these tools, whether universities ban them or not.” | Continue reading
New web game that takes 2 min to play (and perhaps a lifetime to master?): Outsmart. “Five rounds, first to 3 wins. In each round, the higher bet wins. You have 100 total points, so bet wisely. Can you outsmart the machine?” | Continue reading
The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what might … | Continue reading
GPS jamming and spoofing is becoming commonplace in war. “Ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.” | Continue reading
The fish doorbell in Utrecht is back for another season! “Did you spot a fish? Press the Fish Doorbell! Then our lock keeper can let the fish through.” | Continue reading
On the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit sat down for an interview with David Marchese of the NY Times. Here’s the video version: This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the positive … | Continue reading
The NY Times went back through a century of women’s obituaries “to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid”. https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social | Continue reading
Dozens of former employees of Noma tell of abuse & violence at the hands of its chef/owner, René Redzepi. Punching, screaming, shoving, stabbing, slamming, intimidation, ridicule, blacklisting. What an asshole. | Continue reading
Can’t stop, won’t stop. On the heels of the refreshed Rolodex from earlier in the week, I’ve pushed another “Just Enough Social” feature to the site: members bios & profile pics. Here’s what that looks like: Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on your name … | Continue reading
Lots of great defecation physics here: “66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a…small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.” | Continue reading
The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?” | Continue reading
SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”. | Continue reading
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen after glad- … | Continue reading
The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects, including Egyptian temples, Greek oil flasks, van Gogh paintings, and cuneiform tablets. | Continue reading
“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.) | Continue reading
Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…” | Continue reading
Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.” | Continue reading
Oh wow, I love these photographs of “big tusker” elephants by Johan Siggesson. I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer: The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the opport … | Continue reading
This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index. | Continue reading
Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.” | Continue reading
From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.” | Continue reading
After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them: The Manhole, from the devel … | Continue reading
Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses). | Continue reading
In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable: In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as … | Continue reading