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Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott writes about the $2 billion in donations her foundation gave in 2024 and also some alternate and forgotten definitions of the word “invest”: “To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.”

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The Killings of Young Mothers. In the US, “when women under age 25 get pregnant, their odds of death by homicide more than double.”

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Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.

I’ve said this before but it’s incredible that they picked Eilish for this:

I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.

Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.

Tags: Billie Eilish · interviews · music · video

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Hmm. I don’t know. I haven’t liked Superman in a movie since the early 80s. What do you think? Does Superman even make sense as a contemporary superhero?

Tags: movies · Superman · trailers

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Joe Otterson, reporting for Variety: “Silo” has been renewed for both Seasons 3 and 4 at Apple TV+, with the fourth season set to be the show’s last. The renewal news comes as the post-apocalyptic drama is currently airing its second season. The sixth episode of Season ...

The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?

Tags: Christmas · holidays · music · The Muppets · video

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I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the paintin...

I’m an Apple News+ Article. Come and Get Me, Baby. “‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ I whisper from my protected paywall’s safe, loving embrace.”

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Saving this for future reference: the 25 most popular recipes published by NYT Cooking in 2024. Includes a link to the full top 50.

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Thanks to a large donation, lift tickets will be free all season at Storrs Hill Ski Area in NH. “We hope this initiative brings neighbors together and inspires a love of skiing in a fun and accessible way.”

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Marisa Kabas correctly asserts that Substack’s latest announcement reaffirms their status as a publication (and not a platform) and as a place that will publish disinformation and hate under the guise of “free speech”. As we wrote in the Substackers Against Nazis letter, “t...

How to make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament of John McClane crawling through the air duct.

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One last item on Acorn 8. Whether you are a longtime Acorn user (like me), or a would-be new user, you should set aside some time to actually read Acorn’s documentation. It’s a full user manual, and it not only describes, in detail, what every feature in the app does and how...

I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an optical illusion?)

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Sabrina Carpenter is a singer, songwriter, and actress. She had a huge year with her album Short N Sweet, which came out in August 2024. It debuted at #1, and went platinum within a month. At the upcoming Grammys, she’s nominated for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and more. One of her big hits is “Please Please Please,” which she wrote with Amy Allen and producer Jack Antonoff. He’s won Producer of the Year at the Grammys for the last three years in a row. For this episode, I talked to Sabrina and Jack about everything that went into making “Please Please Please.” 

For more, visit songexploder.net/sabrina-carpenter. 

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors: The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s a...

Dave Nanian, writing on the Shirt Pocket blog: macOS 15.2 was released a few days ago, with a surprise. A terrible, awful surprise. Apple broke the replicator. Towards the end of replicating the Data volume, seemingly when it’s about to copy either Preboot or Recovery, i...

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Bookshop) is a book by Milton Mayer for which he interviewed ten ordinary Germans about their experiences living in Nazi Germany. From the synopsis: “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer...

Jamelle Bouie: “Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” 100,000%!! This is driving me *nuts*. Dem pols: fight or piss off.