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The Case of the Green Covers is a risograph-printed zine that documents the history of the “Green Penguins”, “a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s”.

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Podcast interview with two photojournalists who have been covering ICE in Minnesota. “It’s a conversation about what they’ve seen, the vital role of photojournalism at this moment, and the personal toll of doing this work.”

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Haven’t watched this 90-minute video yet, but I’ve seen so many recommendations for it that I’m posting it as a to-do list item for myself: You are being misled about renewable energy technology.

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President Zelensky accuses Moscow of using the coldest days of winter to terrorise Ukrainians, as temperatures drop to -20 degrees celsius. Also: French police raid the Paris offices of the social media platform, X. Spain becomes latest country to consider banning social med...

A group of 50 Chilians recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot. Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”.

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Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang ...

The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been. “If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.”

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I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In the newsletter for January:

• LLM predictions for 2026
• Coding agents get even more attention
• Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw went very viral
• Kakapo breeding season is off to a really strong start
• New options for sandboxes
• Web browsers are the "hello world" of coding agent swarms
• Sam Altman addressed the Jevons paradox for software engineering
• Model releases and miscellaneous extras

Here's a copy of the December newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

President Trump says India has agreed to stop buying Russian oil as part of a trade deal with the United States. In return, Washington will lower tariffs on Indian goods to 18%. Mr Trump said Delhi has pledged to buy more oil from the US and, potentially, from Venezuela. Als...

People aren't always what they appear to be. Don't forget that. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Van Lathan, and Mallory Rubin head down to Blue Bay to investigate the 1998 erotic thriller ‘Wild Things,’ starring Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Denise Richards, and Neve Campbell. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elon Musk and other internet racists started an internet war over Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, thereby immediately disproving their point.

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This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...] The book,...

Early this month, a wily coyote swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz. He was in such rough shape, observers thought he’d probably die, but he’s been snacking on birds and rodents and was recently observed fat as a pickle.

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For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later. A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs: Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.

Tags: movies · music · Seu Jorge · The Life Aquatic · video · Wes Anderson

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The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed. “Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.” (My kid goes to a liberal arts school & anecdotally can confirm.)

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A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South Chi...

Culinary Students Given Live Baby To Learn How To Care For Bag Of Flour. I laughed so hard at this.

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Introducing the Codex app OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably fir...

During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza: Even in a country where a sincere apolo...

As part of their coursework, students at UC Berkeley are contributing edits to Wikipedia about “LGBTQ+ history, with an emphasis on queer and trans people of color”. They’ve added 300,000+ edits and 3,000+ citations.

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