FeedCity

3books, a site that features the books recommended by guests at the end of each Ezra Klein Show podcast. Built by my pal Michael Sippey.

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Great interactive feature on how former world record holder Max Park solves the Rubik’s Cube. You scroll through his slow-motion solve — he makes 12 moves in the first second. “It’s like playing chess at the speed of ping pong.”

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I loved this: The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department. “The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduction business.”

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In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball...

How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes. “The country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.”

I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin:

How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger:

My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them:

These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made).

Tags: science · video

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Thetrusize.com, by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, is a website that lets you move a country or state around a Mercator projection map of the world so you can see how big or small a country really is.

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Sam Fender is a singer and songwriter from the town of North Shields in England. He won the Brit Award for Best Rock/Alternative Act twice. His most recent album is called People Watching, and just like his first two albums, it went to #1 on the UK album charts. To help produce the album, Sam enlisted Adam Granduciel, the singer and frontman of the band The War on Drugs. For this episode, I talked to Sam, and his bandmate Joe Atkinson, about the title track from People Watching, and the long journey that it took to get made, from Sam’s kitchen, to the Hollywood Hills, to Abbey Road.

A paper recently published in a behavioral sciences journal describes a high school student’s hyperthymesia, an extraordinary ability to retrieve autobiographical memories. Teenager With Hyperthymesia Exhibits Extraordinary Mental Time Travel Abilities: The subject of the ...

Oh wow, after 26 years and 1000+ episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from hosting the In Our Time radio series.

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Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! “We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now.”

gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1436.0_1.pdf Here's the 230 page PDF ruling on the 2023 United States v. Google LLC federal antitrust case - the case that could have resulted in Google selling off Chrome and cutting most of Mozilla's funding. I made it through the first dozen pages ...

Here at Atlas Obscura, we’re big on collections. From rare jerseys to popular ‘90s plush toys, our staff shares the things we collect – and what they mean to us. 

Plus: We want to hear about YOUR collections. What do you collect, and what does the collection mean to you? Or, maybe you have a story about someone who you know who has an outrageous collection. Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Or better yet, you can record a voice memo and email it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re excited to launch TextJam this week, a multi-player editor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. Ever tried to “AI chat” your way to a polished piece of writing, and wanted more control over the result?

TextJam has new inventions that make it easy to tell the AI what to keep and what to change, so you can get from draft to done faster. From typing in pen and pencil, to multi-touch gestures that intelligently resize text, TextJam is a bold new take on what a word processor can be. Try it today for free.

Link: textjam.com/show/demo?df

This video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.

The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs. Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images. It’s a collage millio...

President Trump’s deregulatory agenda emboldened prediction markets to push boundaries around permitted event contracts. Now sites advised by his son are allowing bets on his death.

Making XML human-readable without XSLT

In response to the recent discourse about XSLT support in browsers, Jake Archibald shares a new-to-me alternative trick for making an XML document readable in a browser: adding the following element near the top of the XML:

<script
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  src="script.js" defer="" />

That script.js will then be executed by the browser, and can swap out the XML with HTML by creating new elements using the correct namespace:

const htmlEl = document.createElementNS(
  'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml',
  'html',
);
document.documentElement.replaceWith(htmlEl);
// Now populate the new DOM

Tags: browsers, javascript, rss, xml, xslt, jake-archibald

“New York City is marking its 400th birthday this year and almost no one gives a damn.”

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