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The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey pull off the big con and revisit ‘The Sting’ to kick off Redford Month in honor of the late, great Robert Redford. 'The Sting' also stars Paul Newman and Robert Shaw and was directed by George Roy Hill.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Ronak Nair, and Eduardo Ocampo

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Huh, the original version of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale is a bit different: “An impudent old woman enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears…”

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This one will never get old.

Link: theonion.com/william-safire-orders-two-whoppers-junior…

A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc. The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, inclu...

They’re bringing back Reading Rainbow, hosted by Mychal the Librarian.

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Allison Johnson, The Verge:

Remember the Humane AI pin? And that serious-as-a-heart-attack TED talk about the future of computing? Well, Qualcomm featured Chaudhri in its Snapdragon Summit keynote today, where he’s talking less about lasers you wear on your shirt and more about the amazing battery life on the OmniBook 5 series. How it started, how it’s going, etc. etc.

Johnson’s link above goes directly to Chaudhri’s bit in Qualcomm’s keynote. Looks like a hostage video.

Link: theverge.com/tech/785363/lets-check-in-with-hp-employee…

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Antonio Scurati’s 2018 “documentary novel” M: Son of the Century was a worldwide bestseller about the early political career of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in post-WWI Italy. Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Darkest Hour) has adapted the book into an 8-...

Natalia Newsome is a 5’11” sophomore volleyball player for SMU; she’s got a 40-inch vertical and can touch almost a foot above a regulation basketball hoop. It is bananas how high she rises when spiking the ball.

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Bisa Butler makes quilted portraits and recently debuted a show with some of her newest work called Hold Me Close. From her artist’s statement: This body of work is a visual response to how I am feeling as an African American woman living in 2025. We lived through COV...

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 today, with a very bold set of claims: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the best coding model in the world. It's the strongest model for building complex agents. It’s the best model at using computers. And it shows substantial gains in reasoning and...

Ismail Ibrahim worked as a fact checker for an unnamed magazine (it was the New Yorker). “Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.”

In post-Soviet Russia, Sauron is good actually? “It became a story about hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men oppressing the not-so-evil Sauron and his nation of Mordor.”

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Armin Ronacher: 90% The idea of AI writing "90% of the code" to-date has mostly been expressed by people who sell AI tooling. Over the last few months, I've increasingly seen the same idea come coming much more credible sources. Armin is the creator of a bewildering array of...

M. Gessen: This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well. “When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the bipartisan tributes of Charlie Kirk & the mainstreaming of extremist, bigoted speech. “You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he lived, not as he died.”

An asteroid discovered in 2024 has a small chance of hitting the moon in 2032. “Lunar ejecta could increase micrometeoroid debris flux in low Earth orbit up to 1000 times above background levels.” Scientists say we may be able to nuke it.

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Given a week or two to try out ideas and search the literature, I’m pretty sure that Freek and I could’ve solved this problem ourselves. Instead, though, I simply asked GPT5-Thinking. After five minutes, it gave me something confident, plausible-looking, and (I could tell) ...