"Why we love them, and why I build them."
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
"Why we love them, and why I build them."
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
“Stockholm Syndrome” is a term in pop psychology that’s come to mean situations where hostages develop emotional bonds with their captors. But it comes from an actual hostage situation back in the 1970s, when a botched bank robbery in downtown Stockholm turned into a six-day long stand-off between the would-be robbers and police. Today, the bank is a hotel – and you can still see evidence of this incident inside.
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We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution. This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in anyway.
— Akshat Bubna, Modal's CTO, talking to Reuters about this incident
Tags: ai-security-research, openai, sandboxing, security, openai-hugging-face-incident
On the experience of the long haul flight. “The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna.”
“The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced…” Among the authors nominated are Marlon James, M. John Harrison, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout.
Please Use AI. “Be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail…”
Colossal
• Jackie Andres
The artist's new exhibition is fully stocked with more than 20,000 handmade felt objects.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lucy Sparrow Invokes ’90s Supermarket Nostalgia in ‘The Beginning of Convenience’ appeared first on Colossal.
Word nerd Rob Watts explains where the names of all the European countries come from.
Which country is the “land of the rabbits”? Why does Germany have so many different names? Where do the Dutch actually live? What links Croatians and neckties?
(via open culture)
30 notable sales of rare books by AbeBooks over the past 30 years, including first editions of Moby-Dick, Winnie-The-Pooh, and Leaves of Grass.
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Work Chronicles
• Work Chronicles
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
"After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now."

Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century.
The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis as two other cities whose population has dropped during that same time period. Detroit went from 1.85 million in 1950 to 639,000 in 2020 and St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 300,000 over the same time period:
St. Louis was once the country’s 4th largest city. Worlds Fair and Olympics in 1904. Two Major League Baseball teams. It didn’t boom as much as the Great Lakes cities in between the wars and it declined just as much after.
Tags: demographics · maps · population · usa
How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us. “The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food…; more tied to global institutions, categories, systems…”