Pope Releases Encyclical On Perils Of Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Strategy. “I fear for what horrors the fan base might soon endure, but I would be negligent not to give Andor its flowers.”

Radiohead’s OK Computer reimagined as Nintendo 64 songs, featuring reworked sounds from Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and more.

Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto: Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. And Kino Loy’s speech to his fello...

Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy in which “every one of the ~550,000 words in Infinite Jest [is replaced] with ‘Jeff’ while preserving punctuation, line breaks, etc.”

How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes? Footnotes present “kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go? There is no bottom of the page in an audiobook, obviously.”

Out now: new Boards of Canada album. Get it wherever you buy or stream music.

From The Mandalorian and Grogu, an extended loop of Shakari, a synth-y track from composer Ludwig Göransson. See also Niamos from Andor (composed by Nicholas Britell).

Not a surprise but nice to have the data: the Federal Reserve calculated that inflation would be much lower without Trump’s stupid tariffs.

How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the...

On The Fuel Efficiency of Launching My Enemies Into The Sun. Incredibly nerdy and fun: does it require more power to eject a person from the solar system or launch them into the Sun?

The Rise & Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’. “The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless. The tyrant who chooses to fight it is doomed.”

Down with -maxxing! Searching for the absolute best option isn’t always the wisest course of action. Better to make a good-enough choice so “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live”.

There are no lightsabers in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a first for Star Wars films. There are also no Wilhelm screams in the movie, which is weird because I thought I heard snippets of it everywhere (even Mando’s blaster sounded a little Wilhelm-ish).

Let’s the keep the David Attenborough love going: this is a six-hour video featuring 100 of the most iconic moments from the famed naturalist’s work. I got this via Enrique, who rightly asserts that “There’s no such thing as too much David Attenborough.”

See also Three Hours of Unbelievable Moments From Nature, Narrated by David Attenborough.

Tags: David Attenborough · video

Consider the Sister: an interview with Amy Wallace. “It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her.”

I, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent of the Way There. “Honestly, folks, we are so, so close. The summit is largely visible. It is nearly visible. There is a concept of visibility at play here that is impossible to ignore.”

A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area. The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring bac...

Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States: We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices...

As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists have discovered 1,121 marine species in a single year”. Discoveries include “a new species of deep-sea ghost shark, a symbiotic bristle worm…as well as corals, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, and anemones”.

The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description: Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander. And from the website: Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojo...

A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations, presumably hallucinated by AI. The fake citations “were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references.”

To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant. “If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making?”

“Observe the moth in its monumental fight for life, and do likewise. We gain life’s powers by knowing that eventually they will be taken away. There is beauty in this struggle. Murmurations of starlings occur only in the evening.”

I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me. My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and sc...

My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon. “As I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions.”

The first-ever Enhanced Games (open to those using performance-enhancing drugs) featured 42 athletes, three of whom were competing clean. All three won their respective events.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical letter yesterday; it’s entitled Magnifica Humanitas Of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It is very long and I haven’t been able to read the whole thing; here’s a tast...

The 250th birthday of the United States is coming up and I know many of us are having a tough time feeling celebratory because *waves hands around at everything*. To mark the occasion in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner, historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a ser...

Tenderly Tracking My Husband. “Knowing when to step in and tell a loved one with [Alzheimer’s] that they can no longer do something because it’s too risky is a game of chance we caregivers hate to play.” Lovely & heartbreaking.

Great title for a book: Fascist Yoga. “Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise.”