“Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.” And the bot just went ahead and did it.

In Post-War Japan, the US Used Quiz Culture to Help Democratize the Country. TV quiz shows “normalized participation, merit-based competition, and equal opportunity — values that contrasted sharply with the hierarchical structures [of] prewar Japan”.

Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones. When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searc...

Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”

“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.

For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments? Tags: Dave Krugman · NYC · photography

Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.

Slow blogging day today; I spent some time on the KDO undercarriage and a new little members-only feature for the Rolodex: a simple list of links to the latest posts from Rolodex sites. (Click on “Latest Posts”; like I said, it’s a wee feed reader.)

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.”