Reporting on Homeland Security’s seige of Minneapolis. “No one…is even really bothering with the pretext that they’re here to make the city safer. This is Donald Trump’s revenge campaign, and they’re the foot soldiers.”
“Scientists have been forced to rethink the intelligence of cattle after an Austrian cow named Veronika displayed an impressive – and until now undocumented – knack for tool use.” And: “We don’t believe that Veronika is the Einstein of cows…”
This is a wild Bluesky thread (and bus ride). “they switched drivers at a rest stop and the new driver is telling everyone that they’re the ones on the wrong bus??” (Gotta be logged in to Bluesky to read, sorry.)
This is an animated 3D visualization of the growth of Paris from 300 BCE to the present day. It was made with Blender (no AI) by Christian Ivan, who notes that it’s a “simplification” and so might not be 100% accurate. To my eye, the broad strokes are all there. The subtle sound design helps with the overall effect as well.
Tags: 3D · cities · infoviz · maps · Paris · video
The rate at which the universe is expanding differs depending on how it’s measured. Gravitationally lensed supernovas could solve the discrepancy; the lensing allows for the tracking of the supernovas over time.
The Ping-Pong Hustler Who Inspired ‘Marty Supreme’. “If Chalamet has found, in this role, an all-time character, it is surely in no small part because Reisman was an all-time character.” (Saw the movie; loved it.)
How Russia’s Children Got So Violent. “There is no positive ideology for children in a country fighting a murderous war.” Ultranationalist & xenophobic violence is encouraged by Putin’s regime.
These photos by Chu Weimin show the mind-boggling scale of China’s green energy buildout.
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.
Tags: China · Chu Weimin · energy · photography
Wikipedia turns 25 years old. (I can’t believe it’s
only been around for 25 years…trying to imagine the web without it is impossible at this point.)
At the Stone Skimming World Championships in Scotland (at an old slate quarry), it’s distance that counts, not the number of skips. “Anyone who is familiar with slate could instinctively tell you that it’s a particularly good rock for skimming.”
By All Measures. “Our scales are too imbalanced; we are unable to think the unthinkable. It goes without saying that it can be paralyzing, demoralizing, to be an individual acting as part of the collective, globe-sized world.”
The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century illustrated encyclopedia of indigenous Mexico, “the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico.” Courtesy of the Getty, the entire document is online and searchab...
Many of us have “lost the future” during the radical uncertainty brought about by polycrisis. “I hadn’t fully grasped how the idea of a better future sustained me — now I, like many others, find it difficult to be productive.”
From XKCD, some common sailing rigs, including the ketch, schooner, offset rig, and oops all spinnakers.
London bakery The Dusty Knuckle cleverly used a loaf of bread as a graph to illustrate the costs of running their business:
From their post:
This comes off the back of a big decision to increase our bakers’ pay ahead of the new London Living Wage coming in April 2026. Th...
“This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person, and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life.”
“Divers documents the restless anticipation of walking to the platform’s edge and the fleeting serenity found in jumping.” Lovely. Just lovely. (via colossal)
Tags: diving · slow motion · sports · video
Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White Woman, Dies at 86. “History had me glued to the seat.” Her refusal predates Rosa Parks’ similar stand, but she was deemed “too dark-skinned and too poor” to be a civil rights symbol.
Suzanne Saroff makes unusual photographic sculptures, including these dynamic olive oil shapes.
Tags: art · food · photography · Suzanne Saroff
I Was Kidnapped by Idiots. “Later, he tried the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine on me but undermined the effect by playing both characters himself, on alternate days, which just made him seem deranged.”
Jamelle Bouie: “The American public, then, is left not with a president but with a man who imagines himself master and behaves like a tyrant. A man whose agents brutalize ordinary citizens and then defame them in the wake of their deaths…”
Stop complaining about paywalls existing. “These paywalls are attempts to make this dying field viable. When you get personally offended by paywalls, you’re essentially saying we should work for free.”
Donald Trump Is Waging War Against Human Conscience. “The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late — neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.”
Zoe Saldaña is now the highest-grossing actor of all time (bc of Avatar & Marvel). 2. Scarlett Johansson, 3. Samuel L. Jackson, 4. Robert Downey Jr., 5. Chris Pratt. Would be interested to see inflation adjusted rankings…
Currently listening to this Thai house mix from Meltmode, played from a tuktuk tooling around the streets of Bangkok.
In the late 70s and early 80s, photographer Charles H. Traub roamed the streets of Chicago, New York, and Europe to take photos of people during the lunch hour.
Colorful and direct, animated and intimate, the portraits are shot close to the subjects, composed seemingly off-the-cuff, focusing on just their heads and shoulders. Each subject reveals something of himself or herself to the camera: the woman who takes the opportunity to pose in dignified profile or the one who purses her lips in an exaggerated pout, even the somewhat less-fortunate subjects caught adjusting their glasses or blinking.
Tags: Charles H. Traub · photography
North America kind of sucks at elevators. “Elevators cost nearly three times as much in North America compared to its peers. What is going on here?” (Maintenance fees can be 10x as expensive.)
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How Will the Miracle Happen Today? “Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. You can wait for it, or you can summon it. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness.”
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