Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor. “He has betrayed the very system that made his success possible; the system in which he and a handful of others like him have profited disproportionately relative to their contribution.”
Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning. “The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear.”
How Was the Wheel Invented? “How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not?”
This is great: a proposed “poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts”.
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Good lord, the World Cup is going to be a total shitshow next year. And the 2028 LA Olympics. A jingoistic facade papering over a faded superpower careening towards ruin.
The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work. “The only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings…”
I am only a couple of chapters into James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (loving it!) and in the first chapter, there’s a relatively short passage about some cheese, Jesus’s Cheese, that comes into the lives of the members of the book’s community that is a first ballot Hall of F...
DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website. This Onion article got me for a sec; totally plausible. Wouldn’t be surprised if they actually changed it to the Department of Jesus or something.
Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.
A Ghost goby (Ple...
America is Losing Its Soul in Brown-Skinned Screams and White-Skinned Silence. “The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral. The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.”
Yesterday, the NY Times published an article about Donald Trump’s threat to take away citizenship from a US-born citizen: Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship. The Times Bluesky account posted a link to the article accompanied by this text:
Preside...
Not a joke: there is a new Commodore 64 coming out. “The glowing, translucent Commodore 64 isn’t a software emulator — it’s the first official C64 in over 30 years, with a few new tricks.” You can preorder now & cancel before shipping for a full refund.
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Maya Ruler’s Tomb Is Unearthed in Belize, With Clues to His Ancient World. “This is the first of its kind in that it’s a ruler, a founder, somebody so old, and in so good a condition.”
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Scrappy is a prototype tool for building “little apps for you and your friends”. Shades of Robin Sloan’s
An app can be a home-cooked meal.
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Mend is a project based in Syracuse, NY that publishes the “creative work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as well as individuals who have been impacted by the criminal justice system”.
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The Best Stunts of All Time, Over Nearly 100 Years of the Oscars. Buster Keaton, King Kong, Errol Flynn, Ben-Hur, Bullitt, Smokey and the Bandit, Top Gun, Speed, The Matrix, Kill Bill, Unstoppable, Mission Impossible, etc.
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When the Klan Got Kicked Out of Town. “More than 500 Lumbee men and women showed up, many of whom were war veterans. Some came with shotguns. Some came with baseball bats.”
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The Art of Roland-Garros. Each year since 1980, the French Open has selected an artist to make an official poster for the tournament; this site displays all of the posters from 1980 to 2025.
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In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar...
New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source. “Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding.” I love reading about science/math breakthroughs…
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No One Else Has a Bike Like Mine. “The most elaborately decorated e-bikes often include colorful adhesive ribbons wrapped around the posts, seat tube and headset, spoke covers and LED lights…” How NYC delivery folks trick out their bikes.
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The Bayeux Tapestry is returning to the UK for the first time in more than 900 years. “The huge embroidery - which is widely believed to have been created in Kent - will go on display at the British Museum in London next year.”
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Carl Zimmer writes about the results of a new genetic study of humans and the diseases that afflicted us over the past 37,000 years. It’s a really fascinating read — in part because of how scientific results can defy our expectations. For instance, the researchers expected t...
Craig Mod: Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses. When your bar gets TikToked: “The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to.”
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“Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at the NY Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. As Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist nonsense, the cult of centrism has taken a self-destructive turn.”
A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse look like?” The answer to the first part of the question is: not that much. But the explanatio...
When Moderation Becomes Appeasement. “Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do.”
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