“ICE has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished.” Reminder: ICE was formed in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act, which was criticized at the time for enabling exactly these kinds of abuses.

This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”

Tags: Eminem · movies · music · remix · video

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A Young Readers Edition of Ed Yong’s award-winning An Immense World is out today. “Did you know that there are turtles who can track the Earth’s magnetic fields? That some fish use electricity to talk to each other?”

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I somehow missed this: after a federal judge in VT ordered her freed from a Louisiana detention center, Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was released later that day. 🙏

Scientist Kseniia Petrova came to US to study aging. In Feb, she was detained for a minor offense, had her visa revoked, and has spent 3 months in a detention center in Louisiana. She just wants to get back to her work.

How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans. “Of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government sent to American concentration camps, approximately two-thirds were fellow citizens.”

“Boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom — without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.”

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In Poland, We Know All About Fighting Illiberal Regimes. Here Are Our Lessons for the Trump Age. “Diversity matters most. Not just in communication tools, but in the social makeup of the protest movement.”

I am cautiously optimistic about F1. (The Brad Pitt movie — there’s a full trailer out today.)

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From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution. Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership g...

In Shanghai, “a new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days”.

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The Trumpist assault on the federal government is a “civil war by other means”, says Rebecca Solnit. “It is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.”

“The Trump administration’s policy ideas to incentivize women to have more kids resemble those pushed by authoritarian regimes throughout history.”

I thought this whole Tumblr post by @skaldish was fascinating. The author is a trans man1 who has experienced social situations presenting as both a woman and a man. There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are su...

OMG! The universe is going to decay into nothingness 10^1022 times sooner than previously expected. Carpe diem, everyone!

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Enjoying the Lane 8 Spring 2025 Mixtape this afternoon.

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This is a little bit genius: an analysis of OpenAI based on a close reading of a 22-second video of CEO Sam Altman cooking pasta. “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”

Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York. Uniformly positive results clear from the data after just a few months. And millions raised for public transit. A scandal this didn’t happen sooner.

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Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”

4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government.”

A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.

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I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.

It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.

Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)

Tags: Aardman Animations · remix · video · Wallace and Gromit

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The help desk at Auburn University is still answering questions from the public via telephone. “The rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question…”

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I’d never seen this before: a thief does some stretches in the parking lot before robbing a Dunkin Donuts. Warming up is important for peak performance! https://bsky.app/profile/erikahall.bsky.social

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A few weeks ago, I posted about the hundreds of stills from their animated movies that Studio Ghibli has made available for free download. Since I’m a big fan of the weird little guys director Hayao Miyazaki loves to put in his films (e.g. the kodama in Princess Mononoke1 an...

Bess Kalb: Hooray for Pills. “I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.” Co-sign!

How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed. I saw this in a bookstore recently and wondered if going-off-to-college teens actually read books like these or if they’re just bait for well-meaning adults. Recs welcome!

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Today I learned that Charles Bukowski, “laureate of American lowlife”, wrote about the incompatibilities of early computing platforms in a poem called 16-bit Intel 8088 Chip: 16-bit Intel 8088 chip with an Apple Macintosh you can’t run Radio Shack programs in its disc dri...

I saw Sinners last night (fantastic!) and loved reading Karen Attiah’s piece, ‘Sinners’ is a Black Challenge to White Christianity. Eagerly accepting recommendations for what else to watch/read/listen to about this film.

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Is This Autocracy? “Without a distinction between truth and falsehood, we have no basis for a distinction between good and evil. And at present there is barely even an attempt to conceal the absence of such a basis.”