FeedCity

I feel like in the last couple media interviews I’ve done after stepping down as CEO I’ve done a much better job communicating the vision and importance of the fediverse than I’ve ever done before, which is ironic but maybe logical? Brain work better when less pressure?

Data centers are booming and taking the blame for spiking power costs because of how energy intensive they are. Rosemary Misdary, WNYC and Gothamist science reporter, talks about what Gov. Hochul says she plans to do to reign in the costs to consumers.

 

Image: Data center infrastructure in the United States, November 2025 (DOE — NREL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Caitlin Dickerson, staff writer at The Atlantic, talks about her reporting on a mixed immigration status family who felt the risks of staying in the U.S. were too great, and moved to Mexico. Plus Rachel Cruz and Irvi Cruz talk about why their family made the decision to move...

Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen afte...

I remember individual seasons of Survivor by and for their "mood." This is a nebulous bit of recall, because "mood" (or "vibe," if you will) is both subjective and insufficient; distilling roughly twelve hours of programming into one word is inevitably going to leave a lot o...

When old guys who played for Lou Holtz talk about him, from my experience, they don’t bring up schemes or Xs and O’s. They bring up speeches from the crusty but legendary coach, TV pundit, and rah-rah guy who died Wednesday at 89 years old. No, not loathsome political speeches. Football speeches.

“That guy could talk,” says Bruce Hanson. He played for Holtz at William & Mary from 1969 through 1971, his first three seasons as a college head college coach. Hanson remembers that Holtz, even as a 32-year-old rookie who’d previously held only assistant jobs at W&M, Iowa, Connecticut, South Carolina and Ohio State, was already as great a motivator as the game had ever seen.  

“When he was done with his pregame speech you woulda wanted to go beat the Chicago Bears,” Hanson said. 

This week, we discuss a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerous narrative.

Micro.blog users who actively use our book-related features will have noticed over the last couple of weeks that books search has been unreliable. Long story short, we were using a combination of Google Books and Open Library, and rate-limiting with Google in particular star...

Last Thursday, the Kansas State legislature passed SB 244, overriding a veto by Governor Laura Kelly and enshrining anti-trans law as unhinged in its fury as it is disheveled in structure. Here at Defector, we are committed to explaining incredibly stupid shit so that it can...

The animal kingdom is ruled by open sexual relationships. Bats, beetles, and bonobos all have multiple partners over a season or a lifetime. Barnacles and barracudas don't even get to pick their partners, simply spewing their eggs and sperm into milky clouds underwater. But ...

CALGARY, Alberta — The Germans are famous for squishing words together to form useful new compounds. But Calgarians perfected the art when they came up with "Saddledome." You look at it, and you say, Yup, that's a Saddledome. The building occupied by the Flames since 1983 i...

Meir Kahane, Netanyahu, Trump, and the war beyond Iran.

The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects, including Egyptian temples, Greek oil flasks, van Gogh paintings, and cuneiform tablets.

I have a few blog post drafts about recent AI controversy and advertising that I may post eventually, but for now I do want to note Dario Amodei’s blog post on the ongoing negotiations with the military. I thought his leaked internal post was in poor taste, overly personal, so I like his apology here to correct the record:

It was a difficult day for the company, and I apologize for the tone of the post. It does not reflect my careful or considered views. It was also written six days ago, and is an out-of-date assessment of the current situation.

Lydia DePillis, New York Times reporter covering the American economy, talks about how the war with Iran could affect the economy at home, as issues with oil prices, supply chains and the massive cost of the war begin to pile up.

Photo credit: Natasha Chebanoo on Pexels.

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Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:

I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.

Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)

John McCoy: From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and component...

Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008: There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. Harry McCracken, writing at the time:...

We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, ...

The post War with Iran appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.)