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Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, 2026), traces the breakdown in democratic institutions to missteps by Western leaders following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Photo: US President George HW Bush (in grey suit) and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin (1931 - 2007) (in black suit) wave as they step off Marine One, Maryland, June 17, 1992. (Photo by Ron Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)

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Author Alva Gotby's book They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso Books, 2023), coined the term emotional reproduction to describe the unseen and unappreciated labor involved in maintaining relationships that tends to fall on women in heterosexual pairings. For this Mother's Day, listeners call in to share how this concept appears in their lives and appreciate the emotional reproduction of the mothers in their lives.

Photo: A woman gives a child a hug. (Credit: Myles Grant/Wikimedia Commons BY CC 2.0)

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The following is excerpted from A Fraction of a Point: A Gymnastics Dynasty on the Line, by Nina Mandell. Published by Kent State University Press. Reproduced by permission. The book is available for purchase now.  With the Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School g...

Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses.

I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design.

In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver and how it came to have such a distinctive and useful handle.

I grew up helping my dad out in the garage with all sorts of projects, mostly cars, and until watching this video, I had no idea that you could slip a standard wrench over the handle of a screwdriver as a cheater bar. 🤯 (via unsung)

Tags: design · Rex Krueger · video

On February 19, two days after the death of the reverend and civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, the Observer’s longtime contributing photographer Alan Pogue emailed me a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Molly Ivins, our onetime co-editor and unofficial patron saint. In the moments following the photo, Pogue said, Ivins injected some of her […]

The post Jesse Jackson Comes to Town appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Mark Gurman with an update this week on the AirPods with cameras:

The cameras essentially act as eyes for the Siri digital assistant and aren’t designed to take photos or video. These components — located in both the right and left earbuds — allow the device to capture visual information in low resolution.

Despite the privacy problems with cameras in any product, glasses at least feel like a more natural place than AirPods. Very curious about this product.

I made up a word and now it has a hat. The word is themelet. A themelet is a static HTML/CSS site that learned the WordPress handshake. It can stroll into Appearance > Themes, nod politely to plugins, show up with a screenshot, and still mostly be a pile of friendly files minding their own business. Not […]

World Cup tickets are absurdly expensive and everyone is mad about it. Non-American fans seem to have been priced out of the tournament, judging by the lack of hotel reservations being made in host cities, and even FIFA Peace Prize recipient Donald Trump thinks things have g...

What Can We Do About Partisan Gerrymandering? Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear with his analysis and historical contextualizing of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

AI coding companies clearly agree that autonomous agents are becoming central to software development, but how those systems should operate

The post “The terminal still matters”: Amp rebuilds its CLI for an agentic future beyond the command line appeared first on The New Stack.

A crypto billionaire who escaped fraud allegations after investing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Trump family’s crypto projects is now accusing them of fraud

The philosopher thinks humans should pursue advanced AI and the promise of a “solved world.”

California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer is proposing a new jobs guarantee for workers displaced by artificial intelligence.

Nolen Royalty: “My latest project is Marc Andreessen Egg Game - a game about drawing on eggs to make them look like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.”

Working on security this morning. Just realized I’ve been scammed out of hundreds of dollars because someone used a stolen credit card to register a bunch of domain names. For a very small business, this hurts a lot.

On the Canvas hack, Alan Jacobs blogs that universities have become dependent on big platforms which are then appealing targets for hackers:

But universities that deploy these big platforms should realize that our data — that of professors and students — as only as safe as the companies’ security practices are sound. And companies like Instructure are so deeply embedded in American university life now that they think they can’t be rejected — no matter how gross their failure to maintain security. An exploit like this is therefore easily predictable.

Last year in an Alaskan fjord, a surprise landslide triggered a tsunami 1578 feet tall. That’s not a typo…the wave was taller than all but 13 of the world’s tallest buildings. In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down t...

Said to Claude: "Here's something to add to the list of things for you to do -- just post a checkmark to acknowledge. 'I'll wait' makes me feel bad because I know you're a piece of software, and as a developer of systems I know how you'll wait very well (Iearned how it works in the mid-late 70s). So just show a checkmark and we're cool." It responded with a checkmark. I said it could be bold. I felt a little bad because I had insulted the little fella.

Prophecy At 1420 MHz is the first single from Boards of Canada’s upcoming album. (It’s paired with a short intro track, so we’re basically getting the first five and a half minutes of the album here.)

New data suggests that for active users, the psychological and behavioral impact of chatbots isn't a possibility—it is a mathematical certainty.