May 17
Relentless forward progress
An interesting moment for ultramarathon cycling. New records set for the Lands End to John O'Groats round-trip route, and for 24-hour virtual cycling. [more inside]
Poets tend not to enjoy parties
I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or going to one is a high-risk activity, if done properly. from All Yesterday's Parties by Frances Wilson [The Literary Review]
Emus swam like periscopes to freedom and set up life on the beach
Emus swam like periscopes to freedom and set up life on the beach. When a businessman imported emus to his private island on the New South Wales south coast, he did not realise they could swim for freedom and set up their own thriving colony. [more inside]
Servant of the People
A two-part documentary about Volodomyr Zelensky
Pt. 1, Pt.2
Added value: The Servant of the People S1 E1
The Blasters: American Music
"The Blasters emerged in 1979, put out four albums in six years, and then promptly fell apart. A great band that barely was, but in that time they put out some truly incredible music." [more inside]
📚 Canadian small presses #14 📚
Under the fold, more Ontario small presses Assembly Press, Biblioasis, and Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd. [more inside]
Anti-inductive dice
David and Goliath each have a six-sided die. David’s die has the numbers {1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 6}, and Goliath’s die has the numbers {0, 1, 2, 6, 6, 6}. If each of them throws his die n times and announces the total, then Goliath is more likely than David to have the higher total, except when... [more inside]
Skepticism comes easily to life underground
The entire time I’m underground, it is impossible to shake off a latent sense of the absurd. The planning is exceptional, the engineering impressive; Swiss civil protection services have thought of everything. But to house an entire nation underground for even a few days is akin to trying to colonize the moon: There are so many unknowns that even the most brilliant and thorough plans can easily fail. from Safe Space [The Dial]
May 16
A Missing Fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry Is Returning to France
Newly Rediscovered, a Missing Fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry Is Returning to France. Likely removed by Nazi researchers, the scrap of fabric is a small but crucial part of the tattered tapestry’s nearly 1000-year history.
Under the command of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the Ahnenerbe group commissioned Schlabow and other scientists to travel to occupied France and study the Bayeux Tapestry in 1941. At some point, a member of the group apparently removed a small section of the underside of the tapestry and brought it back to Germany, where it remained hidden for decades.
Brother #1
Tonight, Smithsonian Events is Presenting:' Pol Pot Dancing.' "In Person: Sophiline Cheam, choreographer; Toni Shapiro-Phim, cultural anthropologist and dance ethnologist. This documentary frames the long reach and heavy weight of history through the multigenerational lineage of classical Cambodian dance." [more inside]
14:1 he gets in on the first ballot
Major League Baseball Commish Rob Manfred has removed Pete Rose, the "Black Sox" and anyone who is dead from the permanently ineligible list. [more inside]
God Hates A Coward
In the latest episode of Pretty Good internet sports troubadour Jon Bois ruminates on pointlessness, using the career of baseball player Joe Sprinz as his vehicle for doing so. [more inside]
Cat loses three legs, which is Good News, Actually
"There's no way that there's a cat with extra legs. Cats only have four legs," she said. "Then I got the pictures and went, 'Oh, my God! This cat has extra legs."' [more inside]
The Pinnacle Club Centennial
The Pinnacle Club, a UK organization for women climbers found in 1921, celebrated its centennial with, among other things, a short documentary film and the digitization of their journals, published since 1924. [more inside]
You will die someday. Probably not today.
Would you believe me if I told you that you’re actually more likely to die on your birthday than on other days of the year? This statistical curiosity is called the birthday effect. There have been a bunch of studies on different populations that have proven that it’s real. But I was skeptical (maybe you are too?), so let’s run our own study to understand how – and if – it works. [The Pudding]
The Dad Rock That Made Her a Woman
Niko Stratis on her new book about the music that helped her survive before she transitioned. (slGQ) [more inside]
Who Photographed Napalm Girl?
A photo of then 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running, naked and terrified, after a napalm attack, is one of the most famous photos from the Vietnam War. AP photographer Nick Ut, then 21, won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, and also the World Press Photo of the Year in 1973. The 2025 documentary The Stringer has brought to light questions that Nick Ut took the photo, officially called The Terror of War. After their own investigation, May 16, World Press Photo changed its attribution of the photo to unknown after its investigation concluded that "photographers Nguyễn Thành Nghệ or Huỳnh Công Phúc may have been better positioned to take the photograph than Nick Út." [more inside]
Chinese police officer disgraced on duty
First Nations director made a joyful animation
Tired of tragic projects, this First Nations director made a joyful animation. A lost thylacine — better known as a Tasmanian tiger — finds his people in this new homegrown animation led by Nakkiah Lui and Rhys Darby.
Private Eye salutes best investigative reporting of the year
Every year, the British satirical magazine Private Eye runs The Paul Foot Awards to draw attention to the best investigative reporting work of the past 12 months. The mag's Page 94 podcast is devoting an episode to each contender, the first of which describes an FT journalist's determined work to bring cases of lead poisoning to light. [more inside]
Best British Railway Art
Vote for the best British railway-related painting. The contest is linked with celebrations marking 200 years since the opening of the pioneering Stockton and Darlington Railway.
📚 Canadian small presses #13 📚
Under the fold, Ontario small presses Between the Lines Books, Mawenzi House, and Porcupine’s Quill. [more inside]
An Exemplum
Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019: nearly 6 years later, all the predictions made have come true. - "In 2019, Iceland made headlines by becoming one of the first countries in the world to adopt the four-day working week, not through a general law, but through agreements allowing workers to negotiate shorter weeks or reduced hours. Five years on, the results are indisputable."[1,2,3] [more inside]
There is nothing wrong with this, but it is not communication
The automation of language, whether by Erasmians or by LLMs, depends on rejecting novelty: both work in identical fashion by decomposing apparently new situations and topics into familiar elements, so that those situations can be addressed with language that is already associated with those elements in the training corpus. What this means for Grandgousier and Gallet is that the humanist mindset that enables them to speak so well also makes them approach the conflict with a certain arrogance – with the assumption that they can anticipate anything the other side might conceivably have to say on the basis of what they have already read. from Methodical banality [Aeon; ungated]
May 15
Evan Dorkin
EcoMob working to turn food waste into nutrient-rich soil booster
Indigenous business works to divert tonnes of food waste from tip. Each year Australians waste more than seven million tonnes of food at a cost of $36.6 billion to the economy. A Darwin enterprise is doing its bit to change that. EcoMob working to turn food waste into nutrient-rich soil booster.
“The implication was that they were connected.”
The Trump administration used U.S. diplomats to pressure African governments into fast-tracking approvals for Elon Musk’s satellite company while Musk was working in the White House. The effort involved close coordination between the State Department and Starlink, who described their goal as to “ram this through.” Kristofer Harrison, who served as a State Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said: “If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption. Because it is corruption.” [more inside]
"Peg, we need a woman’s song." "Fuck off, I’m doing the accounts"
Peggy Seeger answers reader questions in The Guardian and talks about touring aged 90, Ewan MacColl, Pete Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, climate change and America.
The inspiration for this invention was simply utility
I’ve come to think about it like this: the items we cherish, protect, and even ignore in our daily lives are all part of a larger and often unexamined picture. Small moments or inventions may not live vividly in the public consciousness, but they are still nonetheless crucial points of color -- like strikes of gold creating a pointillism sun. If we can appreciate small legacies like these, maybe we can learn to appreciate our own as well. from 54 years ago, a computer programmer fixed a massive bug — and created an existential crisis [Inverse]
AlphaEvolve
Today, we’re announcing AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent powered by large language models for general-purpose algorithm discovery and optimization. AlphaEvolve pairs the creative problem-solving capabilities of our Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, and uses an evolutionary framework to improve upon the most promising ideas. … While AlphaEvolve is currently being applied across math and computing, its general nature means it can be applied to any problem whose solution can be described as an algorithm, and automatically verified. We believe AlphaEvolve could be transformative across many more areas such as material science, drug discovery, sustainability and wider technological and business applications.
"countercultural complicity in inspiring a movement fixated on murder"
"[T]his terrifying global network can have its intellectual core traced back to one single book: James Mason’s Siege. And it, in turn, only exists because of the efforts of a handful of people in a corner of the 1980s counterculture who worked together to make its publication a reality."Spencer Sunshine in The Quietus: The Countercultural Figures who helped give birth to the Neo-Nazi Terrorist Networks of Today
It's time to win
I had high hopes for Mark Carney, but then he created a Ministry of AI and appointed Evan Solomon to the position. On Carney's new, gender-balanced cabinet. [more inside]
ICE is running out of space
Addicted to ICE: Trump's Deportation Plans Hinge on Small Towns Hooked on Private Prisons [ungated] - "Like a growing number of US communities, Torrance County, New Mexico, is convinced its financial survival depends on locking up immigrants." [more inside]
From fitness to finance sessions, local library offerings are evolving
A push to explore sex and romance as part of a game’s narrative
Somewhere in Warsaw, Poland, two actors are pretending to have sex. It’s not the most intimate of environments. The mood lighting, if you can call it that, is fluorescent bulbs burning overhead, making the sterile, white walls look even brighter than they actually are. In lieu of a bed or couch, the actors fit tightly into a makeshift tank—a technical mockup that's more pipes and bars than any sort of vehicle—to capture an intimate scene between Cyberpunk 2077 mercenaries V and Panam Palmer. fromHow Video Game Sex Scenes Are Made [404 Media; ungated]
May 14
Your Therapy Will Not Be Regulated (And Neither Will Anything Else)
Mark Zuckerberg is giving public interviews on Meta’s AI strategy, often dropping that chatbots could address the epidemic of loneliness by serving as friends or, more surprisingly, as therapists....
Yesterday, as if on cue, the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the U.S. House of Representatives passed this proposal to prohibit state regulation of AI and “automated decision systems” for TEN YEARS, which is defined as systems that "materially influence or replace human decision making." [more inside]
Grauniad: Why millennials are now considered achingly uncool
Cringe! How millennials became uncool. A guide to Millennial-Gen Z conflict, from the Guardian. Longreads
introduces the story, continue reading an ungated version.
The internet had been my space before and now there was this whole wave of new people with no experience or credibility!Sounds not unlike the Eternal September to me, who has a lot of trouble telling these two cohorts apart, especially w/r/t denim.
"I cleaned yer boots. I'll go get 'em fer ya."
The first trailer for James Gunn's Superman [July 11]. "He is kindness in a world that thinks of kindness as old-fashioned [...] He's a big ol' galoot. He's a farmboy from Kansas who's very idealistic. His greatest weakness is that he'll never kill anybody. He doesn't want to hurt a living soul. I like that sort of innate goodness about Superman; it's his defining characteristic."
Starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, María Gabriela de Faría, Wendell Pierce, Alan Tudyk, Pruitt Taylor Vince, and Neva Howell.
They’ve recently finished writing every four-letter word!
Based on the Infinite Monkey Theorem, monkeys.zip is a game(?) where users can claim a monkey on the Infinite Grid - this monkey will continually type, as we check each letter written against all the works of Shakespeare! Monkeys are awarded with points and cosmetic items for writing words, while we track the global performance and see how much of Shakespeare’s works we can write! [more inside]
Gérard Depardieu convicted of sexual assault
The French movie star Gérard Depardieu was convicted by a Paris court on Tuesday on charges of sexually assaulting two women working on the set of a film in which he was starring in 2021. He received a suspended sentence of 18 months, and his name will be added to the national sex offender registry. [NYT gift link]
Babe wake up
New paradigm for psychology just dropped. Adam Mastroianni writes a substack called Experimental History. Adam Mastroianni is a PhD student at Harvard.
Mastroianni has been mostly pretty critical of psychology. However in his latest post, he is very excited about a new idea in psychology that he's pretty sure is wrong. [more inside]
Try not think of Pink Elephant(s)
The future of AI-powered development is here
ArtificialCast ArtificialCast is a lightweight, type-safe casting and transformation utility powered by large language models. It allows seamless conversion between strongly typed objects using only type metadata, JSON schema inference, and prompt-driven reasoning.
Imagine a world where Convert.ChangeType() could transform entire object graphs, infer missing values, and adapt between unrelated types - without manual mapping or boilerplate.
ArtificialCast makes that possible. [more inside]📚 Canadian small presses #12 📚
Under the fold, Canadian small presses ECW Press (which has a wide remit), Little Ghosts (horror), and Undertow Publications (SFFH). [more inside]
Murder accused says alleged confessions were him being a dickhead
Murder accused says alleged confessions were him being a dickhead. This is one of the most Australian headlines that I have ever seen, from the Australian-Government-funded ABC news: Murder accused says alleged confessions were him being a dickhead.
Here's the screenshot I took in case they changed the headline later - ABC news often changes headlines to be more bland 30 minutes to one hour after they first go up. And this is the
article. [more inside]
RIP, José Mujica.
I thought this would be an awesome tool for me and for my business
Shortly after the Holiday Diamond Showcase, much about Jadelle’s success would come into question; even the marriage proposal was later revealed to be a stunt. Within months, Rechnitz faced multiple lawsuits for fraud and theft, allegations that he’d taken out multimillion-dollar loans using stolen property as collateral, and accusations that he’d leveraged his celebrity connections to create a false impression of credibility. Yet, despite a decade of legal troubles, Rechnitz to date has escaped serious consequences. from All That Glitters [The Atavist]
May 13
The future of (post-)capitalism and democracy: worker-owned businesses?
A $10 trillion opportunity for US employees (yt) - "By 2035, nearly 3 million businesses — collectively valued at $10 trillion — will transition ownership as baby boomers retire. Instead of getting acquired by big corporations or private equity firms, Skoll Awardee Apis & Heritage Capital Partners is empowering employees to take ownership." [more inside]
Clown cars are tiny. Clown shoes are big. What's that gas pedal like?
From slim chance to shiny and fat, pygmy possums back from the brink
From slim chance to shiny and fat, pygmy possums back from the brink. The tiny mammal's population was decimated by drought and bushfires, but after five years of struggle they are starting to thrive. (Australia)