July 7
Word choices
Writers discuss particular word choices and what they imply. "It turns out" as a disarming assertion (by an author in the US). Asking for someone's pronouns, in particular in questions coming from monolingual English speakers (by an author in the UK). "Why I no longer say 'conservative' when I mean 'cautious'" (by an author in Brazil). White-collar US workplace norms that allow "I'm concerned" but not "I'm angry" and "misrepresenting" but not "lying".
“I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.”
There are no reliable figures for how many students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. Bard College literature professor Hua Hsu (archived) reflects on AI and the university, interviewing students and faculty members.
What happens when you choose to do something simple and do it well
What happens when you choose to do something simple and do it well
What kind of paper would you use to fold flowers? As folders, we know that finding the right paper for the model we want to fold (and vice versa) is important for achieving the right form and appearance. Personally, I’ve used a lot of different materials for my work, including everything from printer paper and aluminum foil to cellophane, fabric and more. When folding origami flowers, why not use flower petals? from The Art of Hanakami [The Fold]
Austerity comes to Canada
Carney's cabinet asked to find 'ambitious savings' ahead of fall budget. "Ministers are being asked to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year that begins in April, followed by 10 per cent the year after and 15 per cent in 2028-29."
What wakes you? It's your free thread...
As the residents of Marlborough are woken at 5:30am by a peacock, people in Ynyslas by a mini-tornado, those of Litton are woken by an earthquake, and people in Cheam are kept awake by a bottom-pinching ghost, the optional question for this week is ... what wakes you? Or just chat about what's going on in your life (no politics, as there's a billion other threads on this site for that).
So many ways to waste your time, so little time
The America Party
The dispute between Republican President Donald Trump and his main campaign financier Elon Musk took another fractious turn on Saturday when the space and automotive billionaire announced the formation of a new political party, saying Trump's "big, beautiful" tax bill would bankrupt America. A day after asking his followers on his X platform whether a new U.S. political party should be created, Musk declared in a post on Saturday that "Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom." [more inside]
Capybaras on ice
A snapshot of the first moments of a union
At its broadest, the collection spanned from the New Jersey nuptials of David Thomas and Helena Van Boskerk in June 1728 (“the first Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord GEORGE the Second”) to the 2013 marriage of Loreen M. Bloodgood and Alicia A. Terrizzi, the first same-sex couple to wed in Pennsylvania, before it was even clear their union would be recognized in the commonwealth. Gold-Bikin framed scores of these marriage mementos and displayed them in the hallways of the Norristown, Pennsylvania, law firm where she worked as one of the country’s top divorce attorneys. from First Comes Love [Jstor]
July 6
We've been waiting all year
It's been on your calendar, right? Great British Pea Week starts tomorrow! "It aims to increase awareness and understanding of the provenance and heritage of peas, giving British consumers a reason to celebrate the little green nutritional wonders during harvesting time." [more inside]
Culture literally changes how we see the world
The article and the referenced study is very interesting, but: do you see rectangles or circles?
Five baby beavers born at Cairngorms National Park
(HAVE YOU EVER FANTASIED 4 WHILE YOU WERE AWAKE)
ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is considered the earliest chatbot. He programmed it in Michigan Algorithm Decoder-Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP) on MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) operating system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum’s papers at MIT’s Institute Archives, including an early version of its famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and Fortran Assembly Program. Here we describe the reconstruction and reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, running on an emulated IBM 7094. from ELIZA Reanimated: Restoring the Mother of All Chatbots to One of the World’s First Time-Sharing Systems [IEEE.org]
Why did the marmoset cross the road?
Hundreds of monkeys can now safely cross roads in Alta Floresta, a city in the southern Brazilian Amazon. Seven canopy bridges have reconnected rainforest fragments that were separated by urban roads. [more inside]
Strategic Intelligence in Large Language Models
"Our results show that LLMs are highly competitive, consistently surviving and sometimes even proliferating in these complex ecosystems. Furthermore, they exhibit distinctive and persistent "strategic fingerprints": Google’s Gemini models proved strategically ruthless, exploiting cooperative opponents and retaliating against defectors, while OpenAI’s models remained highly cooperative, a trait that proved catastrophic in hostile environments. Anthropic’s Claude emerged as the most forgiving reciprocator, showing remarkable willingness to restore cooperation even after being exploited or successfully defecting."
“It was some pure algebraic witchcraft.”
One hundred and thirty-seven seconds is a 1976 short story by polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem, translated by Marcin Wichary in 2015, which feels eerily current in a world where ChatGPT exists. Wichary also wrote a short essay about the translation, and shared some notes on the process. He is a big fan of Lem, and co-designed a Google doodle dedicated to the writer, and once showed up unannounced at his house.
The rise of Whatever
"The vast majority of people involved do not actually care what the thing they’re flocking to is. What they care about is that it has a graph, and that they get rich if the graph goes up, so they say whatever might make the graph go up." The rise of Whatever - the greedy and feckless underpinning of cryptocurrency, the Web, LLMs, and online culture in general - a beautiful and heartfelt appeal by someone who really cares (Eevee a.k.a. Evelyn Woods).
The real Salt Path
"how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation". Chloe Hadjimatheou in The Observer investigates the story behind the best-selling memoir and film The Salt Path. A second article summarises the discrepancies. There's also a video (7 min). The book at Goodreads.
People sent away from the only home they've known.
When the world needed it most, it reWHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING
After a few days shy of two years (not even its longest hiatus), the mysterious YouTube channel Classics of Game (previously, previouslier) has returned with a particularly baffling piece of context-free video game footage.
How much more black could this be?
Recently somebody made a band with AI generated music and pictures that passed 1 million streams on Spotify the other day. The “band” claimed that they were real. Then it got interesting when a guy who had no relationship whatsoever with the “band” claimed to be their spokesman. Then he said, kidding! Meet the Velvet Sundown. [more inside]
How an experiment left thousands of schoolchildren unable to spell
How a bold educational experiment left thousands of children unable to spell after they were taught the phonetic, 45-character Initial Teaching Alphabet.
A masterwork of printed ephemera
What are the chances Mr. John S. Thompson knew his three years in cahoots with Mr. Gaddis were three years rubbing elbows with America’s finest novelist, then, now, maybe for always? What are the chances Mr. Thompson’s elbows were covered in corduroys? from Reflections on & Appreciation of A Pile Fabric Primer
The ancient diseases that plagued the dinosaurs
The ancient diseases that plagued the dinosaurs. Scientists have discovered the tell-tale signs of a range of dinosaur diseases – and found that they're remarkably similar to those affecting animals alive today.
July 5
Throat Pouch of Death
40 days and 40 nights
In 1999, Robert Bogucki deliberately walked into the Great Sandy Desert, triggering one of the biggest land searches Australia had ever seen, and a fierce public backlash. The story had all the makings of a tabloid sensation — a missing man, a treacherous landscape, a grieving girlfriend, and American mavericks here to save the day. In 2025 he returns to pay his respects to the land and those who looked for him. [more inside]
An enterprise in which convention is disguised as variety
The vast majority of stories we encounter are versions of the monomyth – from King Lear to Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). But to what extent is even that a normative Western construct promoting a narrow range of possible life-arcs – with the attendant Hollywood industry replicating it over and over, like an oppressive storytelling machine? And, to look even further outside the frame, is there something inherently reactionary about narrative itself? from Our narrative prison [Aeon; ungated]
The New Vertigo Years
Over a century ago, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today. The years between 1900 and 1914 have been called the "vertigo years" by historian Philipp Blom. As this essay walks though, the transformative period had some surprising parallels to our own time. Today as the new vertigo years?
Hey, pal! Remember me?
"Business Insider has learned Meta is training customizable chatbots to be more proactive and message users unprompted to follow up on past conversations. It may not cure what Mark Zuckerberg calls the 'loneliness epidemic,' but Meta hopes it will help keep users coming back to its AI Studio platform, documents obtained by BI reveal. The goal of the training project, known internally to data labeling firm Alignerr as 'Project Omni,' is to 'provide value for users and ultimately help to improve re-engagement and user retention,' the guidelines say."
The logistics of worldwide evil
A remarkable report from UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on how an economy of occupation in Gaza has shifted to an (immensely profitable) economy of genocide. [more inside]
Whale nursery on WA's south coast may hold key to species' future
Whale nursery on WA's south coast may hold key to species' future. Once a hotspot for commercial whaling, a section of Western Australia's coast has become a sanctuary for newborn southern right whale calves. But the population is still struggling to recover.
Don't bore us, get to the...
Torus Sketch is a simple, descriptively-named interactive program for drawing on a square torus.
Things unraveled — slowly at first, and then all of a sudden
The unraveling of the Byju’s empire has come as a shock to many employees. One former employee who led a team for several years until 2024 told me he was proud of the work he and his colleagues had been doing. “I’ve never seen a team that was more dedicated to making sure that teaching was done right,” he said. He’d been surprised, he added, when he first heard the company needed to downsize because some expected investments hadn’t materialized. “Why do we need new investors for us to keep our businesses running?” he remembered wondering. “Have we just been burning investor money to keep up?” from The math tutor and the missing $533 million [Rest of World]
"It's over."
Dr. David Suzuki, noted Canadian scientist, educator, and climate activist, has called the fight. [more inside]
July 4
Florida removes record haul of invasive pythons
Florida removes record haul of invasive pythons in effort to curb population. The increase in Burmese pythons had resulted in loss of animals native to the Everglades.
AI-generated influencers
"Milla Sofia lives in Helsinki, spends weekends on luxury yachts, and recently signed a fashion deal with a Finnish phone accessories store. She also doesn’t exist, not in the real world. She's an AI-generated influencer, a pure creation of software with good lighting, designed to help sell products and generate money for her developer." [more inside]
Security, convenience, organizing, and automation
A few interesting ways to use the encrypted messaging app Signal. "Using Signal groups for activism" by Micah Lee (16 Jun 2025): how to "turn an in-person meeting into a Signal group using QR codes", "manage large semi-public groups while still vetting new members", and "make announcement-only groups" ideal for rapid-response volunteer networks. "A Signal messenger API on your tailnet with Docker Compose" by Parker Higgins (23 April 2025): a setup for sending Signal messages using the command line, following up his "Messaging Signal groups based on Puzzmo webhooks (using Tailscale Funnel)". (Disclaimer: Parker's a friend.)
MOBOTOYS: The Museum Of Battery Operated Toys
Do you like vintage battery operated toys? If so I have a place for you! Weirdly found this from a Reddit thread where the person that runs the museum drives this big truck with cold sparks, smoke, American Flags, etc while towing a Shelby Mustang. People thought it was a MAGA truck, but it ended up being this super great guy who just likes to do this and has nothing to do with MAGA. [more inside]
The Internet is for Extremism
The Internet is for Extremism, by Jeremiah Johnson. "To understand how Donald Trump used the Internet to take over American politics - and why everything else is also going insane - we first need to understand MrBeast. The biggest and probably most knowledgeable content creator on the planet has one philosophy - if you want people to watch, push things to the extreme. And this rule doesn’t just govern YouTube videos. It governs everything we do online."
Rich Man, Poor Man.
Silias Deane as "secret emissary, he was entrusted with three interrelated duties in Paris: to secure merchandise for commercial trade; to obtain and arrange shipment of arms, clothing, and other supplies for an army of 25,000 troops; and to convince the French government to form an alliance with the colonists against Britain. Deane arrived in Paris on July 6, 1776, unaware that Congress had just declared independence and the war had begun"
'The Undoing of Silas Deane' [more inside]
'The Undoing of Silas Deane' [more inside]
This must be what they call contagious energy
I told her that the idea of power is always the first thing that comes to mind when I think of her roles. It’s clear the femme fatale title that follows her, but in that blend of eroticism and danger, there’s always something inherently strong. A woman who, from Basic Instinct through Casino to Diabolique, doesn’t stand behind men but side by side with them, if not a step ahead, can only be strong. from Sharon Stone exclusively for Vogue Adria on her new projects, why she still believes in a better world, and her shift from acting to art
"Fashion through space and time"
Wedding dress sketches (introduction) in the Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon collection, evening gowns (introduction) in the Bergdorf Goodman Custom Salon collection, Jerry Miller shoe sketches, and an in-depth look at fashion sketches, daywear, and eveningwear associated with A. Beller & Co. are among the collections, exhibits, etc. searchable by color at the FIT Library's Special Collections and College Archives and introduced in an essay by Karen Jamison Trivette in The Routledge History of Fashion and Dress, 1800 to the Present (2024), available free online. The book also has essays on the sewing machine, the role of chemical and textile industries in fashion, Black American fashion designers, Africa Fashion Week Nigeria, sportswear, and secondhand clothes--among many other topics.
Reversal of the Southern Meridional overturning circulation
“We are witnessing a true reversal of ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere—something we’ve never seen before” explains Antonio Turiel of ICM-CSIC. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the SMOC is not just weakening, but has reversed. This could will have unprecedented global climate impacts.” (PNAS)
The luxurious lifestyle of the world's richest man
Just a guy and his rockets
Bill the bots, it's Independence Day
Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value. That changes today, July 1, what we’re calling Content Independence Day. Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content. That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.
July 3
Political Grief and the Enemy of Action.
Democratic institutions in the US are being dismantled at a frightening pace, masked thugs pull people off the street without identification, warrants or due process. Our government is building concentration camps in the swamps of Florida.
That sickness in the pit of your stomach might be political grief for all we have lost as a society. [more inside]
Farmers wanting to sell tiny dragons' last known holdout left in limbo
Farmers wanting to sell tiny dragons' last known holdout left in limbo. The home of the only wild population of Victorian grassland earless dragons is no longer viable as a private farm, but governments are unwilling to buy the land for conservation. (Australia)
"The story continues with Jón facing off against an evil serpent ..."
"Icelandic Saga Now Available in English for the First Time" (2024): "The Saga of Jón the Player ... is a ... chivalric saga that dates from the later Middle Ages." Introduction. "Here begins the saga ...." Source. See also "Nítíða saga" (2012): "riddarasögur have not always enjoyed acceptance among scholars, despite their immense popularity in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century." Text & translation of this "maiden-king" saga. Late sagas may be absent from the Icelandic Saga Database and Saga Thing, but for an open access text about an earlier time, see The Norse Sorceress on "the mental and material universes of the people who inhabited Scandinavia and Iceland between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD ... It is ... an up-to-date introduction to ... vǫlur, seiðr, and other forms of ritual behaviour in the Viking world."
US Festival
"The US Generation is an in-depth look at one of the most influential music festivals of all time. The film is directed by award-winning filmmaker Glenn Aveni. Us Generation blends rare concert footage and insightful interviews with both organizers and performers."