December 3
Boing
Mark Twain invented the bra strap
Mark Twain was an inventor. For example: Be it known that I, SAMUEL L. CLEMENS, of Hartford, in the countyof Hartford and in the State of Connecticut, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Adjustable and Detachable Elastic Straps for Garments. You can put that note in your self-adhesive scrapbook, also invented by Mark Twain.
'Forks Out': A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery
'Forks Out': A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery has Muppets parodying a current popular mystery movie. 5 minutes.
META music: a melody inside a melody inside...
i was an atheist before i was an insane occultist
Elizabeth Sandifer (you may remember her book Neoreaction: A Basilisk) has written--well, what has she written? An essay that says, "I think the idea of a so-called 'Artificial General Intelligence' is a pipe dream that does not realistically or plausibly extend from any currently existent computer technology." It's called On Incomputable Language. [more inside]
the history of now
The History of Now "What follows is the story of how our species gained its bearings in time. It is about how, across history, human creatures have come to gauge how large the established past is and how long the future ahead could be."
"whoa, is that REALLY how things work?!"
Metafilter’s own Matt Haughey spent the past year doing technical writing for a disaster recovery company. Along the way, he learned some hair-raising things that made him rethink aspects of his home setup, insurance, and how he could prepare for a potential disaster. Matt explains it all in “Everything I've learned about homeowner's insurance, natural disasters, and recovery aid in 2025.”
"I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself"
Brad Barber builds alternative versions of the Millennium Falcon out of unrelated Lego sets: The Gingerbread Falcon ... the Millennium Flamingo ... Millennium Tails ... Shy Falcon ... Millennium Genesis ... Too Fast Too Falcon ... Millennium Puppy ... Millennium Bunny ... Millennium Starfighter ... Cinderella's Royal Falcon ... Millennium Simba [more inside]
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal
Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Suddenly Behaving Like New York Cabbies [WSJ gift link] - Autonomous vehicles are adopting humanlike qualities, making illegal U-turns and flooring it the second the light goes green. [more inside]
A visual representation of what is valued in a society.
Karen LaMonte has created sublime and enigmatic works in glass, ceramic, bronze, iron, paper, and marble. Her works range from monotype prints to monumental stone sculptures, and explore themes of beauty, gender, identity, and the natural world. [more inside]
Coming in at a massive $0.003 per stream
Welcome to Spotify Unwrapped. I.C.E. ads, meager pay, and AI shenanigans, what's better mix for a music streaming service? [more inside]
Farmers call for change as invasive weed chokes out landscape
Farmers call for change as invasive weed chokes out landscape. To the untrained eye, African lovegrass is just another plant in the NSW Snowy Mountains. But this golden plant is a deceptive invasive weed that is choking out the landscape, causing some farmers to leave the land. (Australia)
He had the idealist’s tenuous grip on physical reality
In our childish moods, we expect what we remember to be there always. Waldo, pushing seventy, looked in vain for the yellow house. Instead there was Hovey’s department store, and a jeweler’s on the corner, and the twin awnings of the Mercantile Library across the street. Now these things, these plump specimens of reality and entrepreneurial zeal, seemed eternal. from The Draft of Time, a reading from Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson [Lapham's Quarterly]
December 2
Periodically one dimensional Game of Life spaceship
Everyone needs money. That's why it's called "money".
From the Department of Machine Learning Leopards Eating Machine Learning Faces: Anthropic has been testing the ability of its AI models in perhaps the most logical way possible: their ability to outwit the crypto smart contracts. [more inside]
Well hully gee, here's to you
When they weren’t busy crashing new machines, the Yellow Kid’s crew targeted everyday routines—farming, construction, anything requiring methodical diligence. For them, upending a stable environment was the ultimate prank, from stampeding livestock to sabotaging city projects. Even the most crucial tasks—like feeding people or maintaining infrastructure—can crumble if incompetent meddlers assume they know best. It’s a humorous reminder that unplanned interference often results in more harm than improvement. from From Comic Strips to Chaos: What the Yellow Kid Teaches Us about Elon Musk’s DOGE Rampage [Forgotten Files]
dinosaur noir
"When the triceratops headbutted in my office door, I was at my desk, cigarette pinched between my claws and a whiskey in front of me. I expected him; he knew I expected him; no point trying to hide it." "Everybody Comes to the Velociraptor’s" is a very short, entertaining scifi story by Timothy Mudie (previously), published last month in Small Wonders Magazine.
The CanCon we deserve
"Like a New York taxi cab supporting the weight of over 4000 elephants."
14-year-old Miles Wu, of New York City, just won $25,000 for a research project based on an origami fold [archive] called Miura-ori, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision. Using the Miura-ori, a tessellated pattern of parallelograms that forms a rigid structure, Miles tested 54 variations. He found that small panels with steep angles were the strongest, able to hold up over 9000 times their weight. Miles Wu explains.
The Death of Higher Education?
AI is destroying the university and learning itself. “The real tragedy isn’t that students use ChatGPT to do their course work. It’s that universities are teaching everyone—students, faculty, administrators—to stop thinking. We’re outsourcing discernment. Students graduate fluent in prompting, but illiterate in judgment; faculty who teach but aren’t allowed the freedom to educate; and universities, eager to appear innovative, dismantle the very practices that made them worthy of the name. We are approaching educational bankruptcy: degrees without learning, teaching without understanding, institutions without purpose.”
Read Palestine Week 2025
This year there is a focus on fundraising to support Palestinian writers in and evacuated from Gaza. You can watch the livestreamed global reading for Palestine - part 1, part 2, part 3. Publishers have made 20 books available for free download, including fiction, poetry, memoirs, and history.
Even more of an American striver
In that era, spotting harbingers of fascism in America would have struck some readers as an implausible provocation; now, in the second Trump presidency, it’s a threadbare cliché. But already in 1992—early in a decade now largely remembered as a time of American prosperity, stability and political consensus—Brodkey sensed something coming apart. In “Notes on American Fascism,” he evoked a “disenfranchised class” driven to an “absolute hunger for absolutes” of “land, rootedness, and meaning,” one that “would avail itself of the egoism of a single all-purpose leader who seems likely to be successful if that leader did not socially shame them, but was like them.” [The Point; ungated]
December 1
The downfall of JoAnn
how one company broke sewing for EVERYONE: a deep dive into the rise and fall of American fabric company JoAnn, the economics of craft and hobbies, and how private equity ruins everything [SLYT]
Winter trial could be key to unlocking huge industrial hemp industry
Winter trial could be key to unlocking huge industrial hemp industry. A trial showing industrial hemp can be grown year-round has farmers excited about the crop's huge potential. (Australia)
Snow Bear
Snow Bear is a hand-drawn animated short film by Oscar-nominated director Aaron Blaise, in association with and to support Polar Bears International and National Parks Conservation Association. [more inside]
If a body meet a body meet a body comin' thro' the sky
The three-body problem is one of the most famous challenges in classical physics and celestial mechanics. It asks: given the initial positions, masses, and velocities of three bodies in space, can we predict their future motion under mutual gravitational attraction? This simulator uses Newton's law of universal gravitation to model the gravitational forces between every pair of bodies: F = G × m₁ × m₂ / (r² + ε²)
Even With Brexit, the US Still Looks Worse
Asking Brits if they'd move to America A street-level snapshot of how the US looks from the UK in 2025 [more inside]
building herself an escape route
Do you really have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene? Some people are quick to give her credit, arguing that her about-face on Trump is a sign she’s truly seen the light, awakening from her Trumpian fugue state. They’re missing the point. We aren’t watching a political renaissance or a feel-good story about deprogramming the MAGA faithful. We are watching a middle-aged career woman time the market on her political and professional ambitions. Tressie McMillian Cottom comments on Marjorie Taylor Greene's upcoming retirement from Congress.
Seattle Shoe Stories (say that 3 times fast)
How one Seattle cobbler explains a century of economic change [archive] + This Seattle shoemaker wears her passion on her feet [archive].
"When I have a little money, I buy books."
Nothing better than a whole lot of books. A small article from Literary Hub about the joys of owning physical books, dead tree books, whatever you like to call them.
White Elephants
What are the best and worst gifts you've ever received/given/seen at an office gift exchange? This is your #FreeThread for the first week of December and it cannot be returned or exchanged.
Ashmolean Advent
I think of the things people have left in my body unbeknownst to me
Lan Thao gleefully holds out a scrap of paper. A few months ago, they were removing rotted wood from a beam of a doorframe in the former sawmill to which we escaped at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They reached into the post’s interior and pulled out a wad of crumpled newspaper. Now they unwrinkle the remnant to show me a date: January 9, 1949. Mysterious, unknown, full of surprises, our homes, like our bodies, are archives, both wondrous and unsettling. Lan Thao muses, “I’m so glad I kept this.” from Archive, Appendix, Hoodie, Home by Lana Lin [LARB]
November 30
"Why I Can’t Just Meet You for Dinner"
What do you know, mine too!
Flash Friday can come on any day of the week
Ideal for checking out purple prose
if you qualify for an account at the Hennepin County Library system, celebrate Prince with a Limited-Edition Library Card. [more inside]
Hinkaku aru Chad
The life of Akebono, the first foreign-born grand champion of sumo. ungated here. "Lumberingly, he paced to the centre of the ring, then back to his corner again. Several times he did this, flexing his arms. Then he squatted, and fixed his opponent with his stare. That stare, of absolute focus, which he could keep for days.
Except for his loincloth, he was naked. His mountainous torso glistened with sweat, oil, fat and muscle. Moments before he had rinsed his mouth with power-water, rubbed his body with power-paper and grabbed a handful of purifying salt to scatter in the ring. His long hair was caught up in a topknot styled like a leaf of the ginkgo tree. He had clapped his hands to alert the gods, stamped his feet to scare off evil spirits, and shown with a few deft postures that he had no weapons. He was more than ready." [more inside]
Lite motif
SFF is deeply intertwined with imperialism and colonization narratives
Can You Live a Normal Life in Cyberpunk 2077?
Any Austin spends a week working in a restaurant in Night City. Wage slavery in the future is much like it is today. This video runs 40 minutes.
I think every eulogy fails
What’s in a word? Subjective multitudes. Memories—an endless string of cherished, ephemeral moments. What does it really mean, ya’aburnee? Three rounded syllables, in its barest form. Is it the innocent, colloquial expression of affection we’ve taken it to be? Or, if we linger beside it, does it remind us of the ultimate burden of bond, perhaps haunt us with impregnable questions: Did you forget love is just two living things on a scale? Did you forget that before both weights transcend, one ends up alone, on the ground? from Ya’aburnee, Four Ways [Longreads]
November 29
I Filmed Plants For 12 Years
YouTuber Boxlapse compiles a bunch of their time-lapse videos of various plants growing into a 22 minute supercut. Plant [and a couple of fungus] names are listed as chapters to the video in the description. As close to touching grass as you can get while watching YouTube.
"Reverse Migration" now clearly stated as a goal of the Trump admin
Two people shot in broad daylight, at 2:15pm on a weekday, two blocks away from the White House and instead of asking what lead to this total and complete breakdown of national security - was it taking FBI agents off counterterrorism to make street arrests of immigrants with no criminal record? doing purges of high-level staff in the military intelligence community? Cancelling counterterrorism grants? - the response is to claim that every person from Afghanistan and also 18 other unrelated countries is a likely terrorist and to use the event to push for more of the dictator shit they already wanted to do anyway. Wall Street Journal: White House pushes for ‘reverse migration’ and aims to expand restrictions on nations it deems high risk. And here's Timothy Snyder from back in April, again: The Next Terrorist Attack. [more inside]
Your "Yukon Gold" Potatoes Probably Aren't Yukons—Here's Why
200 plus and counting.
SLYT from LegalEagle documenting ?all? (200) illegal actions committed by Trump this year from the Cryptocoin bribe funnel before inauguration to the November 20th terroristic threats to lawmakers who reminded Armed Forces members of the requirement to disobey illegal orders. [more inside]
“What led to the disappearance of an entire culture?”
The LBK farmers flourished for more than 400 years, eventually occupying a 1500-kilometer belt of fertile land stretching as far west as the Paris Basin. Then something went terribly wrong. from A headless mystery [Science]
Investigating a possible scammer in journalism’s AI era
A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites. [more inside]
Tomáš Sträussler and Tom Stoppard are Dead
Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love Oscar winner, dies [RTE] hardly covers the range. While Playwright Sir Tom Stoppard dies at 88 [BBC] misses the Hollywood. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound really opened my teenage eyes to the possibilities of theatre.
Inspirational 💀
Inspirational Skeletor is my favorite popular Mastodon account, with a nice meme about once a day. Also available on BlueSky, Threads, and RSS. [more inside]