Quaker principles line up quite well with modern parenting research. “Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior.”
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The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses… “Empowerment won’t fix the mess we’re in. Women know it now. They’re mad as hell. Anyone trying to sell them advice instead of a way to use that anger to build a better world for women deserves to be fired.”
The Night Witches: The Female Nazi Hunters of WWII
The Night Witches were an all-female Soviet bomber regiment that attacked Nazi forces during World War II.
An attack technique of the night bombers involved idling the engine near the target and gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence. German soldiers likened the sound to broomsticks and hence named the pilots “Night Witches”.
Some of the aviators were Jewish, like Polina Gelman:
She would be among a half-million Jews who are believed to have served in the Red Army, according to Yad Vashem. They fought not only for the survival of the Soviet Union, but also against the annihilation of their people in Nazi death camps in Poland.
“I have decided to go to the front,” Gelman wrote to her mother, adding, “I am a daughter of the Jewish people” with “a particular account” to settle with Hitler.
The women were barely given proper aircraft — crop dusters! — but they were quiet & maneuverable, ideal for night attacks:
The regiment flew in steel-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original uchebnyy designation prefix of “U-“) and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th. The plane could carry only 350 kilograms (770 lb) of bombs, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary. Although the aircraft was obsolete and slow, the pilots took advantage of its exceptional maneuverability; it also had a maximum speed that was lower than the stalling speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, which made it very difficult for German pilots to shoot down…
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full list25 Books That Capture This American Moment. They include Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland, and Rabbit Redux by John Updike.
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains. “[Some] developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.”
On “rich guy has an opinion” journalism, i.e. “entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage”.
World History Timeline
This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re looking at — I thought it was a sort of stretched geographical map at first. Get your own here.
The chart is based on Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769):
Priestley is best known for his co-discovery of oxygen.
New York’s Neue Galerie Will Merge With the Metropolitan Museum. “The merger will significantly bolster the Met’s holdings of early 20th-century Austrian and German art…”
The Neanderthal dentist: archaeologists found evidence of a decayed tooth being drilled out with a stone tools 59,000 years ago. “It’s now the oldest known evidence of dentistry — or any direct medical treatment.”
Sarah Rose (who is blind): “Meta glasses are absolute game changers for the blind community…they are completely revolutionary.” And: “It really is incredible to talk to your glasses and ask them what they see and have them tell you.”
How Russell Vought Became the Shadow President
One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. ProPublica produced a video in Oct 2025 about how Vought is acting as a shadow president in his drive to dismantle the US federal government.
Russell Vought is one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration. For almost three decades, he worked in Congress and held prominent roles at conservative think tanks. But he was little known outside of political circles. He’s now the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s campaign to radically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.
In this video, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll tells the story of Vought’s rise from a young staffer for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to his role as the driving force behind Trump’s plan to dismantle the so-called “administrative state.” Vought declined to be interviewed. Kroll’s account is drawn from dozens of interviews, thousands of pages of documents and hours of videos and recordings of Vought’s briefings to supporters, including one where Vought says he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma.”
ProPublica and the New Yorker co-published a lengthy companion article as well.
During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”
Omg, Amazon Prime inserted an ad for Febreze in the midst of the most famous match cut in the history of cinema (in Kubrick’s 2001, when the ape-thrown bone turns into a spacecraft). I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (rn, it’s both).
A very good, very 2026 headline: Japan Runs Out of Robot Wolves in Fight Against Bears. “Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors.”
When Your Participation Is Decoration
This is a smart piece about where we are in America right now, post-Citizen’s United, post-Voting Rights Amendment, post-Dobbs, mid-MAGA: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive).
First, let’s be honest about what the Voting Rights Act actually was, because everything here on out flows from it. It wasn’t a gift, not charity, and definitely not some magnanimous extension of democracy to people who’d been waiting their turn.
It was architecture. Lyndon Johnson, who had few illusions about how power actually worked, understood something the current Court either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to.
The bargain was simple: your participation produces results, so stay in the game.
That deal wasn’t made for the benefit of Black Americans alone, though it was Black blood that paid for it. It was made for the benefit of a country that needed a working, peaceful way for people with every reason in the world to burn the whole thing down to instead choose to work within it. The VRA wasn’t just the nice move — it was the smart one. Its purpose was to keep legitimate grievance inside the system rather than outside it.
Now they’ve put it back outside.
And what happens when you can’t work within the system to effect change? People want to route around it (emphasis mine):
The question is whether this country holds or comes apart, and coming apart doesn’t mean a stern editorial in The Atlantic. It means what it has always meant, every time a society told a critical mass of its members that their participation was decoration. It means blood. It means whole regions of this country deciding that the social contract is a piece of paper the other side already burned, and they’re under no obligation to honor a corpse.
That’s the alternative. Not inconvenience, not even a bad news cycle. That.
The whole thing is worth a read.
“I believe in myself. That’s why I commit.” A young skater doesn’t give up trying to land a three-stair kickflip.
Shape of Dreams (Zendaya × Spike Jonze)
Zendaya co-created a new collection for On, the Swiss fashion company, and Spike Jonze directed this cool promotional video starring the actress. I’ve always loved his aesthetic — along with Michel Gondry, no one makes these types of videos seem “hand-crafted” (in a way that is hard to articulate) more than Jonze.
The Guardian asked authors, critics, and academics to help compile a list of the best 100 novels of all time. They’ve done 41-100 so far. Selecting a book will show you who voted for it, then click on the voter’s name to see their other choices.
The 2026 National Recording Registry inductees were announced today. “The 2026 selections mark the first recordings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé chosen for the registry.” Also: music from Weezer, The Go-Go’s, Chaka Khan, and Johnny Cash.
A Moment That Changed Me: I Saw My First Total Solar Eclipse — and Its Beauty Shook Me to My Core. “I knew the theory, but I was not ready for the experience.”
What Childhood Folklore Did You Learn As a Kid?
I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”.
“Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and you have to hold your breath?” I love hearing the tiny differences in details (some people grew up lifting their feet off the floor when passing a graveyard). But what’s wild is how many of us grew up doing, drawing, singing, and believing the exact same funny little things: Miss Susie had a steamboat, Batman smelled, the floor was lava, and stepping on cracks broke our mothers’ backs.
For a definition of childlore, let’s go to the Wikipedia:
Childlore is a folklore or folk culture that focuses specifically on children typically between the ages of 6 and 15. As a branch of folklore, childlore is concerned with those activities which are learned and passed on by children to other children; it excludes the stories and tales told and spread by adults. Childlore can include games, riddles, rhymes, oral stories, codes, fantasies, jokes, and superstitions created by children.
Other than what’s already been mentioned, I can’t remember many specific childlore from my childhood (my recall for such things isn’t great). Perhaps some string games? I can still do cat’s cradle & Jacob’s ladder and taught them to my kids when they were younger. Oh and those cootie catchers.
The commenters at Cup of Jo offered several suggestions: the diarrhea song, padiddle (when you saw a car with only one headlight), and slug bug (or punch buggy). And OMG, I gasped when I read this comment — I used to make these little feet all the time!
Just recently on a field trip with my kids we all traveled in a school bus. We live in Wisconsin so it was chilly in the bus and the bus driver had the heater turned on high. The condensation in the bus was freezing on the inside of the windows as it so often does on a winter morning her and then it’s fun to draw things in the frost. My favorite is to press the side of my fist against the glass to make a little footprint and then use my fingers to make toes. It looks like a baby footprint on the window.
What childlore do you remember from your childhood?
I Want to Live Like Costco People. “Embracing the Costco lifestyle means accepting the fact that I am, in many ways, becoming my father.”
Robin Sloan writes about the personalized, AI-written, promo emails he’s been getting recently (I have too). “The form is subtler than a one-sized-fits-all promo blast, but it sucks way worse, because it’s fundamentally dishonest.”
What Would J.R.R. Tolkien Think of Palantir?
Palantir, the data analysis defense contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, was named after the magical seeing stones from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. This video compares the ethos of the company with that of Tolkien.
The palantiri of The Lord of the Rings are sort of like crystal balls or “seeing stones” that allow their users to communicate across vast distances, see events from afar, and sometimes even peer into the future. But just about everybody who tries to use a palantir in The Lord of the Rings is deceived by it, acting on the visions they’re receiving without the greater context or wisdom of what’s behind them. So why would the people behind Palantir want to name the company and build its culture around these powerful yet easily corruptible magical objects?
J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government, expressing his fears of what would happen when those two forces combined through his fantasy works and his letters to friends, family, and colleagues. If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.
Palantir is one of the purest instantiations of the Torment Nexus in tech today:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
See also The Right Is Obsessed With Lord of the Rings. But They Don’t Understand It.
In Tolkien’s books, it is not the men of Gondor who turn back the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s those gentle, peaceful hobbits who pull the whole thing off. They’re the only species able to carry the One Ring of Power, because they are, by their nature, unambitious. All they want is to live their peaceful bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they are able to withstand the temptations of the ring and its promises of power, ultimately carrying it far enough to destroy it. The best the men of Gondor can do to help is refuse to ever touch the ring, because they know that if they pick it up, they will not be able to resist temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: If you’re taking Tolkien as your guide, and you believe your homeland to be under invasion by the forces of evil, the solution is not to try to consolidate your power, harden your nature, and glory in needless cruelty. The solution is to refuse power whenever it is offered to you and to fight from a place of humility.
Any of these dopes — Musk, Thiel, Vance — would 100% have tried to take the Ring for themselves.
Meet the Sad Wives of AI. “Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot.”
Just dropped: Foo Fighters’ Tiny Desk Concert. The setlist includes Learn to Fly, My Hero, and Everlong.
Stop-Motion Lego Dr. Strangelove
Two sequences from Dr. Strangelove done in Lego: Muffley’s call to Kissoff on the hotline in the war room and Dr. Strangelove’s increasingly erratic presentation of his plan to preserve humanity in a mine shaft.
This is really well done. (via bb)
A map of the regions of the US, as voted on by Reddit users. I think this seems mostly correct? One funny artifact: Washington state got some votes for “Northeast”, probably because ppl confused it with D.C. or with “Northwest”.
“So, at about 14, I became the team’s unofficial basketball musician,” writes Theocharis Papatrechas. “A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. And if someone missed badly — an airball — I’d drop in a ‘du-ba-dum’”.
The World Press Freedom Index at Global 25-Year Low
Since Reporters Without Borders started tracking their World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago, the global rating has never been lower than the 2026 score. From a summary of their analysis:
For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low. Since 2001, the expansion of increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — has been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries. The Index’s legal indicator has declined the most over the past year, a clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide. In the Americas, the situation has evolved significantly, with the United States dropping seven places and several Latin American countries sliding deeper into a spiral of violence and repression.
The United States ranks 64th out of 180 countries, a pathetic showing for a country that claims to value the First Amendment:
US President Donald Trump has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy, pushing the US down to 64th place (-7). The detention of Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who was later deported, has contributed to the deterioration of an already tense security environment marked by police violence. The drastic cuts to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) workforce had global repercussions, leading to the closure, suspension and downsizing of international broadcasters such as Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) in countries where they were some of the last reliable sources of information.
Some other takeaways from the 2026 report:
Post-Assad Syria has seen the biggest improvement in press freedom of all the countries and territories in the 2026 Index, climbing 36 places in the ranking.
In 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorised as “good.” Twenty-five years later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.
In some countries, the information space has shrunk over the past 25 years due to political changes and increasingly draconian regimes. This has notably been the case in Hong Kong (140th, -122) since Beijing tightened its control on the territory; in El Salvador (143rd), which dropped 105 places since 2014 and the start of the war on maras, or “gangs”; and in Georgia (135th), which has dropped 75 places as the crackdown on the press has intensified in recent years.
Twenty-five years after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, expanding the scope of defence secrets and national security has become a means to prohibit coverage of issues of public interest in many countries. This trend, which is particularly prevalent in authoritarian regimes, has also gained traction in democracies and typically goes hand in hand with abusive applications of the law against journalists, notably in the name of combatting terrorism.
(thx, margaret)
Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.
Jamelle Bouie thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is positioning herself for a 2028 presidential run. “Yeah, she’s running.”
Being Fed Content
From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
I feel like Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece on robotaxis, People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions, rhymes with Hertzfeldt’s comments:
For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases — such as the invention of ride-sharing apps — Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before.
Study: “A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right‑wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly.” People using the “For You” feed were more likely to favor GOP policies, less likely to want Trump prosecuted, and were more pro-Russia (vs Ukraine).
Can You See the World When You Close Your Eyes?
Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.
Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.
Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.
Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster read the piece and realized she was aphantasic. Webster recently interviewed MacFarquhar for Cultured: What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self, which I read with a lot of head-nodding. Like:
I didn’t have a lot of memories, which I always sort of chalked up to trauma, but I got memories back over the course of analysis. I realized while reading your piece that my memories were always spatial. I would remember a space or placements of things. I was always reconstructing a landscape, but without it really being imagistic.
And this is exactly how college was for me:
When I realized I had aphantasia, I reflected on how I always thought I had a photographic memory. For example, when I took tests, I would make notes, and I could see what I wrote on the page because I knew where I had written it. But it’s not a photograph; it’s a spatial memory.
As I said last year:
The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me.
(via @timoni)
We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots. “For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints…”
Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again) and instead of an underwhelming Reddit clone, it’s now just scraping noted fascist cesspool “X” for AI news and telling us that Sam Altman is influential in AI? This is embarrassing. It’ll probably be a huge success.
How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer. “Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.” (A: An extreme level of redundancy.)
Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.
Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies. “It identified your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.”
Mesmerizing 4K Video of a Cat-5 Super Typhoon
Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video.
The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was the “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has claimed 17 lives so far.
Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’ve already been having to take of their own…”
Wallace & Gromit 24/7 Livestream
Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death.
I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world.
People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions. “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.”
Grandma Stand
Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS.
At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” said a visitor. This film shows how a brief encounter has a strong impact and gives us insight into our own lives.
You can watch the complete documentary on the PBS site (like US-only). (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
Where are the public benches on the internet? “Like cities that have prioritized cars, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes.”
Now open in NYC: a pop-up called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which consists of “all 3.5 million pages, 3,437 volumes, and 17,000 pounds of the released and partially redacted Epstein files”.
The Hidden Cassettes. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” (Be sure to read the “What?!” link.)
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress submitted a petition to the UN charging that the “brutality and discrimination” of Jim Crow constituted genocide by the US govt. The US prevented any debate on the petition and CRC leaders were persecuted thereafter.
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