Future Ruins is a one-day music festival featuring film and TV composers like Ben Salisbury, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Isobel Waller-Bridge, and Mark Mothersbaugh. Nov 8 in LA.
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Entries for May 2025
U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat. “Suppose your special forces team is parachuting into hostile territory. Can you really order someone named Ashley to jump out of a plane? It defies common sense.”
The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.”
Power Houses, a photographic look “inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers”. Incl. Spike Lee, Colson Whitehead, Ella Emhoff, Huma Abedin, Martin Scorsese, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Maya Lin.
A Longevity Expert’s 5 Tips for Aging Well, e.g. strength training, better sleep, pay attention to mental health. (Having money helps w/ all this.) And 100%: “If they’re hawking a supplement. I would kick them off the list of being credible.”
“British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.” Harvard bought it for $27.50 — it’s likely worth $10s of millions.
Astronaut Don Pettit’s Marvelous Photos From Space
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.
Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:
I could watch that allllll day long.
More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.
10,000 Drum Machines is a growing collection of web-based drum machines. I like the Extremely Long-Term Drum Machine (“20 bass drums a millennium”).
Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology
In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in his work.
- The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
- It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
- It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
- It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
- If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
- It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
- It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
- It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
- It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
The whole essay is worth a read, especially now as contemporary society is struggling to evaluate and find the proper balance for technologies like social media, smartphones, and LLMs. (via the honest broker)
The End of Rule of Law in America. “After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years.”
Three Fascism Experts on Why They’re Leaving the US
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
When the world is going to shit, people need music; they need to dance. Especially those whose communities are under attack and who feel unsafe. See also Sinners. (That scene! You know the one…)
How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. “The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda.”
Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. It’s a real golden age of rich people revealing how not that smart they are. And now some more laughing: hahahaha.
It’s Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present. Hamilton Nolan reads a book about the beginning of WWII and “found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today”.
Alchemists rejoice! Scientists have turned lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider. “The ALICE scientists calculate that, while they are colliding beams of lead nuclei, they produce about 89,000 gold nuclei per second.”
New Report Finds Vacationing Sources Habla Un Poquito De Español. “We discovered that the sample population was eager to approach locals and strike up conversations about la comida, la playa, y las chicas bonitas.”
What I Learned at My First Tree-Climbing Workshop. “For many, climbing also rekindled a connection to the natural world. ‘It reconnected me with nature in a way that I haven’t really felt since I was a kid.’”
Forget Psychedelics. Everyone’s Microdosing Ozempic Now. (In Hollywood, at least.) “They are doing it not primarily for weight loss…but for the surprising and widely touted side benefits, particularly its anti-inflammatory properties.”
“ICE has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished.” Reminder: ICE was formed in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act, which was criticized at the time for enabling exactly these kinds of abuses.
Eminem’s Lose Yourself, Sung by 331 Movies
This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”
A Young Readers Edition of Ed Yong’s award-winning An Immense World is out today. “Did you know that there are turtles who can track the Earth’s magnetic fields? That some fish use electricity to talk to each other?”
I somehow missed this: after a federal judge in VT ordered her freed from a Louisiana detention center, Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was released later that day. 🙏
Scientist Kseniia Petrova came to US to study aging. In Feb, she was detained for a minor offense, had her visa revoked, and has spent 3 months in a detention center in Louisiana. She just wants to get back to her work.
How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans. “Of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government sent to American concentration camps, approximately two-thirds were fellow citizens.”
“Boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom — without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.”
In Poland, We Know All About Fighting Illiberal Regimes. Here Are Our Lessons for the Trump Age. “Diversity matters most. Not just in communication tools, but in the social makeup of the protest movement.”
I am cautiously optimistic about F1. (The Brad Pitt movie — there’s a full trailer out today.)
In Shanghai, “a new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days”.
The Trumpist assault on the federal government is a “civil war by other means”, says Rebecca Solnit. “It is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.”
“The Trump administration’s policy ideas to incentivize women to have more kids resemble those pushed by authoritarian regimes throughout history.”
On Male Social Isolation
I thought this whole Tumblr post by @skaldish was fascinating. The author is a trans man1 who has experienced social situations presenting as both a woman and a man.
There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.
It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization — unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t ambiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.
You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?
And then later:
When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is — the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.
As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)
But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.
I found this via @danximenes.bsky.social (via someone else I don’t remember, sorry!) and the conversation in the thread is interesting as well.
- From the context (“the culture shock I’m going through”, etc.), it sounds like he was newly out as trans when he wrote this.↩
OMG! The universe is going to decay into nothingness 10^1022 times sooner than previously expected. Carpe diem, everyone!
Enjoying the Lane 8 Spring 2025 Mixtape this afternoon.
This is a little bit genius: an analysis of OpenAI based on a close reading of a 22-second video of CEO Sam Altman cooking pasta. “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”
Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York. Uniformly positive results clear from the data after just a few months. And millions raised for public transit. A scandal this didn’t happen sooner.
Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”
4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government.”
A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.
A Real Life Version of Wallace & Gromit’s Breakfast Machine
I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.
It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.
Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)
The help desk at Auburn University is still answering questions from the public via telephone. “The rules are these: Be as polite as possible, end the call if the question is offensive, don’t answer anything that sounds like a homework question…”
I’d never seen this before: a thief does some stretches in the parking lot before robbing a Dunkin Donuts. Warming up is important for peak performance!
A Visual Celebration of Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys
A few weeks ago, I posted about the hundreds of stills from their animated movies that Studio Ghibli has made available for free download. Since I’m a big fan of the weird little guys director Hayao Miyazaki loves to put in his films (e.g. the kodama in Princess Mononoke1 and Spirited Away’s soot sprites), I thought it would be cool to pull some images from the Ghibli archive featuring these lovable little freaks.
And an honorable mention to this frame from Porco Rosso:
The weird little guys category generally doesn’t apply to humans, but this image of little kids crawling all over a pig man’s airplane certainly classifies as an unusual swarm.
- I bought a shirt with a kodama on it after seeing Princess Mononoke in 1999. At some point, I got rid of the shirt — why the hell did I do that?! It was very close to this shirt on Etsy selling for $288…the collar/sleeve color was a dark blue or black on mine.↩
Bess Kalb: Hooray for Pills. “I hope you shut out the simplistic, reductive, anti-science voices like RFK’s who tell us that pills are bad, and suffering is good.” Co-sign!
How to Be a Grown Up: The 14 Essential Skills You Didn’t Know You Needed. I saw this in a bookstore recently and wondered if going-off-to-college teens actually read books like these or if they’re just bait for well-meaning adults. Recs welcome!
16-bit Intel 8088 Chip by Charles Bukowski
Today I learned that Charles Bukowski, “laureate of American lowlife”, wrote about the incompatibilities of early computing platforms in a poem called 16-bit Intel 8088 Chip:
16-bit Intel 8088 chip
with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
Lovely. And accurate. And somehow even maybe profound? (via sing, memory)
I saw Sinners last night (fantastic!) and loved reading Karen Attiah’s piece, ‘Sinners’ is a Black Challenge to White Christianity. Eagerly accepting recommendations for what else to watch/read/listen to about this film.
Is This Autocracy? “Without a distinction between truth and falsehood, we have no basis for a distinction between good and evil. And at present there is barely even an attempt to conceal the absence of such a basis.”
Bertrand Russell on How Fascism Starts
From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
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