#6 is Westside Gunn with Heels Have Eyes 2. I wouldn't put this in AOTY contention, but it's a really solid 4 mic album. He's had a really busy year and this is probably his best project of 2025 (although some will prefer 12 or one of the other Heels).

#5 is Half of What You See by WRENS. This seems like a neat little album, but it's not really my cup of tea. I'm not even sure that I'd call this a rap album. It feels more like experimental jazz with some spoken word? I don't see myself listening to this one again. I'm too set in my boombap ways.

This guy looks just like Jalen Duren. Do we know where he was in 2003?

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscopic slide. 🫧🐻🧪

Backxwash's Only Dust Remains is #4. This was interesting because at first I was like "this isn't for me" and by the end I was really enjoying it. Standout tracks were 9th Heaven, History of Violence, and the title track. I'll be listening to this again and checking for Backxwash's other work.

We need a name for fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and children we can no longer can see nor hear because of the lawless secret police and their wildcat internment camps. “The Disappeared” has an appropriate sense of dread and moral failure as a label.

#2 on their list is Open Mike Eagle's Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. This is a very enjoyable album. First time through, the standout tracks for me are "ok but I'm the phone screen" and "my co-worker Clark Kent's secret black box." I feel like there's a lot more to pick up. I'll listen to this again.

I decided to start with McKinley Dixon's Magic, Alive! I generally enjoy jazz rap and this is really fucking good. I can see why some would put it above Clipse even though I don't think I would. The production is dense and immaculate. I'll be listening to this one again.

Clipse only being at 16 has me skeptical. I haven't heard most of 1-15 so I'm going to have to go through. Time to broaden my horizons. www.pastemagazine.com/music/best-a...

The dudes in r/conservative appear to be universally appalled at the President's post about Rob Reiner, and I gotta tell you, when you've lost the pandering sycophants of r/conservative, you've finally gone too far

I'm like 40% polarized into being a misandrist

Like 20 years ago I got mailed an ad for audio cassettes to teach me about religion. They offered like a dozen about Christianity, one about Judaism, and one about all other religions in the world. This is now the mindset informing all US foreign policy.

Man, I really think there’s something wrong with me, because I don’t have parasocial relationships with famous people. A politician or a published “thinker” can never disappoint me because I never admired them to begin with.

If you like basketball, Cade Cunningham and Jaylen Brown are playing right now

starting to think maybe "being willing to talk confidently for four hours continuously despite not knowing the first thing about literally anything" is not expertise.

hey look, popularism!

Wikipedia, but still:

Wow. Another reminder that antibiotics against bacteria do affect plants, as the plastids are still very much bacterial in ancestry.

He could have said nothing at all and instead he made a choice to say this.

So much for that

I think "We're gonna make electricity too cheap to meter" is the way.

Updating my resume to add "Heavily engaged with Green Bay Packers, having ownership stake in the organization"

The caterpillar -> butterfly metamorphosis is one of the most interesting things in the world, and he obviously hasn't read about it or else he wouldn't be saying this, lol

Gödel incompleteness theorem for popularism.

Conservatives hate what America is. Democrats should say that more.

"I need to speed in my car in case someone is trying to shoot me" is the most American sentence ever.

online gambling is essentially legal and open money fixing and laundering at this point

we need to bring back hyperbolic linux posting. guys who say things like "software licenses are modern slavery" and "if john brown were alive today he'd be a gnu contributor." they played such an important role in online discourse and now they're nowhere to be seen.

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Someday, perhaps, people will learn that you really can’t trust anyone who’s willing to deny genocide to prove a political point. That includes Noam Chomsky.

That was the baddest Piston beatdown of the season. Holy moses

7 players with at least 2 steals

I would like to talk a little bit about the experience of living in the Roman ghetto in Renaissance Europe for you guys. Just to give a sense of why the idea that Nazis learned from the US is so offensive. A thread of uncertain length. To start, the Roman ghetto was deeply overcrowded swampland.

i am blessed by having discovered the universities existed and you could simply read their course catalogue instead of picking books at random. this, i think, mostly insulates me from reading one fringe academic i found in a used bookstore and deciding they were gospel for each topic

I remember doing the deal for Epic Mickey, and Bob Iger shooting laser beams out his eyes at me in the Disney dining room. “Don’t let this video game fuck up Mickey.” Oh well. That’s over.

i’m convinced they bulldozed the east wing so fast so they could ward off this kind of opposition by basically saying “but we CAN’T delay the ballroom and just leave everything a mess like this”

"Y'all played with marbles, we played with dope fiend needles we found Injected worms when the rain brought 'em up from the ground"

Listening to Light-Years while my 11-year-old son waited for the bus, and the expression he made when the beat dropped in NYSOM3, lol

I wasn't going to listen to this, but I did and it's insanely dope.

one thing that doesn’t get enough coverage or comment with regards to this administration is it how much it hates the actually existing united states

the easy messaging against the data centers imo is "they are investing your pensions in building a big gaming computer that has to have all its parts replaced every five years forever. is that what you want your pension to own shares in? the shares they pay you with?

Baudrillard described this phenomenon when he said that the ’68 protests were defeated the moment student protesters heard the sound of their own voices on the radio.

Genuinely quite upset that I now have to live the rest of my life asking if things are AI or not actually.

Split eye color: A single mutation during early eye development can split an iris into sectors, called sectoral heterochromia.

Fasciated flowers: A small disturbance in stem cell regulation turns a round meristem into a flattened band. When the floral meristem expands or splits, it creates fused, fasciated flowers.

I mention this song all the time when I'm trying to convince my wife that, no, people are not listening to the lyrics. "No, you're the only one who listens to lyrics. Little Brother literally made a song about this!"

#JWST observations: One theory suggests the entire universe may have been born rotating, possibly within a larger, spinning black hole (Schwarzschild cosmology).