Fake it til you make it

Are you a 15th century king? Do you want to show that you’re down with this humanism stuff that your scholars keep talking about, but you’re also terrified of your own people & the damn French? Ask your architect if Fancy Renaissance Gate Sandwiched Between Existing Medieval Towers is right for you.

in the late 2000s people used to say "the Internet is forever" meaning online evidence of wrongdoing never fades, but that turned out to be very wrong. this shit is mad ephemeral. I executed a family of six with a claw hammer in 2013 and there's no evidence because I uploaded the vid in flash player

"Officially there is no alcohol allowed on board, but every once in a while NASA spends a few months trying to run down a spike in atmospheric ethanol that is inevitably traced to obscure origins somewhere in the Russian half of the station." mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-diners-g...

Well, this is my weirdest TIL in quite some time www.cbc.ca/documentarie...

Political ideology is the strongest predictor of Messi-Ronaldo preference. Authoritarians who like short-form video are more likely to think Ronaldo is the GOAT.

I know beef is expensive now but costco, nooooooo

"“Drone pilots located the suspect hiding in a corner of a garage” and then used a high-powered magnet attached to the drone to grab the knife out of the suspect’s hand." www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

looking at news out of the UK and apologies if this has ever come up before, but have they considered reviving the economy by joining a large economic and political consortium of countries nearby, say in Europe?

Weirdly, penalty kicks is are of the very few things Messi has never been great at. Especially weird because he's one of the greatest free-kick takers in history, and obviously thrives in high pressure environments. I figure it's like the Sundance Kid's "Can I move? I'm better if I move."

"But although he enjoyed decoding the mysteries of space, he was increasingly distracted by another problem of cosmic proportions: how to make vegan cheese taste good." www.economist.com/interactive/...

Every large company that’s mandated AI adoption now has this problem. The good engineers are 5x more productive with AI while underperformers are now even worse and delivering 0.5x their previous impact while making their coworkers miserable from dealing with AI slop. It’s the era of Sloppenheimer

Sometimes I think about how much paper there used to be in the world. We were absolutely _drenched_ in paper.

That's enough Death of the Author. It's time for Death of the Audience. Start running fools

To expand this slightly more generally from Netflix's astoundingly limp Avatar adaptation: it kind of feels like a lot of IP shows generally have forgotten that you can do things like "move the camera." There's just a basic blindness toward remotely interesting shot composition and storyboarding

The thing about the movie Face/Off is there really were a lot of easier solutions to their problems then taking their faces off and switching them, that’s why it rarely happens in the real world

This is 100% the experience in NYC. Hotel bookings are *lower* here than this time last year. Bookings into JFK are down from last year. FIFA had projected 1.2M visitors to NY/NJ. We will be lucky to hit 1/3 of that. Huge disappointment. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/t...

I have read this piece half a dozen times over the years and if you haven't, you should right now.

This feels very ten years ago, but still, not-bad Bay Area cultural history: www.sfexaminer.com/forum/word-o...

I think this is basically just full circle on right-wing folks indiscriminately tossing “socialism” at everything, so that now a bunch of folks who effectively want regulated capitalism with a robust welfare state think that makes them socialists.

If you really want a rug to tie your room together, now’s your chance.

"This World Cup is being contested by 48 nations. At some point in its relentlessly feisty imperial history, England or Britain have either invaded, occupied or taken military action against 44 of them" www.theguardian.com/football/202...

I would actually like to try #4.

Trump appeared at the Libertarian National Convention in 2024 in front of a sign that said this, it was the convention's theme

[sitting bolt upright in bed at 1am] most of the ways the coyote tries to kill the roadrunner would, if successful, render it totally inedible

I'm launching a new history deep dive podcast BEFORECAST! Starting with a series on Machiavelli. Hopefully launching in July; you can subscribe here! www.patreon.com/adapalmer/po...

"If the underwater drones cost about $5,000 each, Real Ice’s rough estimate is that bringing the annual shrinking of Arctic sea ice to a halt would cost $10bn over the longer term." www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This (from today's "Analysing Africa" Economist newsletter) is something I've been saying for years - over the decades NGOs (inadvertently) drained nation-state capacity, which was a big reason the USAID cuts were so devastating

"this bizarre turn of fate can be directly credited with inspiring the island’s explosion of newly electrified sounds following independence in 1975" www.theguardian.com/music/2016/m...

This is very good rowlandmanthorpe.substack.com/p/thoughts-o...

As always, your regular reminder that despite having every law enforcement agency of the federal government and billions of dollars worth of surveillance tools available to them, the Trump admin has managed to find a grand total of zero (0) "paid agitators."

One nice thing about living alone is that storing plums in the icebox is a pretty low-risk activity

the wikipedia page for ketchup goes deep, I tell you what

As an actual football (fine, soccer) fan my objections to the first two weeks of this World Cup are: 1. FIFA 2. The appalling xenophobia of this US administration 3. The way FIFA has diluted the tournament to 48 teams, meaning we won't see a real stakes-and-suspense game until the round of 16

they really said you’ll get paid in exposure to the city of los angeles

So, everyone who didn't think "rein in big tech!" and "hold social media accountable" weren't simply excuses for rampant censorship, raise your hands. Everyone with your hand up, congratulations, you fell for it again.

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA

I think some progressive pedagogues have unfortunately adopted the same attitude to educational inequities that Trump had to COVID: That you can make our failures go away by refusing to do tests that reveal them.

this is pretty much what happened with photography and impressionism, which in turn led to Cubism, etc. kiamaartgallery.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/i...

Huh (from www.theguardian.com/books/2013/j...)

this is the ideal newspaper columnist. you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

"Looking past performative backflips, Unitrees can already perform useful work... a task performed in a business to produce some economic output, like sorting boxes, or a task performed to relieve a physical burden of a human, like folding clothes." newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-uni...

Honestly, I think this is the most appropriate read on American ideas about morality, law, and policy. These polls show that a plurality of Americans think medically assisted suicide is acceptable, but DIY suicide is morally reprehensible. From any logical or moral perspective, that's nonsense.

*Did you ever *read* about the Treasure Island Stochastic Parrot? It's two hundred years old, has seen all the evil in the world, and screams obscenities

"Once thought to be a mostly lifeless desert, the twilight zone, it now appears, hosts numbers of fish in the quadrillions, or millions of billions. Just one denizen of this zone, the bristlemouth, is the single most abundant vertebrate on Earth." www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ju...

"A common pattern in aviation accidents is efforts to fix a non-fatal problem rapidly snowball into a life-threatening situation, putting the crew in an unfamiliar part of the flight regime and eroding situational understanding [so] they make serious mistakes" mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-s...

"over the last 5 years, over 5000 different majors have been cancelled around the country, mostly in the humanities ... These majors are no longer suited to the developments of the times, with low employment prospects, and are hit the hardest by AI." weibo.substack.com/p/060826-gao...

What an incredible photo of the scorekeeper for the Durham Bulls.