Italy

Got this text a couple months. Had to investigate it. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/t...

You can spot the France fans as you walk past the bars with the TV on

I feel like I've learned how to watch soccer/football. I used to think it was so fluid you had to watch every second to not miss anything. But now I realized you can basically not watch anything and it's just as good

Edited a piece that will never run today. (I just don't yet know which one)

So scientists have basically created life www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/s...

Stephen Hawking's party for time travelers seems like it was pretty lame. I certainly wouldn't have gone www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ste...

"Science progresses one funeral at a time"

This seems premised on the European belief that there's nothing more dangerous than having a fan blow on you directly.

FML

Wait until they discover sprayable cheese

“Covered five British prime ministers” doesn’t carry the same weight on a journalist’s CV as it once did.

There but for the grace of god

French astronaut Sophie Adenot (France’s first female helicopter test pilot) passed over Mt. Etna and then Vesuvius. Spectacular photos! 🌋 Photos via X (sorry): x.com/Soph_astro/s...

Is AI killing the self-help book? tim.blog/2026/06/12/h...

Jeanne 'd Arc as imagined by early 20th century photographers:

What a headline arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/w...

Fable: "write me a rhyming poem with six four line stanzas, each stanza removes another vowel. the first has no u, the second no u or i, etc."

I'm sure this is a huge problem, but as a former opinion editor, I can assure you that people have been submitting slop for a lot longer than AI has existed.

Wazzzzzuuuppp?!?!?

The cool new shipping craze everybody's talking about www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05...

Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy #EUTech https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260522023127.htm

LinkedIn's algorithm knows me well

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Depressing: "Would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer enticements or draconian punishments to make power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w...

Books that may not be The Best Novels of All Time but that you might enjoy reading more than the ones on *that* list In no particular order: 1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Christopher Nolan is really, really good at marketing Archaeologists Find Egyptian Mummy Buried With the ‘Iliad’ www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/s...

That Guardian Best Novels list is weirdly conservative and predictable. The type of list I would expect ChatGPT to produce.

Like covering news about Washington and the world? Come work for me! @politico.com is hiring a breaking news reporter. Details for the job are in the posting, but I am happy to answer questions. Application will close in ~2 weeks, don't delay! politico.wd108.myworkdayjobs.com/POLITICO/job...

North Macedonia

LLMs are maximally offensive when you personally resemble an LLM already

So now I'm getting snuff film notifications pushed to my phone? Cool cool.

Some entrepreneurial Etruscan in 7th-century-BC Siena recognized there was a market for goofy-ass funeral urns.

Trust me. You don't want to find out what QUESADILLA stands for. ‘Not a Chance Hormuz Opens’: How Wall Street’s new NACHO trade bets on a prolonged oil shock www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/t...

'Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”.'

AI been pwned. This is very similar to how "Internet addiction" as a condition began as an academic joke (a story I tell in The Web We Weave; see next post). Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real www.nature.com/articles/d41...

No LLM has ever scrolled up in a document to copy and paste the most recent em-dash because there's no easy keyboard shortcut. #ReclaimOurEmdash

The ending of Andor was lamer than the ending of the prequels

This "finance writer" job is how I got into The Economist all those years ago. It is up for grabs again. No journalistic experience needed, just a keen interest in explaining what the hell market participants are up to. My top, top tip: write a killer sample article.

Holy SHIT someone found the test pressing of Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues and it is clear as a PIN www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

Tom Waits has released his first new music in 15 years (am I that old?). It's a protest song in collaboration with Massive Attack youtu.be/L-57FrioeuE?...

🇭🇺 Hungarian elections: The 9 a.m. turnout (16.89%) is a massive record; four years ago, the same figure was 10.31%.

New: A mysterious impostor who claimed to be ProPublica reporter Robert Faturechi reached out to a Canadian official and a Latvian businessman working with Ukraine. So, the real @robert-faturechi.bsky.social did some reporting of his own.

If anyone's wondering how I'm doing airallergy.sciensano.be

She Spoke Out About Gaza. The US Turned Her Life Upside Down. My profile of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for POLITICO Magazine. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

“We know everything already, but we’d like to know more." My deep-dive into how the FSB tries to recruit informants to keep tabs on Russian dissidents and foreigners helping them abroad

I'll believe AI has come into its own when it also has to search around online for how to insert an em-dash

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines www.theverge.com/tech/896490/...

‘I had a scalp in my hands’: An oral history of the Brussels terror attacks www.politico.eu/article/all-...