I like this bit that Virginia found--surely one of the first uses of comics to sell electricity via tales about washing machines. From a forthcoming episode of our podcast about the history of things you didn't even know had a history, this one on washing clothes. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

Sooo impressed with my friend @kiliiiyuyan.bsky.social new book (with @charlescmann.bsky.social ). It’s a thing of beauty! Kiliii and I will be in conversation July 18 in #Bellingham.

Reading. bigreaderbadgrades.substack.com/p/we-always-...

Brought up short by this fine Ted Chiang piece about AI in the Atlantic. He imagines asking an LLM to conjure up a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, then has the user step in for one character. Users may feel like they're talking with a live consciousness, but they aren't. (1/5)

From a historian pal: "Frankly, I find it amazing that if you train a neural network with a huge amount of text, and then give it loads of context in a prompt, it can produce output that does as well or better than a disengaged undergraduate in a general education course."

It sure looks like Springer Nature has retracted two late papers by Max Planck(!!) for reasons so dumb that Sam Kean, the author of this piece, suspects it was done by a bot, which if true, as @laurahelmuth.bsky.social says, is its own issue.

Just listened to this excellent & entertaining episode about the history of tooth brushing. Now here's something that agriculture most definitely ruined & we subsequently fixed, from urine mouthwash to chicken bone & rat hair toothbrushes to today's comforts. abundance.institute/our-work/eve...

I know there are tons of things wrong with today's AI industry, but it seems important to separate those from the tech itself, which can do wonderfully cool things like help reveal text from 2,000-year-old books that have been so thoroughly lost that scholars didn't even know of their existence.

At last, a rationale for seizing Greenland that all Americans can get behind.

This is an excellent idea and I'm delighted these guys are doing it. Respiratory diseases are a huge drain on life, especially for kids. But why isn't this kind of moonshot program something that is coming from our political leaders? Why do we have to hope some rich person will look at an issue?

Well, that signature move didn't last long. With 222 flu cases in Lackland Air Force base (up from 159 last week), the military seems to be going back to vaxxing recruits, and the mandate is spreading to other types of service people.

This celebration of the electric washing machine is maybe my favorite episode of this 8-episode podcast-y thing I've done with Virginia Postrel. I loved learning with her about the Mesopotamian laundry business and the intrepid "girl reporters" venturing into London's laundry underworld.

There are only two places in the world free from brown rats: South Georgia Island, in the far S. Atlantic, and... Alberta, Canada. S. Georgia Island is rat-free because it's remote; Alberta, because it's been operating Earth's only successful anti-rat campaign. worksinprogress.co/issue/albert...

Asked a contractor pal about the $13M paint job peeling off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Him: I knew that was going to happen. Me: How? Him: You can't rush that kind of job. The pool bottom has to be really dry or it'll exude water. And you have to clean it like a mofo first...

In April, Pete Hegseth makes flu vaccine optional for armed services, saying vaccine mandates "weaken our warfighting capabilities." ~60% of Air Force doesn't get vaccinated. Two months later, flu outbreak races thru big Air Force base. Air Force re-implements mandatory vaccine policy at base.

"The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368 million ocean-monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill."

TIL that William Shatner played twin Numunuu (Comanche) brothers in the European Western "White Comanche" (1986). In this amazing scene, both Shatners rip off their shirts, speak incredibly stilted dialogue, and fight a duel on horseback in a weirdly empty Western village.

In which some New York Times headline writers smack their brows and come as close as possible in their convention to saying, "This whole 'deal' is complete BS!"

"Doctors around the country say they are seeing more cases of serious, sometimes life-threatening illnesses that vaccines have long kept at bay, including whooping cough and bacterial pneumonia or meningitis. ... Several also said they had seen a growing number of adults refuse tetanus shots..."

Just for fun, a little snippet from the podcast that the estimable Virginia Postrel and I have been working on, this one about the invention of the toothbrush, which of course happened in Newgate Prison. abundance.institute/EverydayAbun...

ICY(like me)MI, this account by @rpethe.bsky.social of Big Agriculture's 60-year failed effort to mechanize lettuce picking is full of stuff I didn't know, including (appallingly) that 40-50% of the harvest may be left on the field in the great US lettuce capital of Yuma, AZ.

Fine, thoughtful piece about the giant, Indigenous-owned Senakw' development now being built in housing-starved Vancouver. (9,000 homes!) One lesson for other cities: the current landowners directly benefit from its construction. How to replicate? One thought: what if cities let homeowners build...

Alex Tabarrok is correct: this is a bad stuff. As has happened before, the Trump people have fingered something that needs improvement--the scientific funding process--and are trying to implement measures, including political loyalty tests, that will make the situation vastly worse.

"The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the [face-recognition] features Meta said did not yet exist." Even by the typical standards of corporate dishonesty, it's remarkable how often this company has sought to deceive its users and the public at large.

The former ICE commander-at-large apparently believes that the US has "106 million illegals who are here"--about 31% of the population. One out of three US people? I mean, I'm in a crowded cafe right now and... well, where are they?

The American Revolution Took Place in Indian Country (by me) app.reason.com/story/838214... #shamelessplug

With Ron Charles and Becca Rothfeld laid off from WaPo, there are now only 5 full-time book critics working in the United States. That's down from 7 when this pubbed last year, though you may find my definition of a "full-time book critic" arbitrary. worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

Yikes, this sounds bad. 400+ papers researching aging in cells apparently used an antibody that recognizes a completely different protein than the one they were looking for--but still many somehow got the "right" results.

I have to admit I was inspired by @theresthistory.bsky.social w/ Dominic Sandbrook and @holland-tom.bsky.social, except somehow the result ended up with no kings, queens, or armies, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Julia Child, and the heartbroken scientists who invented nylon.

In what may be the nerdiest history podcast ever, the estimable Virginia Postrel and I have teamed up to recount the history of things you didn't even know *have* a history--beginning with 3 episodes on brushing your teeth, working out, and cooking dinner. Coming soon: blowing your nose!

Occasionally people ask me why Native Americans initially weren't overwhelmed by European guns. Here's a nice video showing what is actually required to load and fire a 17th-century matchlock.

"The American Revolution took place in Indian country. This was true in two ways..." (by me) I had fun with this and hope you do, too.

In Chicago and struck, as I always am, by how beautiful its downtown is. Is there a better-looking city center in the US?

Happy Tuesday! Who's ready to hear about 1. Flesh-eating maggots (mostly go after cattle) 2. They're native to the US 3. The USDA has kept them out of the US since the 1960s 4. But the flesh-eating maggots are making a 21st century comeback. And believe it or not it may be thanks to MAGA.

New study of 217K women finds GLP-1 drugs associated with a 30-35% reduction in breast cancer. This isn't proof of efficacy yet, but holy cow is this an interesting result. If it holds up, this puts GLPs on the level of tamoxifen as a preventative.

Incredible

"Looking back on the tragedies of the last century, one is struck by the ambivalent role of intellectuals. They often were the ones to give the signal for revolt against oppression; but equally often they laid the groundwork for the fanaticization of spirits, the moral chaos...

Holy crap, says my pal, these Iranian propaganda Lego video guys are horning in on your beat.

None of your pop-culture crap on *this* airplane, thank you very much.

So delighted to hear this. News coverage: www.cbc.ca/books/julian... Accolades from judge Francis Spufford (himself a terrific writer) and others: static1.squarespace.com/static/65fea...

Fine overview of a giant but surprisingly little-known environmental problem: Great Salt Lake is drying up, exposing 800 square miles of lake bed laced with toxic metals from industry, which get blown as dust over huge populated area.

The Freakonomics radio people are re-upping their three-part series on Richard Feynman, one of the last century's greatest scientists. It's good stuff. (I'm briefly in an episode, but that's not why the programs are fun, or why learning about Feynman is worth your time.)

I don't know why people complain about the Other Place so much. I just went over there and learned that somebody can rage-tweet about "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" dozens of times in a single day. (A small sample below.)

Serious question: I Googled a 1972 dissertation about historical fire in the North American West. Google gave me this "AI overview." It gave the right title, provided a decent summary, accurately described its importance, and gave a Proquest link to it. But when I clicked on the link to the thing...

The only thing I have in common with Michael Chabon is that we were both told the same memorable story by Robert Stone. (Stone was Chabon's friend and my writing teacher in college, a great one IMO.) michaelchabon.substack.com/p/part-5-the...

Quantifying the explosion of fake AI citations in the research literature--146,932 BS cites in papers from 2025 alone. Depressingly but unsurprisingly, social-science work had the most fake citations. Write-up of these results in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Race-swapping *is* the Betty Boop story. Max Fleischer hired Mae Questel to voice Boop in '31 cuz she cd imitate the mannerisms (scatting, "boop!' sounds, etc) of then-hot singer Helen Kane. Kane sued for stealing her style. The trial proved Kane copied her mannerisms from black singer Esther Jones.

Every now and then some Spanish ultra-nationalists will take it into their heads to yell at me on social media for something they think I wrote. I showed this recent example to my wife and now she's all, "Hey, ingles de mierda! Ingles de mierda! We gotta hang up the laundry, ingles de mierda!"

"The results announced by Eli Lilly were from a randomized study of 2,339 patients who were obese or overweight. Those who got the highest dose of the drug had lost 70 pounds on average, or 28 percent of their body weight, after 80 weeks, the company said." A big deal, if these results hold up.

I've been reading the flap about the casting of Helen in Nolan's film of the Odyssey and I don't get it. Helen is hardly in the story at all--only a bit in Book 4, when Telemachus visits Sparta, and she's back with Menelaus and being witchy. Why does it matter who plays this minor character?