Another fascinating college admissions story: High Point University, the college that's explicitly courting Wall Street kids with Wall Street tastes.

What is your Star Trek project that only you would love? All of the TOS episodes rewritten in the Mirror Universe. 79 episodes of pure uncut goateed chaos.

I've been geeking out about college admissions lately, altho my daughter is more than a decade away from applying. It's interesting--and refreshing--to see today's students have an easier time of getting into college, even if the fancy schools like my alma mater have gotten more selective.

Q: "What are the odds we'll fulfill Sean Duffy's prediction that we'll land boots on the moon by 2027?" A: "Not high, unless those boots are attached to some other wreckage." #SciWri2025

Good question. Hey, @chicago.suntimes.com, how is this a "bailout" but regular road bills aren't?

Challenge to Chicago's independent filmmakers: create counter-propaganda that depicts these thugs as the fascists that they are.

I wrote this!

Check and mate, transphobes.

Boycotts aren't going to solve everything, but they can get corporations to reconsider allying themselves with the political right.

Cybertrucks owners aren't all what you might suspect at first. Although the guy quoted below 110% is.

I like this pope's priorities.

A companion to the article I shared some time ago about the rise of Florida's universities: their potential downfall.

ICE attempted and failed to disappear a food delivery guy. It needed to be scored.

“Cracker Barrell Outrage Almost Certainly Driven By Bots.” “…the boycott was unlikely to be an organic grassroots response but a bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme/activist accounts.” Via @gizmodo.com In other words, we’re being manipulated. Aggressively, constantly manipulated.

The most accurate recreation of DS9 I've seen.

I kind of want to start a pro-immigration, pro-naturalization group called "Americans for More Americans." If someone else wnats to take it on, you're welcome to the name, but you have to credit me.

As a Jeopardy! alum, this made me LOL: “'After the whole thing was over, Ken and I went back to the greenroom and I was like, "Well, I guess that’s what it’s like to play against us,”' [Brad] Rutter said."

How Florida Universities Became World-Class washingtonmonthly.com/2025/08/24/f...

There's been a lot of interest in universal basic income and cash transfers in the last decade, but some experiments are showing disappointing results. Still, these negative results are worth learning from.

Finally found a good use for AI at work: creating examples of bad proposal writing.

Any time I need a metasyntactic person's name, I reach back to this comic by @davidmalki.com: -Jeredith -Trindy -Blindora -Grichelle -Blazinda -Plabecca -Spachel -Frablinda

How Chipotle lost its groove.

(1/2) Many people are drawing the conclusion that, between declining to run for California givernor in '26 and the announcment of a new book, Harris is laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign. But that might be backwards--

The Wall Street Journal is a top-notch team of reporters married to an opinion page written by the 13 dumbest people at the country club.

The man predicted the future and he told you exactly how it was going to happen, too

Intriguing idea: use a small, uncrowded commercial airport as a place to clear TSA, board a bus airside, and be delivered (airside) to a major airport, as if you had come in on a connecting flight. Sounds like a great way to avoid annoyingly short, small-capacity, infrequent regional flights.

The most out-of-left-field thing I learned from the Trump-Epstein news coverage is that Donald Trump might actually be a not-terrible artist. Like, look at this sketch of the George Washington Bridge. That's better than I could do! Ugh.

When the Onion just reports the actual news.

Just realized that ‪@chsn-media.bsky.social‬ ceased broadcasting over-the-air last month, once they finalized an agreement with Comcast to carry the network. I really enjoyed having Sox games free to watch again, and I'm really disappointed that's no longer an option.

Great Falls of Tinker's Creek, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, June 2025. #nationalparks

An intriguing idea, but I'm not sure how feasible it is, and demolition may start too soon anyway. Still, it would be an interesting site for the commercial music festivals (e.g., Riot Fest) that otherwise take over city parks for weeks each summer.

I feel like everyone is reading too much into Mamdani's primary win. He's a charismatic, upbeat guy, and his main opponent was an charmless, scandal-plagued has-been who didn't even live in the city. This is not revolutionary.

I want to create an equal driving time map between two points. Is there any way to do this other than a) learning some kind of GIS software or b) guessing and iterating usuing Google Maps?

Welp.

For the last few years, I've intermittently published essays on Medium, because a) sometimes I have thoughts I want to write down so they aren't rattling around in my brain and b) so I don't end up monologuing over dinner and causing @dorkylibrarian.bsky.social's eyes to glaze over. (1/5)

A reminder that Donald Trump says something is coming in two weeks for the same reason Liz Lemon's pilot boyfriend on 30 Rock said a delay would last half an hour--it's soon enough that you accept it but far enough in the future that you forget about the deadline when it arrives.

Whoever named the grapefruit needs to be fired.

There ought to be a naturalization ceremony before every MLB game on July 4th, every year. It should be as intertwined with the holiday as barbecues and parades and fireworks.

Every song by the Four Seasons is like, "Baby, I don't deserve to be with you, I'm worthless trash, I love you, here's some falsetto."

Whether it’s his little kid, a wall, or the nerd Dracula whose wife he’s trying to impregnate, I am insanely jealous of whoever got to sock Elon Musk in the face.

I generally disdain the kind of opinion writing that takes another writer's piece and reprints the copy but rebuts it, but I am strongly tempted to do so with Joel Kotkin's latest piece in the Telegraph because it is so obviously wrong on basically every assertion and conclusion.

I'm sure this is fine...

I can't stop thinking about this figure.

This article is even more interesting than the headline promises.

Okay, what the hell @chicago.suntimes.com?

If your students are abusing AI to do all their classwork, consider showing them this stern warning from the future. Sorry, I meant this stern warning from Futurama.

Unexpected "I guess that makes sense" take of the day: it's probably worth accepting Qatar's gift of a 747, but only to use as spare parts for the USAF's own 747 fleet. (The 747 production line is shut down and the US military will probably be one of the last operators of the type.)

Pope Leo spotted on the 2005 World Series broadcast