"The actual effective operational range of the special forces is largely determined by when they need to recharge their battery packs." they're just like us fr www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/o...

The energy transition proceeds apace. Even in coal holdout Poland, more than half the power capacity is now from renewables. notesfrompoland.com/2026/02/19/r...

has anyone had tetrazzini lately

i didn't really get THE LOVER but i'm glad i kept going with Duras to THE EASY LIFE. halfway through and much more into it.

the purpose of a rube goldberg machine is what it does eventually

Meanwhile, Spain's massive investment in renewables is paying dividends now: with prices for Spanish industry and consumers low and stable compared with other European economies. www.ft.com/content/ac77...

three broken-but-maybe-it-could-be-fixed things with the US political system - Citizens Utd - too far towards disproportionate representation (Senate, EC) - executive scope creep especially in foreign policy & especially in warmaking www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/u...

watching SEVEN SAMURAI with my child so that they grow up to know 20 languages and do Lagrangian transformations and know the periodic table and win at piquet 9 times out of 10

it feels particularly insulting that seattle nba fans with league pass are locked out of watching *blazers* games

"What America does abroad is what America does at home." www.forever-wars.com/what-america...

Google's AI search response is once again just completely wrong here. I was obsessed with the MLB Showdown trading card game in middle school. The starter set did not feature any of these except Gonzalez. They've become $$$ and some noob is going to make a bad eBay buy based on this intel!

very bummed that, even amidst surge of data center skepticism nationwide, the WA legislature chickened out on even mild regulation designed to protect the public over profit washingtonstatestandard.com/2026/03/02/i...

it's not politeness if you are forced to do it www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

what makes a good question at a book talk? - clarity - new ground - engagement with the core of the theme, up to its extension to material not covered in the book - up to author how seriously or far to take it; answerable at variable levels - does not have to be a question. a challenge can work.

NO WAR

I recently texted a friend: "Why am I so uninterested in LLM-style AI?" One of the answers: I'm not interested in intelligence -- I'm interested in consciousness. "What does it feel like to be ___?" Michael Pollan was on the same track! www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

"According to Pew, 61% of respondents to a 2025 survey said they wished they had more control over how A.I. was used in their own life." This is the key to something bigger. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/t...

i cannot believe how many years i spent thinking, "i'm not going to read Helen DeWitt's THE LAST SAMURAI, i wasn't into the premise of the movie and why should that change now"

"For Freire and for anyone who teaches great books, what is shared, our humanity, is the most important part of education." thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

You can help build billionaire-free local news. Repost this -> I give $1 Follow @51st.news -> I give $1 Follow me -> I give $1 Donate -> I match your gift Let's fight misinformation, help good journalists to make a decent living, and stick a big ol' finger in Jeff Bezos' eye.

with AI, the expected is your limit

Inequality within countries is why, layered on top of the global climate finance regime of leadership from rich, high-emitting countries, we need robust taxation of wealth/income/financial transaction and carbon emissions/high-carbon activities. You need both to make the politics and money work.

zillow post without floorplan: why?

"I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory." - John Hersey via @craigmod.com craigmod.com/roden/111/

it's right here in the Wall Street Journal: capital's share of corporate income is increasing as workers get squeezed. American workers feel cheated because they are doing more and receiving less www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

'The feeling of the old world fading away comes from witnessing culture lose “the ability to grasp and articulate the present,” but it is not, as Fisher says, because the present no longer exists, it’s just that the present, now, is so beyond what a human mind can hold.' dirt.fyi/article/2026...

This will cause DC to get financial downgrade even tho the city has balanced its budget for 20+ years until Congress interfered.

"Before Trump took office, Lesotho was on its way to overcoming HIV. The massive USAID budget cuts, and the uncertainty around the resumption of some funding, endanger decades of hard-won gains." www.thedial.world/articles/new...

Yeah, it sounds extra unsavory when you put it that way

nationalize waymo

a big week for noncontending teams trading for playoff-quality bigs Jaren Jackson Jr --> UTA Anthony Davis --> WSN Ivica Zubac --> IND Kristaps Porzingis --> GSW

“Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people." lpeproject.org/blog/the-mea...

we can't keep being surprised that the emotional core of US conservatism is not Burkean or small-government ideology, it is white supremacy and patriarchy, layered with capitalism. stop gawking at the "hypocrisy" & make a plan better than proving logical fallacies www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

‘One officer told me that I "had no chance of returning to Minnesota" and that "the best thing for (me] is self-deportation." … She offered me $2600 to self-deport. I refused. I wanted to talk to my attorney. They didn't tell me the judge had already ordered my release and return to Minnesota.’

recalling when Swae Lee claimed foreign assistance was enough to give every American $200k multiplying by 300 million (undercount), that would be $60 trillion... ...which is 600x where it really peaked (~$100B in 2023, $18B for Ukraine)

i've been waiting for someone to bring up jade helm theintercept.com/2026/02/02/t...

remarkable how many people of my generation know that measles isn't just like, chickenpox -- it's a sci-fi-sounding plague that overwrites your immune system's lifetime memory, rendering sufferers immensely more vulnerable to secondary infections

Edge.org seemed cool to me when I was a college freshman. Over the years the evo psych and Jared Diamond features cooled me on it, and it slowed down anyway, but it's still wild to learn Brockman seems to have been Epstein's intellectual frontman.

The Cortylorhynchus considers my problems, nods sagely, and says, "have you tried basking in the sun about it? While being as spherical as possible?"

the world is trolling me...time to extol the virtues of Chairman Phil Mendelson georgetowner.com/articles/202...

a recent CFR poll revealed the invasion of Iraq to be considered the greatest foreign policy error in US history… so im recalling 2011 when Tom Friedman visited my campus. as a gag i asked him to sign his article endorsing the invasion. not only did he sign iirc he wrote “id do it again”

'Banks with the greatest so-called transition risks now “face significantly higher borrowing costs” in funding markets' www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bufflehead or goldeneye at volunteer park? hard to say, it was far away.

we (davidson) made it (nyt crossword)

"A science of society has proved itself the naïvest form of ideology." harpers.org/archive/2026...

in the eyes of the sovereign your life is nothing

In October, ICE grabbed Maher Tarabishi. He was a 24/7 caregiver for his disabled son Wael. At the time of Maher’s detention, disability advocates warned that taking away Wael’s caregiver put his life at risk. Wael died on Friday at age 30. ICE caused his death. They didn’t get to say goodbye.

i find the zoomer haircut a little creepy. we live near a high school and it's de rigeur amongst the white boys. "a form of self-expression and individuality," really?

haven't bragged enough about "The Year That Was and Wasn't" making Today in Tabs for the first time earlier this year, that's a bucket list item checked www.todayintabs.com/p/maduro-in-...