It's the White House Co-dependents Association

Have investors in AI companies lost their minds? Anthropic’s theoretical market value of almost $1 trillion is greater than all of the IPOs during the dot-com bubble put together. But it may also be growing faster than any company ever

“I’m Kid Rock.” “I’m Naomi Wolf.” “I’m Kanye West.” “I’m Matt Taibbi.” “I’m Catturd. Those stories, plus Rob Schneider, tonight on 60 Minutes.”

He won the lottery 14 times with math so they changed the rules Romanian-born mathematician Stefan Mandel used simple probability and a massive ticket-buying operation to win lottery jackpots 14 times. Born into a poor Jewish family in Romania in 1931, Mandel developed a passion for mathematics at…

He ran an $11M fraud scheme from prison and just escaped A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of…

Tools I use and love: Raindrop I like to save things. Particularly interesting websites and news articles. Some of them are just for my personal use (projects I want to work on, etc.) and some are for inclusion in one of my newsletters: either When The Going Gets Weird, which is a daily collection…

A teenager fixed a 35-year-old problem with oxygen sensors A Kitchener, Ont., teen has won the best project award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the name of the project by Gurnoor…

Plants

Some Trump voters pretend this isn't what they voted for, but we know it is.

"Going on national TV to say my husband is not an ugly fuck" is a Dril tweet.

Will AI destroy jobs or create jobs? Yes Will AI wipe out entire categories of jobs? In all likelihood yes, but it will also transform others, and probably create new categories of work that we can barely even imagine. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Italian photographer made a pinhole camera out of pasta Berlin-based Italian photographer Paride Ambrogi recently combined two of his loves, photography and pasta, in a brilliant, possibly tasty way. Ambrogi made the Ravihole Camera, a working pinhole camera made entirely from fresh pasta dough.…

Russian hitman busted because he used Google Translate When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow's harsh winter: a…

Will AI destroy jobs or create jobs? Yes Will AI wipe out entire categories of jobs? In all likelihood yes, but it will also transform others, and probably create new categories of work that we can barely even imagine. It’s not a zero-sum game.

A number of years ago, my late wife and I got to know a gentleman with Locked-In Syndrome on the Straight Dope message board. He started an "Ask Me" thread. For all the problems the Internet has brought, it's been a miracle for people like these folks. boards.straightdope.com/t/rip-blinki...

Not enough shootings in the US so the animals are getting in on it now

The rise and fall of the world’s only female yakuza gangster In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged…

Where do I want her to hurry to? By Marie Howe

He was renovating his basement and found an underground city In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing…

What it’s like to suffer from locked-in syndrome There is one time of day when Dawn Faizey Webster can feel normal. It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix,…

If I knew any shopping mall developers I would tell them to give over some space where all those stores used to be to a video game parlor for old guys who used to play Quake and Unreal Tournament and have some time to kill

Data center criticism is based on bad science and scare quotes A lot of the arguments against data centers that are based on water consumption or power usage tend to collapse on closer inspection

You pity the moth

Seven-foot-four basketball player trained as a Shaolin monk Master Yan'an has trained at the Shaolin Temple in China since he was 6 years old. He has climbed the roughly 1,500 stone steps up Wuru Peak to the Bodhidharma Cave thousands of times. None of the steps is the same size or height. Some…

How Hemingway’s love of boxing changed salad dressing In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, his first collection of short stories, which included his first published boxing story, “The Battler.” On a cool Tuesday evening in October of 1955, three decades after the publication of “The…

Data center criticism is based on bad science and scare quotes A lot of the arguments against data centers that are based on water consumption or power usage tend to collapse on closer inspection

This folksy fast-food icon had a few skeletons in his closet The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of paint was gradually…

The US planned to use nuclear bombs for construction projects The year was 1957. The Cold War was in full swing. The U.S. was seemingly lagging behind in the technological arms race and needed to make a show, a display of power and prowess. Project Plowshare was a project in which the nation’s…

Dad jokes

The monsters are inside you

Man uses legal loophole to declare himself a Swiss king A Swiss man named Jonas Lauwiner has drawn attention after declaring himself the “king of Switzerland” and assembling a patchwork of land parcels without paying for them. His unusual rise is not based on conquest or wealth but on exploiting a…

She saved the NASA moon mission multiple times It’s July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are about to land on the moon. They will be the first humans to set foot on Earth’s only natural satellite. Suddenly, the onboard computer flashes: “Alarm 1202.” Over the next 278 seconds, four more…

Has Richard Dawkins lost his mind or has AI gained one? Richard Dawkins says he believes Claude may be conscious, or at least is willing to behave as though it is. Is he deluded, or is there more about consciousness that we still don't understand? I argue it's the latter

The architect her co-op used turned out to be a serial killer One July morning in 2023, I was driving my son to an art class when my friend Amy Ryan called. The Gilgo Beach serial killer had just been identified and taken into custody.“You will not believe who it is,” she reported: “It’s Rex…

The screech when peeling tape is tiny supersonic sound bursts The screeching of peeling tape is a familiar albeit annoying sound. However, despite decades of study, its source has remained elusive. The peeling of adhesive tape from a solid surface is known to progress with a stick-slip mechanism.…

Police officer volunteered to get human remains from a crocodile A police officer has recalled the moment he was lowered from a helicopter into a crocodile-infested river in South Africa as part of an effort to recover human remains. Captain Johan Potgieter was tasked with capturing a crocodile…

The man who blew up a nuclear plant and then disappeared At 21, Rodney Wilkinson was the best fencer in South Africa: national champion in foil and sabre, second in epee. He had toured Europe and Argentina. He had not stood on the Olympic podium, because South Africa was banned. The apartheid…

Beekeeper jailed for opening the hives to protect a neighbor A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house. Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the…

Hear me out: AI also does things that are good There are lots of things to dislike about AI, but we should admit that it is also doing some inarguably beneficial things, like detecting cancer earlier, designing new medications that work faster, and helping bring medical care to people without it

Secret chambers have been discovered in a Giza pyramid Researchers from Cairo University and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have located two air-filled spaces within Giza’s Menkaure pyramid that hint at a possible secret entrance. The Menkaure pyramid is the smallest of the three main…

Golden hour

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist, Ida Libby Dengrove had a twin sister Freda who was also a courtroom sketch artist. They worked at competing TV stations in NYC; one sister was left-handed & the other right-handed. We need an article or documentary on these two gallery98.org/news/twin-si...

what if it is in fact a human being, standing there all day, guarding the city?

Walking through Turin in Italy I spotted this on a rootfop downtown and I need to know the story behind it. Any Torino residents out there have info? Based on the railing, it is the size of a human being

A heroic quest to find the best free restaurant bread in the US Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have…

American farmers grow more food than the country eats, export 20% of the surplus, and we throw out a third of what’s left. Farmers collect $1.85 billion a year from the federal government to keep a Kentucky-sized 40,000 square miles of farmland intentionally idle blog.andymasley.com/p/data-cente...

The occult history of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jack Parsons was one of the most influential figures in the history of the American space program. He also stood accused of espionage, and held a deep fascination with the occult. By 1939, Parsons and his wife Helen Parsons-Smith had fully…

Learning Italian slowly

I must listen to the birds