A "lost" book manuscript by Timothy Leary, Joanna Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, called THE PERIODIC TABLE OF ENERGY. I haven't read any of it yet, but it is reportedly an early version of Leary and Wilson's THE GAME OF LIFE: maybelogic.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-...

Politics aside, this is a great concept for an alt-history novel.

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"Therefore, say to the Israelites: 'I am the LORD, and...

"Sometimes the original is a copy. As Judy tells Scottie when he accosts her at her apartment, after he's told her she reminds him of someone he knew before, 'I heard that one before, too.'"

"This anachronistic quality is critical to what makes [Philip K. Dick's] stories timeless—his flexible philosophical insight seems to predict whatever era it's read in."

"That's the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination."

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A textbook case of a chilling effect.

"Researchers have synthesized simple cells that feed, grow, reproduce and compete with one another for food. If these cells are not yet fully alive, they have most of the hallmarks of life..."

"A big company without middle management might sound far-fetched, but it's the sort of enterprise a growing number of chief executive officers seem to favor..."

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ME: wants to read a 1940 newspaper editorial called "Democracy in the Jungle," so I search for the headline GOOGLE:

An early copy of the Declaration of Independence—printed in New Hampshire in 1776, then seized when an American privateer's ship was captured—has turned up in a London archive.

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"an experiment in ambition without entrenched hierarchy"

We wanted to watch a family Fourth of July movie, and someone—I swear it wasn't me—suggested DICK.

I link to this one every Independence Day: how the American revolution unleashed a wave of abolition, separated church and state, extinguished feudal remnants, and inspired revolts around the world

Sorry, D.C.: As always, the real July 4 action is at the local parade.

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"American freedom of speech was arguably superior to British freedom of speech as early as 1735..."

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"once you've built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing"

Also—this is really cool—they get citizenship.

If you're a fan of state-corporate media cartels, you should love this: OpenAI wants to appease the administration with a 5% stake in the company, and it's suggesting that all the other A.I. companies do the same.

As the director of a historical video game preservation institution, and someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to this cause, this is accurate. We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organization to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative.

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"There's a fancy bar on the Bowery called Bowery Bar. The name was sort of obnoxiously funny when the place opened, years ago, on the fancy latter-day Bowery. Few people under a certain age nowadays have any reason to know that the name was meant as a joke."

I know people are nostalgic for bipartisan comity, but Baltimore County could benefit from some bombthrowers. The council has been run too long on the idea that each member should respect the others' fiefdoms.

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"The oldest living things in Boca Raton are first the alligators, who were here before the gated communities and the guardhouses and who respect neither of them, and second, the philanthropists..."

Signs of the times: "U.S.-Backed Venezuelan Government Blocks Opposition Leader's Flight Home"

"A state fair that went national would, in theory, outcompete the actual state fairs by bulking up on circus-like steroids. Who doesn't love a fair? Yet there's a good chance you will find more magic at a small-town carnival."

Gosh, why didn't anyone ever think of this approach before?

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Reminder: When "vibe shift" entered political discourse (from fashion writing) in 2022, the implication was a return to normalcy, not a cultural swing from super-woke to super-anti-woke. Only fools saw 2024's 1.5% margin as a sign of the latter.

some advanced Kremlinology here

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"With the benefit of hindsight, Oglesby could recognize in such reactions to Kennedy's assassination the first visibly loose threads that precipitated the great unravelling of the postwar American consensus..."

the myth of Stalin's wine cellar

100 down, 1900 to go. Happy birthday, Mel Brooks.

"I detested geography when I was in school. Little by little, I discovered it was actually fascinating as long as you didn't ignore the high stakes, the power relations, the risks."

"The tables that honestly reported a 'wrong' result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that 'worked.' We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown."

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John Stockwell, RIP

Coming soon: a new reconstruction of Orson Welles' Don Quixote

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Fun fact: If you give this quiz "neutral"/"no opinion" answers on everything and tell it that that you never look at porn, it says you most resemble Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. If you give it all neutrals and say you look at porn daily, it says you're Georgia Meloni.

Flashback to the year 2000: "in a market where simple text-based wireless Internet access is limited, companies' plans to play music or movies over wireless networks appear unrealistically futuristic, many skeptics say..."