Major League Baseball has incorporated the statistics of former Negro Leagues players into its historical records on its website, meaning legendary leaders in some categories like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb have now been replaced in the record books by players who were not allowed to play on the same fields as them during segregation. Josh Gibson, one of the greatest sluggers in the history of the Negro Leagues, is now listed as MLB's new all-time career leader in batting average at .372, moving ahead of Ty Cobb at .367. The MLB website shows Gibson also overtaking Babe Ruth in career slugging percentage.

Top leaderboard changes as Negro Leagues join Major League record [MLB] MLB integrates Negro League statistics into all-time record book with Josh Gibson now career batting average leader [CNN] Josh Gibson becomes MLB career and season batting leader as Negro Leagues statistics incorporated [AP] The MLB's long-overdue decision to add Negro Leagues' stats, briefly explained [Vox] MLB incorporates Negro Leagues statistics, shakes up record books [ESPN] MLB's integration of Negro League stats invites us to explore baseball as never before [The Athletic] MLB Player Comps for Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and More Negro League Legends [Bleacher Report] Seamheads Negro League stats Retro Sheets Negro Leagues site So many previouslies...

Intelligence analysis is a notoriously difficult craft. Practitioners have to make predictions and assessments with limited information, under huge time pressure, on issues where the stakes involve millions of lives and the fates of nations. If this small bureau tucked in the State Department's Foggy Bottom headquarters has figured out some tricks for doing it better, those insights may not just matter for intelligence, but for any job that requires making hard decisions under uncertainty. from The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right [Vox]

given the current discussions around ai and its impact on artistry and authorship, creating a film reliant on the technology is a controversial but inevitable move. however, the software that hustwit and dawes have built may just hit the sweet spot where human meets machine; where the algorithm works to respect the material and facilitate an artistic vision. from B–1 and the first generative feature film.

'eno' is the first documentary about the pioneering artist brian eno, and the first generative feature film. the narrative is structured at the whim of 'brain one', the proprietary generative software created by hustwit and digital artist, brendan dawes. using an algorithm trained on footage from eno's extensive archive and hustwit's interviews with eno, it pieces together a film that is unique at each viewing. as the order of scenes perpetually changes and what's included is never certain, the version you see is the only time that iteration will exist. "in some ways, the film is kind of like exploring the insides of his brain... it's different memories and ideas and experiences over the 50-year plus time frame." ENO Teaser: Australian Premiere of Brian Eno Film @ Vivid Sydney Opera House Sundance 2024: Generative AI Changes Brian Eno Documentary With Every View [Forbes] 'Eno' Review: A Compelling Portrait of Music Visionary Brian Eno Is Different Each Time You Watch It [Variety] 17-track Brian Eno compilation to accompany new doc [Uncut]

Could my desire to be rag-dolled by a big, strong man be a symptom of some sort of patriarchal Disney brain virus contracted during childhood? Do I want to be romantically rescued by a man? Saved by love? Yeah, unfortunately. Like honestly, that sounds fucking great. Is that gross? Sure. Okay, let's sit with that for a minute. It's not like I want to be a trad wife or anything, but there's a reason a bunch 20-something TikTokers are singing the virtues of baking all day. Life is hard. Jobs are hard. I could never give up my sense of self-worth for the trade-off of being a large adult dependent, but maybe that's what the fantasy is really about — having a brief moment where someone else is responsible for me again. from Pick Me Up by Lauren Bans [The Cut; ungated] [via The Morning News]

The FBI and Interpol announce Operation Endgame, the "largest ever operation against botnets". And they made some animated videos to go with it!

The Stasi files offer an astonishingly granular picture of life in a dictatorship—how ordinary people act under suspicious eyes. Nearly three hundred thousand East Germans were working for the Stasi by the time the Wall fell, in 1989, including some two hundred thousand inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators, like Genin. In a population of sixteen million, that was one spy for every fifty to sixty people. In the years since the files were made public, their revelations have derailed political campaigns, tarnished artistic legacies, and exonerated countless citizens who were wrongly accused or imprisoned. Yet some of the files that the Stasi most wanted to hide were never released. In the weeks before the Wall fell, agents destroyed as many documents as they could. Many were pulped, shredded, or burned, and lost forever. But between forty and fifty-five million pages were just torn up, and later stuffed in paper sacks. from Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi [The New Yorker; ungated]

Analyzing my text messages with my ex-boyfriend by Teresa Ibarra

One of those tools, the "Problematic Paper Screener," run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including "tortured phrases." Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. "Breast cancer" became "bosom peril"; "fluid dynamics" became "gooey stream"; "artificial intelligence" became "counterfeit consciousness." from Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures [WSJ; ungated]

We walk into the smoking area next door, which is as peaceful and quiet as a library, if it was a library where you can borrow bongs, which you actually can. Most of the tables are full. A lot of people are on laptops. A TV above plays YouTube cat videos on a loop. Sure. We grab a booth and spark up. Immediately, I'm both thirsty and hungry, which provides irrefutable evidence that weed cafes are a good idea. from I got high in an SF weed lounge and these should be everywhere mannnnn by Drew Magary

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, it's not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? That's probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking. from Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [BigThink] [CW: Not Safe for Breakfast]

All this matters because the interfaces in question do the job of the dictator and the censor, and we embrace it. More than being infuriating, they train us to accept gross restrictions in return for trifling or non-existent ease of use, or are a fig leaf covering what is actually going on. from The accidental tyranny of user interfaces by Oliver Meredith Cox

The convention seemed endless. We wandered into Hall J. Everywhere, people clamored to shake the Palm Tree Wholesaler's hand, either nervously introducing themselves or trying to hide their dismay as they reminded him of their names. I asked if he had a booth at the conference, if he was here to sell trees, and he said, "I'm on the board of the association. I'm the keynote speaker this year." from The Smoke of the Land Went Up a short story by Andrew Cominelli [Guernica]

We interviewed three people whose holiday habits seem precision-engineered to wind up people on Twitter and TikTok. The adult Disney fanatic who's been on more than 70 Disney-themed holidays. A private landlord who flies first class while leaving his kids (and their nanny) to slum it in economy. And what about a 47-year-old who still stays in hostels? Do these people deserve their pariah status? Or might we have something to learn from listening to their perspectives? from Three Maligned Modern Tourists Defend Themselves [Vice]

Wrapped up in the thrill of discovering this new, delightful art and securing versions of it to gaze at while stirring tea in the morning, my dark, skeptical, spidey-senses failed to engage. High on consumer dopamine and browsing picture frames, I forgot, for an important moment, that we recently crossed over into a different sort of world. The sort of world where it is trivial to prompt a neural network to create an image that pulls on the traditional patterns, subject matter, and motifs of William Morris, but layered with the hyper-realistic, high-definition, pixel-perfect asethetics of the modern web; dramatic lighting and sweeping landscapes ripped from ArtStation, meticulously art-directed details from Wes Anderson film stills, the two-tone color overlays and soft glow effects popularised on Instagram and Pinterest. A system trained on everything we've clicked like on, priming us to like what it makes. from Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History

This leads us straight back to the original conversation about "Man or Bear," which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) "Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?" is just another way of asking, "Are you afraid of men?" It's the same question I've been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It's the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world. And it's a question that's always been difficult for me to answer. from A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on "Man or Bear" by Laura Killingbeck [Bikepacking]

"Right now in Hollywood, certain actors are having intimacy coordinators baked into their contracts, which I think is awesome," says Jasmine. "For us in the adult industry, that might look like performers saying, 'I'm going to bring my friend with me for support', but, instead of taking two people but paying for one, it would be really great if [there was an industry standard, so every studio] could say, 'Our budget includes an intimacy coordinator, as well as mental health support before, during, and after'." from Meet the Trailblazers Changing the Face of Porn [Huck] [NSFW]

The partnership with Christopher Kane ended up being just the start, as Crocs began to release frequent collabs with major brands and celebrities, including Justin Bieber, Post Malone, McDonald's, and recently Pringles (yes, the brand you're thinking of). Arguably most important of all, was when Crocs teamed up with avant-garde fashion house Balenciaga — and so began a collaboration that took the humble Crocs into the world of high-fashion, with a series of rain boots, platform clogs, stilettos, and more. Many of the collabs are easy to laugh at (do you want a pair of 7-Eleven Crocs?), but the amount of money Crocs is making is no joke, as Gen Z has learned to love the brand. from How Crocs became a clog-selling profit machine [Sherwood]

Crocs, previously

What makes urushi so different from any other tree resin or in fact plastic? While it would be overly ambitious to try and offer a full insight into the role of lacquer in the spiritual lives of the Japanese people, this article can point out some elements which may lead to a better understanding of the cultural context in which appreciation for this curious resin developed. Despite the fact that urushi arguably has many drawbacks in both use and production, this ancient tradition has—seemingly against all odds—managed to survive into modern times. Still, the use of lacquer is showing a continued decline in Japan, and its manufacture and use have nearly died out in countries like Korea and Thailand. By offering some understanding about its importance as a bearer of cultural heritage, it is my hope that urushi lacquer will receive more recognition as a unique art form that is deserving of more appreciation and support. from Following the Lacquer God [Garland Magazine]

Probe all the nuances, niceties, and subtle shades of meaning your little heart desires. from A Hairsplitter's Odyssey by Eli Burnstein

97: The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions (with Eli Burnstein) [Because Language]

Even in a labyrinth with terrifying tall walls, where the ocean is no longer visible, a minotaur still needs a hummingbird, essential company in the endless journey through dead-ends, restarts, and new beginnings – as well as a reminder of the beauty of the world, the power of the sun, the rain, love, and life, all packed inside the body of a creature that weighs less than an ounce. A sign that within the smallest detail, the whole world is present, and just as the gravity and magnificence of life is present in the mountains, oceans, stars, and everything larger than life, it is also brilliantly present in its smallest bird. from Hummingbirds Are Wondrous by Zito Madu [Plough]

The most common four-digit pin numbers [information is beautiful]

"When you first start out playing Magic, when you're playing with kids in the schoolyard or around the kitchen table with cards that your older brother played with, that is the way it works. Your friend will have a card you don't have. But when you enter the store system, then that's no longer the way it works, you just get many, many more cards, to the point where the magical aspect of having unique cards which nobody else has goes away." from The Creator Of 'Magic: The Gathering' Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong [Defector; ungated]

Suspected Meteor Turns Sky Over Portugal an Astonishing Neon Blue [The Daily Beast]

Um clarão de luz iluminou o país de madrugada: Foi um meteoro? Caiu como meteorito? O que se sabe até agora? [Expresso] Meteoro atravessou Portugal na noite de sábado [Público] Una bola de fuego ilumina el cielo: el meteoro que ha cruzado España era inusualmente grande [El Pais] Footage of meteor that was seen last night in Portugal. [Reddit] Bright green fireball lights up the skies over Portugal and Spain [Space.com] Comet fragment lights up sky over Spain and Portugal 'like a movie' [Reuters]

In this sense, the archival violence inflicted by Artificial Intelligence differs from that of a typical archive because the information stored within an AI system is, for all intents and purposes, a black box. It's an archive built for a particular purpose, but inherently never meant to be seen—it is the apotheosis of information-as-exchange-value, the final untethering of reality from sense. The opaqueness of this archive returns us to the initial question of capitalism without humans, of an archive without a reader, of form without content. When we are gone, is it this form of control that will remain our record of existence? from An Archive at the End of the World

On average, marriages around the world don't last terribly long. The average is eight years in the United States. Ten years in Singapore. Five years in France. And the key reasons couples cite for divorcing are always the same: extramarital affairs. Lack of intimacy. Lack of commitment. Add to that the stresses of work. Especially if your work is having sex with other people. From RIP Jose and Daniele Duval: Enduring, Forever Love [The Rialto Report] (NSFW photos and text)

He sees himself as many Angelenos do: in the gray area between homeless and homeowner. Enough money to get by, but not enough to ever have the picture-perfect California single-family home. One more person with a dream of putting down roots in one of the priciest real estate markets in the country. from An ambulance, an empty lot and a loophole: One man's fight for a place to live [Los Angeles Times; ungated]

"Designing a chair is a very constrained exercise: the general dimensions and angles are very much fixed," Yovanovitch said. "Designing a shoe is even more constrained and technical." from Christian Louboutin and Pierre Yovanovitch perch chairs on legs informed by "iconic women"

Though LSD was sometimes passed around in the 1960s on actual blotting paper, sheets of perforated ('perfed') and printed LSD paper do not come to dominate the acid trade until the late 1970s, reaching a long golden age in the 1980s and '90s. As such, the rise of blotter mirrors, mediates and challenges the mythopoetic story of LSD's spiritual decline. For even as LSD lost the millennialist charge of the 1960s, it continued to foster spiritual discovery, social critique, tribal bonds and aesthetic enrichment. During the blotter age, the quality of the molecule also improved significantly, its white sculptured crystals sometimes reaching and maybe surpassing the purity levels of yore. Many of the people who produced and sold this material remained idealists, or at least pragmatic idealists, with a taste for beautiful craft and an outlaw humour reflected in the design of many blotters, which sometimes poked fun at the scene and ironically riffed on the fact that the paper sacraments also served as 'commercial tokens'. from Acid media [Aeon; ungated]

Let's go back to December 1942, to the corner of Wabash and Ohio, to a small abandoned basement tavern that was also once a pizzeria named the Pelican Tap. The new tenants living directly above the abandoned tavern are a recently married couple with their newborn daughter. The 39-year-old father is the painter and restaurateur Richard Riccardo, owner of the famous Riccardo's Studio Restaurant on Rush Street. from The Secret History of the Original Deep-Dish Crust [Chicago]

There was allure beyond negation. Branson's geo-cultural attributes—not quite the Midwest or the South or Appalachia yet also all three; a region of old European settlement but also westward expansion; perched above whatever modest altitude turned the soil to junk and predestined the land for poor Scots-Irish pastoralists; in a slave state with the largest anti-Union guerrilla campaign of the Civil War but little practical use for slavery—invite an unmistakable imaginative allegiance. This is the aspiration and the apparition that the novelist Joseph O'Neill has termed Primordial America, the "buried, residual homeland—the patria that would be exposed if the USA were to dissolve." "Wherever they hail from," 60 Minutes' Morley Safer went on, "they feel they are the Heartland." No matter the innate fuzziness, Real America in this formula is white, Christian, and prizes independence from the state. It is atavistic, not reactionary. from The Branson Pilgrim by Rafil Kroll-Zaidi [Harper's; ungated]

Slovakia's populist prime minister shot in assassination attempt, shocking Europe before elections [AP]

Who is Slovak populist prime minister Robert Fico? [Sky] What do we know about Robert Fico's alleged shooter? [Euronews] Robert Fico shooting was 'politically motivated,' Slovak officials say [Politico] Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is comprised of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin's inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million. from Time Is Running Out in the Hunt for Rare Bitcoin [Wired; ungated]

In her essay 'The Double Standard [PDF] of Aging,' Susan Sontag explores how a "visceral horror felt at aging female flesh" is entrenched in our visual culture, manifested in caricatures of viragos and witches. "Rules of taste enforce structures of power," she wrote, "the revulsion against aging in women is the cutting edge of a whole set of oppressive structures (often masked as gallantries) that keep women in their place." Reclaiming elderly sexuality is an act of defiance, a rebellion against a youth-obsessed culture, fuelled by misogynistic gender norms. from The Untold Lives of Mature OnlyFans Performers [Huck] CW: NSFW language, it's about OnlyFans and has pictures of women in lingerie.

All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests. Public spending becomes profligate, debt burdens become intolerable, inflation spirals out of control. All of which is to say that the state is subsidizing marginal lives more than it is subsidizing capital. from Extravagances of Neoliberalism, a conversation with Melinda Cooper [The Baffler; ungated]

A comedian's only responsibility is to make the audience laugh. If you're not making the audience laugh, then you're failing at your job. You want to speak truth to power, you want to make a political statement, you want to be confessional—none of that is more or less valid than doing ventriloquism or doing an impression of Christopher Walken. They're all equal, so long as they make people laugh. If it's more important to you to do something that doesn't make the audience laugh, fine, but it's not comedy. It's something else. from Two Guys Walk into a Bar: Kliph Nesteroff on the Evolution of American Comedy [The Sun Magazine]

Lest you believe that interest in studying the habits of unstudied coolness was limited to the world of food and drink, recall the concurrent obsession with "off-duty" beauty and style, a concept that lost its novelty with the advent of Instagram. These days, fascination with figures in the culinary world seems to be very "on-duty"—the tools they use, the shoes and jackets they wear. Today, few may remember that copas de balón were first embraced by lauded chefs rather than marketers at beverage companies ... But the allure of a choice that's more utilitarian than aesthetic has helped the copa de balón endure. It's unexpected and delightful, like a fancy sandwich served on a quarter sheet tray. from The Balloon Effect

Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that's radicalizing him even more. from I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help. [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Elon Musk]

In a state with prolonged bouts of drought and unquenching thirst, stolen water is an indelible part of California lore. But this was not Los Angeles' brazen gambit to take water from the Owens Valley. Or San Francisco's ploy to flood part of Yosemite National Park for a reservoir. The water grab described in a federal indictment allegedly happened cat burglar-style, siphoned through a secret pipe, often after hours, to avoid detection. from Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he's their Robin Hood [LA Times; ungated]

They Made A Crypto Shark Tank. It's Hilariously Bad.