I had taught them what Frank O'Hara had first taught me: poetry is not, as some may think, an arduous exercise in word choice and simile. Instead, it's a way of looking, of noticing details we might have otherwise overlooked. It's too tempting to get used to the sight of the hard hats, to no longer ask what, exactly, they're protecting. The glistening torsos of the construction workers are all too easy to write off as sweaty. You need a fresh set of eyes to see.

On Instagram, Rogers exchanged messages with accounts featuring beautiful women, eventually exchanging nude photos of himself taken with his Fed-issued phone, sometimes in the gym at Fed headquarters in Washington. Soon, the people behind the accounts began demanding money. from Inside Man: How Chinese spies used lies, love and betrayal to target the Federal Reserve [CNBC, Reuters, Department of Justice]

There's ahead of its time, then there's Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l'eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, a 900-page book of paint colors made before any such things were common tools of the artist's, scientist's, and industrial designer's trade.

At a product reveal at a Texas test facility belonging to SpaceX, Musk's other public company, he showed off Tesla's new Roadster, a two-person sports car that not only could go from 0 to 60 mph in record time of less than a second, but he said used suction underneath the car to climb up a steep ramp and hang upside down before spinning off the ramp, flipping in the air and using air jets to land. [CW: Tesla, Musk, Ridiculousness]

The People's Bookshelf in the atrium of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) is one of the central design elements of the building. The Bookshelf stores books donated to the Library and currently is home to almost 8 000 books in 50 languages from all over the world. Everyone is asked to donate a book – of special importance to themselves – to the NLL, also writing a message or personal story relating to the book on its title page.

The implants Grand discovered were also all in wallets sold by unauthorized online sellers who seemingly ran fly-by-night operations that weren't in business for long. But the implants found in wallets sold by CryptoBilis and the European electronics chain indicate the attackers have switched tactics and may be deliberately compromising wallets sold by authorized resellers now.

Create a realistic, interactive 3D model of human buttocks as a single self-contained HTML file. [CW: AI, butts]

Asteroids has always been played on a torus, with a speed of light that is effectively infinite. Here the speed of light is slow enough to matter: by default light takes 2.5 seconds to cross the screen. Everything else follows from taking that seriously.

In a sense, Vollmann is Sacramento. "He's weird, he's quirky, he's got his own kind of thing going," Lytle said. "He doesn't really care what anybody else thinks about him. He's just living his life the way he wants to live it."

A metaphor for something [SLYT]

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.

He tried, however, to remain polite and helpful. As she went about her work, he offered his recollections from his mother's final hours and an account of her long illness, which he had documented minutely over the years. Otto informed the coroner that he was a doctor, but it seemed to him that she was uninterested. She turned to the police officers and, without explanation, told them that this was a matter for law enforcement, before leaving the flat. Otto told me he wondered why nobody was listening to him, the grieving son, the doctor?

Virgil, Texas, isn't real ... It's a backwoods Brigadoon on the edge of exurban creep, suspended between the shopping malls and semiconductor factories of our modern civilization and the last vestiges of the open plains. Virgil is a myth, and like all American myths, it's steeped in the tension between our desire for freedom and the capitalist conformity obstructing our horizon like the drab, prefabricated metal buildings of which, as True Stories says, Texas is the leading producer.

That Will There, Transcription, and Down Time each tease out the confluence of ambivalence, exhaustion, and over-compensative compliance that underscored pandemic life is compelling. Their characters' lack of clarity about Covid and its consequences is, ironically, its own form of clear-sightedness. It speaks to a very contemporary feeling of unease about Covid and the recent past and what this ultimately says about where the culture is heading.

If these characters fail to successfully inhabit the world, it is at least in part because their world—the world as theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida had taught them to see it—isn't one that is easily inhabited. How can a person make a home in an impersonal symbolic field or an ineluctable power machine or a network of deceptive and unstable signs? What kind of human flourishing is possible in such an inhuman universe? What kind of a life?

Infinite Jungle: Click or tap the scene, or press Enter / Return, to show or hide the menu. Double-tap on touchscreens to show it. The menu fades away after 3 seconds unused, except while Settings or Help is open. ? opens this guide with commands expanded, even with the menu hidden. Tap any command to use it; arrow buttons move the view one step. The sound button stays in the top right. Drag to travel; scroll or pinch with two fingers to zoom.

Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle. [via Kottke, and part of mapped.earth]

We can sit here and freeze-frame a show and nitpick it and point out various things, but it's very interesting to see how crosswords as props are part of this whole world that they're trying to build. And as long as it reads well on the screen, perhaps it doesn't matter if it's coming from some stock-image site. It will only matter to the real hardcore people who are looking closely at these things. [ungated, but archive.ph]

Few populations illustrate the internet's profound effects better than transgender people, whose ability to build wide-ranging networks exploded after the internet became publicly available. Suddenly, after decades of insular community groups and disparate activist campaigns, anyone who believed they were the only trans person on earth could privately hop online, search for keywords they could never speak aloud, and find dozens — no, hundreds, no, thousands — of others from all over the world looking for information, support, and understanding about exactly the same topics.

Fans operate entirely outside the structural limitations that thwart even skilled industry technicians. A professional lab might make all the right archival choices only to have those compromised by a revisionist director or a studio's marketing needs. Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven't: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history—an end-run around the rights and financial issues that hold legitimate enterprises back.

And so we come to the celebrated moment, described many times and most vividly in Gentle Regrets, when looking down from the little flat on the Rue de Bérite, Scruton recoiled with all his mind and heart from the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Probing his friends' politics in the following days, he became convinced that whatever he believed, it was the opposite of that. "I came back to Cambridge," he once said, "determined to reanimate a political outlook for the modern world."

Scruton, previously

Dave Blanchard runs the public radio show Wild Card. And one of the less exciting and, in fact, rather tedious parts of his job is that he has to keep an eye on the comments that people post about the show online. And one day last fall on Spotify, he saw all this activity about this episode they did with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. And Dave thought, oh, her book was controversial. It must have struck a nerve, this episode. And then he looked at the comments. [This American Life podcast; Verge article]

It's the software engineers who are losing their jobs to AI, not the weed trimmers, pawn shop workers, garbage men, and grocery store workers. In these novels and in this economy, even the extralegal jobs, despite being precarious on their head, have become more stable than most.

What's Opera, Doc? is a film of "angular settings, gargantuan shadows, rapid cuts, odd colors and dramatic camera angles," in the words of Charles Solomon. And every shot of it required Noble's touch. "Without Maurice Noble, who excited, moved and stimulated us all," Jones wrote, "that film could not have been made."

Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections turned 25 this year (it was published right before Sept. 11). Here is a small collection of articles, including an overview, some critics revisiting the book [archive], a Gen Xer who asks Was this the last great American novel?, two interviews with Franzen, one in The New Yorker [archive], one in the Grauniad, and news of the (inevitable?) Netflix adaptation.

Related: How Jonathan Franzen became America's most divisive novelist [BBC] Jonathan Franzen: The Great American Misogynist [Medium, archive] Jonathan Franzen 'considered adopting Iraqi orphan to figure out young people' [Grauniad] A-and: Never forget [archive]

Welcome to The Crete Fleet, an on-line encyclopedia of the Concrete Ships of WWI & World War II

It is in this sense that the carnival of FinTwit is truly a social and psychological phenomenon, one sustained by the convergence of economic desperation, platforms designed for addiction, influencer monetization, permissive disclosure regimes and a culture that has somehow managed to elevate conviction above analysis. Here, Robinhood's name is uttered so that the poor might think they have a fighting chance against the rich, but this promise obscures an inherently extractive architecture.

Despite growing attention, the plausibility of AI surpassing human controllability remains highly contested. Examining 81 peer-reviewed papers from Scopus and Web of Science, we find a fragmented discourse characterized by bold yet often unsubstantiated claims, including accelerationist growth models and speculative calculations of catastrophic tipping points. Anthropomorphic and speculative AI conceptualizations prevail, while interdisciplinary perspectives that consider issues of infrastructure, social agency, Big Tech power position and politics remain scarce.

This concept of financial freedom—not having to trust anyone else—is the logical end point of the belief that the systems of American life cannot be mended, only circumvented. Bitcoin, I was told again and again, was safe wealth specifically because of its distance from central bankers. Though the currency's value was susceptible to the day's memes, it ultimately required confidence only in code. Bitcoiners call this perceived freedom "self-sovereignty," and its emergence as a primary value signals how fully people have lost trust in national institutions.

[Toni Morrison's] articulation of the subliminal, subaqueous life of Moby-Dick has proved the most valuable means I have of making sense of the recent violence in the United States. More than maybe anything else, this was her project as a critic; she herself recognised that the connection between novels and the world, the author and history, the past and the present, was of great importance not only to Melville and the fractious union of the 1850s, but to her own time and place: "to question the very idea of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority... and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority... that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now."

Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.

Pokémon is a global phenomenon. I'm absolutely convinced that if the world suffered an apocalypse tomorrow, the following day the global currency would be Pokémon cards. Pokémon cards are beating the S&P 500 by 3,000 percent. Emanating from Japan, it really took hold around the world in the late '90s and early 2000s. It then had a zenith moment and then a nadir moment, and ever since then, it's been on a parabolic growth curve. And that really has driven the international market expansion for trading cards.

Pokemon collecting and value, previously

One of Anders's most important concepts was the "Promethean gap": the "growing asynchronicity between the human and the world of their own products." It is the difference, today widening into a chasm, "between our action and our imagination." Our technological prowess has grown stupendously, enabling us to incinerate millions in a moment; but our mental and moral capacity to contemplate the significance or meaning of our actions has not grown proportionately.

I'd long been told that the Dominican Republic's wildly successful baseball industry was plagued with abuse and exploitation — that for decades Major League Baseball has presided over a massive unregulated system that treats tens of thousands of Dominican boys like commodities. But when I began making calls last year, I expected those most involved to defend it. Instead, trainers — the men integral to the industry as instructors, surrogate parents and agents — virtually all told me they felt forced to participate in a system that is broken and costly.

This page is playing a public Caltrans traffic camera live. Nothing is pre-recorded — the timestamp burned into the top of the picture is the real one, and if you come back at three in the morning you will hear an almost empty freeway.

These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they're doing so by gunning for my job.