Posts with Recent Comments
Some people liked physics lab ..
You might need a cuvette or that plastic scintillator or photomultiplier that you've always wanted, but someone else has already written up the lab report in English or Italian, illustrated the setup, graphed the results, and done the math. [more inside]
“I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said.
Terrifying reporting from ProPublica about the SSA describes a meeting held by acting head of the Social Security Administration Leland Dudek in which he seems to admit that the "DOGE kids" may very well actually break the social security payments process and tries to disavow all responsibility because he is clearly alarmed by what he is being asked to do. [more inside]
Enchant us your melody
English folk singer Sam Lee is reinventing the genre for the twenty-first century by exploring its deep past. [more inside]
$4.20 includes wrapping and mailing!
A Postcard advertising The Congressional Club Cookbook.
"Fourteen editions of these cookbooks have been sporadically published throughout the years by The Congressional Club, a non-profit organization chartered by Congress in 1908." In 1927, The first cookbook was published advising, "“Knead and beat 500 licks till dough is soft and blisters,” instructed Willa Eslick, future Member and wife of then-Representative Edward Eslick, in her recipe for “Beaten Biscuits.” [more inside]
"Fourteen editions of these cookbooks have been sporadically published throughout the years by The Congressional Club, a non-profit organization chartered by Congress in 1908." In 1927, The first cookbook was published advising, "“Knead and beat 500 licks till dough is soft and blisters,” instructed Willa Eslick, future Member and wife of then-Representative Edward Eslick, in her recipe for “Beaten Biscuits.” [more inside]
Aw, madraí baineann!
At the beginning of 2025, a great comics heroine of the past finally returned after over half a decade... to discover that her good-for-nothing superheroine daughter Wonderella had been forced to pass her mantle on to her sidekick after causing some kind of pandemic. Today, the former Wonderita finally accepts the most challenging part of the legacy: "Catch me, lassie, and get me gold!" (All past excursions to date after the jump.) [more inside]
The Sampler Archive
"The Sampler Archive database has been designed to share detailed information and high-resolution images of American girlhood samplers and pictorial embroideries from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries." [more inside]
Spooky in ways that are at once real and imagined, novel and banal
This reaches into other outlets that serve the terror-consumption cycle. In the pre-internet landscape all pain (while no less felt) was local. With the internet, what gives all forms of destruction their double-edged blade is their everpresence, their relatability, and their inescapability. The things that go on in someone’s backyard are no longer confined to their backyard. People don’t have to be caught in an immigration raid to be spooked by it. Listeners needn’t be in earshot of a firearm to hear it crack. from A United State of Fear [The Ringer] [CW: grisly details]
Voted Australia's 2nd Best Song of all time in 2001
The song in question? Oz band Daddy Cool's Eagle Rock. a 1971 release. It also inspired the "Eagle Drop" a tradition where men drop their trousers and dance whenever the song comes on in a public place. [more inside]
Run the Jewels
We’re here and here to look
In an age saturated with images, the faculties of perception are coarsened and weakened, like silk put through the dryer. Refining and strengthening one’s sight, a rewarding enterprise whenever, is only more rewarding now. from Do You Want to See? by Alice Gribbin [Cluny Journal]
Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—But It Gets Weirder
Reported by Slate [archive.org]: “I remember r/LuigiMangione got banned, then r/LuigiMangione2, then r/LuigiMangione3, and I think it went up to r/LuigiMangione6 before people were like, ‘We’re not going to keep doing this,’ ” she told me in a phone conversation. “I’d made one called r/LuigiFever, which was just photos of him, and that got banned too.”
Michelle Trachtenberg, 1985-2025
Variety: "Michelle Trachtenberg, 'Gossip Girl' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Actor, Dies at 39." More obituaries: The Hollywood Reporter; CNN; and NYT (ungated). Entries at IMDb, Letterboxd, and Wikipedia. Trachtenberg's work readily available online includes Human Kind Of, "an animated comedy about a nerdy teenager who finds out her estranged father was an alien," released on Facebook Watch and underappreciated in a crowded field of acerbic SF/F cartoons (IMDb).
Just keep swimming
Dam removal on the Klamath shows immediate returns
Within 10 days of completing the final in-water work at Iron Gate Dam – an earthfill structure farthest downstream – more than 6,000 Chinook salmon were observed migrating upstream into newly accessible habitat over a two-week period
Andrea Dworkin’s “Right-Wing Women”
Right-Wing Women reappears in a moment of pitched anti-feminist backlash, as corporate America abandons all pretense of equal treatment and abusers of women fill the government. Women marched, rallied, and told their stories, but no hashtag is a match for misogyny. “No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or elegance, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in the wind or written in sand; they disappear, as if they are nothing,” Dworkin wrote. Male outrage drowned out female pain. As she put it, “The tellers and stories are ignored or ridiculed; threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt.” - Sarah Jones
Female Scribes in the Middle Ages
"[N]o attempt has been made up till now to quantify women’s contribution to [medieval] manuscript production. Here we address the research question: What was the quantitative contribution of female scribes based on available sources?" The answer may surprise you! [more inside]
How Do You FREEly Express Your Creative Self?
Oh sure, there's always the usual mainstream things every article trots out, blah blah blah. But what unusual/surprising/interesting hobby, activity, or task do you find works as a creative outlet? Or talk about anything else - it's our weekly free thread!
The Manipulative Bastards corner is especially interesting
You may be wondering: What makes a villain “best”? That, friends, is really up to you. You can vote for the most iconic villains, the most memorable villains, or the most villainous villains. You can vote for the villain you enjoyed reading about the most, or the one that kept you up at night. You can vote for the cutest villain, if that’s your thing. The point is, there are no rules. Villains are rule-breakers, and so are we. from The Best Villains in Literature Bracket: The Not-So-Sweet 16 [LitHub]
Will the tooth fairy pay up if the tooth has been swallowed?
"Other parents we know have settled on an introductory offer of £1 to £2 for Tooth 1, lowering to a lesser rate for subsequent donations, and we’re about to put this to him when he hits upon a snag. ‘How do I get the money without the tooth?’ he asks, suddenly lamenting his dentivore breakfast. ‘Er, you fill out a form’ I splutter vaguely, since it’s the only thing I can think to say, and he’s already late for school. This is how I end up spending the rest of my morning drafting Form TF230 from the Department of Teeth." [more inside]
Tired of barramundi and cod? A new white fish species is on the way
Tired of barramundi and cod? A new white fish species is on the way. The CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, a scientific research organisation funded by the Australian Federal Government] unveils new fish variety that could one day make a splash on dinner tables across Australia. They are working on developing a sustainable, profitable and eco-friendly farmed fish using an Australian native white fish few have heard of.