- Five Quick and Easy Habits Suggested by Sports Psychologists is a phenomenal resource. Read it.
- The DMARC Guide from Global Cyber Alliance is an invaluable tool for anyone who manages email servers.
- An endurance swimmer aims to become the first person to swim around Martha’s Vineyard, getting in the water during the start of white shark migration season, in a bid to change perception of the predators shaped by Jaws. See also: Jaws Turns 50
- I still can’t get over the serendipity of Harvard not realizing they had an original copy of the Magna Carta. It would be very convenient if someone could find a copy of Constitution somewhere soon. It seems like almost everyone currently in Washington, D.C. hasn’t read it lately.
- Long-distance relationships are always difficult, even for KGB spies.
A Hazy Shade of Winter:
- Moderna pulls application for COVID–flu combination shot. – via carlbergstrom.com
- Majority of US states now have laws banning or regulating cellphones in schools, with more to follow. [Maybe parents wouldn’t be so desperate for a way to contact kids during school if we weren’t always terrified of them getting shot.]
- An AI-generated summer reading list was published in major newspapers. [Tip of the iceberg. Canary in a coalmine. Whatever you want to call it. It’s going to get worse.] – via boghuma.bsky.social
- Diseases are still spreading, but the CDC is no longer warning the public about them.
- The House and Senate both voted to loosen regulations on air pollutants like dioxin and mercury, which are associated with higher cancer risk.
- This might be the dumbest thing he’s ever said, and he’s said some of the dumbest things anyone has ever heard in human history. (And that I don’t even need to tell you who he is because you already know supports this claim.)
Posts tagged “Constitution”
- How to Win an Argument with a Toddler is much better than I expected. – via Links You’ll Love
- It took me twenty-four years, but I finally thought to “Select All” in my Apple Music (née iTunes) library and clear the “Sort As” values for Title, Album, Album Artist, Artist, and Composer.
- Kangaroo on the loose in Florida found safe. / Alligator attacks, kills woman canoeing with her husband on Lake Kissimmee. / Woman arrested after raccoon named Chewy found with meth pipe in driver’s seat during police stop. / Yellowstone National Park reports first 2025 bison goring.
- Pretty much every respiratory intervention or product on the market is not supported by science or research, except one: deep breathing.
- 4×3 is a pretty tricky daily puzzle.
- Bravo has greenlit The Real Housewives of Rhode Island, expanding the franchise to its 12th U.S. city. – via The Dailies
- Unbreaking is a new newsletter which plans to detail how the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us. – via Laura Olin
Death By A Thousand Cuts:
- The [current] administration is invoking the “state secrets privilege” in an apparent attempt to avoid answering a judge’s questions about its mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
- “Rolling Stone reached out to all 53 GOP senators after the president said he didn’t know whether he needs to honor the nation’s founding document. None replied.” – via thetnholler.bsky.social
- Since returning to the White House in January, POTUS has declared eight national emergencies.
- The President of the United States frequently has no idea what he’s signing and has to have it explained to him.
- Newark, New Jersey Mayor arrested at ICE facility / Department of Homeland Security is threatening to arrest members of Congress over the kerfuffle.
- Abortion abolitionists want women who get an abortion to face criminal charges.
- Crumple Zone: What Car Crashes Reveal About Human Hubris and Fragility
- I’m A PGA Golf Coach – Here’s Why I Made Sure My Kids Can Play Golf – via my dad
- I’ve seen some people saying how AI-generated text is now as good as certain published authors, and honestly I think it’s really brave for these folks to admit in public how poor their reading comprehension has to be.
- Officials in Cinque Terre, Italy have introduced several strict measures to control overtourism, including a 2000€ fine for wearing flip-flops. – via Jenny
- Gray goo is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
- How Much Did Congress Make Off Market Turmoil and Why Are They Allowed to Make Anything at All?
- The great thing about fighting back against [fascism] is that if you end up losing anyway you get the same outcome you’d have gotten from complying but you don’t have to fucking hate yourself too.
- [The Administration] Is Gaming Out How to Ship U.S. Citizens to El Salvador – via gtconway.bsky.social
- This is severely bad: Artificial intelligence hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: “slopsquatting.” – via janelleshane.com
- If you wrote a story about a regime so comically evil that it literally snatches people from their citizenship interviews, you’d be accused of over-the-top imaginings.
- [Administration] freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism – via stardustbluepr.com
- A lovely story about Dav Pilkey, author of the Dog Man series: He paid for a whole school’s book fair!
- I adore this brutally honest bio of Jane Krakowski from a recent Broadway production.
- You need to read this behind the scenes article on Minnesota Timberwolves coach’s decision to start Joe Ingles in a “must-win” game so his 8-yo son with autism could see him play. – via @richarddeitsch.bsky.social
- If you have an Apple computer, you can disable the incredibly annoying feature that attempts to guess what you’re about to type. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input and click the Edit button next to your input source. Toggle “Show inline predictive text” so it’s disabled and click Done.
- Great reporting on how a false story about the Dropkick Murphys getting banned for mocking the administration went viral.
- Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains – via @hpsc24.bsky.social
Gross Stuff:
- The story of what happened recently at the United States Institute of Peace is just inconceivable.
- The USPS Union President has sent out an email to employees warning them of impending privatization concerns after [administration] moves to fire 10,000 postal workers. – via @girlsreallyrule.bsky.social
- The Constitutional Crisis Is Here: By shipping men to a Salvadoran prison without due process, [the administration] has begun defying court orders in earnest. – via @kairyssdal.bsky.social
- A lawsuit accuses the [current] administration of unlawfully shutting down the Voice of America and asks a federal court to restore the outlet that for decades has supplied news about the United States to nations around the world — including many that lack a free press of their own.
- A CDC clone site with false vaccine claims is hosted by Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit, anti-vaxx organization started by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – via YLE
- “if the democratic party had a functional propaganda arm it could make a lot of hay of the fact that a non-trivial number of MAGA personalities and politicians are child sex offenders“
- Researchers in Japan have developed a durable and recyclable plastic that fully dissolves in the sea and doesn’t leave microplastic pollution in the oceans because it breaks down in the water over time. – via @oceanbluestar.bsky.social
- Early entry for the best news of the year? Ted Lasso is returning for a fourth season.
- I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It is easily the best work of fiction I’ve read in the last twenty years. After five pages I was enjoying it so much that I decided to pace myself so I could inhabit its story as long as possible, but ended up devouring it in just a couple of days. My only regret is that I will never get to read it for the first time again. 1
- Happy belated 27th birthday to kottke.org, the website that inspired me to start blogging a quarter-century ago.
Notes from the firehose:
- Conservative former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig issued a stark warning about what he described as [the President’s] escalating attacks on the legal system.
- Former Spiritual Adviser to POTUS Indicted for Sexually Abusing a Child
- Top Democrats Warn “DOGE” Employees of Potential Criminal Exposure from Ethical Misconduct – via @beyer.house.gov
- “Mr. Schumer’s stated approach of waiting for Trump to ‘screw up’ and continue this inexplicable embrace of the slippery slope is wholly inadequate and an astonishing failure of leadership.”
- [The President’s] deportation of Venezuelan migrants may have violated a direct court order, leading to what the former general counsel of the FBI, Andrew Weissmann, has called a potential “doomsday scenario.”
- [The President] has already implemented at least half of Project 2025’s objectives in eight areas.
- FDA has given two biotechnology companies approval for clinical trials that will transplant organs from genetically modified pigs into patients with kidney failure.
- That “fresh” apple you just grabbed at the grocery store was probably picked a thousand miles away and over a year ago. The latest episode of Radiolab, Forever Fresh, was full of surprising facts about the food industry. (Spoiler: It’s all about plastics.)
Here are two fascinating links on the importance and function of sleep: Our Sleep, Brain Aging, and Waste Clearance and Scientists Uncover How the Brain Washes Itself During Sleep – both via Jodi Ettenberg- I’m considering adding my bluesky feed to a (new) sidebar on this site using Robert Devore’s WordPress Plugin.
- How do MAGA voters feel after the first two weeks of idiotic executive orders, flagrant disregard for the Constitution, economic upheaval, and diplomatic absurdities? They’re mostly fine with it, which is as horrible and disturbing as it is unsurprising. It was never about eggs.
- Five VSCode Extensions to Supercharge Your Markdown Writing has me interested in looking into VSCode again. (I’ve been using Nova (née Coda) from Panic forever, but really hate the way it handles remote servers and connections.)
- Rather than understand – or even acknowledge – the paradox of intolerance, the increasingly-popular newsletter / publishing platform Substack has decided to double-down on it.
- “Dr. Potter will not be silenced by UnitedHealthcare‘s attempts to threaten and harass her.” Pop Quiz: Without knowing any of the details about this legal issue, would you root for the health insurance company or the doctor?
- A second grade teacher in Philadelphia is using football to help her students score big in math. Her students take inspiration from their hometown football team — the Eagles — practicing their math skills by counting rushing statistics held by Eagles running back Saquon Barkley. – via George Conway
I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.
John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Announcement, June 11, 1963
Prohibition!
It’s the 94th birthday of Prohibition! The Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, took effect on this date in 1920, a year after it was ratified. Congress passed the Act even though President Woodrow Wilson had vetoed it. It made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor illegal. It took almost 14 years before the 21st