Posts tagged “COVID-19”

• I’m pretty sure I’ve already linked to The Labyrinth Locator, but it’s neat enough to warrant posting again in case you haven’t seen it.
• What was your favorite Super Bowl LX commercial? (I thought the Sabrina Carpenter ad for Pringles was the best one.)
• What it was like to be a bush at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance
• Rockhopper Penguins’ Athleticism Makes Them the Daredevils of the Animal World
• I am cautiously optimistic about both the upcoming Ryan Gosling sci-fi flick, Project Hail Mary, and The Adventures of Cliff Booth, the Brad Pitt/David Fincher sequel to the Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
• The first in a wave of legal cases alleging that social media is dangerously addictive is now on trial.
• Here’s a great line from an essay about the death of programming: Someday years from now we will look back on the era when we were the last generation to code by hand.

Winter Olympics

• U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn — who has arguably been the biggest story of the Winter Olympics — crashed during her fifth Olympic Games. So she won’t go home with a medal, but she will go home with the heart of a champion.
• “The summer games are about pleasant activities — swimming! running! playing games with your friends! — and the winter games have 11 separate terrifying ways to almost die hurling your body at maximum speed down an icy mountain.”
• US reaches first Olympic curling mixed doubles final, will face Swedish siblings for gold
• Hot Mic At Winter Olympics Catches NBC Announcer Call Snowboarding Big Air Final ‘So Boring’ – via @blobcostas

A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)

• You are probably getting brain damage from all those COVID infections.
• How TikTok 2.0 Became a Weapon for ICE – via @scalzi.com
• Children trapped in Texas immigration facility recount nightmares, inedible food, no school – via @letatcestmoi
• Heartbreaking: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility
• The President’s online drugstore isn’t what it seems.
• POTUS shares racist video depicting the Michelle and Barack Obama as monkeys
• Dr. Mehmet Oz, of all people, urges Americans to get the measles vaccine as cases rise across the country.
• “Life on Peptides Feels Amazing,” says everyone who’s buying from looksmaxxers on Instagram or AI bots in China and injecting them into their bloodstream.

• A French hospital was reportedly forced to evacuate after medical staff discovered an unexploded World War I artillery shell stuck in a man’s rectum. – via standard.co.uk
• Covid was the #3 killer in 2020, but has now slipped out of the top 10; an American is more likely to die these days from cirrhosis or suicide.
• How to turn off only the cursed AI summary feature in Gmail. – via Laura Olin
• Oh, look! I found yet another excellent article that does a great job of explaining why Substack is the worst. – via @paperalphabet (and me)

Winter Olympics

• Five minutes into the first event of the Games, they lost the stadium lights in the middle of a mixed doubles curling match.
• Mary Carillo will replace Savannah Guthrie as the co-host of the NBC coverage. (I always loved her wonderful 2004 rant about badminton.)
• Facing a 1,000-metre drop, the Milano Cortina 2026 freestyle skiers must overcome more than just their competitors, but their nerves as well. (See also: Japanese freestyle skier Kokone Kondo hurt in training crash, taken to hospital)
• Ice Hockey Underdog Italy earns first Olympic win
• The World Anti-Doping Agency could investigate if evidence emerges that male ski jumpers are injecting their penises in a bid to improve sporting performance.

Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness:

• This should be terrifying to everyone: DHS Hunts Down 67-Year-Old US Citizen Who Criticized Them in Email
• How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism
• If the Fourth Amendment permits the government to tear down your door with nothing more than an administrative warrant, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist.
• South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace is getting dragged after a damning New York Magazine profile revealed she forced staffers to create burner Reddit accounts to boost her standing in a “hottest women in Congress” forum. – via Comic Sands

• I am unabashedly irrationally jealous of Bandit Heeler.
• I recently watched (and very much enjoyed) The Four Seasons on Netflix. Aside from one incomprehensible casting decision, it was great.
• Three hours outside of Las Vegas: Star Wars Glamping
• A few things I’ve researched online recently: types of scissors, Randall Tex Cobb, where to watch Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Are Tarantulas Dangerous?, The Ice Storm cast
• Owls in Towels is exactly what you think it is. – via both kottke and Laura Olin
• Whoa. Liam Neeson is doing a remake of The Naked Gun?! – via The Dailies
• The Missing Semester of Your Computer Science Education
• Killer bees!
• Star Wars Lofi is a collection of ambient background music / videos from a galaxy far, far away.
• The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves:
  • The Whiff of Corruption: POTUS’ New Perfume Has Strong Notes of Graft
  • One of the Dreamliners That Gave a Boeing Manager Nightmares Just Crashed
  • HOTTEST TAKE: Stupid-Americans are the New Irish-Americans, POTUS is Their JFK. is a brilliant essay on our current predicament in America. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out.
  • Alligator Alcatraz immigrant prison camp is Florida’s sadistic ‘one-stop shop’ for mass deportation
  • Why Won’t ICE Comment on Kristi Noem‘s Cannibal Stories?
  • FDA vaccine official restricted COVID vaccine approvals against the advice of agency staff

• Andor was phenomenal. Full stop. It wasn’t simply a great Star Wars story. It was a brilliant story even if you had — quite inconceivably — never even heard of Star Wars. It also managed to stay full-throttle awesome from S1E1 through S2E12, and somehow it did this even though everyone watching knew exactly what happens next, which had to have been unimaginably difficult to execute. (And I am not ashamed to admit that I didn’t realize Andor was “and/or” until several episodes into the first season, even though anyone unlucky enough to be the recipient of a professional email from me can tell you that’s one of my favorite conjunctions.)
• Related? The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
• The New York Liberty Became the First $450M Women’s Team
• I (mostly) agree with the list Bruce Feldman compiled of the 25 best players of the millennium (so far). I have bigger issues with the list David Ubben put together of the best college football games since the turn of the century. I was somewhat surprised to see Florida ranked tenth in the list Stewart Mandel made of the best programs of the 2000s. It’s hard to believe how long it’s been since we had the best QB in history.
• Take It on the Run by REO Speedwagon holds up.
• Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Oneil Cruz recently sent a home run out of PNC Park at 122.9 mph (against the Milwaukee Brewers), recording the hardest hit ball in the Statcast era.
• (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction:
  • Dozens of staffers walked out when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya promoted an unproven COVID origin story.
  • [Current] administration orders Michigan coal plant to stay open
  • The Belief System Behind the Palm Springs Bombing
  • “[D]on’t worry about making your products safe for your customers. Even if you kill them, just pay a small fine and move on.” Apparently not prosecuting criminals is how to make America great again.
  • It’s always a bummer to learn that a perfect domain name is already taken.
  • Every high school theology, civics, social studies, and American history teacher should show the Bible lesson scene from The West Wing (The Midterms, S2E3) at least once each semester.

• 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.)

• Gators!
  • Florida rallies past Houston to win March Madness 2025 NCAA championship
  • How Florida drew from back-to-back champs to stop Houston, start new reign over college hoops
  • After Final Four slugfest with Auburn, Florida stands alone as the class of an all-time SEC
  • Dramatic title game between Florida, Houston delivers end to greatest Final Four ever
• I NY: New York public schools tell [current] administration they won’t comply with DEI order
• Why Big Pharma wants you to eat more meat – via Curious About Everything
• Creating and sharing deceptive AI-generated media is now a crime in New Jersey
• You Can’t Always Get What You Want:
  • Border Czar Tom Homan Faces Backlash in His Hometown for Locking Up a Local Family / ICE disappeared a mother and 3 children. Neighbors said hell no. / BREAKING: Third grader & family abducted by ICE will return home
  • Judge says deportation of Maryland man to an El Salvador prison was wholly lawless.
  • Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer’s Research Could Be Lost Forever – via meyerweb.com
  • “When children die from measles, it means that adults have catastrophically failed to protect them because they have rejected basic science.” – via luckytran.com
  • RFK Jr. says he plans to tell CDC to stop recommending fluoride in drinking water
  • Ousted Vaccine Chief Says RFK Jr.’s Team Sought Data to Justify Anti-Science Stance – via carlzimmer.com

• Steve Carell helped make sure high school students affected by LA wildfires wouldn’t have to worry about paying for prom tickets.
• For reasons I cannot explain, I have still not managed to watch A Knight’s Tale, even though I know it was one of my mom’s favorite movies.
• It doesn’t look like they’ve released their 2025 operating dates yet, but the Breathtaker Alpine Coaster is a must for anyone visiting Aspen in the summer.
• Take a moment to complete The Heritage Foundation DOGE Survey and give them a piece of your mind. (If you decide to use your real email address, you’ll have to unsubscribe from their garbage newsletter.)
• Friendly reminder: There’s seriously no sane reason to drill for oil in Alaska and anyone saying otherwise doesn’t understand math.
• I had no idea that watermarks were invented in Italy in the 13th century.
• Practically all of Spain’s population growth since the COVID-19 pandemic is due to immigration.
• Can confirm: “the democratic party leadership sorely underestimates how much young people fucking despise them” – via @junlper.beer
• Make It Stop:
  • POTUS signs order designating English as the official language of the US
  • This whole story is nuts: With its top lawyer placed on leave after less than one week in the role, a culture of fear has paralyzed FEMA. – via The Handbasket
  • After the POTUS joint address to Congress earlier this week, Hayden Haynes, the chief of staff to House Speaker Mike Johnson and one of the most powerful aides on Capitol Hill, was arrested for driving drunk.
  • Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) “[W]hat’s happening in the US right now is some sort of weird hybrid of the kind of power grabs we’ve seen in the tech industry, combined with a more traditional collapse of democratic institutions.”
  • The Iowa GOP advanced a bill making it a misdemeanor for a healthcare provider to administer a COVID vaccine. – via @piperformissouri.bsky.social

• I will jump on the Last Week Tonight bandwagon and spread the word about how to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta. (And, yes, that’s the correct link.)
• The surprisingly hopeful What Felt Impossible Became Possible is an excellent essay about the downfall of the Ku Klux Klan and how it relates to our current American crisis. The key takeaway — as many others have noted — is that fascism always fails. “It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails.”
• A “super pod” of thousands of dolphins was spotted off the California coast.
• Disney’s Star Wars Succession Problem: Who Will Replace Kathleen Kennedy? – via The Dailies
• What happens when you pull a wildly valuable Jayden Daniels rookie card? For “Dr. Moist Muffins”, it literally changed his life.
• Scientists have found that eating more fiber could help reduce microplastic absorption and minimize its harmful effects on your body.
• Neither vaccines nor the virus prompted an increase in the number of cardiac arrests in athletes, contrary to misinformation that continues to circulate repeatedly.
• Annoying News:
  • Starlink gets FAA contract, raising new conflict of interest concerns. – via @joshtpm.bsky.social
  • The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., declined to sign an arrest warrant sent to them by local police for Republican congressman Cory Mills who happens to be an ally of the President.
  • Trump Administration Litigation Tracker
  • An analysis by ProPublica showed that dozens more pregnant and postpartum women have died in Texas hospitals since the state banned abortion. And while the national maternal mortality rate dropped, it rose in Texas by 33%. – via @joncooper-us.bsky.social
  • Here’s a handy list of sixteen Democrats who simply aren’t doing enough. If your rep is on that list, get on the phone.

• Holy hell do I love this My Life in Weeks project from Gina Trapani. And, like almost everything gold on the web that I’ve found for the last 26-ish years, it’s via kottke.
• Worcestershire gets endlessly dragged but the American pronunciation of sarsaparilla is even less intuitive. – via me
• The Freedom of the Press Foundation has a FREE digital security curriculum for journalism students. – via @dansinker.com
• Spineless milquetoast Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul will not remove New York City Mayor Eric Adams, at least for now, instead proposing “guardrails” to increase oversight of the city.
• The Curious Case of Leland Dudek
• The Incompetence of “DOGE” Is a Feature, Not a Bug: A series of mistakes by “DOGE” shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.
• A new bat coronavirus that has the capacity to spread to humans, similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has been discovered. – via @girlsreallyrule.bsky.social
• Oh, and just for good measure: Prominent “DOGE” Staffer Is Grandson Of Turncoat KGB Spy – via @jasonkirk.fyi

• I watched Conclave over the holiday break and thought it was pretty good. The acting was great, of course, but I’d expect nothing less from a film featuring John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Ralph Fiennes. If you dig Roman Catholic esoterica, I’d also suggest reading this deep dive into the Vatican’s secret saint-making process.
• Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. – via Tom Whitwell’s 52 Things I Learned in 2024, not to be confused with Kent Hendricks’ equally-awesome list of 52 Things I Learned in 2024
• Some of the 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024 (from The Atlantic Science Desk) are really pretty wild! – via kottke
• The Ghosts in the Machine is a great explainer on the current kerfuffle over Spotify’s nefarious fake music.
• Please don’t say just, “hello,” via text. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter, where I also found this awesome food map of Italy
• I enjoyed reading this quick essay on how to write readable sentences.
• What happens when websites start to vanish at random?
• An average of about 900 people per week have died of COVID-19 over the past year in the USA, according to the CDC. – via PBS