- Almost 96% of new cars registered in Norway in January were electric. – via kottke
- The Wild True Story Behind Kendrick Lamar‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show
- The Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that insurance companies can’t bring their own legal actions against those blamed for the catastrophic 2023 Maui wildfire, allowing a $4 billion settlement to proceed.
- Trump’s Driving Legal Principle This Time: “What Are You Gonna Do About It?”
- The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children was told by the Department of Justice that they’d lose their funding if the organization didn’t remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials.
- Aggeggio is a lovely Italian word for everyday objects.
- The ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ of the United States Government
- I need to investigate Tapestry, from iconfactory. It looks like a cool iOS app for aggregating content, and I’ve loved pretty much every other app they’ve ever made. – via hiro.report
Posts tagged “italy”
- Italy has embraced a novel approach to integrate olive oil into its tourism industry through oleotourism, an initiative that invites visitors to engage with the olive oil production process, offering experiences that range from guided tours of olive groves and mills to tasting sessions and educational workshops.
“In the final analysis, the progress of our civilization will be retarded if any large body of citizens falls behind. Without the help of thousands of others, any one of us would die, naked and starved.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Scottie Scheffler, 2024 PGA Tour Player of the Year, missed the first two tournaments of the season because he needed surgery to repair his hand after slicing it while attempting to make homemade ravioli on Christmas Day.
- A growing number of US government websites have gone offline as of Saturday, including several related to USAID and others focused on youth programs, Africa, and more.
- A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032. It’s very unlikely, thankfully, but what should be truly concerning is that nobody was even aware of it until two days after it made its last closest pass to us.
- A dire prediction: “[W]hen NIH and other health agencies emerge from the current freeze they will have been emasculated and politicized, prohibited from releasing information and research whose implications the Trump administration doesn’t like, banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump or at odds with the prejudices of the MAGA base.” – via Jodi Ettenberg
- When I was a kid, most of my possessions were very inexpensive, but tremendously meaningful. A baseball hat or an action figure or a comic book only cost a few dollars, but meant the world to me. My kids have tremendously expensive possessions that are very meaningless. An iPhone or iPad or AirPods cost hundreds or thousands of dollars but have essentially zero sentimental value. I’m sure this says something important about capitalism, but I don’t have time to think about it at the moment.
- Chris Coyier wrote a little about the pros and cons of maintaining your own website that’s worth a read. (And he mentions POSSE, which is something I love.)
- Here’s a cool statistical analysis done to determine whether NFL referees unfairly favor the Kansas City Chiefs. (Spoiler: Yup.)
- 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
“They’re espadrilles but they’re flat,” my wife said to me in Rome with the same mistaken confidence it would be understood as if I’d remarked to her that Chamberlain should never have been fooled by the Stresa Conference and appeasement was always destined to fail.
I Meet My Grandmother in Italy
A beautiful poem
#FridayFive: Roman Holiday
My favorite places in the city on seven hills
Redemption through Reading?
Prisoners can reduce their sentences by reading.
- The story of the creation of the “Wanted” posters for Jonah Hex is pretty fascinating.
About five years ago, on September 1, 2005, I sat at a coffee shop across the street from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and could not believe just how much it leans. And that was five years after they fixed it.
- Everybody loves lists, so Listiki — a site for finding, making, and sharing them — should be popular.
- Adjusting to today’s dollars, the United States has incurred more debt in the last decade then during the entire combined previous 211 years of the republic’s existence.
- How to Create a CD Ladder, from FrugalDad
- “In an era when very little remains shocking, Pierce might have actually managed to create a genuinely disturbing work of fiction, the literary equivalent of Schindler’s List rewritten by the Marquis De Sade and filmed as a Tim Burton animated feature.” (hat tip to rb)
- Just about 100 years ago — on July 24, 1910 — the New York Times featured an article titled “Will Future Generations Lose Historical Documents of To-Day?”.
- “When you are parting with your money, know the person on the other side of the deal thinks you are not so smart and is depending on the anchoring effect when they tell you how much you are about to save.”