- Whoa! Archaeologists Discover Tomb of Unknown Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh. (Doesn’t that make two this year?!)
- My son and I somehow got sucked into a rabbit hole watching Michael Jordan YouTube highlight videos and I had fun trying to explain to him just how jaw-dropping the 1997 flu game was to watch live.
- I recently listened to the Smartless podcast interview with John Lithgow, which reminded me that for a couple of years I lived on the fringe of Beverly Hills and frequently saw him walking his dog around the neighborhood when I’d go on my morning runs. (We never interacted beyond a gentlemanly nod, but he seemed like a lovely man.)
- France‘s far-right leader Marine Le Pen has been barred from seeking office for five years after being found guilty of embezzling funds from the European Union. It’s always refreshing to see powerful politicians held accountable for breaking the law. We should try that in the US.
- The first Shohei Ohtani card to sell for $1 million included a coveted piece of his pants.
- I really love these LEGO picture frames, shelves, and office organizers.
- Apple is pretending to sell the computers from Severance, which I think is a cute little marketing gimmick.
Good News for People Who Like Bad News:
- Turkish student at Tufts University detained by masked men claiming to be police
- Top FDA Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing RFK Jr.‘s ‘Misinformation and Lies’
- FCC commissioner opens investigation into Disney and ABC for diversity policies
- How a Landlord and a Florida PR Firm Helped POTUS Kick Off the Tren de Aragua Gang Panic
- Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions from State Health Services
- The Florida State Health Department released a letter with a surprising new recommendation that contradicts standard of practice guidelines for measles outbreaks. – via YLE
Posts tagged “John Lithgow”
- Less than 1% of Catholic nuns in the United States today are 30 or younger.
- The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale starts on April 8, 2025.
- Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” I feel like there was probably a powerful confirmation bias at work here. This seems like exactly the sort of thing you’d think was obvious, but… as strongly as I would expect the correlation to be, I am guessing we’ll soon hear of all sorts of problems with the statistics.
- I’d forgotten that Taylor Swift hosted SNL a few years ago and performed a ten-minute version of All Too Well. It’s been a long, long time since I needed to convert a YouTube video to mp3.
We’re dealing with actual Nazis.- What “Center” Is That, Exactly? is an essay by A.R. Moxon of The Reframe that includes the wonderful line, “I think of how twisted I would have to become, for the spectacle of diversity and equality and freedom to traumatize me into suicidally-counterfactual reactionary nonsense.” This echoes some of the Kübler-Rossian questions stuck on my mental treadmill since that somehow-malevolent escalator ride that foreshadowed so drastic a national decline. How do you watch Footloose and root for John Lithgow? How do you watch The Muppet Movie and root for Doc Hopper? How do you watch Captain America and root for Hydra? How do you watch Star Wars and root for the Empire?! Or – maybe more terrifying – how do you transform into a stormtrooper but think you’re a Rebel?
- When you’re done reading that, check out It’s The Fascism, Stupid, in which Moxon talks about how “the First Buddy, a Nazi apartheid billionaire/corruption mogul whose name means Flair Odor, who was not elected to anything at all, seized control of our federal infrastructure.”
- 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
Sir Budrick the Lion-Hearted
On losing a best friend