Posts tagged “YouTube”

• 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

• A paralysed man can stand on his own after receiving an injection of neural stem cells to treat his spinal cord injury.
• From the Department of NSS: Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being “The more time spent on screens, the greater the negative effects—especially among young people. The study suggests excessive media consumption disrupts essential psychological needs, such as real-world social interaction, physical activity, and sleep quality.” – via Arnold’s Pump Club, which is a surprisingly informative daily newsletter
• Lionel Messi trading card controversy: Who is signing his autographs? (See also: Why do companies buy memorabilia like the Ohtani ball and Skenes card? It goes back to Babe Ruth.)
• Tesla Is Dying, and Polestar Wants to Kill It
• The nightmare scenario for Hollywood has arrived: Viewers are choosing free creator content over premium subscriptions. Nielsen data for February 2025 show YouTube now dominates nearly 12% of total TV viewing time—more than Disney and about equal to Netflix and Amazon combined. And this doesn’t even count viewership on phones and tablets, where creators dominate even more. – via The Dailies
• Good news: Kentucky governor vetoes GOP abortion bill, says it undermines doctors and endangers pregnant women.
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad opened at the Magic Kingdom in 1980 and I still think of it as one of the newer rides.
• Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?
  • I don’t understand why the AP bent over backwards to avoid mentioning the political party affiliation of an ex-North Dakota lawmaker sentenced to ten years in prison for going to Europe with intent to pay for sex with a minor.
  • Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of [the Current Administration’s] Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes
  • “DOGE” claims it’s not an agency that has to comply with FOIA requests, so The Intercept is suing them.
  • POTUS nominates Republican once accused of mishandling taxpayer funds as HHS watchdog
  • For Fascists, Hypocrisy Is a Virtue

• 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.”

• The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson. Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives from the 1990s sent to Iron Mountain are entirely unreadable.
• My son got me hooked on New Rockstars. Erik Voss and his team produce amazing YouTube recaps of all sorts of things in pop culture. The Jessica Clemons breakdown of the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl LIX halftime show is great.
• A moving new trailer has been released for Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, an ambitious documentary that explores the final years of John Lennon through archival footage, never-before-seen interviews, and firsthand accounts.
• A new study shows you can lower your risk of cancer by eating just one serving of cruciferous vegetables per day. Vegetables appear to do the most to help fight gastrointestinal cancers, such as colorectal and stomach cancer, but the protective effects extended to lung and breast cancer as well.
• Climate change is causing hotter temperatures to become more frequent in the four West African countries responsible for producing approximately 70% of the world’s cacao — the key ingredient in chocolate.
• Former Florida Gators and Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Kadarius Toney is facing multiple charges, including aggravated assault, following his arrest in Georgia last week.
• White House says it has the right to punish AP reporters over Gulf naming dispute. (I am rapidly running out of canaries, people.)
• Was I the only one a little concerned that NASA increased the odds of that asteroid hitting us in 2032 from 1.2% up to 2.3%? This brilliantly simple explanation at Scientific American from astronomer Phil Plait should ease your mind a bit.
• Recent Media
  • Black Doves (Netflix) was incredible. Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw can act. Splendid plot. A+++
  • We watched the penultimate episode of Skeleton Crew and I am all-in on this show. Fantastic fun. Jude Law is perfect.
  • Four episodes into Slow Horses and love this show, too.

• Between 7AM and 7PM Eastern you can watch Bao Li and Qing Bao – the two new Giant Pandas at Smithsonian’s National Zoo – live on the Panda Cam as they explore their indoor and outdoor habitats at the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat.
• I know everyone is already drowning in what seems like an unrelenting torrent of insane news lately, but I feel like it’s important to highlight that last week Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett said he believes aliens have underwater bases on Earth.
• New research suggests that your coffee habit might help protect against type-2 diabetes. – via Arnold’s Pump Club
• The Unassuming Town of Bristol, Rhode Island, Is One of America’s Best Hidden Gems for a Weekend Getaway – via my dad
• I recently watched the 1991 Steven Spielberg film Hook for – I think – the first time. Great fun.
• The new MCU-themed Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl hype video is pretty intense.
• Anyone interested in iOS app development with SwiftUI should be reading Swift with Majid.
• Workout.lol is a handy one-page web app that gives you an exercise routine based on what equipment you have available and which muscles you want to target. (Pairs well with musclewiki.com.) – via kottke, from way back in July of 2023
• It’s a bummer that the Dead Bothans Society has been abandoned. It looks like most of the site was archived, thankfully, and many of their videos are still available on YouTube.

Oh, man. If you haven’t already seen them yet, pause for three minutes, break out the Kleenex, and watch these ads from Apple and Coca-Cola. They’re two of the best commercials I’ve ever seen.