Animal life in Florida storm sewers, including alligators. (NY Times, original paper) In my neighborhood, foxes and raccoons regularly use the sewers to get around.
Good Vox article on the advances in brain-to-text technology recently announced by Meta.
Kevin Drum summarizes the current House and Senate budget proposals, which are very far apart. And the radical differences between the House and Senate defense budgets and the ideas floated by Peter Hegseth.
Sabine Hossenfelder describes a new paper that applies mathematical rigor to the notion that the laws of our universe can evolve over time, 6-minute video. And here she again attacks the state of contemporary physics.
For the third year in a row, the winner of the NBA dunk content is a 6'2" white guy, Mac MacClung. Watch him dunk while jumping over a car. The biggest stars don't enter the contest any more because there are these dunk specialists who would beat them.
The NY Times runs a piece on why people don't dress up to go out for dinner any more which somehow fails to mention the world "class," even though it cites a self-proclaimed "expert" who wrote a book on the topic. People used to care a lot about their dress because how you dressed signified your social class, which was supremely important. Class is less important now, so how you dress is less important. There may be other factors but the class question is by far the main one.
Long-studied tomb in Egypt identified as that of Thutmose II, which all the news sites describe as the tomb being "discovered."
Kevin Bryan's Fifty Takes on world affairs (Twitter/X, Marginal Revolution)
Also at Marginal Revolution, more on Germany's industrial decline.
This Smithsonian article on Canyon de Chelly is interesting mainly because of the complexity of modern Native connections to the cliff dwellings, which are much contested among the Hopi (who consider themselves the descendants of the builders) and the Navajo, who may have killed the builders but were once besieged in the canyon by the US government. Also some information on what archaeologists are still trying to learn about these much-studied sites.
Scott Siskind, Lives of the Rationalist Saints, amusing.
The development of political thought and writing under the Ottoman Empire, summary at JSTOR with a free link to the academic article behind it.
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The NY Times runs a piece on why people don't dress up to go out for dinner any more which somehow fails to mention the world "class," even though it cites a self-proclaimed "expert" who wrote a book on the topic.
Reminds me of a self-proclaimed "expert" on dining etiquette who spent twenty minutes of a video trying to argue that etiquette was purely and solely about ensuring that everyone at a meal was comfortable and got along, and never once mentioned "class", or other related concepts like "discrimination".
Which in turn reminds me of Neo-Confederates, and their own insistence on absurdity - "The Civil War was never about slavery! It was about States' Rights!".
Inevitably when a practice falls out of favor due to growing awareness of its underlying faults, the people who continue to champion said practice will insist that those faults are all just imaginary, and never actually existed in the first place.
"Dressing up to eat out isn't about dividing the Haves from the Have-Nots! No, dear me! It's just about looking nice 'for other people'! Yes, that's the ticket! You're actually being generous and kind to others by dressing in expensive clothing! You're not dressing up for your own sake, but for other people's! It's a way of treating other people with respect, not flaunting your wealth! What a silly misunderstanding!"
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