The cultural decline of literary fiction: "No work of literary fiction has been on Publisher’s Weekly’s yearly top ten best-selling list since 2001." People like to blame wokeness or smart phones but the decline began in the 1980s. Interesting but I am not sure "literary fiction" is as clear a category as this writer seems to believe.
The Dull Men's Club, a real and very popular online space. One of the moderators says, "There is a level of one-upmanship. It’s sort of competitive dullness. Dull people trying to out-dull each other."
The conservative podcast space, which has often been derided for never pushing back against MAGA or other conservative views, has been very critical of war with Iran.
New singing cicada fossil found, 47 million years old. Their strategy of long periods underground, with brief explosions into the air for mass mating, seems to have been very successful.
Thousands of Roman fresco fragments found in London.
And some cool artifacts from a Roman grave in Montenegro.
A survey of American readers' favorite books, very strange list.
Bivalves (clams, scallops, etc.) survived the Cretaceous mass extinction quite well and then exploded in numbers and diversity.
Impressive, inlaid medieval sword found in the Netherlands.
A former fact-checker reviews a novel called The Fact Checker.
Using foraminifera to reconstruct past climates and extinction events.
Critical review of the recent novel by Ocean Vuong that has gotten a lot of attention and praise; this reviewer finds the attempt at poetic writing to be completely over the top.
The Commissioners of Mecosta County in Michigan, in a region where people have bemoaned the loss of factory jobs for fifty years, vote to rescind their support for a battery factory that would have created 2,300 jobs. They cite "environmental concerns and the company's ties to China." People love manufacturing in the abstract but finding a site where you can build a big factory is really hard, and politics makes it worse; lots of conservatives in Georgia joined environmentalists and NIMBYs in opposing a new car factory when they found out George Soros was a major investor.
The end of rainbow capitalism. (NY Times)
Many people in the US want to build more nuclear power plants – my company just formed a special nuclear group to compete for work associated with this – but as this article on a recent Supreme Court case reminds us, the US still does not have a long-term storage solution for nuclear waste.
Archaeologists in Williamsburg find the well-preserved skeletons of four Civil War soldiers, likely related to a nearby hospital.
The YIMBY, "Abundance" agenda comes to Ireland.
The spider that kills its victims by vomiting on them.
Another Starship blows up, this one during a static test. Starting to think it maybe has worse problems than SpaceX wants to admit.
The huge cost of Trump's immigration crackdown, in the hundreds of billions.
Thanks to consumer pressure, many more US and European chickens are now cage free.
A proposal to increase birth rates using one of the oldest feminist ideas, paying women for taking care of their children. (NY Times) Like I said, an old idea but where would the money come from in a nation already running trillion-dollar deficits? Plus it doesn't deal with one of the main drivers of the decline, late marriage.
Analysis by the Financial Times finds that across Europe, anti-immigrant parties do better when they also have liberal economic policies, and therefore that Reform UK's vote share is limited by its economic libertarianism. (Twitter/X)
The Chinese AI known as DeepSeek rewrites anti-Russian articles to give them a pro-Russian slant. One of its utterances: "The West's war on Russian culture is hypocritical and self-defeating." (Twitter/X)
A thought on future US military strategy from Heatloss on Twitter/X: "I want to note that Iran had the style of military that the techbro defense types seem to want for us: countless cheap one-way attack drones, hundreds to thousands of ballistic missiles, and a relatively small and weak air force. You tell me if this is the future force you want."
Pakistan's drone war against its rebellious citizens. (NY Times)
British defense types are all tweeting about The Wargame, "a podcast series that simulates a Russian attack on the UK. We imagine it's October 2025. Russia deploys a task force of ships, jets & submarines to the North Atlantic. The UK is in missile range. The PM calls an emergency Cobra meeting. . . " Might check this out on my next long drive.
Ukrainian blogger says that his team is processing 100 videos of drones intercepting other drones every day. The war is now drone vs. drone as much as anything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment