2026-08-22

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• Survival mode': Indiana residents endure a ninth day without power

• I Own 28,000 Books. Here's What I've Learned

  I learned about floor loading the hard way, when a crack appeared in the ceiling of the room below my library. The structural engineer who came to assess it looked at the shelves, looked at the ceiling, looked at me, and said something in Flemish that I will translate politely as "this is too many books for this floor." He was correct. The floor joists were rated for a domestic load — furniture, people, normal life. They were not rated for seven tonnes of literature arranged along one wall. The solution was steel reinforcement beams, installed at a cost that would have bought several hundred more books. The irony was not lost on me. It is also not lost on my wife, who mentions it at intervals she considers appropriate and I consider too frequent.

  • I am showing this to my wife as evidence that our 5k+ titles is not evidence of aberrant behavior.

Horseshit

• How scientists are perfecting chocolate

• Jamie Justice Is Running a $101M Longevity Science Fair

• A young Nigerian man was lured to London in an organ-trafficking plot

• If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Sperm Racing World Cup

• Influencers and Resellers Are Turning Empty Boxes into Big Cash

• the only public one: The Icelandic Phallological Museum: The world's only penis museum

celebrity gossip

• True scale of Meghan and Harry's US political plans revealed — from request for Biden Oval Office meeting to eyeing Senate seat

  Weeks before Democrat Joe Biden’s win over President Donald Trump, a source says, Markle requested a sit-down with California Gov. Gavin Newsom because she “wanted to be considered to be appointed” to the seat held by Harris, which she vacated just before becoming vice president on Jan. 20, 2021. In late 2021, the couple requested an Oval Office meeting with Biden, as well as accommodations at nearby Blair House — a perk reserved for foreign leaders on state visits, multiple sources say.

  • Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Announce Shocking Move Back to U.K

  The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are relocating with Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, to the U.K. for an extended period beginning this month, PEOPLE understands, with the children set to begin school there in September. The couple will maintain their home in Montecito, California, and their vacation property in Portugal while establishing a private, non-royal home base in Britain. The location of the family’s new home and the children’s school are being closely guarded.

Musk

• Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof tiles, not economically viable

• If Your New People Are on X, Maybe Your New People Suck

• Grok keeps sending gibberish responses to users

• Tesla sunsets its Solar Roof tiles

• Musk fumbles the timetable for first Starship catch

  CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX probably won't attempt to catch a returning Starship for several months, walking back his earlier suggestion that it could happen on the next test flight. In a post on his social media platform, X, Musk said: "We will probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months." He added that if a tower had been waiting at sea where Starship splashed down last month, "it would have been caught."

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Waymo Bringing Chinese EVs to American Streets

• London cabbies plot 'skulduggery' to take on robotaxis

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Cognition and consciousness arise from analog computations, says new theory

  Brain waves, long understood to be the synchronized rhythmic fluctuations of large groups of neurons, turn out to be performing that crucial service, Miller and his colleagues argue, citing years of experimental evidence from his lab and many others.

• And the universe said you are the universe

  The laws of physics also seem weirdly hospitable to complexity: for instance, if certain physical constants changed even slightly, atoms wouldn’t be able to form molecules. Cosmologists generally treat this as the product of chance. But Gough wondered whether it might instead be the product of evolution—when we observe complexity elsewhere in nature, evolution is usually the explanation. As Julian put it: “Why wouldn’t ‘evolution’ apply to universes when it applies to everything else?” He theorizes that the universe is complexifying because, like any naturally selected entity, it evolved to develop into a form that would maximize its reproductive potential. None of these ideas originate with Gough. He knew his revelations were hand-me-downs. But he also noticed that cosmological evolution had basically vanished from mainstream science. No one was talking about Lee Smolin. The main problem, it seemed, was that the theory did not make easily testable predictions — and without the prospect of falsification, there is only so much you can do with a great scientific idea.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism suspended by university

  • Jason Arday and the new politics of plagiarism

  Arday had spent weeks fighting plagiarism accusations. The way they took on a life of their own in the media ecosystem is a stark reminder of the steep price people can pay in a culture that has made originality a kind of moral virtue. The controversy over Arday’s work reflects an ongoing trend of ideological opponents levying plagiarism accusations to undermine one another. I think it’s also worth exploring why such attacks continue to be so enticing – and so effective.

  • The Controversial Academic Who Ignited the Jason Arday Furor

  • How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair

  Many people have asked me if I regret writing the Arday exposé. This is a tricky question to answer. I set off a series of events that led to a death. If I say I have no regrets, it sounds like I don’t appreciate the horrific nature of the outcome. If I say I do regret it, it sounds like I’m accepting moral responsibility for what happened. The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge. Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

  • In Wake of Arday Scandal, European Elite Institutions Turn on Free Speech Instead of Reforming.

• Why Are Colleges Giving Financial Aid to Rich Kids?

• Harvard to pay US$53M over sold stolen body parts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Harass and Bully Girls at School

  Much of the behavior on display is plainly harassment and bullying, often filmed without the subjects’ knowledge or consent and uploaded online to humiliate them further. Strikingly, every single one of the many smart glasses videos we found were captured by teen boys — and their bad behavior was overwhelmingly directed at girls.

  • Meta glasses are a workplace menace

  • As demand for Meta AI glasses explodes, it's harder to avoid creepy recordings

• Teen drops lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap ahead of trial

  • "Whistleblower" Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta.

  He called features like video autoplay, "like" counters and infinite scroll "inherently unsafe for teenagers."

  • 'The young ones are the best ones': Meta's alleged effort to hook kids

  • Massive Child Safety Trial Against Meta Starts in Federal Court

• Grand jury declines to indict Ohio man charged with destroying Flock camera

  • Amid intense backlash, people are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras

  • How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With?

  • WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust

  • Darth Vader Wants Flock in San Diego

  • Man Dressed as Darth Vader Defends Flock Cameras to San Diego City Council

• Layoff in Apple's Vision Products Group prove slow progress in spatial computing

  • Apple Reportedly Lays Off 60 Vision Products Group Employees

  • Apple is laying off staffers working on the Vision Pro and Siri

• FCC Weakens U.S. Broadband Speed Goals to the Benefit of Elon Musk and Comcast

• Zoomers don't know what Usenet is

  last week, the talk of the algorithmic town was a Usenet thread from 1998 that fans dug up which featured a 21-year-old Gerard discussing in detail, on alt.fondle.vomit, his love of watching girls puke—preferably clothed. I have no parasocial attachment to this man or his music so have no feelings one way or another about his kink… But what I did find incredibly interesting was the variety of ways in which young fans comprehended the environment that Way was posting in. I saw some fans calling the posts “leaked emails” and others referring to the forums as “AOL.” Some were seemingly under the impression it was some kind of instant messaging service. Still other fans referred to it as “Google Groups” — which, yes, that is the interface through which the posts are preserved today, but certainly not their original home.

• Take-Two subpoenas Microsoft and Discord in hunt for GTA 6 leaker

• LinkedIn Has Accidentally Become a Dating Site

• Nintendo Wipes Out 400 Switch Emulator Repos in Single-Day GitHub Sweep

• Oura ring misleads consumers about sleep-tracking accuracy

• "No Disc, No Buy" Is Bigger Than Sony Expected

• British Groups Are Shaping US Age Verification Laws in 21 US States

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• NASA abandons orbit-boost attempt to rescue Swift space telescope

• Greenwich moon time? The race to set lunar clocks

• NASA’s Artemis II Crew Set to Receive Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• How A Texas student blew the whistle on a rogue AI hacking attempt

• American AI May Not Survive Chinese Open-Source

• The Brains Who Powered China's Surprising AI Leap

• Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers

• Stripe Buys A.I. Startup OpenRouter for $7.5B

• Anthropic Plans to Change Data Retention Policy for Advanced AI

• White House tech strategy leaves open-weight AI off its critical list

• Google gives publishers a new way to fight AI-driven traffic losses

• Only one type of lawyer will survive the AI wipeout

• Young Americans increasingly fear AI will take their jobs

• OpenAI Is Backing Away from Reddit as Reddit Tries to Become OpenAI?

• California Draws More Startup Investment Than All Other 49 States Combined

• Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?

• Meta's app for creating generative AI minigames is now available in the US

• 'The Data Center Has Taken Everything: Our Lands, Future, Happiness'

• Apple Music to Label AI-Generated Songs

• Google Is Buying All of Spirit Airlines' Data to Feed Its AI Models

• Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful.

• Delta Use AI to Cut Costs Set Diff Ticket Price–CEO Says Profits Could Rise 50%

• 1/3 web pages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship

• A failed project could help solve the biggest energy need

• UC Berkeley professor admits to using AI to edit op-ed on students' math skills

• Meta launches new vibe-coding platform, Pocket, in the US

• Edgerton, KS sues citizens trying to put data center ban before voters

• The US techlash is real

• How Frontier AI Is Changing the Economics of Cybersecurity

• Anthropic plans to change enterprise data retention policy

• Data center investors are overlooking the political risks

• Linus Torvalds Endures a Debug Session from Hell, "Enormously Helped" by AI

• AI is about to uncover a hidden world of animal communication

• I Worked at OpenAI. Here Are the Guardrails We Need Now

• AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

• Nvidia just showed that the harness, not the AI model, is now the real hero

• Nvidia to Pay AI Startup Poolside a $6B License, Newcomer Says

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Bitcoin's short squeeze traced to a Treasury bond buyback decision

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Guggenheim loan trades in distressed territory after investor call

• Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise

  • How Micron's $50B Boise buildout is reshaping its hometown

• US debt is rising by about $90k every second, or $7.8B a day

• New York unseats San Francisco as the top market for tech talent, CBRE reports

• Walmart to Begin Accepting Apple Pay in U.S. Stores

  • Walmart adding Apple Pay, other tap-to-pay options

• America Is About to Get More Expensive

• Citadel unwound more than 80% of risk tied to Situational Awareness portfolio

  • Citadel offloads 80% of portfolio scooped up from Situational Awareness

• Goldman Says Hedge Funds Had Worst July vs. S&P 500 in 20 Years

• America's capital crunch: Soaring debt collides with AI spending spree

• Supermicro fired staff after probe into $2.5B GPUs-to-China smuggling operation

  We’ve asked Supermicro how many staff it dismissed or disciplined, and how they breached company policies and the code of conduct. We will update this story if we receive a substantial response.

• 'Ghost Job' Ads Are Getting So Bad That Lawmakers Want to Ban Them

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The new kingmakers: Crypto, AI, betting firms fuel record spending on midterms

• Supreme Court chief justice allows work on Trump's $400M White House ballroom to continue for now

Trump

• Trump, Vance and Bessent try to calm the bond market with 'alternative facts'

Democrats

• ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis pleads the Fifth in closed-door deposition

• Website behind widely shared fake election polls run by 21-year-old

  A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal. “Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not,” said Prakash. “I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own.” He added: “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this.”

• Jill Biden entertains possibility Joe was drugged before 2024 debate with Trump

Left Angst

• NSF set to issue lowest number of new grants in four decades

• Trump's brazen crypto bank scheme may be his sleaziest yet

• ICE Wants to Give Every Officer a Body Cam, Restrict Public Access to Recordings

• The Right Has Forgotten What Beauty Is For

• The Trump administration Turns a Blind Eye to White-Collar Crime

• Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

  • Customs asked for his phone passcode. Now he faces a felony

• Is the Smithsonian Trying to Destroy America?

• US Navy carrier honouring Black war hero to be renamed after Trump

• CBP Officers and Contractors Abused Government Databases to Stalk Their Exes

• New Photo Shows Natalie Harp Running After Trump's Golf Cart

• Trump Threatens Suit Against Think Tank over Report He Doesn't Like

• The Scales Can't Fall from Our Eyes Fast Enough

• Trump's space transportation policy calls for new spaceport on federal land

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Who Is Jessica Bowie? Woman With Alleged ISIS Link Accused of NY State Capitol Plot

  Jessica Bowie, a 35-year-old Albany woman, pledged allegiance to ISIS and plotted to bomb the New York State Capitol, federal authorities alleged Thursday. A criminal complaint obtained by Newsweek alleges Bowie converted to Islam about five years ago, adopted the name "Aisha Saif," maintained numerous social media accounts promoting extremist views and spent weeks conducting reconnaissance around the Capitol.

• Thousands of Soldiers Now Roam Washington's Streets at $1.6M per Day

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• America Inc has a tight grip on allied governments

• Pentagon dismisses Stars and Stripes leadership after opposition to interference

  The Pentagon on Friday fired the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and a top reporter for insubordination after they spoke publicly against any interference by the Defense Department in the military news outlet that has a long history of editorial independence. It was the latest move by an administration that has grown increasingly aggressive toward the news media. The newspaper’s publisher, who announced his impending retirement days ago, was also dismissed. Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of the military newspaper that is partly funded by the Pentagon, told The Associated Press he was dismissed for insubordination after an interview he gave that objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military.

World

• Swiss tourist sentenced to year in jail for insulting Bali sacred Day of Silence

• Sweden became a country of big-state libertarians

• Stock indices no longer reflect equity reality

• Engineers warn that changes to electrical safety rules create new hazard

• Chinese FM to visit Seoul as Lee floats multiparty talks on ending Korean War

• Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn now face an Australian news law

• Apple paid $17B in taxes to Ireland after court ruling on back levies

• How French cyber spies hacked EncroChat phones

• Uber Faces €825M Dutch Fine over Driver Suspensions

• Britain would be bonkers to ditch Palantir

• Most of the Fastest-Growing Megacities Will Soon Be in Africa

• Higher Regional Court curbs Amazon: reporting button and algorithms violate DSA

• Nayib Bukele's Content Machine Is Reshaping Latin America

Iran / Houthi

• Deaths of 'Iranian leaders' hindering deal with US

• Trump Threatens 'Tremendous Consequences' for Countries Doing Business with Iran

• Donald Trump Effectively Just Told Iran to Get a Nuclear Weapon

• Why Your Next Long-Haul Layover May Be in Seoul, Not Dubai

Israel

• US envoy Huckabee tells Israeli settlers not to take Palestinian Americans' land

• Israel calls Erdogan an ‘anti-Semitic dictator’ after Turkey issues Netanyahu arrest warrant

• Australia Summons Israeli Envoy Over IDF Decision Not to Probe 2024 Killing of Aid Workers

China

• China puts robocops on traffic duty, minus the arrest powers

• Hong Kong convicts two Tiananmen vigil activists of inciting subversion

• China Hunts for Scientific Talent. The U.S. Is Making It Easier.

• China Rejects Australian Bean Imports Due to Glyphosate Residues 5x Above Limit

• China launches biggest ever auto recall campaign over door handle safety

• The Next China Shock Is Here

Health / Medicine

• As More Americans Turn to Cannabis, Problem Use Is Increasing

• Cannabis addiction climbs fast while alcohol use disorder slowly declines

• NYC sanitation workers fed up with being pricked by weight-loss drug needles

• Big Food's Biggest Challenge: People Who Don't Want to Eat Anymore

• Natural Light Is an Essential Nutrient

• For decades, we were told to choose low-fat dairy. New research says otherwise

• Longer meal intervals linked to faster disease accumulation in older adults

• America's First Legal Psilocybin Program Treated 346 People

• Moderna's cancer shot: exciting for investors, inconclusive for patients

• Why Some People Are Born with Devastating Gene Mutations–and Never Get Sick

• Peanut Allergy? Fecal Transplant Might Be a Solution

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• DRC Ebola outbreak 'growing exponentially,' UN says

  The outbreak is already the deadliest in the country's history, with more than 2,500 deaths from over 5,000 infections. "The epidemic is spreading widely. It's now covering an area that is bigger than France," UN senior Ebola coordinator Julien Harneis told journalists, adding that half of the 2,500 deaths had been reported in the last 20 days alone.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• El Niño set to be 'strongest in living memory', says Met Office

  • "Off the charts" El Niño strongest ever recorded with months before it peaks

• First giant tuna caught off Yorkshire since 1960s

• Thousands of years of indoor air pollution

• Ancient South American families built waterways by themselves

• New snake species named in honor of Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash

• You're Not a Universal Mosquito Magnet

• Rising CO2 Speeds the Growth of Grasses on the African Savanna

• The Summer the Ticks Took Over

• Contrail-free flying could help the climate

• U.S. Announces Colorado River Cuts for 3 States Amid Drought

• Dolphins observed using sea snail shells as tools outside Western Australia