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“In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States — but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and …
The Washington Post [no paywall]: “How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy…“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.” He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up …
Ars Technica: “There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop—the most recent coming just two weeks ago. These instances raise serious questions about the quality of peer review in some journals—how could anyone let a figure with terms like “runctitional,” …
Evolving State Legislative Efforts to Censor Public School Libraries – “Thousands of books removed from schools out of fear of state governments nationwide. Judy Blume’s Forever… banned from every Utah public school; To Kill a Mockingbird and 39 other titles pulled from a Texas school district that used AI to review materials; a list of …
Bloomberg no paywall: People Watched 700 Million Hours of YouTube Podcasts on TV in October. ” People are spending more time tuning in to podcasts on Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, and increasingly they’re turning to the biggest screen in their homes: the TV. In October, viewers streamed more than 700 million hours of podcasts on their …
The New Yorker [no paywall]: Is the term a new way of calling people pretentious, or does it reflect a deprioritization of the written word? “Here’s a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” He could very well be …
PHYS.Org: “A study published in the journal Ornithological Applications shows how conservation organizations are using data from birdwatchers to pinpoint opportunities to reverse population declines. The study, led by researchers from nine different Migratory Bird Joint Ventures (cooperative, regional partnerships of federal and state agencies, Tribes, and nongovernmental organizations who work together to support avian …
“The presence of evil doesn’t break people. From a young age, we learn that there are wolves in our midst. It is the absence of courage that plunges us into crisis. Great courage can help redeem a catastrophe. But abject cowardice not only magnifies our pain; it makes us doubt the strength and virtue of …
The best science images of 2025 — Nature’s picks The Sun’s fiery surface, a tattooed tardigrade, rare red lightning and more.
Anne Applebaum – “I needed several days to absorb the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, to re-read it, to listen to reactions, to compare it to the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in 2017. My conclusion, published in the Atlantic (gift link here), is that it isn’t really a strategy document at all: …
This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, Kyle Chayka argues [no paywall] – The New Yorker – This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment. “The Turing test, a long-established tool for measuring machine intelligence, …
Center for the Study of the Public Domain – Public Domain Day 2026 – On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As …
