The Guilty Pleasures of Emily in Paris
I tried to avoid this show. Then I succumbed.
Dispatches
Young Man Addresses the Crowd: TCR at the DNC
The young man talked another 40 minutes. The bus crawled through rush hour and the security perimeter at the United Center, where Harris would make her speech. There was no bathroom or water on the bus, and no exiting it.
The Aural Prison of Leaf Blowers
(Wiki-CC) A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car…
Time to Rethink the Mississippi Watershed—and Design Itself
“Water is one of the most politicized things on Earth, if not the most,” Hoeferlin notes. “Yet it is apolitical. Water goes where it wants to go. It will find its way.”
Winnie the Pooh Would Have Loved This
If the bees' queen begins to falter, they induce her replacement, as political parties have been known to do. If she dies, the entire colony realizes it can no longer smell her scent, and a “queenless roar” goes up, an agitation that triggers the raising of the next queen.
Humanity’s Tiny, Ultra-Durable Insurance Policy
The “eternity crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.
Flowers Have Mastered the Art of Seduction
The wild and crazy things a flower will do to get laid
The Man Who Saw Missouri’s Beauty
A fresh look at the Katy and Rock Island trails—and the difference they make.
Reading the Iliad in a Time of War
It is predictable, but also true, to say that the Iliad makes poetry out of war and conflict. It is more precise to say that the Iliad reminds us that war and conflict are always with us, whether in open conflagration and mounting body counts or simmering beneath the surface.
AI Illiteracy
If visual-textual AI literacy is this bad, what (else) will Americans believe about, say, politics, based on social media posts with altered or fictional material? I think we know but pretend not to.