#Circlepath

Physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on who should read books about physics. “The question of ‘What is space-time?’ doesn’t belong only to scientists. It belongs to everyone who has ever wondered about

Quaker principles line up quite well with modern parenting research. “Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect

25 Books That Capture This American Moment. They include Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland, and Rabbit Redux by John Updike.

This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re look

The Neanderthal dentist: archaeologists found evidence of a decayed tooth being drilled out with a stone tools 59,000 years ago. “It’s now the oldest known evidence of dentistry — or any direct medica

One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that’s really saying something; it’s a fierce competition. He’s the guy who said in 2023 that he wanted to put federal worke

This is a smart piece about where we are in America right now, post-Citizen’s United, post-Voting Rights Amendment, post-Dobbs, mid-MAGA: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive). First, let’s be

The 2026 National Recording Registry inductees were announced today. “The 2026 selections mark the first recordings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé chosen for the registry.” Also: music from Weezer, The G

I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”. “Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and yo

A map of the regions of the US, as voted on by Reddit users. I think this seems mostly correct? One funny artifact: Washington state got some votes for “Northeast”, probably because ppl confused it wi

“So, at about 14, I became the team’s unofficial basketball musician,” writes Theocharis Papatrechas. “A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. And if someone missed badl

Since Reporters Without Borders started tracking their World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago, the global rating has never been lower than the 2026 score. From a summary of their analysis: For

Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.

From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow: Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare s

We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots. “For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to

Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again) and instead of an underwhelming Reddit clone, it’s now just scraping noted fascist cesspool “X” for AI news and telling us that Sam Altman is influential in AI? Thi

Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.

Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’v

Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long docu

Now open in NYC: a pop-up called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which consists of “all 3.5 million pages, 3,437 volumes, and 17,000 pounds of the released and partially