January 12
Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.
As many as two billion people suffer from chronic pain, can science finally bring us relief? [NYT / Archive]
Resist the urge to make turn signal noises
YouTube user tontarotaro's "community" page is a wall of short, cute Pokémon animations.
all that glisters should probably be denominated waaaaay smaller
In Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’, historical blogger Bret Devereaux takes a dive into historical coinage and accounting to explain why, when you get down to it, Dungeons & Dragons and most other historical/fantasy RPG settings are out of their goddam minds if they think people were lugging gold coins around on a daily basis.
Bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong
"In Hong Kong, skilled armies of scaffolders can erect enough bamboo to engulf a building in a day — even hours — using techniques that are thousands of years old, and have been passed down through generations."
The biobattery that needs to be fed
"A battery that needs feeding instead of charging? This is exactly what researchers have achieved with their 3D-printed, biodegradable fungal battery. The living battery could supply power to sensors for agriculture or research in remote regions. Once the work is done, it digests itself from the inside." [more inside]
Ellen Ternan
A bright, penniless girl of eighteen who found herself admired by a rich older man had good reason to be excited. The role laid down by her society were suddenly reversed: having been always powerless, she now began to be in command. In Nelly's case the man she might command was also brilliant and famous, a charming and entertaining companion, and in a position to transform her life, which in any case held few counter-attractions.
How to sit down
"If you have taken on a complex subject and try to engage with it too soon, the writing will be off, with a hard, raw tang. That applies to matter that hasn’t yet been fully digested, and includes subjects, like your childhood if it’s recent or your social scene if you’re in the middle of it, that might need years or decades of marinating; much depends on individual temperament." Author, chronicler, critic and essayist Lucy Sante is writing about writing [substack]. [more inside]
Lucrative tools for converting anxiety into income
We need to talk about the doomers and the attention economy they’ve built. Not because they’re entirely wrong — from climate change to political extremism, a lot of their concerns are valid — but because they’ve created something extraordinary: a perpetual motion machine powered by anxiety. Let’s call it the Doomscroll Industrial Complex (DIC). It operates on a simple principle: bad news is good business. But unlike traditional doom-peddlers who simply predicted the end times and waited to be proven right or wrong, today’s digital prophets have discovered a much more sustainable model. from How Anxiety Became a Business Model [Joan Westenberg] [more inside]
Migraine molecules may drive endometriosis pain
Migraine molecules may drive endometriosis pain. Existing drugs might help.
Pain-sensing neurons exchange signals with immune cells that drive endometriosis, sparking the pain associated with the condition, new research suggests.
Hold on, I'm comin'... RIP Sam Moore (1935–2025)
Sam Moore of the legendary soul duo Sam & Dave passed away aged 89.
Obituaries in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NME, New York Times, Washington Post.
His partner in the duo, Dave Prater passed away in 1988. [more inside]
January 11
"This soldier will in honored glory rest under my eternal vigilance"
excellent Taste, pleasant Smell, and curious Shapes
The pineapple is a tropical plant indigenous to South America. After being brought to Europe, techniques were developed to grow it in colder climates including the use of fermenting horse dung to keep the plants appropriately toasty. Pineapple contains protein-degrading enzymes and so is good at tenderizing meat and ruining Jell-O desserts. It's also fairly acidic, which makes its juice useful for kicking off a sourdough starter. There's a lot to be said about their taste, but are pineapples really delicious?
Never quite caught on in the United States
It’s one of those things everyone’s heard of, but few truly understand. It sits quietly in the corner of the bathroom (or as an attachment to the toilet itself), radiating mystery and a slight sense of intimidation. Ask someone about it, and you’ll usually get a shrug or a vague explanation that trails off into awkward silence. Why? Because nobody really wants to get into the nitty-gritty of how, why, or when you’re supposed to use one. For centuries, the truth about the bidet has been elusive, tucked away behind a veil of cultural quirks, taboos, and plain old disinterest. from Let’s Talk About the Bidet, the Bathroom’s Best-Kept Secret [MessyNessy]
A Beacon of Certainty when Certainty is Impossible
John Sheppard's Media Vita is a monumental work of choral music written in the 1500s. It has been recognized as such only relatively recently with the 1989 recording by the Tallis Scholars led by Peter Phillips. The music and its composer are shrouded in mystery. Only five of the six vocal parts survive and the original manuscript has been lost. Sheppard died in 1557, likely in a flu pandemic. A history, background and musical analysis. Says Phillips: "“It’s seductive, it draws you in, and you just can’t leave it alone; you have to go with it.”" [more inside]
Cinematic Passion Projects & White Whales
"Eggers first announced his intention to remake “Nosferatu” 10 years ago, but his affinity for the landmark 1922 horror goes back much further. Growing up in New Hampshire, Eggers first encountered Orlok as a 9-year-old, on a VHS copy of Murnau’s “Nosferatu” made from a faded 16-millimeter print. He was so compelled by Max Schreck’s performance of the titular vampire, which felt all the more eerily authentic within the degraded version of the film he saw, that in high school, he directed a stage adaptation—later staged professionally—that was both silent and black-and-white, with music playing and actors painted monochrome. (Orlok was played, of course, by Eggers himself.)" [more inside]
H. Allen Smith, Father of the Chili Cookoff
The chili cookoff is so profound an American culinary tradition that one would assume its origins to be lost in the mists of history. Instead they trace clearly not just to a single man but to a single piece of writing: “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do", by H. Allen Smith [more inside]
Kelp is changing the seafloor in Melbourne from a desert to a forest
Kelp is changing the seafloor in Melbourne (Australia) from a desert to a forest. Kelp forests decimated by sea urchins are being replanted in Port Phillip Bay in an attempt to rebuild the ecosystem.
“I confess it is a hard doctrine”
Mattie travels through her past with such a steely countenance that I often found myself stopping and doubling back, imagining what she doesn’t describe, creating an unwritten text alongside Mattie’s. I found myself moved and troubled by the adult narrator’s attempt to write her younger self into stoicism. We’re invited, I think, to fill the novel’s unnarrated spaces with this psychology, and to understand that Portis has given Mattie this moralizing, allegorizing impulse for reasons that have to do with character: writing this story is her way of making it tolerable. from He Got Away With Everything: Reading True Grit After the Reelection of Donald Trump [LitHub]
January 10
Alice Coltrane
what the fuck are we doing anymore (yes this is about social media)
Kate Wagner (many prevs), of McMansionHell and many other projects, is not feeling optimistic about the future of journalism. "Really, what other word is there to describe what is coming our way than atavism? I don’t feel like waxing poetic about the good old days of getting work because there is enough of that and those days are over. The only way out of this bind is the hope that such competition does not foreclose us from building together something new, something stable, something that is large-scale rather than a gaggle of one’s old friends; perhaps most importantly, something formally organized. The time is running out for what is left of social media to be utilized to this end."
Mantracks
The latest from Dan Olson (previously, and previously, and previously, and etc.) is "a True Story of Fake Fossils" - discussing how fossil hunter Roland Bird's chance discovery of some obviously-faked "fossilized human footprints" in 1938 lead to both a major discovery of actual dinosaur footprints, as well as a major expansion of creationist science. [more inside]
It is written in the Book of Stimpy
Joi Massat has collected every cartoon show bible they could find on archive.org and collected them here. Some of these were used to pitch their shows, some were used during production, but all offer an insight into the making of their shows. A handful of highlights (many more links at the site and inside this post): Adventure Time, Dungeons & Dragons, He-Man internal and selling to networks, Batman TAS, Gravity Falls early and later, The Real Ghostbusters Season 2 and Ren & Stimpy (very thorough). [more inside]
SF Transit Boss Hashes Out His Robotaxi Experience
In an interview with Bloomberg, outgoing San Francisco Muni director Jeffrey Tumlin discusses his experience with autonomous vehicles as part of his role managing SF's transit systems. (SLBloomberg) [more inside]
The chart he used until the mid-sixties
Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. from A Diagram of My Life by Gerald Murnane [The Paris Review; ungated]
smashing an upside-down pizza onto a chicken casserole
Food writer Dennis Lee ("whose main goal is to ruin food for everyone") attempts a recipe for "Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano" from a cookbook found in a thrift store. The secret ingredient? A Totino's pizza flipped upside down on top to act as the "crust." slSubstack, but you can also peruse past experiments like No Knead Gatorade Bread (previously) and The Olive Garden Hot Dog, which I previously thought that I had invented.
Loser Lane
"..there’s no beating the game, no cheat code or special technique — you always die." Toronto artist Marie LeBlanc Flanagan created a video game in response to Ontario Premier Doug Ford's plan to rip out three busy bike lanes out of the Toronto core. [more inside]
Please do not illegally release Lynx in Scotland
Scotland has a proper, properly managed program to re-introduce Lynx to Scotland to help control overpopulation of deer, which can cause loss of trees, erosion and possible landslides. That's great! Unfortunately, an irresponsible person illegally released some Lynx into Scotland without the proper quarantine etc checks, which could have caused the death of two Lynx, or introduced new diseases. Fortunately, the Lynx have now been recaptured.
Container Ships
Nearly everything you own, including the clothes you're wearing and the device your're reading this on, was delivered by a container ship. [more inside]
"unprecedented global temperatures"
Global temperature increases breached 1.5°C for the first time in 2024. Today the European Union's Copernicus Climate Service posted its 2024 Annual Climate Summary, which showed temperatures 1.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels. [more inside]
"I can live without inventing, but I can't live without me best pal!"
Beloved duo Wallace & Gromit returned to our screens at Christmas, 34 years after their first appearance, in their second feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl (Fanfare thread). Group blog (-slash-arts-magazine) It's Nice That recently interviewed creator and director Nick Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham and supervising animator Will Becher about the plasticine pair's legacy and creating their new adventure.
Ruff love
Tired of seeing paintings of countless puffed-up toffs rendered in oils for posterity, German visual artist Volker Hermes breathes life into the boring old routine with his updates on Old Masters paintings. His Hidden Portraits use digital technology and collage to refocus our gaze on symbols of self-representation and social status embedded in such paintings.
January 9
Anita Bryant, 1940--2025
'"The thing to remember is that Anita Bryant won that battle initially, but she did not win that war,” said the historian Julio Capó Jr'. 'Bryant's public victory became her private devastation. Students listed Bryant as the "woman who had done the most damage in the world" in a 1978 Ladies Home Journal poll. The man they picked was Adolf Hitler.' Anti-gay rights campaigner Anita Bryant has died at the age of 84.
One bag to rule them all
Indefinite Backpack Travel. "In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack, and I’ve been living at this level of minimalism since. The idea is to only own what I need, which allows me to focus more, spend less, travel spontaneously and simplify my life." Jeremy Maluf posts yearly summaries of his backpacking adventures. In this overview, he lists the contents of his one travel bag. [more inside]
The Church of Saint Coltrane
End Of The Pizzagate Road
Edgar Maddison Welch, who shot up a DC pizzeria because of an online conspiracy theory that it was a front for a child sex slavery ring, was killed by police when he pulled a weapon on them during a traffic stop. [more inside]
"a high heel you ordered online during a prolonged daydream"
No-buy 2025 offers other ways to fill the void (WaPo gift)
Tiny anime girl cyberprison shown at CES
"At CES 2025, a company called Sybran Innovation showed off the Code27 Character Livehouse. It's an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever."
Woven In Respect
Sakiori is a hobby of making new cloth out of strips of old fabric salvaged from worn clothes. It comes from a time and place when cotton was a scarce commodity, but it lives on today because the result is a fabric with a unique aesthetic. [more inside]
Simultaneous Mario Bros
From Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, four speedrunners play Super Mario Brothers at the same time, superimposed.
"The live audience had a great time, I think..."
"In his one-hour stand-up special, D.J. Demers: Interpreted, Demers is raising the standard of accessible comedy with two versions of special, one complete with closed-captioning subtitles and an onstage American Sign Language interpreter, as well as descriptive captioning for the visually impaired." Canadian-born Demers is a Deaf comedian who does his stand-up in English (as opposed to ASL) and discusses some of the choices he's made about how much of his disability to turn into comedy. See also: Tonight Show debut, YouTube channel, an impromptu joke with his interpreter, Jennifer Lees.
"the arc of the universe bends towards disco"
A Twinge of Saudade is an essay by Norwegian-British music critic Chal Ravens about Abba, going from their beginnings, through their glittering career, and their afterlife. She discussed the band, and the cultural moment in Sweden from which they hailed, and why they were at odds with Anglophone pop culture, with Thomas Jones on an episode of the LRB Podcast.
Physics for Cats
... is Tom Gauld's upcoming collection of his New Scientist cartoons. You can see ten pages from it on the Drawn & Quarterly site I've linked.
The World's Largest Cruise Ship: Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas
Building the World's Largest Cruise Ship. What's it like on the world's largest cruise ship? Walkthrough
ten tips for an "overtly consumptive hobby"
"What I wish I had was a list of now-obvious tips for keeping and running a home bar, and here is where I will keep them", says Justin Duke, who believes much cocktail-related writing on the Internet is 'not particularly actionable to the genre of person who is like "I made this drink and it's tasty! How do I get better at this?"' Disclaimer: Justin is a friend of mine.
Gish Gallop
The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available [more inside]
Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?
The amount and quality of this scholarship can be celebrated — or for conservative critics, decried — but the question here is, does it possess a distinct identity? And what is its impact? An identity to this academic Marxism is difficult to outline since little links the Marxist literary critic and the Marxist sociologist, except left-wing sympathies and occasional shared vocabulary. from American Marxism Got Lost on Campus [Jacobin; ungated]
January 8
Imagine a clock but with like, four arms
s32 unix clock. A cool visualization of the original signed 32-bit integer Unix time moving toward the 2038 ending of the epoch that began in 1970. More description in David Buchanan's announcement blog post about it (from 2023, but what is time?).
There’s an emu on the loose on the Eastern Shore
Patti LeConte and her husband were driving home from Ocean City on New Year’s morning when they saw traffic slowing near Hebron in Wicomico County.
As they got closer, the Ellicott City couple realized the reason why: A 6-foot-tall bird was loping down Route 50.
Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise
The prevalence of documentaries about musicians is a curse, because most of these films do a terrible job of showcasing music. One rare and moving exception is the work of the director Robert Mugge, whose film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise -- about the musician and bandleader whose multimedia and pan-cultural activities made him one of the prime artists of Afrofuturism -- is one of the most satisfying musical portraits I’ve ever seen. - Richard Brody, The New Yorker [more inside]
"95% of vampire novels take place in Alaska, New Orleans, or Las Vegas"
Article by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker about an allegation of plagiarism in a romantasy series. Archive link. Unpublished novelist Lynne Freeman thinks that Tracy Wolff's Crave has used elements from Freeman's Blue Moon Rising, with involvement from her editor and publisher. Waldman discusses the difficulty of establishing plagiarism when the books are different in tone but have many similar details, particularly within a genre which uses tropes extensively. Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.