As above, so below
On Monday, the State Dept. issued a 100-page report denouncing Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and several activists and organizations as “front groups and fellow travelers” for Cuba. / The Guardian
So far this year, an unusually high number of gray whales have been found dead on North America’s Pacific shore, likely from starvation caused by climate change. / Smithsonian Magazine
“Hiking up a glacier in my T-shirt, driving boats without gloves. It was really sad.” Many Antarctic tour guides are quitting over ethical concerns and climate change. / The Conversation
We’re missing a chance to save the night sky—and our health—with LEDs, which allow a “community to control when, where, at what levels, and in which colors its lights shine.” / IEEE Spectrum
See also: Visualizing the roughly 28,000 pieces of space junk caught in Earth’s orbit. / The Washington Post [$]
A fascinating map of Earth’s underground fungi network, estimated to be “110 quadrillion kilometers less than 10 centimeters underground.” / A Hidden Infrastructure, FlowingData
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On the run for more than 20 years, a physician accused of rape was recently captured in Los Angeles, where he’s been running a biotech company. / NBC Los Angeles
See also: Trump’s IRS and SSA head allegedly accessed sensitive information and spied on fellow executives when he was co-COO at JP Morgan Chase. / The Wall Street Journal [$]
Private equity ruined your favorite cookware, but some brands—or at least some of their product lines—have so far eluded enshittificaiton. / Worse on Purpose
Texas is on track to have the most data centers in the US by 2030, in large part because the state eased permitting requirements for AI companies. / WIRED
A company is buying up printed books from before the LLM era in order to sell their contents to AI companies for model training. / 404 Media
Josh Kerr runs the fastest-ever men’s mile, shaving half a second off one of track and field’s longest-standing records. / Running World
Rachel Harrison on reading and writing horror: “It’s so redeeming as someone who always worries the worst is going to happen to see that, yeah, sometimes it does!” / Darker Times
What’s on Texas’s new elementary school reading lists: Bible passages, excerpts from The Children’s Book of Virtues, and an extra focus on patriotism. / The New York Times [$]
According to a classics scholar, Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t Homer’s Odyssey, but it’s Homeric in tone, asking us to “think about the relationship between the past and the present.” / Hyperallergic