Watergate
Swedish tabloid Expressen revealed Wednesday that government officials have been ensuring in advance that all places frequented by Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg are free of bananas — due to the minister’s strong phobia of the yellow fruit.
René Descartes died on February 11, 1650, in Stockholm, Sweden, succumbing to pneumonia at the age of 53. He was in Stockholm at the time to help the queen of Sweden set up an academy of science. Queen Christina, only 22 years old, made Descartes rise before 5:00 AM for her daily lesson—something which proved detrimental to his health, as he was used to sleeping late since childhood to accommodate his sickly nature. One morning, likely as a result of this early rising, combined with the freezing Swedish winters, Descartes caught a chill that proved to be fatal.
Rob Horning: Since the U.S. election, the Twitter-like platform Bluesky has been the beneficiary of millions of users deciding that they had finally had enough of serving time on and adding value to a platform owned by a egomaniacal charlatan increasingly devoted to promoting right-wing propaganda. (Why did those users wait so long? Haven’t they heard of the sunk-cost fallacy?) […] fewer and fewer people bother to read text and society is purportedly becoming increasingly “post-literate.” (This was a theme in some election postmortems: that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate lacks the critical thinking skills that come from better reading habits and are thus readily susceptible to demagoguery.) Passive consumption of video is the algorithmically enforced norm on most platforms, which have become more or less indistinguishable from conventional television, with a rationalized, rigidly formatted flow of content and ads. (Most of what Raymond Williams wrote about TV in 1974 applies equally well to social media today.) A recent post from Katherine Dee speculates that “social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture”
Texting abbreviations seem insincere and not worth answering
It looks like Standards, Annie, HEALTH, Swans, and a number of other notable one-word artists were targeted directly. Spotify confirmed that the onslaught of AI garbage was delivered from one source. How fake music targets real artists
A Serbian Film is a 2010 Serbian exploitation horror film produced and directed by Srđan Spasojević in his feature directorial debut. It tells the experience of a financially struggling pornstar who agrees to participate in an “art film”, only to discover that he has been drafted into a snuff film with pedophilic and necrophilic themes. […] a number of sources have described A Serbian Film as the single most disturbing movie of all time
Berlin’s techno clubs close their doors […] Watergate will shut for good at new year
Study confirms Egyptians drank hallucinogenic cocktails in ancient rituals
I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life — As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behavior. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain.
Octopuses are the species that are most likely to take over the world after humans. In the event of a wipeout through either wars or climate change, the marine invertebrates are said to possess the ‘physical and mental attributes necessary’ to evolve into the next civilisation-building species. […] Primates - long thought to be the successor to humans - would face the same challenges and also become extinct
