Excellent analysis of cults.

Innovation is the “main event” of the modern age. It’s the reason why after millennia of comparative stagnation, the last several hundred years featured sudden, dramatic improvements in technology and therefore living standards: from steam engines to search engines, from vaccines to vaping.

A farmer in northern B.C. captured a wild cat he found in his chicken coop Sunday, picking it up by the scruff of the neck and gently scolding it before relocating it to the bush.

My partner and I are both book nerds–we met working at a bookstore–but we don’t have a lot of overlap in our reading. He tends towards science fiction and horror, and I read YA, literary fiction, and queer lit of all genres. When we do both read the same book, though, it’s always an interesting experience for me. I tend to immerse myself in books, absorbing the general emotions I get from the story, or the big ideas that it grapples with.

We've all seen what "good flirting" looks like, and you've probably seen some "bad flirting" in action, too. Sometimes the distinctions are quite obvious, but other times the line between flirting wins and flirting fails is sometimes hard to pinpoint until you've crossed it. How can you be a "better" flirt?

Users of Comcast’s Internet Essentials plan will be getting a significant speed increase on March 1st. The service, which currently runs at 25Mbps, will be automatically upgraded to 50Mbps without requiring additional fees or action from customers. Upload speeds are also being increased from 3Mbps to 5Mbps. Faster access for the same price should be a relief for many families struggling to adapt to having work, school, and entertainment largely shifted to the internet during the pandemic.

They actually got some of this right. Anyway,if you need a good laugh,this will do it.

“How much LEGO can you get up your bum?” Honestly, if this isn’t a question you’ve asked your closest pals, are you even really friends in the first place? In The Inbetweeners, it’s just another casual conversation between classmates. Scaringly, though, it’s the most accurate depiction of what it’s really like to be in high school.

Maria Fernandes died at the age of thirty-two while sleeping in her car in a Wawa parking lot in New Jersey. It was the summer of 2014, and she worked low-wage jobs at three different Dunkin’ Donuts, and slept in her Kia in between shifts, with the engine running and a container of gasoline in the back, in case she ran out. In the locked car, still wearing her white-and-brown Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, she died from gasoline and exhaust fumes.

Scientists may have discovered physical evidence of King Solomon entwined in 3,000-year-old strands of purple wool. Using radiocarbon dating and a special chemical analysis technique, a team of researchers from Israel has identified three textile samples dating to approximately 1000 BCE from the Timna Valley region of Israel. The fibers were dyed "true purple," using special salt-water mollusks found in the Mediterranean.

It takes a certain amount of financial acumen to understand exactly what happened earlier this eventful week on Wall Street. The simplest explanation, however, is that a bunch of Redditors reenacted the climax of Trading Places, using stock for the still-chugging-along Donkey Kong retailer, GameStop. The cleverly coordinated market manipulation has moved even some unlikely voices to rejoice around the so-called little people sticking it to Master of the Universe-types by exploiting their own exploitative loopholes and practices.

A Harvard astrophysicist thinks a mysterious object that swung by our solar system in 2017 was from an extraterrestrial civilization.

When I was teaching a class on opinion writing, I always ended the semester with a warning not to go into journalism. I felt bad about that, because I love my job, and wish everyone could have it. But I have spent my entire career watching the industry struggle with collapsing advertising revenue--half expecting an implosion at any moment, wearily unsurprised when it finally came.

Logicians don't rule the world or get the most done. Could it be that a consistent world view is neither desirable nor achievable? If we abandon the straightjacket of rationality might this lead to a more powerful and exciting future, or is it a heresy that leads to madness? 

In the rich volcanic soils of central Madagascar’s Itasy province grows a rare and fragrant coffee coveted by bats and humans alike. The twist: humans want it even more after the bats have nibbled on it.

Mystery SF game.

Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in high school, and we merged them to form a single, teen-age megacorp. For around six hundred dollars a month, we rented office space in the basement of a building in town.

This gastroenterologist provides some interesting insights.

I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma, explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. “They don’t know,” the opera singer belts out at the climax, “that they don’t know.”