-
2025 Tiny Award nominees
For all of the AI slop and corporate influence on the web, weird and fun and unique things still exist. The Tiny Awards attempt to capture this.
-
All the theories about why the stock market keeps going up
As the stock market soars ever higher, the theories of why it rises have suffered the opposite fate. One by one, every favored explanation of what could be going on has been undermined by world events. The uncomfortable fact about the historic stock-market run is that no one really knows why it’s happening—or what could bring it to an end.
-
Denmark will stop delivering letters
At the end of 2025, Denmark will stop delivering mail letters and functioning fully on packages. 100 million letters are still flowing through the system today, but nowhere near the peak of 1.8 billion nearly 25 years ago. It sounds like third-party companies will fill the gap, but at what cost?
-
Corn sweat affects climate
Also contributing in some places: “Corn sweat,” wherein vast amounts of growing corn and other produce give off moisture through evapotranspiration, further increasing humidity levels in and around agricultural zones.
-
AI ruined lo-fi music
AI tools are making it easier to create generic, meditative music. Kieran Press-Reynolds at Pitchfork explores lofi, music, landscape, and the impact of AI.
Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI breeding ground, crammed with hourlong mixes full of soporific dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated.
-
Choose Your Own Adventure Books Mapped
The Choose Your Own Adventure books introduced interactive fiction to millions of school children. While fans have shared diagrams of various branching paths in each book, recently, the publisher has republished some of the original books with diagrams.
The last installment of the original “Choose Your Own Adventure” series came out in 1998, but since 2004, Chooseco, founded by one of the series’ original authors, R.A. Montgomery, has been republishing classic volumes, as well as new riffs on the form of interactive fiction that seemed ubiquitous in the 1980s and ’90s. The new editions also carry an additional feature—maps of the hidden structure of each book.
-
They’re Made of Meat by Tony Bisson
Tony Bisson with a delightful short story, “They Are Made of Meat.”
-
Trump Action Tracker
Informative and depressing: the Trump Action Tracker. Tracks all the actions and orders taken and what they affect.
