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A really great video about how to be creative when you don’t feel very creative
A really great video about how to be creative when you don’t feel very creative.
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Powerline giants
A really cool design proposal that would have built, powerline transmission towers as human looking giants.
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26 ideas for 2026
Derek Thompson put a list of ideas together for things to look forward to or watch for in 2026. Here are some:
- Everything is TV
- Anti AI populism
- Housing costs
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Google’s XR smart glasses
Privacy issues aside, Google’s XR smart glasses look to be an impressive leap in the device class as they take advantage of a paired phone to do the heavy processing. If these were completely hands free, they’d make a perfect device for those with limited dexterity or motor function in their hands.
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The science of when we run out of fucks to give
It turns out there’s science behind why sometime in middle age, we run out of fucks to give.
Let’s start with the science, because this isn’t about you becoming a worse person. It’s about your brain finally doing some overdue maintenance.
For decades, your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for executive function, social behavior, and impulse control—has been working overtime. It’s been monitoring social cues, calculating risks, suppressing authentic responses, and managing everyone else’s emotional experience.
This is exhausting work. And it turns out, it’s unsustainable.
Research in neuroscience shows that as we age, the brain undergoes a process called synaptic pruning. Neural pathways that aren’t essential get trimmed away. Your brain is essentially Marie Kondo-ing itself, keeping what serves you and discarding what doesn’t.
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The Em Dash responds to AI slander
In McSweeney’s, the Em Dash responds to AI slander.
Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit.
You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.
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Child deaths to increase this year
Due to USAID cuts, childhood deaths will increase this year.
Global deaths among children under five are forecast to rise this year for the first time this millennium, largely as a result of falling foreign aid.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicted that 4.8 million children would die this year, up from 4.6 million last year. Declining humanitarian assistance is a major part of the reason why child deaths have fallen 50% since 2000.
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To praise Gen X
Amanda Fortini dives deep into the cultural relevance of Generation X. It’s lasting impacts to music, movies, books permeate the pop culture landscape.
Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture.
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Declining US birthrates
In a press release, the lead author of a recent meta-analysis suggested that among men in the U.S. with no known fertility challenges, “sperm counts are largely stable and haven’t changed significantly” in recent years. Moreover, it’s unclear whether sperm quality has declined. According to a 2022 review published in Nature Reviews Urology, researchers have observed a trend in some geographic areas, but available data doesn’t indicate that semen quality is necessarily deteriorating worldwide or in the Western world.
In other words, inconclusive.
But what is true and conclusive is that it’s really expensive in the United States to raise a child.
