PJH Studios

Tag: nytimes

  • Man sinks in quicksand, rises with a girlfriend

    Any millennial will tell you, we thought quicksand was something we’d have to deal with given how all the cartoons warned us about it. We encountered metaphorical quicksand *gestures all around* instead. Well, for one man, he stepped in actual quicksand.

    The quicksand depicted in films, when a daring adventurer is suddenly ensnared in a life-threatening vortex of sand, is largely a myth. But that didn’t make it any less scary when Mitchell O’Brien slowly began to sink.

    Mr. O’Brien was on Van’s Beach on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan with his friend Breanne Sika last weekend hunting for Leland bluestones, a byproduct of the iron ore furnaces that operated in the nearby fishing village that attract rock hunters.

    Some dredging had been taking place on the beach, and Mr. O’Brien, 37, from Traverse City, Mich., said he had thought the sand felt unstable.

    “‘That looks really dangerous,’” he recalled Ms. Sika saying. “I turned around and ended up walking right to the spot she said was dangerous.

  • How Musk Took Over the Federal Government

    The New York Times goes in depth as to how Elon Musk took over the government.

    Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.

    Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?

    Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.

    And with a little education on a few bureaucratic agencies, that’s essentially what happened.

  • The Oscar Best Picture Nominees, each uniquely weird

    Wesley Morris ties all the 2025 Oscar Best Picture Nominees with a common thread: they’re each uniquely weird.

    They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.

    I’ve seen 9 out of 10 of the nominees (still waiting for I’m Still Here to be available), and my vote would either be Conclave or Anora. Each contains beautifully composed cinematography for their respective stories with casts that held my attention the entire time. But they’re vastly different. Conclave runs along as a tense thriller, while Anora is a fable with a Three Stooges episode in the middle.

    And regarding Wicked, I texted two friends:

    begrudgingly and surprisingly enjoying it. It’s like skittles in movie musical form

  • Luddite teens

    It sounds like a hipster indie band, but Luddite Teenagers are meeting up to emphasize connections without the distraction of technology.

    “Our club promotes conscious consumption of technology,” she said. “We’re for human connection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in Philly.”

    She pulled out a flip phone, mystifying her recruit.

    “We use these,” she said. “This has been the most freeing experience of my life.”

  • A physicist solves the City equation

    Geoffrey West, a physicist, set out to study cities and urban growth and find variables for growth and decline. Consuming massive amounts of data, he discovered cities are governed by Laws, just like physics.

    After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars.

    Cities grow like organisms:

    The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

    Why do people move to cities?

    In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

  • Creativity and divergent thinking as a strategic national asset

    Thomas Friedman views immigration and the melting pot that is America as a strategic asset of creation:

    …America’s most important competitive advantage: the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together. We live in an age when the most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative — to spark and imagine new ideas, be they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer drugs. And where does creativity come from?