Excellent Reads

Data equity, data justice, and data sovereignty point us toward a fundamentally different approach to civic data. Instead of powerful institutions studying communities and extracting information, communities themselves decide what questions to ask, what information to gather, how to interpret findings, and how data is used. This includes community data—what the Coalition of Communities of Color defines as the qualitative, quantitative, cultural, and place-based knowledge that communities generate and use on their own terms. Examples include stories, maps, oral histories, participatory research, and documentation of lived experiences that traditional data systems often exclude or ignore completely.

Alternate site (neither paywalled, the wixsite’s font just irritates me): https://redsails.org/creating-the-innocent-killer/

The American bison is the new U.S. national mammal, but its slaughter was once seen as a way to starve Native Americans into submission.

A recent *study* published in Nature Sustainability concluded that New Orleans residents should plan now to move away from the city. For the hundreds of thousands who live in New Orleans, and the millions of others, like me, who love the Crescent City, this is an incredibly sad conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that many other cities rich in culture and history will face around the world as sea levels rise.

The question is not, What does Tucker Carlson believe? The question is, What does Tucker Carlson do? Without fail, Tucker Carlson does what is best for Tucker Carlson.

The assignment took me into the public housing complex where I observed radical destitution. One night, my unit entered a high-rise building in search of a young man who was possibly involved in a murder on an off-ramp of I-280. We took the steps up several floors, walking through trash and stench in dingy stairways. The building was barely habitable, yet crowded with families.

“No foot leaves a trace if it doesn’t rise,” she writes. “The print of the foot demands its absence.” By pushing against the stasis implied in the footprint metaphor, Subramaniam exposes the absences and leaves readers to wrestle with the erasures, willful or unintentional, that human movement inevitably causes.

Matrix, to its credit, says this about itself out loud. In his State of the Union talk at the 2025 Matrix conference, co-founder Matthew Hodgson described the goal as “being the best decentralized secure comms platform in the world,” and then followed it up with “we are not going to pursue decentralized social, good luck to Bluesky and atproto, Mastodon, ActivityPub and nostr.” So the open protocol that started in the decentralised social world, is deliberately moving away from it. The interesting question is: why?

As a geologist, I have studied various types of natural rocks, but recently I have become interested in ‘anthropogenic geomaterials’ – things like industrial slag – and how they become entwined in geological and environmental processes. I came to Workington originally to look at the slag, because I was interested in its potential to scrub-capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. However, when encountering the rock platform with the wheel in it, I was drawn by its incongruity. After studying the geomaterials of Workington more closely with my colleagues Amanda Owen and David Brown, we believe that this little-known section of the English coastline represents a tangible and potentially long-lasting signature of the impact humans are having on the planet.

english.elpais.com David Samson, anthropologist: ‘Humans went through a radical evolutionary experiment. We are the primates that sleep the least’ Enrique Alpañés 10–12 minutes

Greg Pahules wrestles his powerful frame into a classroom chair in his spartan apartment above a nail salon in central Florida. Aged 68 and bald, save for a string of grey hair pulled into a ponytail from the back of his head, he is practically twitching. He fixes me with cloudy blue eyes and asks if I think he’s “normal”.

an overview of “AuDHD”

The new findings in A. panamensis suggest that Gloeobacteria may indeed reflect a more ancient, basal form of photosynthesis. Over the past few billion years, most cyanobacteria and plants have evolved new features — more complex photosynthetic proteins as well as entirely new structures, such as thylakoids, to make the process more efficient. However, the photosystem I architecture of the Gloeobacteria has changed little over all that time. Now researchers can inspect the core of the photosynthesis reaction center to understand how this ancient molecular machine might have evolved.

Their Own Private Genesis

A paradox is at play here: streaming services promise their users agency—namely, the ability to be curious, exploratory, and adventurous. Under the hood, though, they assume something else entirely—that, just as High Fidelity*’s* Rob Fleming would argue, you are what you like, and certain types of listeners will prefer certain types of music. The opposite is also thought to be true: those who prefer certain types of music are a certain type of listener. This paradox—perhaps unsurprisingly—is present throughout the history of science and technology.

deadcarl.com The Kaiser and a “Mediocre Man” Theory of History Kiran Pfitzner 11–14 minutes Bildnis Kaiser Wilhelm II as art print or hand painted oil.

Across the globe, mid-ocean ridges have a nondramatic style — nothing like Washington State’s explosive Mount St. Helens or southern Italy’s Mount Vesuvius, the destroyer of Pompeii and Herculaneum. So the team aboard the Meteor wasn’t expecting anything unusual when they passed over a submerged segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called the Reykjanes Ridge. They just wanted to confirm that their equipment was in working order.

Superman was probably the most supportive of the war effort, even encouraging readers to buy war bonds, recycle rubber and scrap iron, and donate blood. Nevertheless, he was investigated by Army Intelligence. Had the Man of Steel turned traitor? Not exactly. After Superman writer Alvin Schwartz used the term “cyclotron” in a story, the War Department became concerned the writer was receiving leaks from the Manhattan Project. In truth, he had simply recalled the term from an old issue of Popular Mechanics.

I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how the 25-year-old Austrian logician and mathematician did such a thing, and then writing a rundown of his proof in fewer than 2,000 words. (My wife, when I reminded her of this period: “Oh yeah, that time you almost went crazy?” A slight exaggeration.)

bloomberg.com What Happens When Someone You Love Changes Their Face? Alice Robb 10–12 minutes

If redefined as more than bootstrapping and colorblindness, the American dream has the potential to appeal across the political spectrum. Framing the radical American dream not just as a deferred freedom dream of the Black radical tradition but also as an immigrant dream—a familiar theme—points the way to a nearly unexplored possibility: a dream of Indigenous Americans as well. As many have pointed out, in targeting Latinx people, ICE is also singling out descendants of First Peoples, descendants of Mexican land appropriated in the treaty following the Mexican-American War.

The purported aim of Against Money is to put money back in its proper place. In the process, Mason and Jayadev put a lot of other economic concepts in their proper place too. Money, they show, is neither natural nor neutral. It is, rather, a distinct social institution or technology of coordination, with its own drive or logic.

Kurniawan’s use of the bildungsroman* *to critique religious individualism might seem counterintuitive: is it not, after all, the narrative form of individualization par excellence? But we must remember that some of the most important literary works from postcolonial countries—from José Rizal’s *Noli Me Tángere *(1887) to Anna Burns’s *Milkman *(2018)—have been coming-of-age novels.

“Bunnyhopping” is an exploit of a very popular bug in games like Quake III Arena, Half-Life, and Counter-Strike. Bunnyhopping, or bhopping for short, allows a player to exceed the game-defined speed limit. It has created entirely new methods of play and allows very exciting, fast-paced emergent gameplay. As a decidedly skill-based mechanic, competitive players love bhopping because it is so hard to master. Thus, it may be useful to you as a game developer to “implement” bunnyhopping into your game. The purpose of this article is to define what bunnyhopping is, why it is important to consider as a game developer, and how to implement it mathematically into your FPS movement code. All code examples are open-source and free to use, as always.

In December 1982, South African Rodney Wilkinson walked four bombs into Koeberg power station – the crown jewel of the apartheid state – pulled the pins and then left on his bicycle.

terrygodier.com The Boring Internet https://indieweb.social/@tg 16–20 minutes

U.S. students who study at Sciences Po said they believed that Mr. Trump’s re-election had negatively affected their classmates’ attitudes about Americans. Sofia Antonioli, 19, who is from Bethesda, Md., said that French students now used the word “American” as a pejorative, as in “Oh, that’s so American.”

Just as a marble added to the cup must sit on top of all others, an electron entering a metal cannot be understood without reference to all the pre-existing electrons. It interacts with them, but it also becomes quantum-mechanically entangled with them. From this perspective, it is remarkable that this second class of emergent electron – the elementary electron plus the interactions and entanglement with all others in a metal – resembles an elementary electron at all. In fact, it does, but this idea (called Fermi liquid theory) took many decades to understand.

“Do you think about me?”

Reticulum is a project offering a truly and radically decentralized alternative internet architecture. This markdown file is basically their manifesto, explaining the philosophy behind the project. It’s a very thought provoking read

Biologist Colin Domnauer is reopening an old case that Chinese health officials seem to have stopped caring about. Every summer, residents of the Yunnan province check into hospitals with complaints that they’re hallucinating tiny elflike people. They would see the little dudes marching under their doors, scaling their walls, and clinging to their furniture.

Hindsight makes it easy to find in Marcel Proust’s essay On Reading (1905) the spark that would later flare into his multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). However, his essay was not the intuition of solitary genius. Rather, it was published as a preface to the French translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) – a cryptic title bringing together two lectures Ruskin delivered in Manchester in December 1864. Working on this text allowed Proust to realise why he deeply disagreed with an author he nevertheless admired: he resented Ruskin’s moralising defence of reading.

Tehran does not need those sunken vessels the Republican alluded to in order to control the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian political scientist Vali Nasr asserted in a recent interview with this newspaper. The fears of tanker owners — and, above all, insurers — are enough to deter many ships from attempting to cross the strait. Tehran also does not need frigates to deter those who venture into those waters. It is sufficient to use “drones, mines, and cheap weaponry,” …Or, indeed, speedboats.

Slammers

Gareth Gore was on a research trip to California earlier this year when he was told to expect a call from the Vatican arranging a one-on-one audience with the pope.

Sexologist Shere Hite wrote one of the best-selling books of all time, The Hite Report; transformed the lives of millions of people through her eye-opening findings about the female orgasm; then vanished from public awareness in the course of a mere 50 years. That, at least, is the argument of a new book by the London-based academic Rosa Campbell, The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared, as well as a 2023 Dakota Johnson–narrated documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite. The framing of both these works is tricky; to say that no one talks about or remembers a thinker of the relatively recent past is a fuzzy practice, as it depends entirely on who you know and talk to. I happen to remember Hite and her books quite well, but Campbell—who appears to be younger than I am—maintains that when she told her colleagues and friends that she planned to write about Shere Hite, she got nothing but blank looks in response, and we’ll have to trust her on that.

System cards are presented as if they’re offering information the company is required to disclose for consumer safety — like the side effects in a pharmaceutical commercial — when, in fact, the companies volunteer them. So why would a company make their product sound scarier than it is? Perhaps because this is the best advertising money can’t buy. People like Harari and others repeat these accounts like ghost stories around a campfire. The public, awed and afraid, marvels at the capabilities of AI.

Later on, as I moved from literature and into consciousness research in my work, I encountered similar views in other places: most prominently in Buddhist philosophy and in the Western eclectic and non-religious adoption of Buddhism as mindfulness. But also in the reductive and materialist accounts of personhood in Western philosophy that challenge the dominant essentialist and narrative accounts, represented by thinkers such as Hume and Mach, as well as Derek Parfit and Galen Strawson, who is similarly sceptical of the narrative approach: see his Aeon Essay ‘I Am Not a Story’ (2015).

If you were rewarded for following a particular pattern of behavior, wouldn’t you keep doing it? The answer turns out to be more nuanced than you might think. In a new study, University of Iowa researchers report that pigeons rewarded with food after pecking five buttons in any order did, indeed, decrease the variety of their sequences. However, the birds kept their options open, never gravitating toward a single sequence and consistently electing to try different sequences.

Communication is central to the survival of most animals, including humans. Yet animals of different species communicate differently, and the complexity of their communication skills varies greatly. One characteristic of advanced communication systems is the ability to combine different sounds (i.e., vocal elements) to create structured sound sequences that convey more information. This ability, known as syntax or combinatoriality, was originally thought to be unique to humans, yet a growing body of research showed that it is also present in other species, including the Western Australian magpie.

The fixation on Wright’s paradoxes obscures a deeper contradiction embedded in the culture that produced him. Namely, that the United States has always been ambivalent about the individual: we valorise self-reliance but distrust those who stand too far apart; we celebrate democratic ideals but are uneasy with idiosyncrasy; we admire originality while punishing the disorder it brings. Wright lived squarely inside that tension. He took seriously the idea that one could make a life and a world from first principles – an act of courage in the best light. Hubris in the worst.

This linked article is interesting as well https://thewalrus.ca/when-evidence-can-be-deepfaked-how-do-courts-decide-whats-real/

For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.

Hypercuriosity offers a useful lens for understanding many puzzling aspects of ADHD. It explains why attention shifts so readily in low-stakes, repetitive contexts, yet locks in place when a problem is urgent or rich with unknowns. It also helps many familiar features of ADHD fall into place. Rapid changes of focus reflect sensitivity to what feels promising in the moment. Distractibility reflects the presence of several competing leads, where attention is consistently drawn toward the most motivationally salient stimuli – whatever offers the greatest expected informational reward, whether that’s a new idea, an intriguing problem or an exciting possibility. And it might help explain more than is obvious at first glance. People often lose track of time when their attention locks on to something that feels immediately rewarding or mentally stimulating. The difficulty with boring conversations isn’t just about attention but about the painful absence of anything new to learn. Even racing thoughts at bedtime can reflect a mind that keeps generating new possibilities to explore, unable to stop asking ‘What if?’ or ‘What about?’ Taken together, these experiences point to hypercuriosity as a potential key driver of where attention goes and how long it stays there.

When I joined my patient support group, we were a collection of disparate lives tethered by a reluctant masonry. We spoke in bruised shorthand: comparing palliative care, clinical trials and the provisional nature of plans. There was an unexpected symmetry in this shared vocabulary. We began as strangers, yet were quickly bound by a radical intimacy that made conventional friendship feel almost superficial by comparison.

But why give a machine a soul? Why not stop at creativity and wisdom? For one thing, the romantics aren’t wrong about everything: unpredictable personal trajectories are a potential source of creative inspiration. But there’s far more at stake than this cognitive edge. Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning.

A single word can tell us a great deal. The journey of bitch, from a literal term for a female dog to one of the most charged words in the English language, shows how language shifts alongside changing ideas about gender, power and identity. In this case, it suggests that sometimes you really can teach an old dog new tricks.