Scientists worry about the politicization of vital statistics. / Undark Magazine

Spencer Ackerman connects the dots between Vice President Vance's "Nazi apologia" and his artificial-intelligence boosterism. / Forever Wars

See also: Thanks to under-moderated social platforms, anyone can write their own Mein Kampf now. / Garbage Day

President Trump's assault on DEI is also an assault on rights for the disabled. / The New Yorker

"What Google is doing here is changing the name of the continental shelf of Mexico and Cuba." Mexico threatens to sue Google. / axios

Twenty-four hours of aerial firefighting in Los Angeles, animated. / LinkedIn

Art handlers explain how they dealt with Los Angeles's recent fires. / The Art Newspaper

For people who view the late Angeleno thinker Mike Davis as "a prophet of doom," they're reading him wrong. / The Los Angeles Times

The top of Yelp's annual list of the best US restaurants is an LA seafood counter. / Yelp

Related: When the Michelin star becomes a restaurant's curse. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Dr. Bronner's is dropping its B Corp certification, saying its standards are too weak. / FastCompany

Confessions of a former online hater. "I do feel like the snark sub-Reddits aren't helping anybody." / The Cut

People in smaller towns are forming nonprofits to save their local movie theaters. / The New York Times [+]

A new proof solves "the moving sofa problem." / Quanta Magazine

See also: Some tips from a very experienced traveler. / KK

Jon Krakauer is once again defending his mountaineering book Into Thin Air, this time from a YouTuber. / Slate

For your weekly wanderlust, a report and some beautiful pictures from a bike tour of the Turkish Highlands. / The Radavist

Paintings by the artist Bianca Raffaela, who is registered as blind. / artsy

Even as a decline in illegal border crossings is a gift for Trump, it makes it harder for ICE to put up the arrest and deportation numbers it wants. / The Washington Post [+]

More journalists were killed in 2024 than ever before, and Israel was responsible for two-thirds of those deaths. / Democracy Now!

Will the IMF survive Donald Trump's presidency? Only if it can avoid—or at least limit—arm-twisting by the world's big three economies. / The London School of Economics

How Trump is weaponizing financial payments—potentially to the point where the administration could target organizations it opposes. / Programmable Mutter

Anyway, the IRS is reviewing a request from DOGE to provide access to a classified system that contains personal taxpayer data. / The Guardian

See also: "Right now it feels like we're being hacked from the inside." The federal tech workers facing down DOGE. / Blood in the Machine

Full authoritarianism in the US is unlikely. The more probable scenario is competitive authoritarianism—here's how other countries have managed to fend it off. / The Detox with Neil Abrams

Checking in on how the party of the working class has helped American workers, one month in. / How Things Work

"Many in the mountains find it hard to trust government and city people who want to tell them how to take care of the land." Pitchaya Sudbanthad on Thailand's wildfires. / Orion

The lie we've been told about recycling is worse than we thought: It's poisoning residents where the world's plastic refuse is dumped. / The New York Times [+]

"It still boggles my mind that my books end up being classified as dystopian literature." Fernando A. Flores's new novel is about Elon Musk's Texas. / Texas Monthly

Helped by Peter Thiel and Y Combinator, an initiative to push Christianity to Silicon Valley via direct-to-consumer marketing. / The New York Times [+]

"You gotta take care of your own soul, and I'm writing this because I want to clarify mine." On AI, and more importantly: Is it OK? / Robin Sloan

Rooster fans: From John Warner, here's an inside look at the Tournament of Books and the ideal book review. / The Biblioracle Recommends

Historians say the United States is on the cusp of "competitive authoritarianism." / Foreign Affairs

Chris Geidner: Trump is a salesman, as is Musk, and they are both trying to sell America on being an authoritarian state—but they can't do it unless we allow them to do so. / LAWdork

The State Department plans to spend $400 million on armored Teslas. / The Guardian

Tressie McMillan Cotton: What Musk is sowing is chaos as content. / The New York Times [+]

President Trump's "energy whisperer" is Harold Hamm, the billionaire behind fracking company Continental Resources. / Heated

See also: "You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates." Nearly 200,000 Danes—seemingly—sign a petition to buy California. / KTLA

Fewer than 40% of the 465 homes destroyed by the 2018 Woolsey fire in Malibu have been rebuilt. / The Los Angeles

The story behind history's largest and most famous disability access ramp. / Ex Urbe

Landlording in New York City is said to be a nesting doll of companies and agents that "protects wealth and shields against consequence." / Curbed

Unrelated: Why you stacked plastic cups in elementary school gym class. / Defector [+]

Anticipating Valentine's Day, some comic panels that resemble the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. / Ironic Sans 

Singles in India are turning to AI for help with arranged marriages. / The Walrus

What does it say about philosophy that almost all of its canonical figures were unmarried men? / aeon

See also, from January: What was the "horny profile?" / Flaming Hydra

A beautifully designed, "humiliating list of all the ways your brain can deceive you." / Futility Closet

The playbook on how to win influence over President Trump is well known—and it still works. / Wake Up to Politics

Law professors explain what happens if the White House ignores the courts. / NPR

Benjamin Wittes: How effective can judges be in this task? Courts, after all, don't have armies. / Lawfare

Noura Erakat: Surviving this next chapter demands that we see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us too. / Boston Review

Google's online and mobile calendars no longer include references to Black History Month, Women's History Month, or LGBTQ+ holidays. / BBC News

The chief information officers of at least three major government agencies have been replaced by Silicon Valley executives. / WIRED

From January, a look at how luxury real estate owners in Montana save thousands of dollars annually, thanks to the state's agricultural tax code. / High Country News

A report from residents of America's "first car-free neighborhood" in Arizona. "It reminds me of Mykonos." / dwell

Unrelated: "The Bop House Is an OnlyFans Paradise That Pulls Millions Per Month." / VICE

The fact that Los Angeles can aspire to host a "car-free" Olympics owes a great debt to researcher Donald Shoup. / Torched

A mystery woman has been revealed in the upper right corner of Picasso's "Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto." / Hyperallergic 

Novelist Tom Robbins dies at 92. / The Seattle Times 

An essay connects Goodnight Moon to Louise Glück's final book, regarding her granddaughters. / The Paris Review

See also: "Whatever else it is, deep reading is slow reading." / The Hinternet

Some interviews with India's finest carvers of chess sets, many of whom specialize in just one piece. / Atlas Obscura

Retired athlete Diego Schwartzman explains how having a small body made him one of tennis's biggest players. / ATP

M. Gessen explains the five categories of arguments people use when they engage in "anticipatory obedience." / The New York Times [+] 

Spencer Ackerman: Regarding Palestinians, Trump is "a fulfillment of longstanding currents in American history." / Forever Wars

A trend forecaster plots the chart between Brat Summer and Capitalism XCX. / After School

Google, OpenAI, Discord, and others fund the development of new online safety tools. / Platformer

A newly discovered asteroid, named 2024 YR4, has a 2.3% chance of striking Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. / Marginal Revolution

Microplastics can move through mice brains and block blood vessels, a peer-reviewed paper says. / ScienceAdvances

A study finds worse weather amplifies social media activity. / Sage Journals

Do states with more renewable energy have more expensive electricity? It seems not. / Sustainability by numbers

Luigi Mangione's defense team is set to accept more than $300,000 in donations. / The Guardian

An animated Chinese film becomes the first non-Hollywood release to gross $1 billion in a single market. / Semafor

Why have music biopics gotten so banal? To give audiences uncomplicated stories, and to avoid messing with the money. / Little White Lies

Reporting on the strength of the Japanese vintage market: "All the best American vintage in the world is sitting in Tokyo." / KCRW

"I often tell people there's too much blood in my caffeine stream." Details from a visit to the UC Davis Coffee Center. / Atlas Obscura

It wasn't until 2021 that the US included domestic extremism in its counterterrorism scope; Trump's pardons of insurrectionists calls into question who counts as a terrorist now. / ProPublica

How to access the full data.gov archive, which as of now contains 311,000 datasets harvested in 2024 and 2025. / Library Innovation Lab

"The public can not wait on the government to come tell them not to discriminate." A Dept. of Labor staffer describes life on the inside right now. / How Things Work

Photos from the US government buildings where Trump's anti-DEI policies are already plainly visible. / Bluesky

"The age of corporate social media has been a roaring success." You can't post your way out of fascism. / 404 Media

See also: When a seemingly innocuous photo of you reveals personal information, what exactly is being detected? / Internal exile

"Silicon Valley believes they are big enough now to create the future, rather than scale up to meet it." The Super Bowl was filled with delusional ads for AI. / Garbage Day

A portal containing personal data on hundreds of environmental advocates has been shuttered—the company counts major chemical and pesticide manufacturers among its clients. / The Guardian

Coke's next big thing is milk, and it's at least in part driven by people taking GLP-1 drugs, who are advised to consume more protein. / Bloomberg [+]

"Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation condemned the viral Russian pop song 'Sigma Boy' as a tool of 'information warfare.'" / The Moscow Times

Hank Azaria on AI and the future of voice acting: It's more than sound, it takes inspiration and improvisation. / The New York Times [+]

A trip to JICO, where some of the best turntable styluses anywhere are still produced by hand. / Hearing Things

Testing ChatGPT's "deep research" with the famously misunderstood Section 230: "the facts aren't wrong, but the omissions sure change what story they tell." / The Verge

Researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon find greater use of generative AI can "result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved." / 404 Media

Why is everyone sick right now? Unlike most flu seasons, this year there have been two spikes: one from late December to early January, and now. / Gizmodo

As Israel prepares to move ahead with Trump's plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, Egypt says doing so may threaten its peace deal with Israel. / AP

A leading climatologist says limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius by 2100 is no longer possible, calling that target from the Paris accord "dead." / The Japan Times

How China might take advantage of Trump's policies: By rallying domestic support and among nations the US alienates—and preparing for what the world looks like in four years. / Foreign Policy

Related: Be wary of narratives that oversimplify China filling a humanitarian gap left by the US—"it's not just the disappearance of money, it's the disappearance of experience." / The Guardian

To access US government websites archived prior to Jan. 20, add "wayback.com" after ".gov" and you'll be redirected to the page at the Wayback Machine. / GovWayback

An attempt at documenting who's working at DOGE and what they're doing. / ProPublica

Related: The White House and Treasury claimed a DOGE worker did not have write access when he in fact did, and it wasn't rescinded until days later. / WIRED

A closer reading of the NCAA's ban on trans athletes in response to Trump's order: "They were willing to stand up for trans people when it seemed like the popular thing to do." / Read Rodge

An ongoing list of all the federal lawsuits related to Trump's executive orders. / Court Watch

Parable of the Sower's vision of early 2025—fires, climate change, an authoritarian US president—is remarkable but superficial: "The world as we know it has ended several times over, in ways small and large, whether we want to acknowledge it or not." / The New Yorker

Why February usually has 28 days: It's because of ancient beliefs in unlucky even numbers and lucky odd numbers. / Conversable Economist

How an exoskeleton can help pianists play faster, and retain the ability even after removing the device. / London Review of Books.

See also: Watch a pianist burn through Liszt's notoriously difficult "La Campanella." / YouTube

A list of television series that were canceled after one episode. / Wikipedia

See also: NBC producers deny using AI in new series Detective Fireman Lawyer Chicago Los Angeles Show. / The Onion

Studies suggest people often prefer AI-generated content to human-generated material, or can't tell the difference. / Allure

Unrelated: A clamshell keyboard that turns phones into laptops. / dezeen

A former Instagram researcher says Meta not only doesn't understand how friendship works, it doesn't care. / Meets Most

Remember those "luddite teens?" They're now in college, still relying on laptops and flip phones, and their movement is growing. / The New York Times [+]

The average teen with a smartphone spends nearly a quarter of the school day texting, streaming, or scrolling. / axios

Teenager Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the F1 driver selected by Mercedes to replace Lewis Hamilton, obtains his driver's license. / Sports Illustrated

Almost 96 percent of new cars registered in Norway in January were electric. / France24

See also: Last month was the world's warmest January on record. / BBC News

President Trump may have caused a "counterintelligence disaster" after the CIA sends the White House an unclassified email of employees' names. / RawStory

The White House says Elon Musk will police his own conflicts of interest. / The New Republic

Arab Americans for Trump changes its name Arab Americans for Peace, citing displeasure over Trump's proposal for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. / The Associated Press, The Intercept

An argument for calling what we're witnessing a "coup." (E.g., "of course it's a coup.") And an argument for saying it's not a "constitutional crisis" (yet). / The Atlantic [+], Thinking About…, Wake Up to Politics

See also: How can we be human within an inhuman system? / Desire Paths

A proposal to rebuild the American labor movement calls for establishing "strike schools." / n+1

Remembering when Hollywood union members began to embrace "canned music." / Pessimists Archive

Collaborations between the US and Mexico restore the California condor. / Knowable Magazine

Some black and white pictures from the career of Arthur Tress. / Flashbak

It's here! The long-awaited Field Notes x Tournament of Books 2025 Memo Book, with all profits going to the fight against censorship. / Field Notes

Thousands of residents flee the Greek island of Santorini after earthquakes are recorded for a fourth consecutive day. / BBC News

Sweden suffers its worst school shooting, with at least 11 people killed. / Al Jazeera

A growing number of countries are forging economic partnerships without the United States. / The New York Times [+]

President Trump says the United States should annex Gaza. "I don't want to be cute, I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something so magnificent." / Semafor, Politico

The president's crackdown on things like work from home or acknowledging gender "has created an atmosphere of paranoia and hyper vigilance." / The Verge

A former CIA officer writes an open letter to JD Vance, pleading with him to stop wearing an Apple watch, for fear of spying. / Watches of Espionage

Meanwhile: The CIA offers buyouts to its entire workforce. / The Guardian

Small websites that specialize in federal news are seeing big upticks in traffic. / CNN

Julie Hollar: As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it's incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context. / FAIR

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump and Musk's opponents have a tool to use, it is the power to shape public opinion. / The New York Times [+]

If business donors controlled politics, "why can't the global corporations stop these idiotic tariffs?" / How Things Work

A bookseller argues that supporting independent bookstores right now is one way to oppose the White House. / Lithub

Spotify reports its first profitable year. / CNBC

Related: Spotify is not unlike Heidegger's radio. / The Hedgehog Review

Nicola Twilley assesses science's quest to replicate human blood. / The New Yorker

Philadelphia's starting offensive linemen are the tallest and heaviest line in Super Bowl history. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Fashion researchers struggle to understand why medieval Europeans wore such long shoes. / Open Shoes

Pictures from the "day without immigrants" protests, mostly organized on social media. / The Los Angeles Times

China responds to tariffs with export restrictions and surcharges on American coal and gas. / Semafor

India extracts more groundwater than any other country worldwide, more than the US and China combined. / Undark

Indonesia casts doubt on the Paris climate agreement after President Trump announces the US's withdrawal. / The Financial Times [+]

A study finds gambling tactics may be the best way to encourage people to use reusable coffee cups. / Sprudge

Jamieson Webster: Catastrophic time is time without time. Time is now screen time. Breathless time. / Pioneer Works

Rebecca Yarros's "romantasy" Onyx Storm is the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years. / The New York Times [+]

The very first children's books in English were instruction manuals for good behavior. / The London Review of Books

See also: A meditation on the unlikely pleasures of serving on a jury. / Meditations in an Emergency

An ode to the CVS banger. "Hearing music in public is a sure sign you're alive." / Duque's Delight

Stories about obscure, niche baseball hats. / One Thing

For your weekly wanderlust, a visit to the ancient city of Samarkand. / Noema Magazine

Photographs from a bus tour of 1970s England. / Flashbak

Some pictures of 1960s San Francisco may or may not have been taken by Agnès Varda. / The San Francisco Chronicle

"Commentators should please stop using words such as 'digital' and 'progress' and 'efficiency' and 'vision' when describing this coup attempt." / Thinking about...

Related: The engineers playing a key role in Elon Musk's attempt to dismantle federal infrastructure are all recent college grads—one may still be in school. / WIRED

DOGE is what Biden warned about in his farewell address, and there's still so much we don't know about who they are and what they're doing. / Can We Still Govern?

If you're looking for hope, Democratic leaders' messages aren't the best place to look. / Welcome to Hell World

Finally, a Democratic senator announces he will obstruct Trump's State Dept. confirmations until Trump and Musk end their siege on USAID. / Outside the Beltway

An investigation into the criminal records of pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionists reveals a variety of convictions or pending charges for rape, domestic violence, and other serious crimes. / NPR

As measles vaccine rates in Texas fall, four new cases are reported in Lubbock, where there hasn't been a new case in more than 20 years. / The Texas Tribune

Inside the illegal trade for conophytum, an especially unusual succulent. / Financial Times [+]

All communication now is near-instantaneous, and too much input may be too much for our brains. A new book argues for inserting more friction into the process. / Los Angeles Review of Books

"We would sit there and drink and smoke and pretend we were intellectuals." A friend remembers a teenaged David Lynch. / The Yale Review

See also: Both The Elephant Man and On the Air, Lynch and Mark Frost's post-Twin Peaks sitcom, are available to watch. / Internet Archive

"This kind of favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent." Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint will no longer require blurbs. / Publishers Weekly

How the explosion in gluten-free packaged foods, paired with inaccurate labeling and confusing packaging, can end up harming those with celiac disease. / STAT

"You have retained the juvenile ability to love tons of candy." Caity Weaver quits sugar. / The New York Times Magazine [+]

Imagine an alternate timeline by changing the outcomes of key historical events. / A Better World?

It's no longer enough to measure income gaps to depict inequality; now, wealth gaps paint a far bleaker picture of American prosperity. / The Conversation

See also: The wildfires exposed a truth about how power operates in Los Angeles: "No city is more in need of its next incarnation." / Bloomberg

Labor unions are at their most treacherous moment in a century, a "result of both the forces arrayed against unions, and the weakness of unions themselves." / How Things Works

"The fallout from Chaplin's anti-fascist speech in 1940 is a sharp reminder that the other side has always been active here." Thinking under fascism. / Dada Drummer Almanach

Among the many topics DeepSeek refuses to address is Ai Weiwei, who calls his omission "quite telling" and says the West is compromising its values in similar ways. / Hyperallergic

CES this year was—unsurprisingly— all about AI, whose "exponents are no longer asking whether anyone wants what they're selling and simply asserting its inevitability." / Defector

Unrelated: Scientists discover a patch of dinosaur vomit. / The Guardian

There's no evidence internet brain rot is real—at least as far as technology can cause "permanent brain damage"—but that doesn't mean you aren't experiencing negative effects. / Dazed

Fake product reviews may be pervasive, but when you consider that any review on a retail site is part of a marketing strategy, all reviews are fake. / Internal Exile

See also: When you discover it's legal for your 911 call to be tracked and for your information to be provided as a sales lead to ambulance chasers. / A Whole Lotta Nothing

How the New York War Crimes—a print resource chronicling misrepresentations in the New York Times' Gaza coverage—is made. / Lux

"The level of manic energy—not to mention labor—it takes to come up with these drinks over and over is not sustainable." A history of why your cocktail is so damn weird. / Punch

A cozy game about cozy games—also, the new comfort movie canon. / Reuters, Cultured

More than half a million displaced Palestinians have returned to northern Gaza. / Al Jazeera

At least 30 people were killed during a crush at India's Kumbh Mela festival. / BBC News

A judge temporarily blocks President Trump's attempt to pause federal funding. / Reuters

A round-up of executive orders signed during Trump's first week in office. / NPR

See also: One Trump adviser says the administration hopes to make civil servants miserable in their jobs. / ProPublica

An escalation of orders against the trans community "paints a grim picture of what lies ahead." / Erin in the Morning

Larry Bartels: When popular grievances are used as a pretext for bad policy, it's politicians, not the citizenry, who are culpable. / Inside Story

An "elder millennial" battled Traump fans through TikTok comments and loved it, until it took up too much time. / Bumble

Related: A new parlor game, "who goes MAGA?" / The Sword & the Sandwich

"Challenge trials," in which people volunteer to get sick, are on the rise since the pandemic. / The New York Times [+]

Google searches for "no buy challenge" are up 40% year-over-year. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

What's it like to run a made-in-the-USA clothing company right now? "Everything is your own headache." / Outside

Studies are mixed on whether or not Americans desire urban sprawl. / Climate Connections

Some notes from regular visits to see Lee Krasner's "The Seasons," painted after the death of her husband Jackson Pollock. / Critical Thinking 

Edmund White's new memoir about 70 years of sex and lust is said to be mostly melancholic. / Slate

See also: Excerpt from a Japanese memoir about a cat. / The Paris Review

Human-like fossils found in China appear to have extremely large brains, bigger than ours. / RNZ

A study finds 55 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds approve of the use of violence, property damage, or misinformation to enact change. / VICE

College enrollment in the United States increased this fall, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. / Fast Company

How many people died from disasters in 2024? Less than the year before, thanks to fewer earthquakes. / Sustainability by numbers

Temporary housing has contributed to the deaths of at least 74 children in England in the last five years. / BBC News

One way to understand the current White House's politics: reduce everything to friends or enemies. / The New York Times [+]

Metadata from the Office of Personnel Management shows Trump devotees from the Heritage Foundation writing policies at federal agencies. / [citation needed]

Google says its maps app will change the Gulf of Mexico to "Gulf of America" and Denali to "Mount McKinley." / CNBC

The "Good Daily" newsletters, which operate in 47 states and 355 towns and cities across the US, are run by one guy using AI. / NiemanLab

Some trespassing directions—we do not advise this—if you wish to see Jeff Bezos's underground clock. / Asterisk Mag

Everything you need to know about DeepSeek. / Stratchery

Unrelated: A global atlas of sorts for the modern literary novel. / The Modern Novel

Interior design trends to anticipate for 2025. / Vogue

Remember that espresso machine that doesn't require water? How about a water machine for your kitchen. / dezeen

Some thoughts about laughter when it's not tied to humor, when it "appears to render us mechanical, terrifying, monstrous." / Sapiens

Something that's getting lost in yesterday's was-it-or-wasn't-it US-Colombia trade war: "Colombia accepted 475 deportation flights from the US from 2020 to 2024." / AP

And also: Because Trump wants to use military—not civilian—flights to transport deportees, "American taxpayers are paying 300% more for Trump's immigration plan than they should." / Proof

Federal prosecutors have dropped charges against a surgeon who all but admitted he leaked the medical records of underage patients receiving gender transition care. / The Texas Tribune

See also: 20 lessons on tyranny from the 20th century. / Thinking about...

"The entire food supply has been sewn up by cartels of 2-5 giant companies, and they colluded to raise prices, and bragged about it, and got away with it." It's not a crime if we do it with an app. / Pluralistic

See also: What if we had a maximum income? / How Things Work

Exercising your way through four years of all this and other ways to weather the storm. / The Cut, Kottke.org

See also: "Cute winter boots" is a form of algospeak TikTok users are using to message their resistance to Trump. / User Mag

This is fine: "Wind-blown avian feces may be route of transmission for bird flu, Minnesota's infectious disease expert warns." / CBS News

A recent poll showed 63% of Americans read at least one book in 2024, up from 54% in 2023. / The Washington Post [+]

In a new paper, researchers address the book-sorting problem, and introduce an algorithm that minimizes the time it takes to insert a book—or anything, really—into a sequence. / Quanta

LinkedIn's co-founder thinks AI should stop you from buying books you won't read, and Anthropic's CEO says AI will double your lifespan within the decade—but "this is not a very exact science." / The New York Times [+], Gizmodo

See also: "The less people know about AI, the more they like it." / WIRED

Unrelated: "The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million." / Ars Technica

Based on 60 years of data collection, a study finds men lose 50 percent of their emotional support networks between the ages of 30 and 90. / PsyPost

"I love being on the Earth at the same time as bears." Dance pioneer Carolyn Brown has died at 97. / The New York Times [+]

Photos from the David Lynch shrine at Bob's Big Boy in Burbank. / Los Angeles Magazine

With the inauguration of Trump's second term, the Doomsday Clock will move forward next week. / The Nation

See also: A subreddit that provides "the perfect soundtrack for your personal apocalypse." / r/CollapseMusic

Unrelated: When a scientist convinced members of the San Francisco 49ers to ingest radioactive material to determine if physical fitness predicts surviving a nuclear war. / Defector

"Humanity's Last Exam," a new test that's stumped every popular AI model, is now the yardstick by which AI is measured against humans' intellectual capabilities. / The New York Times [+]

Can the Stargate AI project really create as many as 100,000 jobs? Possibly, but they might not be for humans. / Vox

See also: According to a new poll, about half of US adults have an unfavorable view of Elon Musk, and even more disapprove of Trump relying on billionaires' advice. / Axios

A developer has released code that lures AI crawlers into a "tar pit" of randomly generated pages, and that website owners can deploy to defend their content, waste AI company resources—or both. / 404 Media

After the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in admissions, medical schools have reacted "overzealously," waving in a new era of discrimination. / STAT

"Being forced to really think whether you want to risk embarrassment by asking somebody if they carry a certain film or record in the shop goes a long way in learning to appreciate things." Bring back video rental stores. / The Melt

Trained on Minecraft, but without respecting object permanence, an AI model "fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else." / AI Weirdness

"If we want video game writing to be taken seriously as a craft, then we have to encourage players to engage with it as a creative process." / Florence Smith Nicholls

A very long, detailed history of how once-sprawling social media platforms splintered into smaller, politically homogenous communities. / Noema

Anne Helen Petersen: "I told myself I'd put both Instagram and email back on my phone at the end of the in-between weeks. Days kept passing, and I kept not doing it." / Culture Study

Biden's cabinet had a combined net worth of around $120 million, which is absolutely dwarfed by the $20 billion net worth of Trump's presumptive cabinet. / The Intercept

Spencer Ackerman: What starts as temporary, emergency measures tend to become fixed in the firmament of American governance and normalized. / Forever Wars

See also: A running list of Trump's planned executive orders, actions, proclamations, and legislation. / Politico

Scientists are worrying over threats posed by manufacturing bacteria that are mirror images of natural ones. / Undark Magazine

Previously: Built with a reverse set of amino acids and sugars, synthetic "mirror cells" pose an "unprecedented risk" for all life, scientists warn. / Smithsonian Magazine

See also: Photographs of uncanny objects by Joyce Lin Blur. / Colossal

A theory called "predictive processing" says that we don't experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. / Vox

Should children really learn about getting rich? "It conjures a fantasy world where people who 'deserve' it get rich and those who don't simply disappear." / The Cut

Chinese traditional medicine is now a $60 billion-a-year industry—and cows' gallstones have become the must-have item. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Some sound advice for any people in Southern California worried about air quality. / Torched

TMN recommends: This Friday—for 24 hours only—you can stream the generative documentary film Eno. / Oh You Pretty Things

See also: A very cool interactive interpretation of Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies. / It's Simply a Matter of Work

NASA astronauts will search for life that can thrive in harsh environments by checking if there's any clinging to the exterior of the International Space Station. / Gizmodo

See also: "You never know true beauty until you see Earth from space, or true terror until you hear someone knocking on the space station door from outside." / Clickhole

Over 100 medal winners at last summer's Paris Olympics have complained their medals are crumbling. / Semafor

A round-up of President Trump's first day back in office, playing "ping-pong between the serious and the stunning." / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Trump's political urgency may be slowed "by a more languid Congress." / Semafor

The United States military debates possible deployment on US soil. / Politico

Molly White: No, Trump didn't make $50 billion from his memecoin. / [citation needed]

Democrats have in key ways helped expedite the formation of the tech oligarchy they are now decrying. / Blood in the Machine

Each time you see a targeted ad online, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called "real-time bidding." / EFF

See also: "FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices." / Federal Trade Commission

Some thoughts on how to "escape the algorithm." / escape the algorithm

Schools are using an AI simulation of Anne Frank that urges kids not to blame anyone for the Holocaust. / The__Byte

Related: A conversation with a virtual Anne Frank. / Bluesky

Trend experts attempt to predict the late 2020s. "Sports and wellness have not reached their apex." / The Trend Report 

A new sport takes off in the Bay Area, involving tricycles. / The San Francisco Chronicle

Fire rebuilding in Southern California may be on a collision course with Trump's immigration crackdowns. / The Los Angeles Times

From Los Angeles, some thoughts about how the past is not as easy to recover and rebuild after disaster strikes. / National Geographic

What happens when someone in a crowded LA movie theater yells "rape" at the screen? / Meditations in an Emergency

A 2016 documentary about David Lynch is free for anyone to watch through the end of January. / The Criterion Channel

The CDC is urging labs to accelerate testing patients hospitalized with flu to determine whether they have seasonal influenza or bird flu. / NBC News

The future of the West Coast is "hydroclimate whiplash," where, for example, mudslides are the result of wildfires followed by intense storms. / Defector

See also: In vast numbers, more homeowners who are eligible to do so are dropping their home insurance policies, even as climate risk increases. / The New York Times [+]

Imperialists who say America should annex Greenland or Canada also envision a world that's going down in flames anyway, so they may as well get rich off it. / Thinking about...

"In the spring, when it rained, I thought the rain was good. But it isn't good." Colm Tóibín on Gary Indiana's personal library, newly arrived in LA and lost to wildfire. / London Review of Books

Looking back at The Last Whole Earth Catalog: "How did all these good ecological intentions linked to tools go so wrong?" / Dada Drummer Almanach

Unrelated: "Hey man, didn't you just give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a private equity billionaire?" It's looting season in America. / How Things Work

Reviewing a phone Interview you recorded with David Lynch only to hear dead air where his voice is supposed to be is about as Lynchian as it gets. / The Ringer

When David Lynch decided to live "the art life," he began a journey that left few creative mediums unexplored. / Welcome to Hell World

See also: From last August, "The Sound World of David Lynch." / The Wire

A 100-year-old piano virtuoso is the last surviving pupil of Sergei Rachmaninov. / Classic FM

TMN's Andrew Womack on the year in under-appreciated albums. / Andrew Womack's Newsletter

Younger fans empathize with how Joan Baez's toxic relationship with Bob Dylan is depicted in A Complete Unknown: "It's currently happening to girls everywhere." / The Guardian

See also: Bob Dylan joins TikTok days before it may be banned. / Consequence

On living in the West Village today: "We were essentially living in a museum—self-consciously, nostalgically, hopefully." / First Things

"I mean, yeah, you can have your 'story' about why you're on a walker." Catching up with a guy who had his legs surgically lengthened by three inches. / Heavies

From the archives: Photographs from a cross-country trip to document streets named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. / The Morning News

Qatar, Egypt, and the United States announce a cease-fire deal, though Israel has yet to convene ministers to discuss it. / Reuters

Ilan Goldenberg: The most realistic scenario is that Hamas and Israel paper over their differences on post-conflict governance. / The Contrarian

Fires continue to burn in Los Angeles, and conspiracy theories continue to emerge. / The Guardian

Unrelated: "The impulse to do a smash and grab with one's audience, to retreat to some precarious platform or another, to exit the polity, is overwhelming." / The Late Review

LA's rebuilding will rely heavily on immigrants. / The Washington Post [+]

Also impacted by the fires: The livelihoods of nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners. / The Los Angeles Times

Meanwhile, so-called wellness influencers are hawking tinctures, detox products, and "parasite cleanses." / Mother Jones

The FDA's new nutrition labels may push the food industry to get healthier. / STAT

President Biden's green jobs program, the American Climate Corps, is now done. / Grist

Abortion rights supporters prevailed on ballot measures in seven of the 10 states this year, but matters may come down to judges. / KFF Health News

Dutch psychiatrists are seeing an upswing in requests for medical assistance in dying on psychiatric grounds. / Undark Magazine

"Russian roulette" may have been invented by Russian officers, but a Swiss author made it famous. / Swiss National Museum

If you wanted to store data for a century, where would you even start? / Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab

For your weekly wanderlust, some photos and a report from a four-day bike trip through the Namib desert. / The Radavist

A new coffee machine draws water from the air. / Techradar