South Korea's fertility rate rises for the first time in nine years, supported by an increase in marriages. / Reuters

Denmark's economy is one of Europe's fastest-growing thanks to Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Ozempic drugs. / BBC News

Brooke Harrington: Trust in government to do what is right, at least most of the time, is a form of wealth that breeds prosperity. / The New York Times [+]

A federal judge gives the Trump administration less than two days to release billions of dollars in US foreign aid. / The Associated Press

A sampling of a dozen trans people finds all of them educating themselves about guns. / The Washington Post [+]

Trump wants to offer a "gold card" visa to wealthy foreigners—something often found attractive by criminals and corrupt officials. / NPR, FATF

On a lighter note, "the Natalie situation" in the White House refers to an aide who doesn't "do well with boundaries." / The Cut

Federal courts in Maryland, New York, and DC are hearing lawsuits challenging DOGE as a "threat to democracy." / The New York Times [+]

Unrelated: Apple is working on a glitch where iPhones replace the word "racist" with "Trump." / The Wall Street Journal [+]

A new smartphone app will prevent you from accessing other apps until it knows you've "touched grass." / Touchgrass.now

John Oliver offers advice on how to make yourself less valuable to Meta. / Last Week Tonight

The publishing industry says goodbye to mass-market paperbacks in airports. / Publisher's Weekly

A remembrance of when William Faulkner set the record for the longest sentence in literature—with one consisting of 1,288 words. / Open Culture

A contemporary art museum in Norway offers a private tour for $26,300. / The Art Newspaper

The Waldorf Astoria is selling apartments in New York City for up to $18.75 million. / The New York Times [+]

Descriptions of winners from the 2025 World Whiskies Awards. / Gear Patrol

See also: Some recipes involving tinned fish. / The Tinned Fish Market

Ukrainian and US negotiators are said to be in the final stages of a minerals deal. / The New York Times [+]

The White House's mixed signals on Russia and Ukraine may reflect an internal strategic clash. / Just Security

Facilities in Mississippi and Texas are holding the most detained immigrants. / axios

A list of things restaurant owners and workers can do to protect themselves from immigration raids. / Eater

See also: Video of people standing up to President Trump. / Bluesky

Nearly one in 10 adults in the United States identifies as LGBTQ, almost triple the number since Gallup started counting in 2012. / USA Today

Three incarcerated queer people explain their tattoos. / Them

The uproar around last week's "small" paper about Covid vaccines is "a parable for the ways in which the internet is being used to weaponize basic vaccine research." / STAT

See also: Lessons from a science journalist who lived underground for 10 days. / Vox

Archaeologists use laser mapping technology to find an ancient Zapotec city in Mexico. / The Art Newspaper

From last year, a short video (best muted) about the largest cruise ship ever built in Germany. / YouTube

A Norwegian humanoid robot, designed for home chores, comes wrapped in beige knitwear. / dezeen

An interview with a woman who makes people's decisions for them. "The answer to, 'Should I break up with this person?' 98% of the time, is 'yes.'" / Café Anne

Unrelated: Profiles of young women who are becoming nuns. / Cosmopolitan

A longtime food critic retires and leaves behind morsels (sorry) of succinct advice. "Some of the best foods carry with them the faint whiff of death." / The Guardian

Economists say the DOGE purge of federal workers could trigger local recessions, and how bad it gets depends on the scale of the layoffs, which is still unknown. / CNBC

An explainer on how the billions in cuts that DOGE's public ledger claims to have uncovered are riddled with miscalculations and embellishments. / The New York Times [+]

Current and former federal workers launch a website to share anonymous stories about DOGE's efforts to dismantle government agencies. / We the Builders, The Verge

In October, the lawyer who is reportedly now DOGE's general counsel said ignoring the courts would destroy the country. / The Intercept

The FDA is trying to bring back hundreds of workers from the thousands who were cut by DOGE. / The Independent

"Trump is turning off all 8,000 EV chargers at all federal government buildings." / The Drive

"Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration's central ideological project," which is to reestablish segregation. / The Atlantic

See also: "Any company whose value is this dependent not on its balance sheet but instead on a shared popular narrative is unusually vulnerable to narrative shifts." How to cost Elon Musk $100 billion. / How Things Work

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was everywhere, riding an "America First" slogan into the mainstream. They felt unstoppable, until people stopped them. / Dan Sinker

"LANA KIHN flips a switch as the SJWs look on." Leaked pages from Amazon's James Bond script. / Read Max

What's it like for an author to realize the book that took years to research and write is suddenly available as a "summary" someone is selling for $4.99 on Amazon. / 404 Media

One interesting similarity between AI and the public domain is how, used improperly, both are shortcuts that elevate aesthetics over meaning. / It's Nice That

"It is inescapably relevant that Ono was a Japanese woman who demanded to be let into the avant-garde scene in New York just a few years removed from the end of World War II." At the Yoko Ono symposium. / Defector

The White House and the Treasury will restrict DOGE's taxpayer access to read-only, anonymized data—the same as what academic researchers and IRS IT professionals can see. / The Washington Post [+]

See also: Finally, my tax dollars are being used to uncover publicly available government information. / McSweeney's

An agency-by-agency list of how far Project 2025 has succeeded in its goals—for example, USAID is now at 100% completion. / Project 2025 Tracker

After Texas banned abortion in 2021, "the rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester." / ProPublica

Elon Musk says he will "fix" fact-checking on X that contradicts Trump's claims Zelenskyy is unpopular in Ukraine. / Al Jazeera

See also: X is reportedly intimidating advertisers to return to the platform by suggesting companies who don't may trigger the federal government's ire. / Gizmodo

Probably unrelated: X is in talks to raise money at a $44 billion valuation, the same amount Elon Musk purchased it for more than two years ago. / Reuters

Germany's top court rules Birkenstocks are not works of art, a designation the company sought to access stronger copyright protections and fend off copycats. / The Guardian

Microsoft says it has created a new state of matter that is neither solid, liquid, or gas. / The New York Times [+]

Google's ad tech violates its own policies, allowing targeting of users based on personally sensitive data—potentially to where a specific individual could be identified. / WIRED

See also: Ways to rethink how your online shopping tools and habits to fight surveillance pricing. / The Cut

Always-on social media and location sharing means we all know too much about each other. / Dazed

Fascists do love to exert power over art communities that have long rejected them. / Hyperallergic

What it's like to be queer in Nigeria, where "to live safely as themselves, they have to do so underground." / The Dial

From the menswear guy: What do James Baldwin's clothes tell us about him? / PBS

Five Trends that will shape urban Africa in 2025—e.g., the Addis Ababa model. / The Week in Africa

William Shoki: Elon Musk's outrage over South Africa wants to reinforce an idea that black political power is threatening. / Africa Is a Country

How to understand President Trump best? By tracking Maggie Haberman's byline. / Wake Up to Politics

Unrelated: His mugshot hangs outside the Oval Office. / NPR

European leaders and Ukraine are scrambling—what would a UK-Europe force look like? / Sky News

The White House sends out an order to study how in vitro fertilization can be made more affordable. / CNN

Abortion rights groups dismiss the move and tie Trump to abortion bans and other limits on women's health care. / axios

An issue that RFK Jr. and his critics agree on: a troubling loophole that allows Big Food to introduce new additives without getting approval from the FDA. / STAT

Iowa advances a bill targeting public librarians. / Bookriot

An argument says local journalism is as essential to well-functioning communities "as potable drinking water, safe streets, and reliable emergency services." / The Walrus

To celebrate Robert Rauschenberg's 100th birthday, six contemporary artists to follow. / artsy

Portraits of cats from Hong Kong's Sheung Wan district. / Huck

A profile of the new shameless "dupe" company Quince. / The Cut

A pharaoh's tomb is discovered in Egypt for the first time since 1922. / BBC News

Amazon now controls who plays James Bond and when the next film goes into production. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Former Brazilian President Bolsonaro is charged with leading a plot to overthrow the government. / Reuters

Argentina's Javier Milei tries to deflect criticism after a cryptocurrency he endorsed on X collapses, erasing $4 billion in value. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

President Trump suggests Kyiv is to blame for Russia's invasion. / The Guardian

Ukrainian President Zelensky says Trump lives in "disinformation space." / CNN

Fifty hot takes from a moderate Canadian academic. / X 

Kishore Mahbubani: Trump's meeting with Putin shows how irrelevant Europe has become, even when its geopolitical interests are at stake. / Foreign Policy

Research suggests phenomena like pandemics reduce young people's trust in scientific and political authorities. / The Atlantic

See also: Gen Z prefers influencers over experts—"not because they are wrong, but because they are inconvenient." / Fortune

An interview with a young woman digging up ephemera from Flickr. / Molly Soda

A new study links a protein variant found only in humans to the origins of spoken language. / The Associated Press

The "artificial cryosphere"—basically, the world of industrial refrigeration—is reportedly "vast and still growing." / The London Review of Books

Mapping dispossession in San Francisco's Black communities. / Logic(s)

Meta's AI-powered glasses are said to give blind people accessibility benefits "at a price point people can afford." / The Wall Street Journal [+]

A clothing company makes a jacket from 250,000 pieces of wood. / dezeen

"Coincidental" photographs from Eric Kogan's daily walks around New York City. / Colossal 
 

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

A central aspect of negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war is that the US would provide Ukraine with post-war security in exchange for access to rare earth minerals. / Reuters

See also: "Even now, most Ukrainians see continuing to fight as incomparably better than the terror of Russian occupation." / Foreign Affairs

"I am safer than every single one of you reading this in the United States." A dispatch from a train out of Kyiv, headed to a city 20 miles from the front. / Thinking about…

Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel on how Trump is weaponizing the FCC against media companies that don't fall in line—and how it's already working. / The Verge

Since Trump's inauguration, the Dept. of Education's Office for Civil Rights has stopped fielding investigations based on student complaints, and switched to those initiated by Trump's agenda. / ProPublica

Health insurers deny some 850 million claims a year—but when people actually appeal, around three quarters of patients end up winning their cases. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

To understand some of Elon Musk's business practices, as well as what appear to be his aims in US government, look to how apartheid began as an economic strategy. / The Nation

Probably related to all this: Inside the retreat where wealthy heirs are trying to give away their fortunes. / Business Insider

"We know that the feds and police will target vulnerable communities in Los Angeles. The Olympics will only bring more violence to them." / Welcome to Hell World

Clay Risen: The last time a president purged "disloyal" government workers it was under the guise of the Red Scare—and that was about loyalty to the US, not to an individual. / Politico

"It has provided me a foundation, something to hold on to when the waves are swelling." Jhumpa Lahiri on Ovid's Metamorphoses. / The Dial

How the illustrator for the Guardian's weekly sex column does what he does. / It's Nice That

The past, present, and uncertain future of the fashion show. / High Snobiety

The most powerful neutrino ever detected—at 10 times the energy of the previous record—has been spotted "tearing through the Mediterranean Sea." / New Scientist

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