Power is slowly returning after a massive power outage in Spain and Portugal. / The Guardian

Meanwhile, Spain's electrical grid recently ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time. / pv magazine

President Trump's meme coin has "eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy." / The New York Times [+]

A White House memo authorizes treatment at Guantanamo "that in practice amounts to torture." / Forever Wars

The Trump administration's cuts across government agencies heighten concerns about food security—and into the gap step free grocery stores. / Civil Eats

For non-MAGA types: Five-hundred words to stick on the back of your Tesla. / McSweeney's Internet Tendency

If you find yourself emitting exclamations of distress all day, author Elif Batuman suggests shouting "surfing" instead. / The Elif Life

One way to enact political action? "Become unscammable, an anti-con artist." / The Trend Report

Multiple studies say Gen Z is the worst at discerning fact from fiction on the internet. / Politico

The University of North Carolina encourages its student-athletes to work with consultants who will help monetize their social media. / The New York Times [+]

See also: Soccer clubs owned by American groups are set to sweep England's top three divisions. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

A help desk in Alabama still answers the public's calls after 70 years. / The Oxford American

The aesthetics of Hergé's Tintin are now public property. / College Towns

What it was like to work for Andy Warhol? "All summer I was soaring on a wave of adrenaline, drugs, alcohol and teen hormones." / Granta

HHS says there won't be an autism registry, walking back NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's controversial announcement from earlier this week. / STAT

As government and fringe groups—kind of the same thing right now—promote the pseudoscience of eugenics, geneticists must take a stand. / Nature

The Dept. of Government Efficiency is anything but: "Firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion." / The New York Times [+]

See also: By marking nearly four million people dead in SSA databases—without evidence—DOGE shattered the financial lives of many who are very much alive. / The Daily Beast

China is exploring the possibility of building a nuclear power plant on the moon by 2035, as part of its joint effort with Russia to establish a lunar research station. / Independent

This is fine: "Beijing recently asked South Korean companies not to ship products containing China's rare earth minerals to US defense firms." / Reuters

Pope Francis was a music fan—he even blessed one of his favorite shops following a renovation—so NPR made a playlist of his favorite songs. / Instagram, Spotify

See also: Obama Cinema, or a list of films that are "representational of an idealistic world in the mind's eye of American democrats." / Letterboxd

A seasteading enthusiast spends 120 days living in a fixed underwater habitat, breaking the previous world record of 100 days. / The New York Times [+]

See also: A reading list on the perpetual dream of floating cities. / Places Journal

How do conservation teams move endangered black rhinos? By dangling them upside down from a helicopter. / ZME Science

"I'm wondering if we're going to have an Endangered Species Act in four years." Anatomy of an extinction. / Mother Jones

If you've listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast—or people have urged you to listen—you may be interested in an article basically debunking it. / The Cut

Russia hits Kyiv with missiles and drones, one of the deadliest attacks on the capital since last year. / The Kyiv Independent

A tunnel between Denmark and Germany will link 90 individual segments, piece by piece, "like Lego bricks." / BBC News

Italy's transformation into "a recycling powerhouse" is credited to "individual change, collectivized." / Grist

A video from Norway shows a tree being turned into an eight-oared rowing boat using traditional methods. / aeon

See also: Los Angeles is said to be facing a massive tree crisis unless private interests step up. / Torched

GitHub code repositories support a whistleblower's allegations that a DOGE worker surreptitiously downloaded sensitive NLRB data. / Krebs on Security

Simon Goldstein and Peter N. Salib say the best path for both the US and China is to jointly back the world's best AI lab. / Lawfare

A new datase reveals how many African workers are "indirectly employed" by Big Tech, doing content moderation, customer service, and data annotation for AI models. / rest of world

Making the case for predistribution, i.e., sharing the wealth before AI-driven inequality takes hold. / Noema Mag

Unrelated: An interactive exercise in flying kites based on places' weather patterns. / A Cursor Is a Kite

Some thoughts about analyzing the different mobility patterns of women and men when it comes to designing shared mobility systems. / Knowable Magazine

After experiencing the downsides of contemporary dating, a woman puts a $100,000 bounty on her marriage. / Knowingless

Reading psychiatrist Irvin Yalom suggests we all have meaningful lives, "but we're just not sufficiently aware of them." / 3 Quarks Daily

See also: Some beautiful travel notebooks full of exquisite details. / Colossal

"An aesthetic once dismissed as 'metro' was now emblematic of self-optimization." The menswear guy explains the roots of the manosphere look. / Bloomberg [+]

The brief story of a missing Banksy painting—and the museum employee who stole it when he retired. / The Art Newspaper

The trade war between Washington and Beijing looks good for African nations. / Semafor

From February, a round-up of China's top trading partners on the continent. / China Global South

Fourteen reasons why tariffs won't bring manufacturing back to the United States—among them: "most Americans are going to hate manufacturing." / Molson Hart

See also: Stefanie Stantcheva wins the John Bates Clark Medal in economics. / The American Economic Association

David Gate says El Salvador's mega-prison, aka the "Terrorism Confinement Center," should be called a concentration camp. / A Rebellion of Care

Markets respond to President Trump saying he'll back down on China (and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell), while Elon Musk steps away from DOGE. / The Wall Street Journal [+], Politico, NPR

Measles has infected more than 600 people in Texas and killed two school-aged children. / The Texas Tribune

American scientists submitted 32% more applications for overseas jobs in the last quarter than during the same period last year. / nature

Unrelated: Examples of scientists amusing themselves with papers like "Strapless Evening Gowns." / Ironic Sans

Half of American teens say social media has a negative effect on their peers, but only 14% think it negatively affects them personally. / Pew Research Center

A guide to deleting personal information on the internet using a free tool from Google. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

People are becoming popular on TikTok for reading out celebrity lawsuits line by line. / The Atlantic

Pinterest discourages young people from using its app during school hours. / The Verge

See also: Diane Keaton's "Pinterest house" in Los Angeles is up for sale. / Uncrate

In Victorian England, Scotland Yard was originally formed as a means to prevent crimes from happening. / Crime Reads

How did Athens become such a muddled concrete sprawl? Basically, by modernizing too quickly. / BBC News

Photographs of men and boys in cramped spaces. / It's Nice That

The dollar falls to a three-year low, as a trade war and threats against the Federal Reserve drive "Sell America" trades. / Semafor

Andrew Burmon: If the fig leaf of prestige falls, the upper middle class will discover how angry it is at "the misalignment of their expectations and their circumstances." / GQ

Bill Maher's recent account of his dinner with President Trump gets spoofed by Larry David. / The Guardian

Larry David: I can't stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate—he hated that, too. / The New York Times [+]

Related: The story of how London's Imperial War Museum came to own an official portrait of Adolf Hitler. / The Art Newspaper

Scientists say they've discovered a new color called "olo." / LiveScience

An investigation finds the California Department of Motor Vehicles routinely allowing dangerous drivers to renew their licenses. / CalMatters

One way restaurants still get a boost from Covid? People ordering takeout, which shows up as higher productivity for kitchens. / NBER

"Ganking" spreads from China to the US: city dwellers attempting to forage in public parks. / Semafor

Unrelated: A new "sleepwear concept" from Japan uses embedded sound and lighting to promote sleep. / dezeen

Investors wonder if a buzzy autonomous-robot startup in Silicon Valley is hot air. / The Wall Street Journal

Some examples of human aesthetics that are already AI-seeming. / artdev

What's it like to have a Neuralink chip embedded in your brain? "It did feel like magic at first." / Men's Health

New York City's Frick Collection reopens to the public. / artsy 

Pictures of street protests in New York from 1980 to 2000. / Flashbak

A new exhibition documents American photography's first 70 years. / BBC News

For your weekly wanderlust: A story of three friends who revitalized a crumbling desert resort and saved a town in the process. / Travel + Leisure

Pope Francis has died at 88, "the first [pope] in generations to make the Vatican feel less like a fortress and more like a field hospital." / Migrant Insider

The Bush administration argued Guantanamo should be beyond the reach of the courts; CECOT is the Trump administration's attempt at making that goal a reality. / Forever Wars

See also: El Salvador won't let a US senator inside its prison, but influencers are welcome to enter and film propaganda videos. / X

An investigation into the crypto grift Trump and his family are undertaking right now, along with signs that show it's going to get much worse. / Citation Needed

See also: "A little-known firm with investors linked to JD Vance, Elon Musk and Trump could get a piece of the federal expense card system—and its hundreds of millions in fees." / ProPublica

The faculties at the Big Ten consortium of US universities are aligning to create a "mutual defense compact" against Trump's attacks on higher education. / The Hill

In cases of aspiring tyrannies and the masses that oppose them, the group that's better coordinated wins out. / Programmable Mutter

What happened to the DOGE "five things" emails: Apparently nothing, except in one case where an employee responded with profanities. / The Washington Post [+]

"We will toast to our freedom and everything he did in that nameless era." How a famous Chinese author befriended his censor. / The Guardian

A study of texting habits finds that correspondents who use shorthand abbreviations are deemed "less sincere and far less worthy of a reply." / Fast Company

Unrelated: Sam Atman says users who include "please" and "thank you" in their ChatGPT messages cost OpenAI "tens of millions of dollars" in computing power. / Futurism

The iPhone has been losing its luster in China, where consumers are embracing Chinese brands for the tech or for patriotism, or at least to appear patriotic. / Rest of World

On last week's news about a distant planet's atmosphere containing signs of biological activity: Other researchers in the field of exoplanet biosignatures say the claims are far-fetched. / Nature

Rising CO2 levels from climate change can increase the amount of arsenic in rice, though the varieties you buy and how you cook it could reduce your exposure. / BBC

The latest in American preppers' home bunkers, which are replete with all modern conveniences, and often that means a concealed gun range. / The New York Times Magazine [+]

Chinese President Xi Jinping wraps up a Southeast Asia tour to strengthen already robust trade relations. / The Associated Press

Goldman Sachs says a decoupling of the United States and China may cost the US $2.5 trillion. / The South China Morning Post

The World Trade Organization expects trade of merchandise between the two countries to drop by 80 percent this year. / axios

The CEO of a consumer products company says he's alarmed by anticipated shortages of transformers, air conditioners, and other complex goods. / X

Unrelated: Scientists in Sweden develop a battery that has the texture of toothpaste. / Gizmodo

An interactive guide to changes in the White House press briefing room. / The New York Times [+]

What if scrolling on social media is more "akin to an alcohol-induced blackout?" / Luke Burgis

Despite all of yesterday's details about Elon Musk manipulating the known and unknown mothers of his children, what remains unclear "is how many other women Musk has approached on Twitter to have his kids." / The Wall Street Journal [+], Jezebel

Some Relationship lessons from Erich Fromm's 1956 The Art of Loving. E.g., "wanting the other person to unfold 'as they are.'" / Philosophy Break

Unrelated: We are all living in the world porn made. / The Atlantic 

For the first time, a colossal squid has been filmed in its natural habitat. / YouTube, NPR

Photographs from a trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by pack raft. / Patagonia

Photographs of Lenny Kravitz's lavish home in Paris. / Architectural Digest

An heir to the Porsche fortune stokes a class war over plans to build a private tunnel to his "cavernous" underground garage. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Notes from a visit to Costco in Europe. "I don't see someone in France buying that much mustard at once." / David Lebovitz Newsletter

A day in the life in northeastern Ukraine, where there are no signs Vladimir Putin wants to end his war. / The New York Times [+]

A whistleblower explains that as DOGE staffers exfiltrated data, someone in Russia followed them through the door. / NPR

Related: The EU issues burner phones to officials traveling to the US for fear of espionage. / The New Republic

From last month, a list of things possibly in store for us if President Trump keeps running the show. / Terra Nullius

An economist rates who's up and who's down right now in American politics. / The Pursuit of Happiness

A former congressman explains what representatives do all day. / Understanding Congress 

Those gold medallions now hanging in the Oval Office are strikingly similar to items available on Alibaba for between $1 and $5 (before tariffs). / Sherwood

Companies that make their goods in the US struggle to sell Americans on domestic manufacturing. / Business of Fashion

Related: Fifty "Made-In-America" clothing and footwear brands. / Gear Patrol

The National Weather Service stops translating radio alerts for non-English speakers. / The Associated Press

Timothy Snyder: "It is easier to move people away from law than it is to remove law from people." / Bluesky

A timeline for how Israel has used humanitarian aid to punish Palestinians in Gaza for the last 17 months. / Al Jazeera

Tesla's 50-day average share price falls below its 200-day measure, aka a "death cross." / Semafor

Research suggests girls are being hit by a mental health crisis, but the problem is overshadowed by boys' struggles. / The Guardian

Explaining how "you won, Jane" became the UK's new "Keep Calm and Carry On." / Experimental History 

Unrelated: "Ultra-poptimists" are said to believe that celebrities should always be profitmaxxing. / Culture: An Owner's Manual

Some photographs from the chaotic Minecraft Movie screenings in theaters. / Instagram

Portraits of Texas ranching communities by Alex Bek. / Booooooom

Some thoughts on the appeal of running a marathon. "When you go to extremes, new things happen?" / Interconnected

The Nile's migratory birds are threatened by tourists' poaching habits—"Maltese hunters take everything in sight." / The New Arab

New technologies are helping to regrow Arctic sea ice, but they remain controversial. / Grist

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele says he can't return a mistakenly deported Maryland resident. / axios

On the same matter, the White House is following the Supreme Court's ruling "by ignoring it completely." / The Atlantic [+]

President Obama condemns President Trump's freezing of federal funds for Harvard. Steven Pinker calls it "truly Orwellian." / The Guardian, The New York Times [+]

Alex Ross: The word that best describes what the Trump regime is trying to do to Harvard is gleichschaltung, or, "bringing into line." / The Rest is Noise, Wikipedia

Trump's crackdown on foreign students is changing college journalism. / Inside Higher Ed

The IRS's top technology officers resign, seemingly over a plan to share data with the Department of Homeland Security. / NextGov

See also: "I wasted years of my life under the delusion that people could be convinced by rational argument." / Trying to Understand the World

Chick-fil-A, Instagram, and Nike are among teenagers' favorite companies. / businesswire

Philippe Starck says design is being taken over by "toxic" trends. / dezeen

From March, bad design sometimes makes people trust a website more—and buy more stuff. / Web Designer Depot

What if we made advertising illegal? "The machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel." / Simone

Unrelated: Some theories on why AI company logos look like buttholes. / VelvetShark

An abandoned nuclear power plant gets repurposed as an advanced acoustics testing facility. / The Verge

An ode to roadside attractions: "Exactly how we found Dinoland is lost to me." / The Paris Review 

Sixty minutes of observing people around a reservoir. "It's hard to get into any emotion when you got got." / Meditations in an Emergency

A round-up of purportedly haunted accommodations for people who love the paranormal. / Atlas Obscura

The man arrested for breaking into and setting a fire in the Pennsylvania governor's mansion planned to beat Gov. Shapiro with a small sledgehammer. / AP

The Trump administration is privately discussing how to "denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador." / Rolling Stone

In an agreement among major shipping nations—the US was notably absent—ships that emit greenhouse gases over certain thresholds will incur additional fees. / AP

"We need a right to remember." By deleting entire government databases, the Trump administration is intent on imposing control through data loss. / The New York Times [+]

A look at the US Naval Academy library's book purge: "The Bell Curve, which argues [Black people]...are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled." / The New York Times [+]

See also: Among the studies purged from the National Institute of Justice's website is one that found undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than US citizens. / Bluesky

Yes, DOGE is chaotic and dangerous, but it's also been wildly ineffective in its stated aim of saving money—and in some cases has increased the costs of governing. / Intelligencer

With its company town in coastal Texas now all but imminent, SpaceX also wants the county to cede its authority in deciding when to close a nearby public beach for launches. / KUT News

"A manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible." When a McMansion looks like the White House. / McMansion Hell

Compared to a year ago, travel to the US is down from nearly all regional markets—the UK has dropped by 15% and Germany by 29%. / Forbes

The menswear guy breaks down how tariffs infiltrate the pricing formula for a pair of Nikes that's made overseas, shipped to the US, sold to Foot Locker, and then purchased by you. / Bluesky

A new book explores the important role teeth have played throughout history, from facilitating animal diversity to aiding post-mortem analysis. / London Review of Books

Job- and date-seekers are leaving notes inside Waymos. / The Washington Post [+]

See also: Photos of notes left on Los Angeles windshields. / The Morning News

"Picture it: A grown man lying on the carpeted floor of a living room, legs up on the couch, listening to music on headphones in the dark for an hour." I learned to listen from my dad. / Hearing Things

"The Trump administration believes it has what game theorists call escalation dominance over China... [but] it is China that has escalation dominance in this trade war." / Foreign Affairs

The EU and China are in talks to set minimum prices on Chinese-made EVs, six months after Brussels raised tariffs on the vehicles to as much as 45.3%. / Reuters

See also: A new US Senate bill aims to prevent Chinese vehicles from entering the US market. / The Detroit News

Even with the revised tariffs, the average US household will lose $4,700 in 2024 dollars. / The Budget Lab

According to the US Economic Uncertainty Index, concerns about financial futures right now far surpass what was reported at the onset of the pandemic. / Bluesky

Related: Estimate how much the tariffs will affect your grocery list. / The Cost Index

Jamelle Bouie: Trump's insistence on making every interaction a zero-sum game means he won't be satisfied until everyone bends to his will—US citizens included. / The New York Times [+]

After Nvidia's CEO spent $1 million for a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump loosened restrictions on the company's China exports, threatening America's hopes for AI dominance. / Platformer

See also: Trump's deportations are hampering the nation's bird flu strategy; farmworkers are terrorized and fearful of talking with health outreach workers. / KFF Health News

The White House moves to classify thousands of living immigrants as dead to cancel their Social Security numbers and pressure them to "self-deport." / AP

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: First, there is your executive order saying that it's illegal not to." Poetry revised for 2025. / McSweeney's

A visual guide to the Christian nationalist flags representatives display outside their offices in the US Capitol. / Baptist News Global

The National Park Service updates to the Underground Railroad website that removed Harriet Tubman and downplayed Black abolitionists has been restored to its original text. / Hyperallergic

"Each frame of integral film is a small, square machine with an even smaller chemistry set inside of it, working at a pace of any time but now." On Polaroids and time. / The Georgia Review

From March, a list of the world's best eating cities says the top three are New Orleans, Bangkok, and Medellín. / TimeOut

Push notifications, a simulation. / xkcd

Analysts say President Trump's pause on some tariff measures "upends any pretence that we understand his strategy." / ING

Meanwhile, Trump now faces accusations of market manipulation. / Al Jazeera

The Financial Times: "We now know the market has Trump on a leash, and we have an initial estimate of its length." / The Financial Times

A full list of the new updated tariff rate country by country. / The Guardian

See also: Research strongly suggests America's 19th-century tariffs were probably harmful. / Economic Forces

Switzerland launches a trial program offering young criminals psychotherapy and increased freedoms while keeping them in a confined environment. / NZZ

In the US, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants a system of trucks to handle mass deportation similar to how Amazon's fleet delivers packages. / The Guardian

Why aren't universities using their billion-dollar endowments to fight Trump? "It's easy to see the next four years as a blip when you're about to celebrate your 400th birthday." / Vox

Unrelated: A collection of "improprieties in pronunciation" among people from New England in 1808. / Futility Closet

A biologist says insects from the '70s and '80s were already collecting microplastic, decades before the term even existed. / Bluesky

Remembering heiress Katharine McCormick, who funded development of the pill and Planned Parenthood. / The New York Times [+]

Reviews of Meghan Markle's sold-out raspberry jam: "It's too runny for a PB&J or, God forbid, an open-faced slice of toast." / The Cut

Hunter Biden says sales of his paintings have plummeted since his father left office. / The Art Newspaper

Some notes on Pablo Picasso's drawing notebooks. / Noted

Some photorealistic oil paintings of urban landscapes. / Colossal

Modern culture and emergent tech are said to be reshaping our relationship to dreaming. / Noema

The world used clean power to meet more than 40% of its electricity demand last year. / The Guardian 

Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than doubled. / Grist

Lithium-ion batteries became the leading cause of fire deaths in New York City last year—how LA removed 1 million pounds of them from its burn zones. / The Los Angeles Times

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—a new axis called CRINK—unite to defy Western sanctions. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

The tariff war between China and Donald Trump's White House now looks like a big game of chicken. / The New York Times [+]

Economists find only 15.1 percent of the decline in goods-sector employment from 1992 to 2012 stemmed from US trade deficits. / Marginal Revolution

Unrelated: "Slime supersedes economic and social status." A visit to a shrine to slime. / i-D

Physicists propose a new model of space-time that may provide "the first observational evidence supporting string theory." / LiveScience

OpenAI makes ChatGPT Plus free for college students through May. / Adweek

Lessons learned from tracking AI use in global elections in 2024: "It became another tool to generate content on the cheap." / rest of world

Lessons learned from teaching an AI model to become a therapist: "We got a lot of 'hmm-hmms,' 'go ons,' and then 'Your problems stem from your relationship with your mother.'" / MIT Technology Review

See also: Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster on mass anxiety and "nasal menstruation." / Interview Magazine

Tesla's Cybertruck is said to be the auto industry's biggest flop in decades. / Kottke

Cybertrucks are thought to be such failures that Tesla won't take them as trade-ins, forcing owners seeking compensation to enter the Lemon Law process. / NJ.com

Some illustrated thoughts on maximalist interior design, or "the art of too much." / Misfits' Architecture

The 2025 US Barista Champion explains his recipe for "super milk," a blend of full-cream dairy, cashew, and pistachio milk. / Sprudge

President Trump plans an expensive military parade for his 79th birthday. / Washington City Paper

Economic tensions with the United States' trading partners begin to escalate. / Semafor

Tariffs may not make other countries respect the US, "but they can make them move on without it." / The Atlantic

A 5-4 Supreme Court lifts an order that blocked the deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador. / Reuters

Meanwhile, three-quarters of those deported had no apparent criminal record. / CBS News

Tips for people visiting the United States to minimize the risk of Border Protection accessing their data. / WIRED

A round-up of high-speed rail projects in the US that have a chance. / The New York Times [+]

A billionaire in Southern California owns about 75% of the apartment units in his Orange County city. / Bloomberg [+]

Unrelated: A skateboarding trip through the Golden State. / YouTube

For nearly a year, the FBI secretly ran a money laundering scheme named after Elon Musk. / 404 Media

To justify its power, Silicon Valley obsesses over IQ, "the term of choice for the man who doesn't just think he's smart, but thinks he's smarter than everyone else." / The New York Times [+]

Children of the wealthy spend upwards of $6,000 a month to live in luxury housing near Ivy League schools. / Airmail

See also: "Inside Boston's Luxury Brothel Scandal." / The Wall Street Journal [+]

A long essay on what it's like to live next to malevolent neighbors. / Electric Lit

Thomas R. Wells: There's no good reason for small countries to exist if their primary business is enabling tax avoidance. / 3 Quarks Daily

Some analysis of male characters who appear in Michael Mann movies, for whom nothing is fun and everything is work. / The Los Angeles Review of Books

Some paintings by Emma Beatrez, "the most intriguing of which examine prototypical cheerleaders and the spectacle of small town pep-rally bonfires." / Booooooom

Jesse Pearson interviews his mother about her collection of 8-track cassettes. / Apology Magazine

Trump often blames popular resistance to his policies as bad polling, but the size and scope of the Hands Off protests were far too large to be the product of faulty data. / Strength in Numbers

The Israeli military walks back its account of killing 15 Palestinian medics after video contradicts its claims that the victims' emergency signals were not on. / AP

Related: If you are in the US military, you are about to be asked to betray your own values. / How Things Work

According to a researcher, authoritarian regimes tend to break down when elites turn on each other when faced with an economic crisis. / Bluesky

Unrelated: Billionaire hedge fund manager—and Trump booster—Bill Ackman calls Trump's tariffs "a self-induced, economic nuclear winter." / BBC

Now that a second death has been recorded in the Texas measles outbreak, it increases the likelihood that we're going to see more. / STAT

Related: "The generation of physicians who are currently, for the most part, treating patients haven't actually seen what a measles case looks like other than from a textbook or a video." / The New York Times [+]

Trump is offloading the cost of disaster response to cities and states, which could drive them to invest more proactively in climate adaptation and other risk mitigation. / Energy & Environment News

ICE Air flight attendants say in case of a water landing they're instructed to ignore passengers and "make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off." / ProPublica

The National Park Service's Underground Railroad webpage is being literally whitewashed—sometimes not by direct order, but by low-level NPS workers seeking to comply with what they believed Trump wanted." / The Washington Post [+]

"Are we at the point where universities across the country must have presidents who are agreeable to President Trump or else risk calamitous cuts to their federal funding?" / David Pozen

US cuts leave Democratic Republic of the Congo—a country of more than 100 million—down more than 70% of humanitarian aid, cutting off potable water and HIV drugs overnight amid simmering conflict.  / Think Global Health

See also: "You don't improve global security by allowing the World Food Programme to run out of funds to feed 2 million desperate people in the Sahel." / Financial Times

International standards organizations are said to be a current of anticapitalism in the corporate stream. / MIT Press Reader

Splitting more than atoms: Physicists form factions for and against a new, bigger, budget-hungry Large Hadron Collider. / Guardian

Economists consider switching from "gross domestic product" to "net domestic product." One big difference: Counting depreciation of natural resources makes petrostates appear less wealthy. / IMF, Climate Home

As states like Texas enact fossil-reliant energy strategies, a stark reality: New gas turbines are wildly expensive and difficult to procure right now. / Canary Media, Gas Outlook

Winter ice long visited by a dragon spirit no longer freezes; Shinto devotees blame climate change and disharmony with nature. / The New York Times [+]

See also: According to the company behind the initiative, de-extincting mammoths is a win against climate change—but it's almost sure to fail, and the money burned getting there would be better spent on actually fighting climate change. / Ars Technica

A forbidden workplace romance ends with a Major League Baseball player marrying the mascot—or, rather, the woman in the costume. / People

About 70 percent of adults in the United States say they are following news about the White House. / Pew Research

The administration plans to build a "war-fighting headquarters" in Japan to deter China. / NBC News

Donald Trump says he is not joking about running for a third term. / BBC News

We now know what a Millennial American president looks like, and he has a beard. / The Trend Report

Canadians turn "elbows up" into a movement rallying the nation against President Trump. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Corey Robin: Fear works most potently and powerfully when it threatens our highest sense of ourselves. / Corey Robin

Behind the design of a new Swiss passport. / SWISS Magazine

A tour of an "ultra-narrow" Tokyo hotel. / Spoon & Tamago

A round-up of the best things ever made by Microsoft. / The Verge

Tressie McMillan Cottom: AI is a stellar tool for demoralizing workers. / The New York Times [+]

Blocking the internet on your smartphone improves "sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being." / PNAS Nexus

Related: Easy steps for lobotomizing your smartphone. / She's a Beast

Former tennis pro Andrea Petkovic says greatness in the game is a question of tension. / Finite Jest

Unrelated: A new college course likenes heterosexual partnerships to eating disorders. / The Cut

This year's Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, reaches its closest-ever conclusion! / Field Notes, The Tournament of Books

Due to fatigue from producing this newsletter and the ToB, TMN is going to take the rest of the week off. See you next Monday.

Canada's Prime Minister says the country's old relationship with the United States, "is over." / BBC News

An alliance providing vaccines to poor communities says a loss of US funding could potentially cause a million-plus deaths. / The Associated Press

Scientists are stunned that a long-discredited researcher will conduct a federal study on whether vaccines cause autism. / STAT

Researchers are being told to remove any references to "mRNA"—one of the most promising areas of medicine—from grant applications. / Semafor

See also: A poll finds 75% of US-based scientists are considering emigrating, likely to Canada or Europe. / nature

Hillary Clinton: It's not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it's the stupidity. / The New York Times [+]

The White House revokes hundreds of visas to crack down on students who support Palestinians. / NPR

There have been more than 170 violent vigilante attacks by "pedophile hunters" since 2023. / The New York Times [+]

Headline of the week? "Kansas babysitter checking for monsters finds man hiding under bed." / The Guardian

Walking through a thought experiment about: what if jobs were purchasable? / No Dumb Ideas

Related: A brief poem about not working too hard. / Futility Closet

A former Meta employee says a new Facebook memoir "puts a face to the horrific events and dangerous decisions." / rest of world

Today's books and films depict agriculture in outmoded fashion, rather than as "an industry that's ruthless and exploitative in ways peculiarly modern." / The Dial

Eighty percent of women are said to be wearing the wrong size sports bra "with wide-ranging consequences." / The Athletic

Amidst all the anime-izing of photos with ChatGPT, Hayao Miyazaki, founder of Studio Ghibli, is "disgusted" by AI. / The Verge, 404 Media

See also: The Tate Museum got rid of a Van Gogh portrait about a century ago because the subject's beard was "too funny." / The Art Newspaper

"You get really high and you answer emails." Pedro Pascal explains why his Starbucks order is six espresso shots over ice. / Sprudge

If the news is getting you down, why not join the conversation at the Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, on its penultimate day?! / Tournament of Books, Field Notes

The European Union tells residents to stockpile enough food to last 72 hours in readiness for war. / Politico

The week's long read: A reasonably condensed version of one person's seven-year saga of escaping Iran for the United States. / Outliving Iran

Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza protest against Hamas. / The Associated Press

A 19-year-old engineer working for DOGE once provided tech support to a cybercrime ring that bragged about trafficking in stolen data. / The Guardian

A round-up of issues dividing GOP lawmakers—including whether to acknowledge their planned tax cuts will cost $4 trillion. / Wake Up to Politics

The contact details for White House security advisers—and even some of their passwords—can be found in leaked customer data caches. / Der Spiegel

Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others ask the White House to block state AI laws and say it's legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their models. / The New York Times [+]

See also: A federal judge rules that a newspaper copyright lawsuit against OpenAI can proceed. / The Associated Press

A researcher says one reason people are making fewer babies is the "hyper-engaging" media found on phones. / Vox 

Four college students explain how they make "positive masculinity" videos for TikTok that are appealing to young men. / Rolling Stone

Two-thirds of single people in the US hold on to clothes that belonged to an ex. / Women's Wear Daily

See also: How to become a contemporary fashion critic. / Ssense

An in-depth interview with actor Michael Shannon about his R.E.M. cover band. / Bitter Southerner

George Saunders: "The first and only time I ever did acid, I looked down at my hands and noticed that they were not, in fact, 'flesh-colored' after all." / The Paris Review

A first look at Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne's archive at the New York Public Library. / Vulture

Russia agrees to a ceasefire in the Black Sea following talks in Saudi Arabia, then almost immediately demands new terms. / Semafor

Unrelated: President Donald Trump is gifted a new portrait from Vladimir Putin. / BBC News

Consumer confidence in the United States falls to a four-year low. / Al Jazeer

The US put tariffs on goods from Canada in the late 1800s, thinking the country might join the Union—instead, nationalist sentiment surged. / TIME

Security officials say "heads are exploding" after a journalist was added to an administration group chat on Signal. / NPR 

The White House insists nothing clasified was shared—so the Atlantic decides to publish the entire chat. / The Atlantic

There are few things more dangerous than firing a spy—and a researcher says Chinese intelligence networks are already recruiting ex-USG officials. / The Associated Press, Reuters

Unrelated: Everything you need to know about Elon Musk's new restaurant in Los Angeles. / Eater

Business jets operating at Mach 5 are becoming closer to "a workable reality." / Robb Report

Malcolm Harris reviews a new book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, who can "brook no structural conflict between social classes" and believe abundance requires no tradeoffs. / The Baffler

The average non-elderly American household only has 46 days of cash savings. / People's Policy Project

A paralysed man can stand on his own after receiving an injection of stem cells to treat a spinal cord injury. / Nature

From last year, a round-up of the 10 hardest dayhikes in the US. / Backpacker 

The winners of this year's British Wildlife Photography Awards are said to "celebrate the diversity of animal life across Great Britain." / Colossal

Photographs capture Mexico City's water crisis. / Long Lead

A trendy new way to microdose alcohol? A shot-and-fake-beer setup. / Punch

Gay men recall the kindly waitresses at Hooters who made their restaurants "a secret sanctuary." / The New York Times [+]

A Palestinian director of this year's Oscar-winningn documentary is arrested by the Israeli army after masked settlers attack his house. / The Guardian

In the fallout of a journalist being added to a Signal group discussing White House war plans: a lot of loathing for Europe is made public. / The Atlantic [+], Politico

Republicans coalesce around a defiant message despite the news. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Signal is typically not allowed on government phones, which means officials were likely using their personal devices—which are much easier to hack. / Today in Politics

Is President Trump a natavist or a neocon? He's basically being both at the same time. / Forever Wars

Unrelated: Heartwarming thoughts from an indie bookseller in the South. / Kottke

In China, income taxes collected from individuals were 7.5 percent below expectations last year. / Marginal Revolution

The DNA of 15 million people is up for sale after the bankruptcy of 23andMe. / 404 Media

A science journalist says the US needs a "reckoning" over its handling of Covid. / Vox

See also: A round-up of interesting things learned by researchers during Covid that don't have much to do with Covid. / The New York Times [+]

A brief history of "accelerationism"—i.e., the theory that human history is a small mechanism within techno-capital's history. / The Latecomer

Colorado begins overseeing legal use of psychedelic mushrooms in mental health treatment. / Undark Magazine

Architects explain how they restored the skylight in Houston's Rothko Chapel. / Architect

The amount of hair-loss content on TikTok is said to cause many to "think about their scalps too much." / The Cut