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Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth. [Axios; ungated]

Between 1996 and 2002, VH1 had a show called Pop Up Video which paired music videos with trivia and jokes that "popped up" on screen, mostly without controversy. Most of it is unavailable today, but the Internet Archive has a number of episodes taped off televion. Here is a list:Episodes 1, 2 & 3, featuring these videos: Tina Turner, "Missing You"; Sheryl Crow, "Leaving...

Journalist Robert Evans, best known for his sharp, sardonic perspective in everything from Cracked to Bellingcat to Behind the Bastards, live-skeeted his experience of the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the annual showcase of the latest tech coming your way (whether you like it or not). Lowlights of the bacchanalia can be found in a series of increasingly pointed episodes of...

"As one of Coltrane's final recordings this duet session with Ali is one of his most essential and unique. ... Coltrane had engaged in earlier duets with Elvin Jones... but in Ali he found a drummer even more willing to abandon terrestrial rhythmic boundaries and set course for uncharted space. Across these duets the saxophonist is at his most visceral exuding an overpowering confidence...

Wheeled luggage has become the one true luggage and makes traveling so much easier, but when and where did they come from? And how did sexism affect their acceptance?I remember traveling before wheeled luggage became common and carrying your suitcase around was exhausting. Today's post is to celebrate the wheeled luggage that we now take for granted! Wikipedia's history of the suitcase History of...

With Amis came a new kind of literary voice, and a public whose taste for it was rapidly inspired. This voice spoke of damage ("Damage is waiting. Soon, damage is going to stop waiting – any day now"), fear ("One of these days I'm going to walk right up to fear"), booze, junk food, pornography, bodily functions ("As I emerged from some X-certificate work...

"TrueFood is a user-friendly interface designed to unveil the degree of processing of food products, powered by GroceryDB, a comprehensive database. GroceryDB is part of a research project [Prevalence of Processed Food in Grocery Stores, Nature Food, 2024 (note:PDF)], that provides the data and methodologies necessary to quantify food processing and analyze ingredient structures within the U.S. food supply. By integrating large-scale data on...

Billionaire couple focus their fortune on conservation — and profit. In the middle of Tasmania (Australia) sits a 5000-hectare property once used for sheep grazing. But when the sheep farmers left, an unlikely buyer moved in.Wedgetail is a private company investing in projects around the world that restore ecologically valuable areas. It was founded by Lisa Miller, who purchased the Quoin in 2021. A...

Max Ochester discovered tapes recorded at Sigma Sound Studios for 'Young Americans. The tapes include an unheard version of a Bruce Springsteen song. He's trying to get the music to the Bowie estate. Back in 2022, when Max Ochester loaded up his car with 15 U-Haul boxes of reel-to-reel tapes he purchased at a Montgomery County estate sale, he had no idea he was...

In an ongoing series of images titled Not What You Saw, photographer Keerthana Kunnath documents a burgeoning community of female bodybuilders in Kerala. Set against common backdrops like beaches, the outside of a traditional Indian home, and lush, green foliage, the collection highlights an alternative vision of beauty grounded in immense female power. from In Kerala, Keerthana Kunnath Photographs the Female Bodybuilders Defying Beauty...

How a Cessna 172 Works A 20-minute animated tour showing the important components of this popular general aviation aircraft, using detailed 3D rendering.

A group of biologists based at Stanford has discovered a new form of life, unrelated to any known animal, plant, bacteria, archea or virus. Known as obelisks, they consists of tiny circular fragments of RNA, without a protein coating (like viruses have). These were discovered by computer-aided searching through tens of thousands of RNA sequences and according to the authors "they define the working...

Two short speculative stories in which pairs of women figure out some things about their relationships. "Twenty Thousand Last Meals on an Exploding Station" by Ann LeBlanc, published 2021 in Mermaids Monthly: "Riles Yalten has approximately thirty minutes before she dies, and that's just enough time to try the new gravlax place on level sixteen." "The Freedom to Decide" by W. L. Bolm, published...

A deliciously "naughty" (but SFW) examination of long, pointy-toed shoes and the moral panic they provoked. "Aside from the sinful association of fleshly pleasures, clerics were concerned that the long toe-pieces prevented people from kneeling in the approved obeisant manner."Can it be said they weren't responsible for the pestilence?!

A short comic about a farmer and a god of small things, based on a tumblr writing prompt and several collaborative replies.

Before being Rednoted (recently), but after sabotaging attendance at Donald Trump's 2020 campaign rally, TikTok users discovered Donghua Jinlong is the only choice when you're looking for High Quality Industrial Food Grade and New Pharmaceutical Glycine (and then going full dada). What does this meme say about TikTok, the future of free speech and the internet? Depending where you are, you may now or...

Indigenous doctors from across the globe point to the benefits of first languages in health. Hundreds of Indigenous doctors have converged from across the globe to share their tips for good health.

I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that's the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally...

I'd Rather Be Sick Than Eat Progresso Soup Drops Ever Again you may ask. is this real? but what is reality anyway

The 80s were long ago and, in terms of socially acceptable comedy, far away. (CW: Brett Kavanaugh and screen piggishness)Private Lessons (1981) Goin' All the Way! (1982) Porky's (1982) with Kim Cattrall Zapped! (1982) Class (1983) with Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe Losin' It (1983) with Tom Cruise My Tutor (1983) Private School (1983) with Matthew Modine and Phoebe Cates Spring Break (1983) Bachelor...