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depending on your personal philosophies, you'll see the beautiful young women in question as empowered, exploited, or something in between. regardless of your stance, the hot girl economy will keep on running. the only thing that might disrupt business as usual is if RHRGs stopped buying in and started warning their younger counterparts about the trade-offs. but do they want to? or, when all...

After decades of translating literature from Japanese to Swedish, the career of daughter-mother translation team Yukiko Duke and Eiko Duke came to an end when Eiko passed away in 2024. In "The Joy of Translating is Gone" (translated from Swedish by Ian Giles), Yukiko reflects on their career, their relationship, and the act of translation.

The right-wing war on empathy. No more love thy neighbour as thyself. Evangelical Christians, right-wing academics, and tech-bro extremists agree that the great evil and sin of society today is caring about other people.

Top American scientists just lost their jobs; Canada is rolling out the welcome mat. Also: Toronto's University Health launches recruitment campaign Quebec hopes to recruit disenchanted American scientists Dr. Jen Gunter is headed back to Canada! Hooray! But: As academics flee to Canada, Canadian scholars are concerned it makes less room for our homegrown academics in favour of American ones.

The rights to Threads, a documentary-style drama set in Sheffield to a backdrop of deteriorating global politics, have been picked up by Warp Films, the makers of Adolescence, and will be rebooted as a series. The original trailer and [CW: a bit grim] closing scene.

For an outside-the-US person this is a decent (and very wry) explanation of the US political system's workings and the current serious threat. via Hacker News.

Humans possess the remarkable ability to flexibly acquire and apply abstract concepts when interpreting the concrete world around us. Consider the concept "maze": our mental model can interpret mazes constructed with conventional materials (e.g., drawn lines) or unconventional ones (e.g., icing), and reason about mazes across a wide range of configurations and environments (e.g., in a cardboard box or on a knitted square). Our...

There are 368 chickens remaining. Free them by matching three. (The source code is all on the page, which is fun.)

Across India, in metro markets from Delhi's Nehru Place to Mumbai's Lamington Road, technicians like Prasad are repurposing broken and outdated laptops that many see as junk. These "Frankenstein" machines — hybrids of salvaged parts from multiple brands — are sold to students, gig workers, and small businesses, offering a lifeline to those priced out of India's growing digital economy. (archive)

If we ask what cannabis can do for philosophy, on the contrary, I think that the disappointing answer is – not very much. It is a well-worn cliché that the halo of brilliance surrounding our thinking when we are high does not generally stand the test of critical evaluation in the sober aftermath. I do not personally believe that using cannabis can enhance philosophical...

Over on Ars Technica, long time space industry writer Eric Berger landed a 10 minute slot to interview astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams about what went wrong on the Boeing Crew Flight Test to the International Space Space. Those 10 minutes ended up being a half hour as the astronauts went into detail about how bad things actually became .

In the wake of our recent conjectures about a world without advertising, Slate's Ethan Ris says There's a Nuclear Option to Fight Trump's War Against Colleges. You Aren't Going to Like It. I like it.(archive link)Let's start by canceling intercollegiate athletics. This would be an immediate cost-saving move that would mitigate the pain of the Trump cuts. Despite the glitz on display during events...

Meeting Gary's favourite economist: Ha-Joon Chang (49m52s) Special: Can tariffs make you rich? with Ha-Joon Chang (10m10s) (Gary's Economics, YouTube)Ha-Joon Chang is the best-selling author of '23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism'. If you want to understand how our economic system is failing us, this is the economist to study. Gary Stevenson's book Ha-Joon Chang's books Ha-Joon Chang previously on Metafilter

Exceptional: Rat earns world record for sniffing out landmines in Cambodia. Landmine-hunting rat Ronin has set a new world record by sniffing out more than 100 mines. Ronin, a giant African pouched rat, has tracked down 109 landmines and 15 other potentially deadly war remnants since his deployment to northern Preah Vihear province in August 2021, according to Belgian charity APOPO. Five-year-old Ronin has...

There is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can't be predicted — and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. "The biosphere is creating its own possibilities," Kauffman said. "Not only do we not know what will happen, we don't even...

Walk down the block of a wealthy neighborhood at night, and you might be surprised by how much you can see. One uncovered window might reveal the glow of a flatscreen TV across from a curved couch; through another, you might glimpse a marble kitchen island and a chandelier. Of course, some of the curtains are closed—but many are flung open, the home's interiors...

But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, "Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show" at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as Mar-a-Lago face." Although plastic surgery and injectables...

Microsoft has made a lot of products over its 50 years, ranging from file formats and PC accessories to cloud servers and design languages. A great many were duds — it's hard to nail everything over five decades — but a lot were memorable, fascinating, or simply excellent products that would go on to be used by billions of people or change the industry...

Some TV shows take a while to "get good." Modern classics like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Community, and Bojack Horseman are notorious for "starting slow" and are often recommended with a disclaimer like "Give it a few episodes; I promise it gets good!" At the same time, some shows never get good. Recently, I started a spy series called The Agency, which could best...

Back in 2016, an oil painting surfaced at a flea market in Minnesota and was bought for less than $50. Now its owners are suggesting that it could be a lost Van Gogh, and therefore would be worth millions. (One estimate suggests $15 million.) The answer—at least to anyone with functioning eyeballs and a passing familiarity with art history—was a resounding "nah." The painting...