Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entr...
We have "growth hackers" but no "stability hackers." "Disruptors" but no "preservers." Our entire vocabulary is oriented toward the new. We have no language for the equally difficult work of keeping existing things from falling apart.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/
Since the Enlightenment, we’ve been making our own decisions. But now AI may be about to change that, says Joseph de Weck, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute
"In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argued that the rise of fascism could be explained in part by people preferring to surrender their freedom in exchange for the reassuring certainty of subordination. AI offers a new way of surrendering that burden of having to think and decide for yourself."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/ai-dark-ages-enlightenment
The idea came to Moylan on a rainy day in April 1986 when he hopped in one of Ford's employee fleet cars to drive to a meeting at another building.
The guy who “invented” the little arrow on the dashboard that tells you which side of the car the fuel tank hole is on, former Ford employee James Moylan, died on December 11 at age 80
#automobilehistory
https://www.jalopnik.com/2061179/inventor-little-arrow-what-side-fuel-filler-is-on-dies/
Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
I was about to comment on how this sounds an awful lot like what @pluralistic has been advocating for.
Then I read who authored the article. 🤣
“In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers.”
https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/
The very best reporting and investigative journalism from our friends at other publications.
New, by @lorenzofb and me: We just published TechCrunch's annual jealousy list of cybersecurity stories that we *didn’t* publish but wish we had. This is the very best cybersecurity reporting from our friends at competing publications.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/these-are-the-cybersecurity-stories-we-were-jealous-of-in-2025/
Giant amphipod species Alicella gigantea, once thought to be very rare, is found to inhabit the majority of Earth's deep ocean floors.
One of the main lessons of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is that we must actively think in the now, and try to grasp new realities on their own terms.
As Christopher Finlay (DurhamU) suggests perhaps the lesson to take from Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, is as much abut the way she thought about the current events of her time as the conclusions she drew about them.
We need to be 'actively thinking in the now, and trying to grasp an emergent “something” on its own terms – a threat that is taking shape, but which hasn’t yet fully revealed itself', not necessarily trying to fit it into old models!
#politics
https://theconversation.com/how-hannah-arendt-can-help-us-understand-this-new-age-of-far-right-populism-269626
Lucinda is a member of an exclusive club — living heart donors, and is the only woman to have a baby after a heart-lung-liver transplant
In recent years, I have been asked to comment on the Middle East “impasse”, though I am no foreign policy expert. I am merely one of many humanists who mourn this tragic history and rail against the failure of the international community to exert the great influence it has to bring peace and ...
Peace and justice will only come to the region when Palestinians are recognised as a people with the right to self-determination, sovereignty and their own state. As true yesterday as it will be tomorrow.
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2024/09/these-are-the-things-ive-learnt-you-cant-ask-about-israel/
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