@charlescmann
Author of "1491, "1493," and, most recently, "The Wizard and the Prophet." New book coming out in Spring 2027 from Knopf. The background image is real old by now, but I like the pig. The avatar photo is only a few years old, though, so that's something.
They kind of stacked the deck in choosing the writers, IMO. Most of them are on the purple side, which gives the AI a target to shoot at. Even the Le Guin passage is uncharacteristically fancy-pants, with all the Victorian capitalization.
Someone I know pointed out that Claude can do a good job of mimicking voice and tone, which are important. But the best writing goes after bigger game.
I got one wrong. I thought, "This sounds like Cormac McCarthy on a bad day," and marked the passage as AI. But it *was* Cormac McCarthy on a bad day.
The quiz is fun, but in my experience a bit misleading. AIs can produce 3-4 pp of OK prose, but then go haywire. They should test longer passages.
The risk for babies who get measles under the age of 6 months to develop this within 10 years is 1 in 600.
Fascinating Nature study shows how symbiotic bacteria in insects--they provide key amino acids and vitamins--are shedding parts of their genomes, losing their identities and evolving to become part of the host organisms.
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Good writeup: phys.org/news/2026-02...
@tedgioia.bsky.social: Hordes of scammers are impersonating famous jazz musicians on Spotify. Spotify not only doesn't try to stop them, it actually is promoting some of the scams.
Ripping off jazz musicians--not exactly well-known for rolling in dough--somehow seems extra awful.
Impressive how Corpus Christi region (~500K people, mid-income area) has dropped the ball on providing itself with water. Striking quote here from a regional water official about how the best hope to avert disaster is ... a 20-30 inch rainfall (!). Which, yikes. www.texastribune.org/2026/03/08/t...
This machine kills fascists
they brought back fucking polio
@wsj.com: "EveryLife Foundation for Rare Diseases chief mission officer Annie Kennedy said the FDA has rejected at least 23 rare disease therapies since early 2025... 'This is a policy of death by technicality, these little, tiny glitches that the FDA is producing [as reasons for rejection].'"
I don't know Klein so can't say anything about where he's coming from. But I sometimes wonder if he's one of those people who got whacked on the head by a set of surprising (to him) facts early on and now sees them wherever he goes. It's an occupational hazard--one, alas, I'm all too aware of.
This shows a corollary: even if you try to do the reading, there's always something you'll miss. The only thing you can do is to try to cut down the number of screw ups to a tolerable minimum.
Excerpt from interview: Ezra Klein is talking about a commencement address he was asked to give, but ultimately didn't, because of Covid. He says, "The whole commencement address was called "Just do the work," or do the reading in this case, actually. The point I was making was that you just would not believe, as a young person going out into the world, how many shortcuts your elders are taking. "When I got into journalism, the idea that I would just actually read the Congressional Budget Office reports, which are not complicated, are not usually longer than 30 pages, but people are just reading the executive summaries, if that. People just weren't doing the reading, and that was a huge opportunity for a young person. "You could just beat people by outworking them, by reading the things that they had ignored, that they found too boring, that was not the part of the job they enjoyed. It happens to be the part of the job I actually enjoy, so bully for me. I read the book."
This, from Ezra Klein, matches up with my experience. There are far too many journalists for whom this applies.
Or to put it another way: I sometimes say my sole advantage, as a journalist, is that I am willing to go to the library.
howiwrite.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...
The Forest Service has OK'd exploratory drilling at Peβsla, in the Black Hills, a site sacred to the Lakota--a place where the world began.
How much did the Forest Service weigh the Lakota campaign to preserve Pe'sla? Its name doesn't appear in the decision memo. drive.google.com/file/d/1aiPm...
Excuse the language goofs ("THE speedometer screen," "more shockED"). I'm still reeling from the conversation.
And one day my 20-yr-old daughter came up to me and said, "Daddy, did you know a big warning comes up on speedometer screen when you go faster than 93mph?"
I didn't know whether to be more shock that a) she'd inherited her mother's penchant for this; or b) was foolish enough to tell me.
The Tesla absolutely has cooler bells and whistles. But we got the Bolt after my speed-demon wife test drove it and found herself easily taking the corners on little country roads at 70mph like the road-rally champ she'd always been in her imagination.
*Pres Donald Trump, #1 NAIMBY anti-LLM guy
*Quick, line up to get shoulder-to-shoulder with this heroic enemy of all-things-slop
We have a 2019 Bolt w/ few options. We got it for $26,000 and have paid a grand total of $250 for maintenance since then (I banged up a side mirror housing). No diss on Teslas, but I'd be interested to learn how you could get a more fun and reliable driving experience for that cost.
What's weird to me is that EVs drive so great--super-high torque, whisper-quiet, low centers of gravity from the heavy batteries that let them corner like a dream. We can't afford a Porsche, but our Bolt gets us 90% of the way there, as my wife's speeding tickets attest.
Sodium-cooled reactors are the most developed of these technologies. The company building the facility in Wyoming calls its design the Natrium reactor, "natrium" being the Latin word for sodium. (The element's chemical symbol is Na for the same reason.)
"Gen IV"--Generation IV--is a vague term that roughly means "supposedly better-designed 21st-century nuclear plants." There's a handful of types--sodium-, gas-, or lead-cooled fast reactors, molten salt reactors, supercritical-water-cooled reactors, very high-temperature reactors, etc.
Important news in the nuclear world. The NRC has approved construction of a new reactor in Wyoming--the first Gen IV reactor ever approved, the first commercial reactor OK'd for construction in nearly 10 years, the first approval for a non-light water reactor in 40+ years.
With all due respect to your beloved w., calling the Bolt stinky is odd. One of the reasons my beloved w. adores our Bolt is that she no longer gets gasoline odor on her hands from filling up the car and no longer smells carbon monoxide in the garage after she pulls in.
Thereβs a case to be made for deporting violent felons. If thatβs what my governor believes sheβs doing, she should make that case publicly.
Thereβs no case to make for trying to hide what is going on. Kudos to @burness.bsky.social for digging it out despite tenacious federal and state opposition.
Several times a year random people come up to me and ask if I am Stephen King.
Every aspect of this story is jaw-dropping and it seems to be spreading into more areas and getting worse.
Fallout continues from one of the most appalling cases of scientific misconduct I've ever come across: journal retracts 138(!) case studies as fictional. (Incredibly, it may have to un-retract one that is not fake.)
(New Yorker piecethat set off the current furor: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...)
He seems to be on his way to winning.
Al Jazeera chart shows that the US has bombed 10 countries since 2001: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Iran.
Chart from Al Jazeera showing the number of countries each US president has bombed by year since 2001.
β’ Tied for No. 1: Trump (2017, 2025) and Obama (2016).
β’ No. 1 in new countries bombed: Trump (2025).
β’ Fewest countries bombed since 2002: Biden (2022)
www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/...