Month: August 2024

“Took its name from a pub on the nearby corner of Ladbroke Grove, the Admiral Blake, itself named for a man who, having been deemed “too short” to be an academic, became an MP and fought in the Civil War, notably saying he’d eat three of his four pairs of boots before surrendering Taunton to…

“Its leaders did what they always do when threatened by a new regulation: They threw a temper tantrum, in this instance threatening to block all news content in the state of California were AB 886 to become law. But that threat didn’t derail the bill, which kept merrily chugging along after Google made it. No,…

“Perhaps, for the smaller countries at these Games, the responsibility on each individual athlete weighs so much heavier. There are no second chances, no repechages, no other events. This, right here, on a breezy Friday morning in the Paris suburbs, is your window of opportunity, and if you miss it the pain can be unbearable”…

“Still, if you want to predict what will last I think you should look to what has partisans among dedicated readers—scholars, critics, genre nerds, etc.—rather than what merely sells well with casual readers. Specialists not popularists. And then what work seems influential among younger artists, such as work that seems foundational in a certain style…

“I’ve always been keen to the idea that most people pay too much attention to national politics; it’s more or less absurd if you know and care more about some Senate race on the other side of the country than about who is running your kids’ school” https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/join-the-pta-no-seriously

“Elections force candidates and parties to adopt campaign platforms and promote policies. They also reset the time horizon for officeholders, by eliminating it for lame-duck electoral losers, and pushing it maximally far off for freshly (re)elected officials. And, perhaps most importantly, elections provides a strong signal to everyone involved about what public policy choices will…

“The world of 2024 is not that of 1941. But you don’t have to look far among the extremely online today to come up with examples of people whose far right politics, one suspects, comes from a similar source: a broken personal life, or professional failure, or a baffled rage that money or success has…

“Since 2018, the chain has been using digital price labels that can change in real-time based on the mountains of data the store collects on shoppers. Kroger expanded this system to 500 of its 2,750 retail grocery stores in 2023. Kroger has been working with Microsoft since 2018 to put cameras on its so-called EDGE…

“The Online Safety Act is a curious piece of legislation: an attempt to corral the worst impulses of the internet, written by a government that was simultaneously trying to position itself as the pro-free-speech side of a burgeoning culture war, and enforced by a regulator that emphatically did not want to end up casting rulings…

“Nowhere, it seems, is the debate over the mass-breeding of salmon as bitter and polarizing as it has become in Iceland. Many Icelanders are concerned that sickly, diseased and fattened farm fish could do permanent damage to the country’s ecosystem by causing irreparable harm to the native wild salmon population. Some two-thirds of Icelanders are…