Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie took to the House floor Monday to call for an investigation into Israel’s 1967 attack on an American spy ship, giving new prominence to a decades-old conspiracy theory that has become a touchstone for critics of Israel.

“It’s my great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue, to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty,” Massie said. “Fifty-nine years ago today when they were viciously attacked by IDF jets and also after that by torpedo boats.”

The attack on the USS Liberty occurred on June 8, 1967, in the midst of Israel’s Six-Day War. The intelligence-gathering ship was stationed off the shore of the Sinai Peninsula during the conflict when it came under attack by Israeli forces, killing 34 crew members and injuring 171 more.

Israel later apologized for the attack, explaining it had mistaken the boat as Egyptian, and paid damages to the United States and the families of the victims. Multiple U.S. investigations, including by the CIA, have since determined that the attack was a mistake.

Still, the incident has become a rallying point for critics of Israel who claim the attack was deliberate and gained more adherents lately as anti-Israel sentiment has swelled. On Friday, Massie cited a host of U.S. military and intelligence officials he said had cast doubt on the outcomes of the U.S. investigations.

ATQUE: Remembering the USS Liberty – and why it still matters

Read it.

The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.

iPhone -> social media -> dating apps -> massive amounts of attention -> women aren’t happy with their locally available prospective sex partners -> waiting for Drake to text … and waiting … and waiting….

Pretty straightforward.

The Register.

Britain’s much-heralded scheme to attract top scientific talent has managed to attract a total of 18 takers, the government has admitted.

The Global Talent visa program was launched last summer following announcements from the EU and France that they intended to tempt scientists unhappy with their lot in Trump’s America and elsewhere.

But while the EU was putting up €500 million ($575 million) in funding for foreign eggheads, the UK could only stump up a dedicated pot of £54 million ($72 million) to lure boffins to Britain.

According to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), UK research organizations have managed to attract ten leading international researchers in the latest wave, who are expected to drive breakthroughs in clean energy, life sciences, and other advanced technologies.

This is on top of eight researchers previously announced by the agency.

The downside is that you have to live in Britain—or France.

Read it.

In Argentina, equine cloning in polo is no longer a rarity. It’s now a mature industry — although ethical dilemmas surrounding it persist.

Read it.

A fresh college degree used to come with a quiet edge in the job market. New grads had better odds of landing work than the average worker, and that edge held for as long as anyone tracked it. Not anymore. They now face higher unemployment than the workforce as a whole, and the gap is the widest on record.

What makes this strange is the timing. The reversal did not start with ChatGPT, and it did not start with the pandemic. It started in early 2019, before either one was on the radar.

Read it.

Remote work skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research since has prioritized studying the impact of working remotely on productivity and job satisfaction but neglected other consequences such as loneliness and mental health. Emanuel et al. examined pre- and postpandemic population-level changes in well-being among workers in remote-capable jobs versus jobs necessitating on-site presence (see the Perspective by Zang and O’Brien). After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable jobs spent more time working alone and avoided social activities with their friends, remaining more isolated both during and after work. This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely. —Ekeoma Uzogara

Except for introverts, of course, who were in hog heaven.

Read it.

If you’ve ever tried chatting with a public figure, you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”. They produce slick soundbites that sound smart-ish, and could plausibly be connected to the question you asked, or what you said. But the responses aren’t bespoke. It’s like they have a lookup table, and compare the vague topic and sentiment of what you said to their roster of prepared responses, and return the best match.

This is not unique to public figures. I do it. I think almost everyone does it to some degree. And the degree tends to correlate with how often they get asked the question. (The same way a webserver serves cached versions of the most frequently-requested, slow-to-load pages.) Since public figures get asked the same questions a lot, it makes sense that they serve most traffic from the cache.

The cache can have good stuff in it, but it’s never as interesting as interacting directly with the origin. The cache is stale. The cache is optimized. The cache is safe.

How do we bust the cache?

Wrong question. Take a step back. Why is it so important to ‘bust the cache’? Why does What You Wnat trump What They Want?

Albanians fight Trump resort with blow-up flamingos (The Telegraph)

This liberal woman hates that she likes Trump’s restored Reflecting Pool

The White House’s Latest Provocation Is ‘Grotesque and Terrifying and Juvenile’ (M. Gessen/New York Times)  Because it’s Trump. No need for a reason.

How Bari Weiss’s Free Press laundered MAGA talking points about refugees (Radley Balko/The Watch)  I give up—how does one ‘launder’ talking points? I suspect that Radley Balko has been hitting ChatGPT too hard.

White House Explodes Over Viral Video of Sleepy Trump, 79 (Olivia Ralph/The Daily Beast)  At his worst, he’s not as bad as Biden.

As Trump prepares to make his pitch to farmers, he’s haunted by his record (Steve Benen/MS NOW)  Haunted! The mind-readers at MSTHEN are hard a work crafting the Narrative.

First on CNN: DOJ sends prosecutor to observe LA ballot counting amid Trump’s baseless ‘cheating’ claims (CNN)  They have to put ‘baseless’ in the headline to make sure you kinow what the Narrative is.

Democrats ramp up plans to investigate Trump through corporate America (Nicholas Wu/Semafor)  The same ‘corporate America’ they keep trash-talking?

Trump auctions off rights to drill in Alaska wildlife refuge, but gets few bidders (Rachel Frazin/The Hill)  Nobody is going to risk their money on something that the Democrats will just cancel if they ever get a chance.

Trump Fumes as Republican Senator Delivers Todd Blanche an Ultimatum (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic)  Fumes! The mind-r4eaders at the New Republci are hard a work crafting the Narrative.

Todd Blanche Reveals He’s Making It Harder for Dems to Prosecute Trump (Malcolm Ferguson/New Republic  As Merrick Garland made it harder for Republicans to prosecute Bidens.

Trump says he asked Pulte to gut intelligence agency (Aaron Pellish/Politico)  No, he didn’t. This is just proglodyte propaganda.

Leon Panetta Calls Iran War ‘Trump’s Vietnam’ While CNN’s Keiler Calls It A ‘Quagmire’  I guess the Democrats are still living fifty years in the past.

Read it.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) relies on its primary L1 frequency to broadcast precise timing and orbital data, allowing receivers on Earth to calculate their exact location. Because the L1 C/A signal transmits at just fifty bits per second, every bit of this navigation data must earn its place. Yet, within this highly constrained signal, the standard sets aside Subframe 4, Page 17 – a 176-bit field broadcast every 12.5 minutes – for “special messages with the specific contents at the discretion of the Operating Command”. While the official specification suggests it carries readable text, the reality is entirely different. For nearly twenty years, this channel has acted as a global numbers station, broadcasting military ciphertext on a public signal to billions of receivers in plain sight.

Happy D-Day.

The War Zone.

For decades, the massive MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter has served as the Navy’s primary airborne mine countermeasure platform, dragging massive mine hunting sleds through waters all around the globe. However, the Sea Dragon’s days are now numbered, with the last 11 aircraft scheduled to sunset sometime next year. With the MH-53E’s demise on the horizon, we reached out to one of its former pilots, Steve Jones — a man who came to know this monster intimately during the Global War On Terror. He had plenty of stories to tell and provided us with a new understanding of the often misunderstood counter-mine mission.s

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Antigone.

This realisation that law could provide answers to questions by using reasoning, rather than by authority alone, has profound implications not just for the sophistication of law, but for the idea of what we might call rights. If it is possible to work out that something must be the law (in a given case, perhaps as to what is due to us)^[5] by reasoning from premises of things we already recognise as law, then it is possible to identify “law not simply positive [i.e. declared by an authority], but existing of right and coordinated and developed by reason.”^[6] And further, if what is lawfully due to us can be identified by a process of rational argument based on the nature of things (known laws being among those things but not exhausting them), then it might be possible to say that we have natural rights, and that we might have those rights whether or not there is any legislation that declares we have them. It is ironic that a society that engaged pervasively in slavery nevertheless developed a conceptual apparatus that now offers perhaps the most powerful basis for defending universal human dignity.

Read it.

While China has been pouring billions into its own AI infrastructure and expansion, it may also be funding an equally expensive influence campaign here in the U.S. to oppose the building of data centers — critical to advancing the technology.

The stakes in the AI are incredibly high, so high that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently said whoever dominates in the field of artificial intelligence is “going to control the world.”

While China is massively expanding their AI industry growing evidence indicates they are pushing misinformation campaigns in the U.S. with the goal of stopping or delaying the build out of data centers.

Actually, I would like to strongly encourage Gloria Steinem and all other women similarly inclined to have as many abortions as they can. (Think of it as evolution in action.)

Katherine Dee:

The premise that everyone wants and is owed a Princeton seminar is itself a fiction. An educated, literate public is a fiction. Most of human history, including the history that produced most of the literature and music and political theory we still draw on, took place in societies where the deep reading of difficult texts was the practice of a small, privileged minority. The first novels were written for an audience that, by our standards, barely existed.

In a perfect world, the world I hope for for my children, the university will get smaller, weirder, more expensive and – if can you excuse my elitism – probably much better. It will look more like Oxford in 1890 than Stanford in 2025. In 1890, universities such as Oxford and Harvard had fewer than 3,000 enrolled students. In those days, undergraduates spent a few years studying Greek and Latin philology followed by Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Kant, Hegel, Hume, and Mill. They read an essay aloud once a week to their tutor and defended it in conversation. That model is what the university will rediscover, by necessity, over the next decade – that is, the life of the mind. The life of the mind that so few of us really need, or frankly want access to. (Embarrassingly, I include myself in this.)

The Spectator.

College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion .

This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub and dicking around on X and Repl.it than in four years of lectures.

It’s sad, but how many people were attending school for “the life of the mind” to begin with? The work is and has been purposeless for most of the people doing it for decades, and they know it, and the professors surely know it, and the institutions have responded by pretending otherwise. When an assignment has no purpose, copying the answer from a machine is not a moral failure, at least from my vantage point. It’s more efficient than googling it, or asking the kid next to you, or buying the answer.

It’s also excellent practice. You know, just in case.

Read it.

In 1999, after twenty years and many tens of millions of books sold,[1] Bantam Books announced that it would no longer be publishing its Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s paperbacks. So, since these histories currently find themselves in 1999, this seems like a good time to look back on one of the formative influences upon the computer games I’ve been covering for so many years now, as well as upon the people who played them — not least, yours truly. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for me to finally write an article I should have written a long time ago. Either way, I hope you don’t mind if I step out of the chronology today and take you way, way back, to steal a phrase from Van Morrison.

Read it.

ou might imagine nuclear power plants as behemoth facilities spanning hundreds of acres. Nuclear microreactors, by contrast, could sit on land the size of a football field and power a whole town.

However, after decades of fraught relationships between the nuclear industry and communities in many parts of the U.S., building these tiny reactors requires reckoning with the complex history of nuclear technology and rebuilding public trust.

Microreactor technology for use in towns or cities hasn’t been developed yet, but many researchers have been building the case for its use.

Good luck with that. Between the Mountain of Red Tape imposed by modern micromanagement government and the dementia of modern Leftists activism, I will bet you it won’t happen, if an all, until we are all dead.

And of course it would do absolutely no good to point out that U.S. Navy ships have been running nuclear reactors that would fit into a Chipotle (and have never had a shred of trouble with them) for over sixty years.

Read it.

Picture this: eight men in their seventies arrive at a New Hampshire retreat in 1979. But something strange awaits them. The magazines are from 1959. The radio plays twenty-year-old news broadcasts. Ed Sullivan flickers on black-and-white television screens. Even the mirrors have been removed.

These men aren’t here for nostalgia therapy. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has something more audacious in mind. For five days, she wants them to live as if it’s 1959. Not remember it. Not discuss it. Live it.

What happened next should have revolutionized how we think about aging, health, and the stories our bodies learn to believe.

By week’s end, the men had measurably improved. Their hearing sharpened. Posture straightened. Grip strength increased. Memory and cognition perked up. Most remarkably, independent judges looking at before-and-after photographs rated the men as looking younger.

No drugs. No surgeries. No medical interventions at all.

Just a shift in context. A different story to inhabit.

Sometimes the old ways are best. I remember 1959 (back when Disney animated films were worth watching) and in many ways I prefer it to what we have today.

Read it.

The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk.

Full disclosure: Mark Miller was a friend of mine at Yale, and you could not get him to shut up about Xanadu.

Read it.

In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim?Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.

All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.” Either way, where do these exorbitant value judgments come from?

Tom Wilder looks for the answers through the wider cultural world that brought the violin to prominence after its development in the sixteenth century and laid the stage for it to become the most iconic instrument of Western music: a physical manifestation of “taste, refinement, and wealth.” The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D?18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.

Read it.

“Fare il frocio col culo degli altri”

The Italian proverb lands with earthy bluntness: it is easy to be generous with someone else’s backside. The costs are never yours. This single observation captures the heart of Gad Saad’s 2026 polemic Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. What masquerades as boundless kindness is often cheap virtue performed at someone else’s expense, luxury beliefs funded by taxpayers, institutions, or abstract “society,” never by the people waving the placards. The term Suicidal Empathy, therefore, requires a sarcastic interpretation, because the gesture is in reality neither suicidal nor genuinely empathic. It is a signal of virtue, which it self is a concept spoken out of the side of its mouth. This because a central component of virtue is that it bears a cost and that has to be by the one being virtuous. So the loan of someone else’s butthole for sexual gratification is easy virtue in more than one way.

Read it.

America’s missile production hinges on a small number of ammonium perchlorate facilities, meaning a single plant accident can bring output to a standstill; a concentration risk that has no real equivalent elsewhere in the defense industrial base. AP production relies on narrow workforce pipelines for specialized energetics handling, layered environmental and explosives permitting, and purpose-built manufacturing equipment. Each of these inputs is hard to duplicate quickly, even with dedicated funding, which is why decades of rhetoric about supply chain expansion have produced so few second sources in practice.

Notice the significance of ‘environmental and explosives permittint’.

Chronicle of Higher Eduction.

Funny how many articles in the CHE moan about how students can’t do this or that, but none mention how much teachers can’t teach.

Read it.

In a rigorous blind study, law professors overwhelmingly preferred AI-generated answers to student legal questions over answers written by fellow law professors—and flagged the AI answers as potentially misleading or harmful far less often.

Naval News.

China is launching submarines at a pace unmatched by any other nation. Its latest design, a distinctive and innovative vessel that dispenses with the traditional sail, marks another step in the evolution of an increasingly capable and technologically advanced submarine force. With little official information available, understanding the purpose and capabilities of this new class depends largely on intelligence gathering and expert analysis.

As Western navies struggle to build more than one or two submarines concurrently, China continues to pump them out at an increasing rate. They have launched around 15-20 in the past five years, including at least 8 new classes.

The latest, a previously unreported and unexpected type, has just been observed in Shanghai. The large, streamlined boat is noteworthy for its futuristic ‘sailless’ design.

Guess which one is the Official Person of Color.

The Telegraph (UK).

When a keyboardist fell ill in the middle of a concert in Australia, it seemed that the performance would have to be abandoned.

That was until a young member of the audience came forward and offered to fill in.

The medical emergency happened during a screening in Sydney of La La Land, in which a live orchestra performed the film’s score as the movie played on a giant screen.

…
Step forward, Sterling Nasa – a 21-year-old who plays organ and piano and also teaches bagpipes.

Once on stage, he took the place of the absent keyboardist and showed himself to be more than up to the challenge.

People can surprise you.

The Intelligent Conservative.

Numbers can lead us astray, so let us consider some anecdotal evidence—my own testimony—which suggests that most lawyers are illiterate, or perhaps that lawyers have to try really hard to become literate or to avoid losing their literacy.

I am a lawyer, one who considers himself literate but increasingly in danger of becoming illiterate the longer I remain in my chosen profession. My hope is that literacy stays with you, that if you “frontload,” as it were, you can build a wide enough base to allow for slack in later years.

In 2013, I made an effort to overcome the time restrictions of my job to read through several canonical texts of Western Civilization. For the most part I undertook a book a week, although, because of scheduling constraints, I read what I took to be the most important or most famous sections of the lengthier books and volumes such as Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a work that would require years of study to fully appreciate. I found myself, on many Thursday evenings, reading so rapidly to finish the text at hand that I could not enjoy myself or absorb the nuances and complexities established by the author.

I’d say it depends on their undergraduate major.

Maheen:

This is the foundational idea of Stoic philosophy, stated most clearly by the former slave and Stoic teacher Epictetus, who was one of Marcus’s primary influences:

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

The practice is deceptively simple: before any situation that causes you distress, draw a line. On one side, everything you can directly control — your response, your effort, your attention, your values. On the other, everything you cannot — other people’s opinions, outcomes, the past, the weather, the economy, what happens after you die.

Stoics do not say the second category doesn’t matter. They say that directing your energy toward it is structurally irrational — it cannot change the outcome and it costs you the energy you need for the first category.

Read it.

In 1972, Italian singer-songwriter Adriano Celentano released a song that defied linguistic norms, confused listeners, and yet became an international sensation. The song, “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” is an energetic, rhythm-driven track that sounds like English but is, in fact, complete gibberish. This bizarre yet brilliant creation was Celentano’s experiment to showcase the barriers of communication and highlight how language can sometimes be meaningless in music.

If you are curious how English sounds to people who don’t speak English, here’s our chance. (There is, of course, a YouTube video.)

Read it.

The leading explanation for how the Moon was born is that a world the size of Mars called Theia slammed into the young Earth and flung out the debris that became the Moon, and recent research suggests Theia itself never fully left, with two continent-sized blobs buried near our planet’s core possibly being the last remains of the world that struck us.

London Review of Books, a Voice of the Crust.

So where is all that cash, who’s using it, and for what? The answer proposed by Bullough is bizarre: nobody knows. ‘The number of banknotes is increasing, and the question of why the value of banknotes has increased so markedly remains unanswered.’ Central bankers don’t have much interest in the question. It is immensely valuable for any country to be able to produce currency that’s in worldwide demand: for the cost of printing a few bits of paper, a developed economy receives billions of dollars of value in pounds, dollars or euros. This is called seigniorage, and central bankers are as keen as anyone else on what is in effect free money. But the incuriosity they’ve developed around the question is remarkable. Especially when you home in on what all that cash is actually being used for. According to the Financial Action Task Force, which was set up in 1989 to fight financial crime at a global level, ‘it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the total amount of cash physically transported for money laundering purposes globally is in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.’ This seems to be the amazing answer to the question of the missing cash: it’s being used in criminal transactions.

One thing that comes clear in the article, and which the article appears to ignore, is that money laundering is totally a problem for government; no private citizen or business gives a damn where you got your money. And the reason governments worry about where you got your money is becuase they want to steal as much of it as possible from you through taxation. Who hates billionaires the most? Politicians, who don’t think that they are getting their Fair Share of Jeff Bezos’ money.

The rules are extensive, complicated and very expensive to transgress. The result is that in the US alone, banks file ten thousand SARs every single day. That’s 3.8 million reports a year. It is impossible for the authorities to act on every one of those. The outcome is a system that flags so much activity it functionally resembles one that doesn’t flag any activity at all. The scale of the system is flaw number three: all of this is extraordinarily expensive. Compliance – the process of following the rules – costs $206 billion a year globally, according to the research company LexisNexis. That’s a lot of money for a system that looks in the wrong place, doesn’t work even when it’s looking in the right place, and causes enormous amounts of friction to the law-abiding, who are the ones who ultimately bear the cost. Its processes are hugely intrusive (Bullough rightly wonders at how little fuss there is over the privacy implications of SARs), create bureaucratic obstacles to ordinary citizens and businesses, and don’t do what they are supposed to do: prevent money laundering.

Not to mention the eternal truth that evolution works even when you don’t want it to. All of this regulatory friction affects mostly the innocent bystanders, and rarely touches the objects of government affection. Natural selection works even faster in a hostile environment than in a comfortable one; all that these regulations do is speed up the process of eliminating the least clever.

Read it.

More than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the government since President Donald Trump returned to office, a 17% drop that has thinned legal staff across major agencies and pushed Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups to absorb the displaced talent.

Sounds as if we are getting rid of the right 10,000. A good start.

Read it.

Florida is probably going to end residential property tax (on first 250k of value, growing to 500k of value), thus making the state an even-more attractive place to live. DeSantis is cleverly proposing that new out-of-state purchasers will have to pay 5 years of property tax before they “graduate” into the tax-free category. I suspect that this actually will accelerate migration into Florida, as new buyers will want to get the clock started earlier rather than later. In short: invest now and reap benefits later.

Israel, a country run and populated by the world’s most brilliant fools, have taken exactly the opposite approach. The first 10 years of Israeli tax residency comes with zero include tax on foreign-source income (though every dime must be reported). AND if you move in before the end of 2026, you are tax exempt for the first $250k of Israeli income as well for 2 years (tapering off to zero).

But after that, Israel will tax you in full. And unlike many other countries, the Israelis are incredibly good at collecting whatever they think is due. Immigrants do not get away with the kinds of nonsense that immigrants to the United States do: quite the contrary.

So: move to Israel, and get seized – in the long run. Move to Florida, pay the entrance fee, and it is smooth sailing from there.

This is not a hypothetical tradeoff. I know a lot of people who choose between Florida and Israel. It is a common dilemma. Florida now has more Jews than the entire New York/NJ area! And I am quite sure that this trend will accelerate with DeSantis’ initiative.

Read it.

In our cells, cytoskeletal proteins called tubulins snap onto each other to form soaring tubular arches and rails, capable of spanning entire cells, growing at one end while they fall apart at the other. These tubes, known as microtubules, form and bloom and decay in a dance that controls many aspects of eukaryotic life. They handle our chromosomes and help cells divide. They carry machines and act as tracks for motors. They push and pull cellular membranes, turning them into useful shapes.

Now, researchers have found that these proteins are in those mysterious cells. What are they doing there? And could they be part of what, so long ago, helped our ancestors strike out in new directions?

Read it.

By now, the hand-drawn feature was supposed to be dead. It’s been 25 years or more since the talk started.

Back in 1995, Toy Story proved that CG features could be great — and massively successful. Just a few years later, Pixar’s president (that is, Steve Jobs) was boasting that hand-drawn animation was outmoded. “The characters we make are far more expressive, so we tell better stories,” he said.3

The workers who created Pixar’s movies didn’t necessarily feel that way. “My first love is really 2D animation, so I’d like to think it’s not dead. And I don’t think it is,” said Pete Docter in 2001. He argued that it has its own strengths, techniques that “will never work in CG.” The studio’s Doug Sweetland agreed: “people didn’t stop painting” with the invention of photography, he noted.4

They made good points. But Hollywood is a strange business. Certain decisions get made based on the buzzwords or slogans going around the corporate offices that day. If it sounds good, and it appears to help the bottom line, even a myth can become common sense.

Read it.

A recent post from Daniel Lacalle, “How Keynesians Got The US Economy Wrong Again,” exposed the widening gap between John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory and reality. Despite the confident forecasts of leading Keynesian economists, the U.S. economy in 2025 continues to defy expectations. The Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle failed to trigger the widely predicted “hard landing,” and growth has proven more resilient. Simultaneously, inflation remains somewhat sticky, but still declining, and the economy refuses to follow the neat, linear pathways that textbook models suggest.

This latest embarrassment for Keynes’ orthodoxy is part of a much larger story. The failures aren’t isolated miscalculations but the predictable result of a flawed framework that policymakers have clung to for decades. Keynesian economics didn’t just “get it wrong” in 2025, but has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promises for over forty years. And the consequences are becoming impossible to ignore.

At its core, Keynesian economics is deceptively simple. When demand for the private sector falls, the government should borrow and spend to fill the gap. The idea is that temporary fiscal stimulus injections will smooth business cycles, reduce unemployment, and quickly return the economy to full capacity.

Read it.

I once had a job interview for a backend position. Their stack was Node.js, MySQL, nothing exotic. The interviewer asked: “If you have an array containing a million entries, how would you sort the data by name?”

My immediate thought was: If you have a JavaScript array with a million entries, you’re certainly doing something wrong.

The interviewer continued: “There are multiple fields that you should be able to sort by.”

This felt like a trick question. Surely the right answer was to explain why you shouldn’t be sorting millions of records in JavaScript. Pagination, database indexing, server-side filtering. So I said exactly that.

…

My crime? Prioritizing real-world efficiency over theatrical scale. The interviewer didn’t see a practical engineer, he saw a candidate who “lacked vision.”

I wish I had known this when I was interviewing for jobs. It would have saved me a lot of grief.

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Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.

They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.

That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.

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Researchers at the University of Vermont have found a new way to understand language, challenging a major assumption in psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that has guided research for more than 70 years.

Their study, published in Science Advances, presents “ousiometrics,” a quantitative approach to studying essential meaning. The work suggests that language is not organized mainly around emotion, but around a deeper pattern shaped by power, danger, and order.

The central finding is striking: across language, humans consistently lean toward safety.

Never trust any ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.