Andrew C. McCarthy via National Review:

‘Republicans and Democrats, together, should regard this week’s developments as the last straw.

There’s serious competition, but the Soviet Union could claim the title of modern history’s most monstrous regime. It killed tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions more. In the post–World War II era, it emerged as the mortal enemy of the United States in the Twilight Struggle that lasted four decades — during which nuclear war was barely averted in 1962 and the Kremlin sponsored proxy wars against our nation and our allies, killing thousands of Americans. As President Ronald Reagan declaimed, the Soviets were “the evil empire.” His Cold War solution was simple — “We win, they lose” — because peaceful coexistence with an enemy committed to our destruction was too precarious a prospect.

Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent, is a born and bred devotee of the Soviet system. He solidified his despotic status by orchestrating a series of bombings inside Russia as a pretext to crushing Chechnya. We’re now well into his third decade as Russia’s murderous dictator. He openly regards the 1991 fall of the USSR — America’s foe in modernity’s greatest triumph for liberty — as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Putin’s war of aggression and hoped-for conquest against Ukraine, like his war of aggression and conquest in Georgia (swaths of which he has occupied for nearly two decades), is part of his quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy.

And President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.…’

Steve Wright via Classical Music:

‘Laurel Canyon gave the world some of the most influential music of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell and the Mamas & the Papas were among the artists who gravitated towards the wooded hills above Los Angeles, creating a close-knit musical community whose songs came to define an era.

But what if their remarkable concentration in one small neighbourhood was more than a happy accident? A controversial conspiracy theory suggests that the counterculture’s unlikely birthplace was connected to the American military-industrial complex – and that the music scene may have served a hidden political purpose.

According to the theory, the aim was not simply to encourage young people to rebel, but to turn that rebellion against itself. By cultivating or infiltrating the counterculture, its supposed architects could encourage drug abuse, instability and scandal, eventually associating the wider movement with violence and social disorder. The ultimate target, in this interpretation, was the anti-Vietnam War movement and the broader challenge to American authority that the hippie generation represented.

It sounds like the plot of a paranoid thriller. Yet the theory draws on several genuine historical details: musicians with military family connections, a secret military film studio operating in the canyon, and a cast of famous artists whose lives sometimes intersected with some of the darkest episodes of the era. Taken together, these details have fuelled a story considerably more sinister than the familiar tale of young musicians finding one another in the California sunshine….’

Terrence O’Brien via The Verge:

‘During a rally on Saturday, October 17th, in Highland Heights, Kentucky, Donald Trump bragged about how much more powerful and influential he was during his second term. While listing off his accomplishments, he mentioned his decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario.

“This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that’s unbelievable … I called Google, Google Maps. See, Google wouldn’t have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass.”…’

Via Dopamine Shop:

‘A real store where nothing costs anything… The free fake-shopping simulator — browse, fill your cart, check out. Retail therapy without spending a cent….’

Rumored to be trendy in Korea. 

Adina Wise via The Atlantic:

‘The genetic changes that made the human brain may have made us uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer’s….’

A.O. Scott via The New York Times:

‘The works of the British art critic John Berger offer the antidote to our age of infinite scrolling….’

Bennito L. Kelty via Raw Story:

‘Any Trump official who sends armed federal agents to polling places this November could be walking into a trap that springs years later.

Federal law bars “troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held,” and the crime carries a five-year statute of limitations, The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reported Friday. That leaves the door open for an administration elected in 2028 to prosecute violations committed during this year’s midterms….’

Conover Kennard via Crooks and Liars:

‘Donald J. Trump walked past his presidential limousine, known as The Beast, after his rally in Dalton, Georgia, and appeared to be confused about where he was going.

The rally itself was confusing enough. He talked about a “good-looking guy,” but his exit was entirely different, as his security detail had to guide his cankled body back toward his limo. The Beast is hard to miss, but somehow Trump didn’t seem to see it, even though its door was open just feet away….’

Brittany Wong via HuffPost:

‘It’s Banned Books Week, and the stakes have never been higher: According to PEN America, a staggering 11,982 book bans were recorded nationwide during the 2025–26 school year — the highest single-year total ever documented.

Texas and Florida are leading the charge when it comes to censorship: Fueled by state legislation like Senate Bill 13, which increased local school board control over library collections, Texas had 8,193 book bans across multiple school districts. Florida, meanwhile, had 3,212 book bans, driven by state-level pressure campaigns and enforcement from the Department of Education and attorney general.

Many of the titles that conservative parents and right-wing lawmakers are targeting deal with issues of racial diversity and LGBTQ+ identity….’

Eleanor Burleigh via AOL.com:

‘Despite the White House insisting he remains in “perfect” health, Mr Trump fed the flames of speculation during a rally in Dalton, Georgia, this week, ahead of the November mid-terms. Addressing the crowd, the president made an offhand comment about Chinese president Xi Jinping, who he said “was here last week”.

In reality, Xi visited the US and met with Mr Trump during a three-day trip from September 23 to 25, around three weeks ago. The apparent blunder sparked a flurry of reactions on social media, with one user labelling him “Dementia Donnie”. Another wrote: “He doesn’t [know] what day it is. It’s gonna get worse as he goes along.”…’

Jillian Wilson via HuffPost:

‘Doctors warn that about 38% to 40% of measles cases this year have been in adults. Here’s what you need to know….’

Lisa Needham via Daily Kos:

‘People in President Donald Trump’s orbit have to be incredibly nervous about the Democrats retaking Congress and regaining the ability to investigate the vast swath of corruption that has been the hallmark of this administration.

Because of that, it was exceedingly tough to keep this list to just 10 of those people, so consider this a sampling of who will probably be facing an absolute grip of subpoenas.

And sure, Trump is likely going to try to pardon literally everyone on his way out the door, but that will only protect them from criminal consequences. It won’t do a damn thing to prevent Democrats from dragging them in front of Congress to lay all their malfeasance bare.

So without further ado, here are the top 10 people who will be most screwed in the event of a blue wave….’

Khloe Quill via Fox News:

‘A rare fungal infection that can strike healthy people is rising across the U.S., prompting calls from public health officials for heightened awareness and national tracking.

Cladophialophora bantiana (C. bantiana) is a black yeast-like mold that can infect the brain and contains a dark pigment called melanin, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Data from a microbiology laboratory at the University of Washington shows that detection of the fungus nearly quadrupled between 2023 and 2025.

Between January 2009 and July 2026, researchers identified 48 confirmed cases and one probable case of C. bantiana in tissue samples from 21 states and the District of Columbia. The median patient age was 68 years old….’

Cameron Peters via Vox:

‘Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews.

The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot.

“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.)…’

Isaac Arnsdorf via The Washington Post:

‘Power struggle erupts in Trump’s White House as midterm losses loom. Top personnel are jockeying for position as some expect Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to step down after the elections…’

Bennito L. Kelty via Raw Story:

‘Reuters reported Thursday that the order to limit Starshield, the military-grade version of SpaceX’s Starlink service that Ukrainian troops use for drone operations and battlefield communications, came from inside the White House, according to two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said people were killed when interceptor drones relying on the system stopped working. On Wednesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk pinned the limits on the U.S. military and “ultimately” the president. A senior U.S. official insisted to Reuters that “no such request was ever made by the president.”…’

Dr. Joel Zivot, opinion contributor  via The Hill:

‘Civilian prisoners proposed the firing squad because the law left them no other option. When asked recently why the firing squad, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s reply was simply: “No-brainer.” Historically, the firing squad was considered an honorable death for a soldier, while alternative execution methods like hanging were disgraceful criminal punishments. It is uncertain if Hasan considers his impending execution an opportunity to show bravery and exhibit honor. Judged by Hegseth’s rhetoric, an honorable, cruelty-free death for Hasan does not appear to be the goal. The violence is the message….’

Chris Hoffman via PCMAG:

‘As the owner of a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, I can tell you that foldable phones sound revolutionary until reality sets in and you realize you’re carrying around a heavy, clunky handset that’s rarely worth opening. After a year with my Galaxy Z Fold, the honeymoon phase is over—and I’m left with buyer’s remorse and a phone I rarely unfold. Some people are sure to love the iPhone Duo, but I suspect even more will prefer to carry around a regular iPhone after the novelty of a foldable wears off….’

Maurice Cassidy via Atlanta Black Star:

‘He spoke for more than an hour at Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport and made a chilling admission that no one could ignore.

“I travel with more doctors than any human,” Trump told the crowd. “If people get sick in the audience, they leave them alone. You know what they call them? Collateral damage.”

He didn’t stop there. Trump singled out a man in the audience before explaining how his team would respond to a nearby sick person.

“If that person right over there, he looks like s—t actually. He looks like he’s ready to have a heart attack,” he said in a clip shared on X. “They would leave him alone; I said, ‘please help him.’ They’d say, No sir we can’t leave your side.”

Many people expressed shock as the crowd laughed and clapped while Trump bragged about refusing to help sick people….’

Matthew Chapman via Raw Story:

‘MS NOW’s Jen Psaki challenged the media to nail every last Republican running for re-election on a particular rant President Donald Trump ushered forth on Wednesday in Arizona.

“Today, Donald Trump delivered what I would consider his most unhinged performance at a political rally I have seen to date,” said Psaki. “Look, I understand how easy it is to dismiss whatever nonsense falls out of Trump’s mouth on a given day, right? The nonsense is, after all, part of the strategy.”

That is why, Psaki said, MS NOW generally ignores his rallies and doesn’t give them any more oxygen than they need: “Because so often the noise is just that it’s noise. But tonight is not one of those times.”

Now, she said, “I happen to think that every single Republican in every single race in the country should have to answer for the things Donald Trump is saying right now.” And in particular, she said, they should be pressed on “a range of things that Trump said in Bullhead City, Arizona, today, including what he said in an apparent reference to the first strikes Trump ordered on Iran this summer … and the subsequent reporting that came out of the Pentagon.”

“Somebody leaked, some sleazebag,” said Trump in the clip. “They ought to go to jail and be shot for the rest of their life. They should be in jail. Leakers should be — in my opinion, leakers should be shot. They should be shot. In the old days, we used to shoot leakers. You know, leakers should be dealt with very, very strongly. They’re real to me. They’re the scum of the Earth!”

“This is not the most important detail, but there were no leaks before the first strikes on Iran,” Psaki noted. But more to the point, “Donald Trump says leakers should be shot.”

“Every Republican candidate should be asked between now and November … do you agree with Donald Trump that leakers should be shot?” said Psaki. “Everybody should be asked that question. Do you agree with Donald Trump that the U.S. government should shoot anyone who leaks information to the media?”…’

Nick Pearson via Nine.com.au:

‘Donald Trump has made a bizarre confession about his own health at an event at the White House. The US president was addressing a group of firefighters when he went on a tangent about personal vices. 

“If you don’t drink or you don’t take drugs or if you don’t smoke, there’s no problem,” Trump said. “I have other problems, I have some very severe problems. But those are not one of them.” The 80-year-old did not go into details about his “very severe problems”. “I don’t want to add them to the list, ‘cos if I did I guarantee I wouldn’t be here right now.” 

Moments later he tried to backtrack on his comments. “The press is going to say ‘What problem does he have? Let’s figure that out’,” he said. “I probably set myself up for that one. “I actually don’t know. I was just having fun to the media. They’re wonderful people.”

The president’s health has been the subject of much conjecture, with questions raised about various apparent ailments and odd behaviour. In the last month several videos have circulated which appear to show Trump failing to walk in a straight line, or slapping the side of his leg in an unusual fashion. Questions have also been raised about large black bruises on the president’s hand. The White House has said the bruise stems from shaking so many hands….’

Anna Rahmanan via Newsweek:

‘Sally Rooney has made a literary career out of exposing the contradictions of people convinced of their own moral clarity. Now the Irish novelist faces a contradiction of her own: having championed cultural boycotts as instruments of political pressure, she has seen her books withdrawn from sale in Britain following her pledge to fund an organization the British government has designated as terrorist….’

Ron Dicker via HuffPost:

‘Trump’s insecure beef with the higher education of the still-popular, two-term, non-impeached, non-convicted commander-in-chief dates way back….’

smccroskey via The Nation:

‘The Houthis, an Iranian ally vying for control of war-torn Yemen, hit the headquarters of the Saudi state oil company Aramco in Dharan on Tuesday night. That attack came just days after they fired ballistic missiles into the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 12 and further puncturing the regime’s carefully cultivated image of competence amid a sea of instability. These market-rattling attacks unfolded just weeks after an Iraq-based militia struck and damaged a critical east-west Saudi oil pipeline.

This sudden demonstration of Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability is the latest bout of regional fallout from President Donald Trump’s impulsive and failed war against Iran. The conflict hasn’t accomplished any of Trump’s war aims—to the extent that he’s able to articulate them—but it is clearly destabilizing the entire Persian Gulf region, with consequences that will extend far beyond the time horizon of the upcoming midterm elections or even this disastrous presidency….’

Terrence O’Brien via The Verge:

‘We knew that a number of big tech firms were helping to fund the construction of Trump’s ballroom, but we didn’t know just how much they were giving to the cause. Now the Washington Post published a list of all the major donors to the White House ballroom project, along with how much each contributed. In total, Silicon Valley and the crypto industry have reportedly delivered over $150 million for the effort….’

Laura Hall via BBC:

‘I’m in a Copenhagen bakery, standing in line for sugar-dusted slices of lemon cake, delicately plaited cardamom buns and golden-brown cinnamon swirls. When I reach the front of the queue, I’m ready to order in simple Danish. But then I hit a snag: in this country, there is no single word that works quite like the English “please”….’

Thanks to Abby, via Purdue:

‘Winds and rough seas near Nikumaroro made conditions unsafe for the 17-person Taraia Object expedition team to use transport boats from the Marin Mainiku vessel to the South Pacific island Thursday (Oct. 15). In the interest of safety, the Marin Mainiku may stay as far as a mile away from the atoll’s imposing reef…’

Ian Millhiser via Vox:

‘On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring the Bureau of Prisons to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Issued alongside a record 26 other orders that day, it was an unsurprising development, because Trump had made this issue one of the centerpieces of his 2024 campaign.

The fate of that executive order, as well as the US Bureau of Prisons’ (“BOP”) memoranda implementing the order, is now before the Supreme Court in a case called Trump v. Kingdom. And, while this case obviously has high stakes for incarcerated transgender people specifically, the Court’s resolution of this case could potentially have far greater reach — cutting off many cis and transgender people’s access to healthcare while they are incarcerated….’

Elizabeth Rayne via Popular Mechanics:

‘A controversial idea called qualia suggests the reality you see belongs to you alone….’

Ellyn Lapointe via Gizmodo:

‘The crabs are so oppressive that expeditioners won’t even be able to sleep on the island where the plane is believed to have crashed….’

Henry Abraham via Henry David Abraham’s Stuff for Public Consumption:

‘Last week I wrote in my Substack piece “Why the Emperor Has No Clothes” what may be behind Trump’s increasing profanity and lying. I appreciate McWhorter’s description of the three stages of profanity, but Trump’s profanity is more than just “how language works.” He misses how dementia works. One aspect of the disorder is disinhibition, an increasing inability to hold back thoughts, words, and actions which people can do under normal circumstances. Other signs include diminished speech, poor emotional control, reduced judgment (the Iran war, for example), confusion, memory impairment, and disorientation. Speaking during an event at the UN the President asked, “Where’s Marco? Where’s Marco?” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was sitting next to him.

A single mental lapse is not dementia. Multiple lapses, on the other hand, all point in the same worrisome direction. We can apply O’Donnell’s “sir” test to catch the President in a manufactured memory. We can even use McWhorter’s three stages of profanity as a test for increasing disinhibition. Look for Donald Trump to break the taboo against racist and homophobic language. That will be the best, and worst, tell of all. But perhaps no tests or tells will be needed. There were empty seats recently at Trump rallies in deep red Alabama, Ohio, and Tennessee. America may be awakening from its nightmare…’

Gloria Dickie via the Guardian:

‘[O]n a June day in 2015… Mitani and his fellow researchers were observing a cluster of the group when the chimps began to display nervous behaviour and scattered at the sounds of approaching group members. “All of a sudden, the individuals I was following just ran down the hill for no apparent reason,” Mitani says. “Chaos erupted. They started to run around and chase each other.”

That moment, in retrospect, was the first sign of what would become a years-long bloody conflict – chronicled in the 2023 Netflix series Chimp Empire – between a once close-knit group of chimps. In a study published this April in the journal Science, Mitani and his colleagues describe what may be the first “civil war” among wild chimps.

By 2018, two distinct chimp groups had formed in Ngogo. Nine males and 19 infants have been killed during the conflict. Scientists later found that the unexpected result of this lethal aggression was that female fertility doubled and offspring survival increased substantially at Ngogo….’

Passant Rabie via Gizmodo:

‘Somewhere beyond the familiar glow of the Milky Way, matter may be meeting its mirror image in a spectacular act of cosmic annihilation. A recent study suggests that our galaxy could be leaking antimatter into the vast darkness of intergalactic space, where these elusive particles collide with ordinary matter and disappear in flashes of energy….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘Convicted felon Donald Trump recently learned that Jon Husted was a pretty good football player, and decided to check out the Ohio Senator’s physique. Trump likes the package. I looked at his ass,” Donald said, before moving on to Husted’s hands, which he described as “claws.” Nothing says athlete like a good set of claws….’

Hadley Tomicki via L.A. TACO:

‘What does it take to scare someone in 2026? L.A.’s scare professionals have some of the craziest work deliverables imaginable: scare the hell out of you after you paid a small fortune for thrills during Halloween season. These people literally get paid to make you scream.

We talked to the deranged geniuses behind the mazes at Halloween Horror Nights, Knott’s Scary Farm, Zombie Joe’s Underground Theater, The Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor, Delusion, and the L.A. Haunted Hayride, asking them about their deepest fears, seminal October memories, and supernatural experiences. We also hit them up for their best tips on how we can make our pals pee themselves a little bit as Halloween creeps up on us.

These are just a few of the stories we heard when sitting down with L.A.’s most legendary haunt creators…’

Karl Mathiesen via WIRED:

‘Solar geoengineering could buy humanity time against climate change—or trigger a dangerous new arms race. A first-of-its-kind simulation offered a glimpse of what happens when geopolitics takes the wheel….’

Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing:

‘Additives with no proven cancer risk and levels below 0.5 parts per billion could skip safety review, including perchlorate and some PFAS….’

Beth Mole via Ars Technica:

‘Outrage has erupted among health experts over news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still eager to fund a widely condemned vaccine trial that would expose newborns in Guinea-Bissau to hepatitis B, putting them at high risk of a lifelong infection, which can lead to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and premature death.

The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director’s office told the agency’s budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC’s global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo….’

Joshua Keating via Foreign Policy:

‘Talk of “super intelligence” distracts from frequent screwups.…’

Kenny Torrella via Vox:

‘The humane myth of catch and release fishing….’

Via Big Think:

‘[A] flurry of philosophical and scientific papers has sought to assess how each generation of AI systems stacks up. Perhaps the most important result came earlier this year from Anthropic, the company that develops Claude. Using mechanistic interpretability methods, which trace the internal representations that AI systems use in computation, the Anthropic team identified a small and privileged set of those representations they termed the “J-space.” What distinguishes this from other forms of processing is that its contents seemed to be directly poised for use in verbal responses, deliberately maintained, and jointly accessed by otherwise separate processes.

Crucially, such workspaces have also been proposed as potential mechanisms for human consciousness. The global workspace theory — developed by cognitive neuroscientists Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene, and others — argues that information becomes consciously accessible when it enters such a workspace and is broadcast to the brain’s otherwise specialized systems. The discovery of a workspace analogue inside an artificial system has unsurprisingly captivated researchers working on machine consciousness….’

via BBC:

‘In 1940s Maine, a group of scientists built the School for Dogs, a massive facility to breed a “super-dog”. Things didn’t go as planned.

Humans have been a little bit obsessed with dogs for millennia. In the late 1940s, though, an enormous experiment took that obsession to a level never seen before or since. 

The findings would help close one of the darkest chapters in scientific history. …’

Anna Griffin via The New York Times:

‘“Are you equating voting for Hilton with trying to have a lesbian relationship? Are you equating it with grooming?” he said. “It manages to be both offensive and confusing.”…’

Antonio Regalado via MIT Technology Review:

‘Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly found the popular medicines reduce molecular markers of age….’

Dylan Scott via Vox:

‘A woman’s death last week near a Russian facility studying the plague immediately put the world on alert. This is the plague, after all, responsible for the deaths of some half of the humans in Europe during the worst outbreak in the 1300s. And it happened in Russia, a country with a long history of bioweapon experimentation.

After the Covid-19 pandemic — which many people, including many scientists, genuinely believe started with the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory — the worst-case scenario was obvious: What if this is another lab leak that seeds a global outbreak?

That’s not likely, for a number of reasons (the facility is very isolated, plague is not nearly as infectious as Covid, it’s easily treated if caught early). But that doesn’t mean our work with such dangerous pathogens has gotten any safer; in fact, it may be getting less so. The anxiety about the Russian outbreak is a window into two trend lines that do worry global health experts: In the six years since the Covid-19 outbreak, the world has been building even more bioresearch facilities, some in places where that kind of work has never been done before; meanwhile oversight of the science and the security measures at those facilities is struggling to keep up….’

Matthew Rozsa via Alternet.org:

‘Speaking with AlterNet last month, Dr. Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government at Harvard University, echoed Elias’ alarm about Trump trying to steal the midterms.

“I have no doubt that Trump is willing to order some sort of a coup against democracy to try to overturn the elections,” Levitsky told AlterNet. “He has shown over and over again that he is not a democrat and is perfectly willing to engage in really old-school authoritarian tactics to overturn elections.”

Levitsky added “We don’t know for sure whether he can get away with it. There are some troubling signs. One of them is that we’re just completely unprepared for a sort of radical seizure of power in this way. The courts have been pretty good, not great, on Trump’s efforts to sort of overstep his bounds on elections, but courts move slowly. And it’s just not at all clear, if on election night Trump were to order the seizure of ballot boxes, declare some kind of an emergency, mobilize troops, that courts could move quickly enough to stop it. So at the very least, it would create a massive, massive crisis.”…’

Nick Hilden via Alternet.org:

‘Garrison began by playing a clip from a recent Fox News interview, in which Trump declared that the price of oil is “going to go down like a rocket.” According to Garrison, “There were two neurological issues in this very short clip, both of them verbal. One is that he’s having speech planning issues, saying ‘going down like a rocket.’ Obviously, that’s combining phrases. He’s having a hard time organizing his thoughts. And second is an involuntary vocalization.” Here Garrison replays the clip, noting an abrupt sound Trump makes, explaining, “The pathways that deal with language are disrupted. We are seeing serious issues with language with President Trump.” What’s more, Garrison asserts that such vocalizations are “relatively new.”…’

Joe Wilkins via Futurism:

‘”Pentobarbital is not a painkiller, and when it is injected by the state, no one can say when a prisoner stops feeling pain.”…’

Lewis Dartnell via BBC Sky at Night Magazine:

‘Planet 9 is the hypothetical ninth planet in our Solar System. Has it finally been found?…’

Justyn Newman via PCMAG:

‘You’re not very likely to run into Wi-Fi scammers at home. Hackers could theoretically try to tap into your home network, but the chances of that are quite slim. Your main concern should be your ISP. Not only do these companies often lock you into their service out of regional dominance and monopoly, but many are also in the business of profiting from your personal data. After all, these services know just about everything you do online. A VPN will blind your ISP’s prying eyes and grant you significantly more control over your privacy.

Still, a VPN can’t stop all forms of snooping. Advertisers employ advanced techniques such as browser fingerprinting to identify you and your online habits. You’ll need to pair your VPN with tracker blockers and use browsers with built-in privacy tools for maximum effectiveness. That’s not to say a VPN is completely useless. It will make it harder for advertisers to maintain an up-to-date fingerprint of your activities. What it won’t do is remove that profile if one already exists….’

Suzanne Rowan Kelleher via Forbes:

‘Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio previewed a new U.S. passport redesign for 2028 featuring President Donald Trump’s likeness on the inside cover—as commercial passport services told Forbes the president’s image “appears to be non-negotiable.”…’

Ellyn Lapointe via Gizmodo:

‘The death of a 28-year-old lab worker at a plague research institute in Siberia has reawakened pandemic fears….’

Miss Cellania via Neatorama:

‘A horrible recipe can be much more than something that didn’t turn out the way you wanted. The website Don’t Cook That gives us 144 recipes that were actually printed in recipe books between 1831 and 1929, but should never be tried for various reasons. Some of them use ingredients we know now to be poisonous, like making expired meat good again by soaking it in potash or exposing it to hydrogen chloride gas. Others give preparation methods that are not at all safe, like preserving butter in salt brine. Of course, you’ll find ingredients that can no longer be purchased as food, like a refreshing drink that calls for sulphuric acid from 1906. And some of these recipes are just plain gross or weird, like the peacock cooked and then re-wrapped in its own skin and feathers. Oh, it’s not safe, either. Yeah, you can learn how to cook an opossum, too, but don’t…’

Luke Fountain via CNBC:

‘President Donald Trump is touting two federal cash-payment programs already underway while renewing a much larger $5,000 check promise contingent on Republicans retaining Congress.

The cash offers come as Republicans head into the final stretch of a midterm campaign dominated by concerns about prices and the economy….’

Tim Lister via CNN:

‘Russian authorities are responding to an incident in which a suspected dangerous infection was released as a result of a laboratory accident in Siberia and a researcher died.

The incident occurred at the Anti-Plague Research Institute in Shelekhov, near Irkutsk, according to Russian state media TASS.

It is unclear exactly what was released, according to the state agency that handles infectious disease, Rospotrebnadzor. One person – a laboratory worker – is said to have died in the incident after being diagnosed with a pneumonia of “unknown” origin.

…The head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, Alexei Tsydenov, said earlier that the employee – a 28-year old woman – died “possibly from the plague.” He also noted that “there are no plague outbreaks” in Buryatia….’

Matthew Rozsa via Alternet.org:

‘Back in May, a group of 36 health professionals wrote an open letter to Congress warning that President Donald Trump is in a state of cognitive decline. Even though the medical and political communities were willing to call out President Joe Biden’s apparent decline during the 2024 election, Trump has received an inexplicable and inexcusable pass for his own obvious infirmities. Individuals are willing to sound the alarm, of course, but nothing has occurred on a systematic level to alert the American people to the fact that their president is psychologically unwell.

Below is AlterNet’s exclusive interview with psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly of Tufts University, who said that Trump is literally a “maniac” because he displays manic traits like posting on social media late into the night. He also broke down Trump’s tendency to ramble, his grandiosity and his obsession with his predecessor, President Barack Obama….’

Dr Abraham is a colleague of mine and, as readers here can tell, I share his perspective on the Orange Menace and repost selections from his Substack writing.

David Nield via ScienceAlert:

‘According to the 2025 study, carried out by a team from the University of São Paulo in Brazil and the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the lateral parafacial (pFL) brain region can trigger biological changes that raise blood pressure.

The pFL is linked to breathing control – specifically those forceful and deliberate exhalations that happen during exercise or when we cough or laugh.

In tests carried out on rats, the researchers found it can also do something else: tighten up blood vessels.

That combination of breath control and blood vessel signaling could be driving hypertension in some cases, the researchers say.

It might explain why so many people (around 40 percent by some estimates) still have uncontrolled blood pressure despite taking anti-hypertensive medications….’

Conor Murray via Forbes:

‘Six of Trump’s Sunday afternoon posts including pictures of the Kennedy Center’s apparently deteriorating interior—which he called “crumbling,” “dilapidated” and “grotesque”—as well as sharp words for Christopher Cooper, the federal district judge who ordered his name removed from the venue.

“The Kennedy Center is crumbling, and a great danger to anyone who walks inside,” Trump said in one post, claiming it will “only get worse unless the Radical Left Judge, with his Trump Hating lawyer wife, allows me to do what must be done!”—an apparent reference to the Kennedy Center’s latest attempt to place Trump’s name on the venue, which Cooper blocked.

He also posted a handful of Greenland memes, one of which shows a large Trump looming over a mountain, while the other shows Trump looking at a group of penguins (which do not live in Greenland) holding American flags.

Several of Trump’s posts were pictures of himself with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he hosted last month, calling him a “Great Leader” in one post, while another post brags that “President Trump gets YOUNGER.”…’

Nahal Toosi via POLITICO:

‘President Donald Trump has done a lot this year to live up to the criticism that he is reckless. But in a faceoff with a heavily armed, religiously driven regime that’s threatening a critical waterway, he’s acting remarkably restrained.

Trump may have no choice: It’s really hard to deal with the Houthis….’

Norman J. Ornstein via The New Republic:

‘If House Democrats don’t use every tool at their disposal to name names, kick ass, and stop further destruction, there will be hell to pay with the base….’

Abbi Henderson via BBC Science Focus Magazine:

‘New cholesterol guidelines aim to tackle heart disease decades before it strikes. But is earlier treatment always better?…’

Steven Levy via WIRED:

‘For years these billionaires gushed obsessively about AI. But they meekly went along when Trump canceled the term….’

Via Ars Technica:

‘Reminder: The “border exemption” to your rights is real….’

Jacek Krywko via Ars Technica:

‘Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn’t build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.

Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it….’

Stratego was my favorite childhood board game. 

Via Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:

‘Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalist beliefs tend to be characterized by lower education and substantial knowledge deficits across multiple domains. Building on research connecting lower cognitive ability to religious fundamentalism and reactionary political views, I theorize cognitive ability as an important factor influencing Americans’ adherence to Christian nationalism. Analyses of multiple waves of the General Social Survey reveal that cognitive ability (measured with the wordsum vocabulary exercise) is significantly, negatively associated with believing that being a Christian is important to being “truly American” and favoring mandatory Christian prayers and Bible-reading in public schools. These associations persist after controlling for education and various religious, political, and demographic characteristics. Interactions reveal these associations hold across survey waves and subgroups, disappearing only among the least educated Americans. Findings affirm that Christian nationalism appeals to Americans with lower verbal intelligence, suggesting an underlying role of differential cognitive resources not reducible to educational disparities….’

Adam Clark Estes via Vox:

‘AI can make you more productive while quietly making you less capable on your own. Offloading more tedious or mind-numbing tasks is less likely to make you feel dumber. The long-term solution isn’t necessarily less AI. It’s being more intentional about the tasks you use AI for….’

David Gilbert via WIRED:

‘Robert A. Pape, a leading authority on political violence, wants Americans to understand that the threat is coming not from the fringes, but from the mainstream….’

Abigail Wise via Outside:

‘Researchers have identified a sweet spot between fear and fun that explains our obsession with creepy night hikes and haunted campfires. We compiled a month of terrifying tales in our It’s Dark Outside series to celebrate that exact feeling.…’

Ed Pilkington via the Guardian:

‘Pike alive but in critical condition as experts call ordeal that unfolded in Tennessee ‘unimaginably barbaric’…’

Isaac Stanley-Becker via The Atlantic:

‘Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are readying themselves to fend off a Russian attack—with the help of the United States, or without it.…’

José Olivares via the Guardian:

‘These men in Maine, Georgia and Florida shared no ties – until they became casualties in the latest phase of Trump’s anti-immigration campaign…’

Marc Novicoff via The Atlantic:

‘The idea that Democrats could take back the Senate seemed far-fetched a year ago—but new polls suggest that such an outcome is now more likely to happen than not …’

Holly Baxter via The Independent:

‘The president seemed like he was struggling, writes Holly Baxter, and through the struggle he forgot to claim that the Iran war isn’t a war and that the $5,000 midterms payment isn’t a mass voter bribe…’

Nick Visser via the Guardian:

‘The ocean phenomenon could raise sea levels by up to a foot as El Niño keeps warm water trapped along the coast…’

Via RFI:

‘For much of that history, works by psychiatric patients were viewed through the lens of their illness. In 1900, London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital – the institution whose name gave rise to the word “bedlam” – held the first major international exhibition bringing together such works.

Its 600 pieces were treated mainly as medical records rather than art. When their artistic qualities later attracted attention, they were sometimes attributed to a supposed lack of inhibition among patients.

Sainte-Anne’s collection tells a different story. Works created in a hospital setting came to be valued for their artistic qualities as well as studied by psychiatrists, while the supposed link between mental illness and creativity has increasingly been questioned….’

Dustin Illingworth via The Atlantic:

‘These titles are no longer fashionable, if they ever were—but should you manage to read one, you might love it…’