Jason Pargin via Cracked.com:

‘picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We’ll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you’d be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We’ll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they’re all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That’s not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey’s monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built…’

Britt Peterson via BostonGlobe.com  from 2015:

‘IN RECENT MONTHS, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has used it; musician Buddy Guy has used it; Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson used it in grand jury testimony, as did his victim Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson. A friend used it in an instant message chat to me, describing her attitude toward her sick boyfriend: “i’m like STAY OVER THERE.” It’s called the “quotative like,” and over the last 25 years, it’s become one of our language’s most popular methods of talking about talking. The use of “I’m like” or “he was like” to introduce a quote, a thought, or a feeling has spread through English worldwide, from Jamaica to New Zealand.

One American dialect has rapidly adopted an even less by-the-book variation. In African American English, or AAE, a grammatically distinct variety, you can say not just “she was like,” but “she be like”—a version of “quotative like” with special powers of its own. At the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting this month, researchers Janneke Van Hofwegen of Stanford and Charlie Farrington of the University of Oregon presented a paper that found that “be like” is now so widely used it accounted for 20 percent of similar uses of the verb “be” among a group of young AAE speakers in North Carolina. An analogous group studied in the 1980s didn’t use the term at all….’

Alan Bellows via Damn Interesting:

‘The 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami remains the highest such wave in recorded history. As of 2016, no subsequent megatsunamis have been observed in that location. But evidence for multiple prior events in Lituya Bay suggests that giant waves occur there every 30-40 years on average, so the 1958 event is quite unlikely to be the last. The area remains sparsely populated, but trollers and adventurers pass through frequently. Anyone planning a visit to this remote hydraulic oddity ought to consider: if the gulls of Cenotaph take suddenly to the air, or a roar akin to 100 airplanes rises in the distance…’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘Not every surface in America is waiting to become a Trump product….’

Dylan Scott via Vox:

‘…[C]ook the produce that you can — heat is the absolute best option for eliminating cyclosporiasis — and to clean your raw fruits, vegetables and herbs as thoroughly as possible.

Wash everything with running water before eating or preparing it. Scrub the firmer fruits, like melons and cucumbers, with a produce brush if you have one. If you see damaged or bruised areas on your fruit or lettuce, cut them away. Even if a food’s package says it’s prewashed, Linder said she advises people to rewash it just to be sure.

Previous outbreaks have specifically been linked to bagged lettuce and salads, so you might consider buying whole heads of lettuce instead. If you do that, cut away the outer layers and then separate the inner leaves to wash them. For green onions, you should cut away the bulby root and the outer layer and then wash them thoroughly. Raspberries were associated with one of the first US outbreaks in the 1990s, and they are particularly tricky to clean given their bumpy surfaces; you may want to consider eating them only after cooking (to prepare a jam or compote, for example) or opt for frozen raspberries for the time being. (Freezing is believed to reduce, if not completely eliminate, the parasite.) And be careful with leftovers: You should refrigerate any unused foods that you plan to eat later within two hours.

You could also consider buying locally sourced foods, Linder said, because cyclosporiasis is more common in food sourced from other parts of the world.

If you do start to experience extreme diarrhea, make sure to hydrate very well to avoid dehydration. Linder told me that if somebody experiences dizziness, they can’t keep fluids down, or they have very dark urine, then they should seek immediate medical attention. And anybody experiencing those symptoms should get in touch with their health care providers and their local health department….’

Astead Herndon notes on Vox that Kamala Harris is quietly laying groundwork for a possible 2028 presidential run, including touring early-primary states, meeting key Democratic figures, and sounding out progressive and pro-Palestinian constituencies. She leads many early polls but remains publicly noncommittal and has avoided taking clear positions in the party’s major ideological disputes.

Her allies portray the 2024 defeat as an exceptional circumstance rather than a rejection of her candidacy: Biden withdrew late, leaving her only 107 days to campaign, and Trump benefited politically from assassination attempts. This explanation minimizes her own weaknesses and ignores her failed 2020 primary campaign.

Major donors may be reluctant to support another run. Some want the party to move beyond the Biden administration and believe Harris and Gavin Newsom would compete for the same California donor base. There is also a perception that private doubts about Harris are often muted because donors fear being accused of racism.

Harris nevertheless retains significant support among Black voters and women but that coalition is becoming less cohesive. Younger Black voters criticize her prosecutorial record and Gaza stance, while some men prefer a conventional male candidate and many women remain committed to electing a woman. Across factions, voters repeatedly express a desire for “freshness”  —  reinvented Harris or someone entirely new?

So Harris has not been displaced, but neither has she secured a clear lane. The Black electorate that traditionally consolidates Democratic primaries appears divided by age and gender, suggesting a fragmented and unpredictable 2028 contest.

Samuel Moyn via The Yale Review:

‘Why Americans aren’t celebrating the semiquincentennial…’

Ritoban Mukherjee via Lifehacker:

‘As I’ve explored these browsers, I’ve been mindful of the many security risks to contend with: Prompt injection, where malicious AI prompts are hidden in a website or browser extension’s HTML source code, is the most obvious threat. But there are also cases of AI agents acting without a user’s permission to access your logged-in accounts. Moreover, AI browsers can leak data between browser tabs and hand over user credentials on clever prompting without even using any malicious code.

But despite the risks, there are legitimate ways to experiment with AI browsers without compromising your privacy. In fact, most of these browsers have optional features you can enable to both beef up your security and keep the apps from having more access than they need. If you’re going to use an AI browser on your device, here’s what you need to know to protect yourself….’

‘To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir, the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day.…’ (Jia Tolentino via The New Yorker)