“Researchers have proposed studying sex in space, but so far, the only documented case is a pornographic science-fiction film called The Uranus Experiment. If NASA wasn’t so uptight, I could provide more specifics. But as an insider, I’m now convinced it’s true: They do have sex on the Space Station. Just don’t expect NASA to ever admit it.”
“Five years after the height of COVID, nurses are still fighting for their rights”.
“We’d be quiet too if we were them because it’s such a humiliating self own. Maybe, like many other pundits, they thought that Trump was just bluffing about tariffs. Maybe they thought they could push him in a direction that was purely beneficial to their industry. He might still back down. But at least for now, what the accelerationists did here by backing Trump is not just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, but methodically blow off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.”
What sea turtle tears may be able to tell us about the earth’s magnetic field.
“Sports betting seems to be following a classic American formula: Introduce a product to the marketplace, then, after the negative consequences become evident, call the government in to clean up the mess and put safeguards in place for the future. But this formula might not work for sports betting. The genie may simply be too far out of the bottle to be easily put back inside.”
Leave The Leftovers alone! (Update: They are. Good.)
The physics of the torpedo bat. Math-heavy but quite accessible.
RIP, Jay North, former child actor best known for his role as the titular character in Dennis the Menace.
The White House, or The White Lotus? Genuinely hard to tell.
“Trump’s decision to single-handedly hobble the world economy and immiserate tens of millions of Americans has presented his fellow Republicans with a stark choice. Do they continue to kiss his orange butt and slavishly nod along to every nonsensical whim of their idiot Golfer King as he leads them into a recession and almost certain electoral apocalypse? Or do they defy him, splitting the party and opening themselves to a primary challenge … and possible electoral apocalypse?”
““[M]oral incongruence around pornography use is consistently the best predictor of the belief one is experiencing pornography-related problems or dysregulation, and comparisons of aggregate effects reveal that it is consistently a much better predictor than pornography use itself”.
“You can think of this as the sin-tax problem of tariffs. You can levy a tax on cigarettes as a way to discourage people from smoking. Or you can levy a tax on cigarettes to create a reliable, long-term source of revenue. But you can’t do both at the same time.”
“A recent study of the nation’s 200 most populous cities ranked Houston ninth in the United States for naked gardening.” Saturday, May 6, is international World Naked Gardening Day, if you want to test that out.
RIP, Octavio Dotel, former MLB pitcher who played five seasons with the Astros and won a World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals.
Trump’s tariffs will make you a man again. Or something like that.
“So it’s those two groups all the way down. But it originates with no theory beyond a love of tariffs, a deep obsession with trade deficits and a zero-sum theory of dominating and dominated. And it’s all turbocharged by profound governing failure by which the entire country is now hostage to the degenerate will of a single man.”
“The world used clean power sources to meet more than 40% of its electricity demand last year for the first time since the 1940s, figures show.”
“In these simple culture-war arguments, conservatives found a place of easier agreement. It may be hard, with the various factions of this MAGA movement, for there to be any kind of unified stance on a historically chaotic economic policy. But on the topic of gender, there was no conflict: A manly America, in this MAGA vision, is a healthy America. In gender politics, at least, they were able to make the unfamiliar familiar.”