Not a surprise but nice to have the data: the Federal Reserve calculated that inflation would be much lower without Trump’s stupid tariffs.
On The Fuel Efficiency of Launching My Enemies Into The Sun. Incredibly nerdy and fun: does it require more power to eject a person from the solar system or launch them into the Sun?
There are no lightsabers in The Mandalorian and Grogu, a first for Star Wars films. There are also no Wilhelm screams in the movie, which is weird because I thought I heard snippets of it everywhere (even Mando’s blaster sounded a little Wilhelm-ish).
From The Mandalorian and Grogu, an extended loop of Shakari, a synth-y track from composer Ludwig Göransson. See also Niamos from Andor (composed by Nicholas Britell).
Down with -maxxing! Searching for the absolute best option isn’t always the wisest course of action. Better to make a good-enough choice so “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live”.
Out now: new Boards of Canada album. Get it wherever you buy or stream music.
The Rise & Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’. “The energy required to deceive is unsustainable. Reality is relentless.
How Should a Book Sound? And What About Footnotes? Footnotes present “kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go?
Slow blogging day today; I spent some time on the KDO undercarriage and a new little members-only feature for the Rolodex: a simple list of links to the latest posts from Rolodex sites.
Infinite Jeffs is an actual physical book you can buy in which “every one of the ~550,000 words in Infinite Jest [is replaced] with ‘Jeff’ while preserving punctuation, line breaks, etc.”
Andor loves a good monologue.
I, Sisyphus, Am Ninety-Five Percent of the Way There. “Honestly, folks, we are so, so close. The summit is largely visible. It is nearly visible.
Consider the Sister: an interview with Amy Wallace. “It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is.
Pope Releases Encyclical On Perils Of Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Strategy.
How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.
Radiohead’s OK Computer reimagined as Nintendo 64 songs, featuring reworked sounds from Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye 007, and more.