The Freedom 250 concert series, pitched as a “Great American State Fair” to take place on the National Mall over 16 days in July, looks like an enjoyable American birthday boozathon featuring a variety of contemporary and oldschool musical acts. When i…

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Paul Lagier built a tiny note-taking device with an e-ink display, a couple of buttons, and no significant functionality except recording what you say to it, organizing and playing it back, and sending you the text of it.

“Just press a button, speak, and the device saves everything directly onto the SD card,” Lagier writes. “Once connected to WiFi, it ca…

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The US Layoffs Tracker is updated daily with the latest disclosures under the WARN Act, which requires employers with 100 or more workers to give 60 days notice before major layoffs or site closures. Though only a portion of the countless people fired, made redundant, pushed into resignation or otherwise removed from…

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In January 2025, a woman who writes under the byline Heather Jane got a Google Alert: CBC had a new podcast, Sea of Lies, about her father. He is Albert Walker, the man the British press called the “Rolex Killer.” Walker embezzled millions from Canadian clients, fled to the UK with her teenage sister, assumed the identity of a man …

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This weekend’s Blue Moon, the second full moon in one month, is also a micromoon, because it is at the moon’s apogee, the furthest point from Earth in its orbit. The best moment to catch it, writes EarthSky, is just before 4 a.m. Sunday morning in Central Daylight Time.

It won’t be so small you’ll have trouble finding it, assuming the weather coopera…

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Her wedding necklace cost $75,000. She died guarding a worthless mine

Ellsworth Toohey / 3:04 pm PT Fri May 29, 2026

In Mar…

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The anti-vaccine crowd spent years trying to rebrand measles as a harmless childhood inconvenience. Texas just supplied the hospital records.

In a study published yesterday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, state and federal researchers provided a detailed postmortem of last year’s massive multi-state measles outbreak that mushroomed out of West Texas. The data reveals a disease that’s far from just a rash, with about 20 percent of people—mostly younger children—being hospitalized.

“The outcomes experienced by patients hospitalized during this outbreak underscore the seriousness of measles infection and highlight that measles can cause life-threatening complications affecting multiple organ systems and place significant stress on patients and health care systems,” the authors conclude.

By the end of the outbreak, there were 762 outbreak-related measles cases in Texas alone. The new analysis focused on 325 cases in the outbreak’s first three months (January 20 to March 18, 2025). Of those, at least 60 were hospitalized (18.5 percent). The researchers collected medical and case information from 54 of the hospitalized patients. All of them had no record of being vaccinated.

ArsTechnica

That is what measles does when vaccination rates fall far enough for it to come back. It does not arrive as a debating point. It arrives as a highly contagious respiratory virus that can wreck multiple organ systems and make a pediatric hospital very busy.

The old miracle was not that measles became harmless. The old miracle was that vaccines made Americans forget how dangerous it was.

In March 1935, Sue Bonnie pushed through three feet of snow to her friend’s cabin on Fryer Hill outside Leadville, Colorado. She and Tom French broke a window and found 80-year-old Baby Doe Tabor dead on the cabin floor, partially clothed, arms flung out, her body frozen stiff into a cross.

Fifty years earlier, Baby Doe had been one of the richest women …

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President Trump had his name added to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, having stacked its board with cronies, then closed the center for “renovations” after credible performers began giving the fabled institution a wide berth. A judge today ordered Trump’s name removed from the center, ruled that only Co…

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OK Nintendo is a full-album cover of Radiohead’s seminal 1997 release OK Computer. Instead of Thom Yorke’s plaintive, soaring vocals, we have samples from Mario Kart and other N64 classics. Arranged by on4word, there’s a companion album at Bandcamp: “Nintendo 64 Music from a parallel universe.” [via Kottke]

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Horror movie Backrooms is set to become A24’s biggest hit, with $10.4 million clipping through in preview screenings, earning back its production budget, and signaling a $40-50 million opening weekend. Alex Garland’s “Civil War,” the company’s previous top earner, made $2.9 million in previews.

Adapted by Kane Parsons from his own low-budget, h…

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Researchers at Kyoto University Hospital have begun the first human trial of TRG-035, a drug meant to grow new teeth in people who are missing them. Humans keep a set of dormant tooth buds left over after the adult teeth come in, but a protein holds them switched off for life. The drug blocks that protein, which the research…

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The second annual Oscar Mayer Wienie 500 is eleven innuendo-packed minutes of giant hot dogs racing around Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is more or less what we call fine art in America.

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The pyramids used to be smooth, white, and blinding in the sun. Now they look like giant ancient staircases, and the usual explanation is that people stole the good bits. History for Granite says the truth is messier and far more interesting.

The simple story is that people stripped the pyramids for b…

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An AI consultant told Axios that one of their clients “recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month” on Claude, the Anthropic AI assistant, because nobody had capped how much its employees could run on the licenses they were given.

Corporate leaders “are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is deliverin…

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A lot of California’s problems are made worse when homes and storefronts become investments rather than places where people live, work, shop, and gather. San Diego’s Measure A is a vacancy tax aimed at one very expensive form of killing communities for personal gain.

San Diego residents will vote on Measure A next week, a controversial tax that would charge homeowners if their properties are vacant for more than 182 days a year. If passed, it would go into effect in 2027 and charge up to $8,000 the first year and $10,000 the next, with additional fees for commercial property owners. All the revenue would go into the city’s general fund.

It could amount to 5,140 homes that qualify for the tax, the measure says, resulting in about $24 million generated each year.

SF Gate

I will be watching this one because vacancy taxes are one of those ideas California should take more seriously.

A vacant home in a housing crisis is not neutral. It is a locked box where a home should be. The same logic applies to commercial space. Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade is a perfect example. I once owned a theater there, and watched up close as the area tried to turn itself into a high-end, LVMH-powered shopping experience. The rents went up, the things that actually made the Promenade feel alive got pushed out, and then the economy proved unwilling to support the expensive fantasy. The start-ups left, the office space sat vacant, the restaurants and storefronts starved.

What followed was the familiar landlord standoff: empty spaces, high asking rents, and owners unwilling to rent for less because lower rents could mean painful refinancing, upside-down mortgages, and admitting the building was not worth what the spreadsheet said it was. The public gets the dead street. The landlord gets to preserve the dream valuation.

Opening the area to waxing parlors and day drinking seems like an odd rescue plan. Inviting Target and other big-box stores into the district does not fix the problem either. A street that once had energy, oddness, food, movies, performers, and reasons to wander does not come back because someone drops a suburban retail box into the corpse.

That is why vacancy taxes matter. They do not solve everything. They do not build enough housing, fix zoning, or magically restore every main street. But they do challenge the economic behavior that lets valuable space sit empty while the neighborhood dies.

Homes are for people. Storefronts are for businesses. Streets are for the community. If an owner wants to keep useful space empty during a housing crisis or while a downtown dies, the city should share in their profit.

San Diego’s measure doesn’t fix all of this, but it puts pressure on folks to open up wasted living spaces, and will show if the idea works.

If vacancy is the strategy, taxation should be the community defense.

The girl said she came from a place called Saint Martin’s Land, where the sun never rose, and everything sat in permanent twilight. She and a younger boy had been herding cattle, heard a sound like the bells of a great church echoing across the fields, and then found themselves standing by a wolf pit in Suff…

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It’s a rule of thumb that when an internet article’s headline is a question, the answer to the question will be No. But in this case, I think it’s a Um, Maybe? Probably?

I learned about the strange story of Freedomland USA from Frank Santopadre’s superb podcast Fun for All Ages. In an episode about defunct amusement parks, Frank’s guests, theme park expe…

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As time goes by, that “Mr. Wonderful” nickname just seems to grow more and more ironic. Billionaire and now amateur actor Kevin O’Leary is apparently not satisfied with having all the money in the world: he now wants all the money in the world and to destroy it. In true Bond villain fashion, he’s been …

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Mazeball is a simple website that lets you watch glowing, colorful balls bounce through a maze. It’s best viewed in full screen if you want to stare at something mindless and meditative for a few minutes (or longer if needed). I just put Mazeball on my screen while I sat through a boring phone call, and it helped keep my sanity intact.

The glowing balls …

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