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This headline makes my brain twitch Scientists just created spacetime crystals made of knotted light
Researchers have developed a blueprint for weaving hopfions—complex, knot-like light structures—into repeating spacetime crystals.
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Stephen Shore, Photographer The NYTimes has a superb article about Stephen Shore’s recent publication of phenomenal photographs he took as a teenager. I love this quote:
I wanted to make pictures that looked like seeing and not pictures that look like photographs.
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Lending Out Books by Hal Sirowitz You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.
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A Discovery Last spring, I planted fennel plants, thinking they would produce bulbs. Not so. I’d planted “herb fennel," a related, but different, plant. It produces anise-flavored seeds, which I’m adding to sandwiches, salads, tostadas, and just chewing on. Utterly delightful. I can’t get enough.
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Happy Birthday, Connie Smith Dolly Parton once noted that there were just three real female singers around—Barbra Streisand, Linda Ronstadt, and Connie Smith. “The rest of us,” she said, “are only pretending.”
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Strange (or Maybe Not So Much) Whatever you may think of Kevin Williamson (and I know
manysome of those I follow on MBloathesometimes have issues with him), this is sizzling:It is strange how excessive admiration for the will to power brings out the servility in so many men.
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Kate MccGwire: Art with Feathers 
MccGwire’s palette is ethically sourced feathers. (It’s worth opening the image in its own tab.)
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Flaco Jiménez, RIP 
I’ve always loved songs with accordions, concertinas, Hammond B3s, etc. Long ago, I even made mix-tapes with names like: “Songs with Organs, Including Accordions.” Flaco Jiménez was a major presence on those mixes.
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Insights from my Bishop I think this is good. Evokes Solzhenitsyn about how “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”
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Tattoo this inside your eyelids From Alan Jacobs (@ayjay):
Yes, he has horns and a tail, and he’s enormous and frightening, but he’s our friend. Why should we be worried about our friend? …
The powerful love and recognize only power. They’re never going to be our friends. They’re going to use us and discard us. Power alienates, and absolute power alienates absolutely. This is why the Bible says, “Put not your trust in princes.”
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Presented Without Comment Nick Cattogio, The Dispatch, “Boiling Frogs,” July 11, 2025:
Naming an austere detention camp where conditions are reportedly horrible something as silly as “Alligator Alcatraz” is postliberal Republican politics in a nutshell. On the one hand, it dials up the cruelty to 11 in the belief that maximum ruthlessness is the key to good policy. Beefing up Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deporting people en masse isn’t enough to deter illegal immigration, you see; to make would-be border-hoppers think twice, what you really need is gigantic carnivorous reptiles.
But on the other hand, it’s deeply cringe. “Alligator Alcatraz” sounds like the premise of a schlock TV movie in the mold of Sharknado.*
* or Kristi Noem
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We think we’re so smart. But we’re not. Matthew Butterick on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), via @ayjay:
Because here’s the thing: to me one of the greatest risks posed by AI is rooted in our failure of imagination: our failure to broadly imagine the possible forms AI (including AGI) could take; our failure to broadly imagine the possible consequences it could wreak.
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