A pipe organ in a medieval church in Germany has been playing the same John Cage composition since September 5, 2001 — and it won’t finish until the year 2640. Nine chords down. 616 years to go. The piece is called ORGAN²/ASLSP, which stands for “As Slow As Possible,” and…
Culture
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The Optimism Gap: Why Fewer Americans See a Better Tomorrow
The Gallup poll dropped this week with a stat that should make everyone pause: only 59.2% of Americans expect their lives to be better in five years. That’s the lowest number since they started tracking this nearly 20 years ago — and it’s down from 68.3% just five years ago….
Culture
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Super Bowl Monday Is the New National Holiday We Won’t Admit Exists
The Super Bowl ended last night around 10:30 p.m. Eastern. By 6 a.m. this morning, an estimated 26.2 million Americans had already decided not to show up to work. Another 5 million? Arriving late with lukewarm gas station coffee and no apologies. Super Bowl Monday isn’t a federal holiday —…
AI
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AI Agents Get Social Media — Chaos Follows
The AI social media bots now have their own platform. Moltbook launched as a Reddit-style forum where AI agents — not humans — create accounts, post content, and argue in the comments. Over 1.5 million bot users. More than 102,000 posts across 14,000 topic forums. Humans can observe but can’t…
News
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Argentina’s Piranha Problem Just Got Real — Low Water, High Temps, and 46 Bite Victims
The Paraná River near Victoria, Argentina, turned into a scene from a B-movie horror flick this past weekend — except the blood was real, the screaming was real, and at least 46 people left the water with chunks of flesh missing. One of them lost part of a finger. The…
AI
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AI Rent Human Bodies — And We’re All Just Tenants Now
The machines came for the jobs. Now they want the bodies. RentAHuman.ai launched this week with a pitch so blunt it almost sounds like satire: “Robots need your body.” Founder Alexander Liteplo — a software engineer with apparently zero interest in subtlety — built a platform where AI agents can…
Culture
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American Demonyms That Actually Work — Unlike Whatever the Government Recommends
The United States Government Publishing Office thinks people from Indiana should be called “Indianians.” Indiana — and the rest of the country — disagrees. For nearly two centuries, they’ve been Hoosiers, a term popularized by John Finley’s 1833 poem “The Hoosier’s Nest,” and no amount of federal paperwork is changing…
Culture
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Film Students Can’t Finish Movies Anymore
Film professors at UW–Madison are curving final exams like never before — not because the material got harder, but because their students can’t finish a single movie. Half-watching while scrolling. Skipping the film entirely and hoping to absorb it through “vibes.” Then showing up to the exam and confidently writing…
Education
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Gen Z Became the First Generation to Lose Ground Cognitively — Here’s Why
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath stood before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in mid-January and delivered a message that should have stopped the room cold: Gen Z — the cohort born roughly between 1997 and 2010 — has become the first generation since cognitive records began in…
Culture
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Six More Weeks of Winter: The Groundhog Has Spoken (And We’re Not Okay)
The Groundhog Day winter prediction came in this morning: Phil saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter. It’s Feb. 2, 2026, and somewhere in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a rodent emerged from a heated burrow at dawn, got waved around by a guy in a top hat, and sentenced the rest…