It starts the same way these things always do — one offhand comment, one clipped quote, one man confidently forgetting he’s a guest. Then the internet smells blood. A British baker living in Mexico described local bread as “white, ugly, cheap, industrial.” Not shouted. Not tweeted. Just said — casually,…
Category: Culture
Culture
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Dark Age Forecasts, Now With Confidence
There’s a familiar rhythm to these warnings. A solemn tone. A handful of Roman references. A quiet certainty that this time the collapse is absolute, imminent, and morally clarifying. Enter the latest declaration of the coming dark age, confidently announcing that Western civilization is on the brink — not drifting,…
Culture
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Squatting Through the Centuries: The Enduring Appeal of Catalonia’s Cheeky Christmas Custom
Well, the big day is over for this year, but there are still some residual Christmas stories. Here is one that I was reading, a perfectly normal Christmas sports feature — new house, young superstar, proud little brother — when the sentence took a hard left turn into folklore madness….
Culture
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The Christmas We Don’t Really Do Anymore
My mom loved Christmas. Not politely. Not casually. She loved it the way you love something you’re willing to exhaust yourself for. The religious meaning. The food. The good cheer. The gifts. All of it. Christmas wasn’t a day in our house — it was a season, a production schedule,…
Culture
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Christmas Eve Traditions Stay the Same — We Change
When I was a kid, Christmas Eve felt like a dare. Try to sleep. Go ahead. See what happens. The house was quiet in that suspicious way—parents whispering, lights glowing just enough, the tree humming in the corner like it knew something I didn’t. My brain ran laps. Presents. Morning….
Culture
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Praying Mantises Have a Reputation — This One Learned a Workaround
I was reading about a newly discovered praying mantis the other day — the kind of thing you stumble on while pretending you’re just “checking the news” — and it turns out one species has solved one of nature’s more awkward problems. Specifically: how not to get eaten immediately after…
Culture
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Even a Koala Have Figured Out How to Escape Traffic
So I heard this story about a koala in Brisbane who wandered into traffic, panicked a bit, and then — with the confidence of someone who knows the schedule — climbed onto a city bus. Not metaphorically. Not “as a symbol.” Physically. Onto the bus. This is where we are…
Culture
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Average Age America and the Long History of Eye-Rolling Youth
The average age of the American population is approximately 39.1 years.* That’s the math. Census tables, life expectancy, delayed adulthood, all of it boiled down into one mildly uncomfortable number. And somehow, that number now comes with judgment. If you’re under 25, anyone born in the 1900s gets treated like a historical…
AI
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The Prison Call That Never Ends — Because the AI Is Still Listening
I was reading a piece in MIT Technology Review the other day — here’s the link since credit matters: https://www.technologyreview.com/ — and the thing stuck with me wasn’t the technical trick Securus built. It wasn’t the “detecting contemplated crimes” angle either. What stopped me was the quiet part: inmates are…
Crime
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Your Cheap Home Camera Might Be Watching You… and Someone Else Might Be Watching Too
Every once in a while a story comes along that makes you stop and think, Wow… we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross. This is one of those stories. South Korean police arrested four people for hacking more than 120,000 home and business cameras. That number itself is disturbing. What…