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I think this battle was lost shortly after Samuel Morse and Ezra Cornell erected their first telegraph poles in 1844.

Yikes: "Firefighters faced an especially dangerous situation in Vall d'Uixo... where the ground contains old ordnance from the Spanish Civil War that explodes when the flames reach the area, Chevi Bolumar, fire chief of the Valencian ​regional government, told public broadcaster TVE."

You can sleep in Dylan Thomas's childhood home in Swansea, including what he described in a letter as his "tiny, renovated bedroom… Smelly. Painful. Hot water pipes very near. Gurgle all the time. Nearly go mad."

NEW: In a stunning admission, the Trump administration admitted in court documents that it canceled billions in energy grants to states "based solely" on politics -- and whether that state was represented by Democrats and backed Harris in 2024. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/b...

Hadn't spotted this before today's Wired story, but this is a fascinating student press case in Marin. High school journalists looked up their county in the Epstein files, found stuff, reported it. Adults freaked out & the principal caved. Which is illegal. California law protects HS journalists.

"Great" is truly a load-bearing adjective

shout out to The Strand bookstore staffer who did this

Today in “Headlines That Sound Like 1830”:

Pages from Romeyn Beck Hough’s unique 14 volume work The American Woods (1888–1913), a collection in book-form of more than 1000 paper-thin wood samples representing more than 350 varieties of N.American tree. More samples from the work here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/t...

I'd totally forgotten about Trump doxxing Graham in the '16 primaries

And a heads up to my fellow freelancers etc: this was a paper letter from WaPo, and it's indistinguishable from junk mail. They didn't email, even though I still have the same email as when I worked for them.

Just got a letter from the Washington Post that they got hacked last summer & "data that was affected by this incident included your name and SSN." The last piece I wrote there was in 2013. Wtf are they doing retaining this 12 years? There's NO reason to retain W-9 info for that long.

Sneeeaky! "Two screw heads on the front portion of the playing surface were usually positioned beneath the accumulated coin mass. An operator could raise the screw heads... impeding the forward movement of the coin mass and causing the coins to "pile-up" and increase the density of the coin mass."

Weirdly fascinated by this 1988 FBI report on coin-push carnival games

Fascinating Smithsonian piece on the Philly inventor who - as her colony had no patent office - had to sail to London in 1712 to become the first American granted an English patent. Her hominy milling machine was patented in her husband’s name, because women still weren’t allowed to hold patents.

Might start signing all my emails like this

From the Domestic Policy Council, which has a defunct homepage (whitehouse.gov/dpc/) & hasn't updated its Government Manual page in 5 years. So who's on it? Well, of the 13 known members, it appears to include one (1) woman. Any people of color? Go on, guess. www.legistorm.com/organization...

This conundrum literally went all the way up to a cabinet minister.

We need fun national problems, like “Do we tax hot-air balloons as air transport or leisure?”