anandi m

Stockholm is Europe’s new capital of capital And with Sweden embarking on a borrowing spree, it is a bond trader’s paradise

www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Before AI, I never heard writers talk about "refining" our work. We edited, we polished. I don't recall "refining" being a thing until AI decided it was a good euphemism for "edit" so as not to hurt people's feelings. Nothing needs to be edited or improved in AI land, only "refined," like a jewel.

Émile Bernard, Funeral of Van Gogh, 1893

Sure, they've made an environmentally catastrophic mass hallucination disinformation plagiarism Clippy that will destabilize the world, but also their other goal is to replace human workers entirely and let us humans starve. A boycott of AI is the most important boycott of your entire life.

the trees, the sun, the light

just at the end of a snow squall you'll see for maybe ten seconds the weirdest and most beautiful light on earth. thats what you tell an old person when they ask you why you always have your phone

[Werner Herzog voice] He is monstrous, but in a more profound sense, Cookie Monster is also a victim

Why did a BBC journalist need to ask a chatbot to identify the bits of this image which were edited? Surely it’s bleeding obvious? Do they think the chatbot adds more credibility to their story?

Anne Carson, Plainwater

Painting of a white woman in a long grey coat, red scarf and black hat walking to the left in a snowy rural setting with her two cats

Dee Nickerson, contemporary painter who explores themes of living in the countryside #WomensArt #FridayFeeling #ArtAdvent

So it’s NOT my imagination

A screenshot from The Simpsons showing that Duff, Duff Lite, and Duff Dry all come from the same pipe, a joke indicating that they're the same thing. In the original Disney+ version of this episode, the top of the frame was cut off, ruining the joke, which is the reverse of what happened with the HBO Max Mad Men thing.

This is such a mess. The HBO Max "remastered" version of The Simpsons reveals that Duff, Duff Lite, and Duff Dry all come from the same pipe. 🙄

I had an interesting conversation about The Calculation of Volume at work yesterday that helped clarify why I fell out of love with it over the second book. When one person experiences the impossible, it is a philosophical conundrum. When two people experience it, it becomes a political conspiracy.

this is temperature forecast for Gothenburg. we'll go into mid-december with temps as high as 9! we're so cooked 🤦🏻

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— Anaïs Nin
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A man says Good morning, everyone. It's It's an absolute shitshow out there, today.

Morning Bluesky.

‘The Chinese will not pause’: Volvo and Polestar bosses urge EU to stick to 2035 petrol car ban Exclusive: Swedish carmakers push to retain target as Germany lobbies to help its own industry by softening cutoff date

“Electrification will do the job. It is good for the climate. It is really important. It is also good for customers. It’s one of the very few environmentally friendly innovations that customers also will love," says Håkan Samuelsson, the chief executive of Volvo

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Headline: SAVED BY STOPPARD Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL

An astonishing letter published in the Times of London.

Illustration of eighties businessmen by an urban park in Central Milton Keynes

It's #sketchpadvent – celebrating amazing modernist concept drawings and models. December 1: Milton Keynes from 1981

RIP to David Bellos, a great translator, teacher, scholar and popularizer. Here's a charming little essay about what he learned from his landmark translation of Georges Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual'. online.wsj.com/article/SB10...

Vingt rues de Paris avant / après en une minute

There was a time when Lucy Prebble would tweet about her writing, research or just about any mundane detail from her life. And now here we are, in this desert where there are hardly any writers, editors tweeting about their day-to-days.

this is why i will never give up my circa 2010 dvd boxset of THE WIRE. i don't give a shit about high def for older tv shows, give me the original aspect ratio (need to get my hands on an old simpsons boxset for this reason as well)

top of a tight morning. 7am. 6 degrees. pitch dark out the window. rain falls interminably. my heart feels full in anticipation of snow that I'll then, in a Schuyleresque fashion, want to press in a book like leaves

BBC Radio 4 - Rare Earth, Fashioning the Future Can we rethink how we dress to be less impactful on the planet?

Something that really stuck with me from the fast fashion episode of Rare Earth, and is still cheering me up: sites like Vinted and Ebay are making a significant dint in fast fashion sales, and people are choosing to buy better quality clothes so they can sell them on. Less waste, wins all round 🎉🎉🎉

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

2+7= _ I caNnot aNswer this qwestion, as it is agaiNst My reLigious principles. ٠١٨٨ IT'S WORTH A SHOT. aMI, 7 january 1986 NAITION

Has this been posted yet

*woman

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

A light-up acrylic Dickensian snowman.

"Dickensian"