I finished the Season 2 finale, and overall it stuck the landing — with one notable exception.
First, the good: Kurt and Wyatt Russell’s dual portrayal of Lee Shaw across timelines has been one of the quiet highlights of this entire series. The finale gave that performance room to breathe, and both of them delivered. It’s a genuinely clever piece of casting that paid off.
The Kong vs. Titan X fight sequence was flat-out spectacular.
Good episode of the Reason Interview this week. Guest host Billy Binion talks with Jennifer Doleac, an economist whose research focuses on crime and public safety, and author of The Science of Second Chances.
The headline finding — and the one that stuck with me — is that long prison sentences do far less to deter crime than most people assume. The intuitive model is that harsher penalties create stronger disincentives.
My family laughs at me when I’m driving on surface streets. I have bad light karma. I don’t know what I did, or when I did it, but at some point I clearly offended a deity with specific jurisdiction over traffic signals.
I could see nothing but green lights stretching to the edge of the horizon — a perfect, open corridor of go — and then, as if something in the universe noticed I was feeling optimistic about it, every single one flips red.
A 1498 diplomatic letter — written in cipher by a Spanish ambassador to relay sensitive intelligence about Henry VII’s court and the Scottish king James IV — has finally been fully decoded, more than five centuries after it was sent.
The letter was written by Pedro de Ayala and sent to the Spanish court. It was rediscovered in Spanish archives in 1860, and historians have been working to interpret it ever since.
I watch a lot of cooking videos. Skill-focused ones mostly — knife technique, sauce work, the kind of thing where you actually learn something. But the genre has mutated.
Some of the chefs I follow have drifted into entertainment territory — stunts, collabs, increasingly elaborate production. Which, fine. Audiences reward what they reward. But it’s produced a specific phenomenon I’ve been watching with a mix of amusement and mild existential concern.
Somewhere in the back of my head there was a show. Time travel. A kid. A guy who dressed like a pirate and carried a pocket watch that glowed. I could not have told you the name of it. I couldn’t tell you when it aired or how long it ran. I just knew it existed, that I had watched it, and that something about it had stuck.
This is a specific kind of memory — not quite a flashback, not quite a dream.
I finally caught up on episodes 8 and 9 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, and I have thoughts.
The Kentaro arc continues to be the weak link. Every time the character is confronted with something — a decision, a revelation, a monster the size of a skyscraper — the response is the same flat expression of mild inconvenience. For a show that’s otherwise committed to its characters carrying the emotional weight, it sticks out.
I’ve been on a bit of a streak lately — Derry Girls (my wife’s recommendation, and I owe her), then How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, then Bodkin. At some point Netflix noticed the pattern and started serving up a queue of quirky, short-run, UK and Ireland-adjacent shows, and honestly? The algorithm knows me better than I know myself.
Derry Girls in particular I resisted longer than I should have.
We’ve all seen the meme — an analog clock with its hands spinning wildly, a shorthand for how fast time moves, how quickly it all gets away from you. It’s a fine metaphor. I have a better one, and it lives on a shelf in my house.
Every year, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, schools send home a portrait. You order the package, you stick the photo in a frame, and you add it to the row.
have been online for a long time. Long enough to have accumulated a digital life that is now scattered across more services than I care to count — some still running, some sunset, some technically alive but spiritually dead.
The project I’ve been quietly working on is pulling it all back together. Twenty-five years of photos, posts, bookmarks, and memories, distributed across whatever platform seemed like the right answer at the time.
There is a different kind of tweet. One that has nothing to do with bits and bytes, algorithms, or whatever is happening on whatever platform we’re all arguing on this week.
Every morning, one of the first items of business is taking Rose and Iris outside. They have opinions about this — strong ones, communicated at volume — and there is no negotiating. So out we go.
Our backyard is fenced, heavily planted, and at that hour still catching the first light.
Undertone is an A24 horror film from director Ian Tuason, released in March 2026. It cost $500,000 to make and has grossed over $21 million. That math tells you something about what kind of horror this is.
The setup: Evy (Nina Kiri) is a young woman who has moved back home to care for her comatose mother. To pay the bills and pass the time, she co-hosts a paranormal podcast called The Undertone with her friend Justin — she’s the skeptic, he’s the believer.
I read Who Moved My Cheese? about 21 years ago, just before starting my current job. I remembered that it was a business parable about change. I remembered it involved mice. Beyond that, I had to look up the summary.
For those equally hazy on the details: Spencer Johnson’s 1998 book is a short allegory about four characters — two mice named Sniff and Scurry, and two “littlepeople” named Hem and Haw — who live in a maze and depend on a cheese supply that one day runs out.
There’s a moment every morning that I genuinely look forward to. Coffee made, kids' lunches packed, the house briefly quiet. I sit down in my chair, put on my readers, and pick up whatever I’m currently working through. This is my plan. I am very committed to this plan.
And then Iris climbs into my lap and headbutts my book onto the floor.
If you’ve spent any time on Instagram you may have encountered Kiki and Koko, a pair of beagles whose human attempts — heroically, tragically — to cook while they patrol the kitchen.
Today marks 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster. April 26, 1986. I was around 11 years old.
I’m a little too young to be in the duck-and-cover generation — the kids who practiced hiding under their desks like that would somehow help against a Soviet warhead. But I was old enough to have the specter of mutually assured destruction humming in the background of my childhood. It wasn’t panic, exactly. It was just… ambient.
The morning school run has a specific rhythm to it—the hum of the tires, the half-awake conversation, and the constant scanning of the road ahead. It’s a scene that feels remarkably familiar, though the roles have shifted.
Growing up, car rides were a tactical battlefield. My siblings and I had an entire repertoire of games designed for the backseat, nearly all of which served as a flimsy excuse for someone to end up with a sore shoulder.
Saturday afternoons when I was a kid meant one thing: Creature Double Feature. Two monster movies back to back on local TV, usually with a budget for the commercials that rivaled the budget for the films themselves. I didn’t know the word kaiju then. I just knew I wanted more of it.
Godzilla was the constant. Man in a suit, miniature city, absolutely magnificent. I didn’t need the lore. I didn’t need the mythology.
I am a child of the 80s. My first real gaming experience wasn’t a joystick — it was a keyboard. Zork. A blinking cursor. A prompt that asked me what I wanted to do next and actually waited to find out.
GO NORTH OPEN MAILBOX GET LEAFLET No graphics. No hand-holding. Just you, your imagination, and the uncomfortable sense that a grue was nearby.
So when I started exploring AI coding tools, people assumed I’d gravitate toward the VS Code plugin.
Saturday night my wife and I watched Ready or Not — the 2019 one, with Samara Weaving in a wedding dress running for her life from her new in-laws. My wife had already seen it. I had not.
The occasion: homework. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is already in theaters (it came out March 20th), and we wanted to be prepared.
It’s a great movie to watch with someone who’s seen it before.
I’ve been reading Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments — this year marks the 250th anniversary of its publication, which felt like reason enough to finally pick it up.
It is a genuinely great book. But reading it has its own particular rhythm: a paragraph of Smith, then a pause, then a Google search.
Scipio and Camillus. Timoleon and Aristides. Smith drops these names the way a modern writer might cite a headline — as shared cultural reference points, things any educated reader would simply know.