This fungus is so humongous that it can be mapped Big Think

Comparing Gladiator II To What Happened In Reality

There actually were quite a few animals involved in the Colosseum, not to mention the naval battles - but probably no sharks. - Los Angeles Times

86-YEAR OLD DIRECTOR TO 120-YEAR OLD INDUSTRY: Please Keep Hiring Me to Spend Your Money! Gladiator IIdirector Ridley Scott compares Denzel Washington’s character to Trump: ‘A clever gangster.’

Ridley Scott, the director of “Gladiator II,” said during an interview that Denzel Washington’s character in the movie, Marcinus, was similar to President-elect Trump.

“[Macrinus] was a prisoner of war — probably at a North African state — and actually was taken to Rome probably as a gladiator. Survived. Got free. Got into the business of maybe making wine and bread. He evolved into a very rich merchant selling s— to the Roman armies — food, oil, wine, cloth, weapons, everything. He maybe had a million men spread around Europe. So he was a billionaire at the time, so why wouldn’t he [have ambitions toward the throne]? ‘Why not me?’ He’s also a gangster — very close to Trump. A clever gangster. He creates chaos and from chaos he can evolve,” Scott told The Hollywood Reporter.

I’m so old, I can remember when comparing an American president to a gangster was the highest compliment: Quote of the Day: Obama Should ‘Go Gangsta.’ CNN columnist Roland Martin urges the president to unleash his inner Al Capone.

     Grant family Connected to Fawcett

The Slate – “When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?—we expected strong opinions, but we didn’t anticipate the philosophical quandaries that adjudicating and assembling them would bring up.

 After all, what or who confers “importance”? Our experts do, for one thing. But we also determined it had to do with reach and scale, with the sense that a recipe represented a clear shift in some aspect of home cooking for some significant number of Americans. 

“American cooking”? Rightly and necessarily a sprawling thing made by immigrants, shaped by the push and pull of assimilation, separatism, and syncretism, utterly dependent on the open migration of flavors and ideas. Last, what even is a “recipe”? There are many excellent dishes from the past century that, upon examination, are innovations rather than discrete entities recorded for replication in the kitchen. 

Roasted Brussels sprouts, fajitas, chili crisp, and Spam musubi were all nominated and ultimately dismissed for this reason. Recipes carry not only ingredients and instructions (sometimes) but also family stories, regional lore, cultural values, evolutions in technology and free time, and, of course, taste. They track the movement of diverse peoples across borders and nutrition fads through bodies. 

They are both tool and knowledge, artless instruction manual and literary form. They help us celebrate, mourn, or simply get supper on the table. One of our richest inheritances, recipes are time capsules of the past and present that happen to contain something you can safely chew. This is what informed our list, full of little-known history and tips we will now swear by in the kitchen (and some better left in the past). 

Are the 25 recipes we’ve gathered here really the most important from a century of American braising, baking, and imbibing? Possibly! At the very least, we’re sure they’ve profoundly and deliciously changed what Americans eat. So tie your apron, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and stand facing the stove—it’s time to get cooking.”

America’s News Influencers

The creators and consumers in the world of news and information on social media – In the heat of the 2024 election, news influencers seemed to be everywhere. Both Republicansand Democrats credentialed content creators to cover their conventions – and encouraged influencers to share their political messages. Influencers also interviewed the candidatesand held fundraisers for them. What is a news influencer? 

In this study, we use the term “news influencers” to refer to individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) or YouTube. News influencers can be journalists who are or were affiliated with a news organization or independent content creators, but they must be people and not organizations. Refer to the methodology for more about how we identified news influencers. But up until now, it has been difficult to get a sense of the size and characteristics of this new wave of news providers. 

A unique Pew Research Center study provides a deeper understanding of both the makeup of the news influencer universe and its audience. The project includes an in-depth examination of a sample of 500 popular news influencers and the content they produce, derived from a review of more than 28,000 social media accounts. We also conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans to better understand who regularly gets news from news influencers. Key findings about news influencers:

• About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
• News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).
• Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
• A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).
• Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.
• Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization

The New Yorker [unpaywalled] – “Other Western democracies have been roiled by the use of spyware to target political opponents, activists, journalists, and other vulnerable groups. Could it happen here? In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal.

 Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed a vetting process, during which the company was able to demonstrate that it had robust tools to prevent other countries that purchase its spyware from hacking Americans—but that wouldn’t limit the U.S. government’s ability to target its own citizens. 

The technology is part of a booming multibillion-dollar market for intrusive phone-hacking software that is making government surveillance increasingly cheap and accessible. In recent years, a number of Western democracies have been roiled by controversies in which spyware has been used, apparently by defense and intelligence agencies, to target opposition politicians, journalists, and apolitical civilians caught up in Orwellian surveillance dragnets. 

Now Donald Trump and incoming members of his Administration will decide whether to curtail or expand the U.S. government’s use of this kind of technology. Privacy advocates have been in a state of high alarm about the colliding political and technological trend lines. 

“It’s just so evident—the impending disaster,” Emily Tucker, the executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told me. “You may believe yourself not to be in one of the vulnerable categories, but you won’t know if you’ve ended up on a list for some reason or your loved ones have. Every single person should be worried.”