My roommate freshman year was the son of a Slovak father and an Austrian mother who had emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Mike was trilingual from birth, without an accent unless it was a Cleveland accent that I couldn’t hear because it was mine as well. His tastes often seemed “European” to me. He listened to Smetana and Janáček, composers I had never heard of. I introduced him to Charles Ives and Thelonious Monk.

With All Its Philistinism and Coarseness'

What was once a once-in-a-century occurrence — a speaker of the House losing a leadership vote on the floor — has now happened on the opening day of consecutive Congresses.

So far, Mike Johnson has a mandating concept of a Speakership.

God forbid should the Republican argue about skilled worker migration next week

How will we decorate in 2025

This Rare Neurological Condition Can Cause an Addiction to Jokes ScienceAlert 

No one buys books

The Elysian: “Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.  In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into…

Are we becoming a post-literate society?

FT.com: “Technology has changed the way many of us consume information, from complex pieces of writing to short video clips “Human intelligence,” the cultural critic Neil Postman once wrote, “is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn’t take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it.” The year was 1988, a former Hollywood actor was in the White House, and Postman was worried about the ascendancy of pictures over words in American media, culture and politics. Television “conditions our minds to apprehend the world through fragmented pictures and forces other media to orient themselves in that direction,” he argued in an essay in his book Conscientious Objections. “A culture does not have to force scholars to flee to render them impotent. A culture does not have to burn books to assure that they will not be read . . . There are other ways to achieve stupidity.” What might have seemed curmudgeonly in 1988 reads more like prophecy from the perspective of 2024. 

This month, the OECD released the results of a vast exercise: in-person assessments of the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of 160,000 adults aged 16-65 in 31 different countries and economies. Compared with the last set of assessments a decade earlier, the trends in literacy skills were striking. Proficiency improved significantly in only two countries (Finland and Denmark), remained stable in 14, and declined significantly in 11, with the biggest deterioration in Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland. Among adults with tertiary-level education (such as university graduates), literacy proficiency fell in 13 countries and only increased in Finland, while nearly all countries and economies experienced declines in literacy proficiency among adults with below upper secondary education.

 Singapore and the US had the biggest inequalities in both literacy and numeracy. “Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, told me — referring to the proportion of people in the US who scored level 1 or below in literacy. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”…

 “SPOT is a geospatial search tool for OpenStreetMap from DW Innovation. It’s similar to Bellingcat’s OpenStreetMap search tool, except it allows you to submit a natural language prompt for a specific location type. For example, “Show me all shopping malls near a traffic light with a park within 300 meters in Nairobi.” Learn more in SPOT’s tutorial section.” [h/t Craig Silverman]

Cover Your Tracks is two things: a tool for users to understand how unique and identifiable their browser makes them online, and a research project to uncover the tools and techniques of online trackers and test the efficacy of privacy add-ons. Cover Your Tracks researches both how unique your browser is and how effective tracker blockers are. We analyze how well you are protected against online tracking by checking the privacy protections you have in place. 

The test simulates loading of various types of trackers, and determines your level of protection based on if the trackers load or not. Even if your privacy add-ons are working well, you may still be vulnerable if your browser fingerprint is unique. So we also analyze the uniqueness of your browser and let you know how it stacks up to other visitors we’ve observed recently. We generate a report about your tracker protections and browser fingerprint for your own use, and we’ll use anonymous results from your test when generating uniqueness results for others when they take the test…”