I enjoyed Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It was more serious, even somber at times, and traded the usual big-bad formula for something more nuanced. Destin Daniel Cretton (who directed the excellent Shang-Chi movie) built the story around its characters, and the result felt refreshingly grounded.

Centuries before The Odyssey was composed, the palace world that inspired it had vanished. A new study suggests repeated severe drought added pressure as those societies collapsed. My latest for CBC News: www.cbc.ca/news/science... #Climate #Archaeology #SciComm #TheOdyssey

How drought shaped the Bronze Age world that inspired The Odyssey | CBC News

A new climate study suggests centuries of drought added pressure to the Bronze Age societies that inspired Homer's The Odyssey, revealing how environmental stress, food insecurity and failing trade ne...

cbc.ca

I started my day talking to a climate scientist in Sweden and an archaeologist at her dig in Turkey. How’s your morning going?

Just saw The Odyssey in IMAX. The hype is real: it’s extraordinary. It stays remarkably close to the book while drawing one key character from The Aeneid and the wider mythic tradition. A seemingly unfilmable epic, made compelling without abandoning its core story. A remarkable achievement. #Filmsky

“There are different archipelagos of the fandom, but what unifies each and every one of them is that they are very responsive to calls to action from the people who are there watching and feeling that they’re in community with,” said @friede.bsky.social, an English professor at Auburn University.

D&D players raise millions in real-life campaign against ‘corporate elite’

Brennan Lee Mulligan’s Dungeons and Dragons push is part of a wider trend using tabletop games for political action

theguardian.com

The same eugenic rhetoric was directed at people fighting for a 40-hour work week and labor protections. In 1891, Lombroso said they showed “characteristics of degeneracy common to criminals.” In 1895, Max Nordau wrote that the acts of revolutionists and anarchists were “attributable to degeneracy.”

PEIPolitical 🇨🇦@peipolitical.bsky.social · 3w ago

Miller: "It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism." #cdnpoli

Stanley Kubrick anticipated U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth more than 62 years ago. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Kv...

Dr. Strangelove - Precious Bodily Fluids

YouTube video by poolitics

youtube.com

My latest for CBC News: “At the top of a 6,739-metre Andean volcano, where the air is thin, temperatures are almost always below freezing and humans struggle to survive, a tiny leaf-eared mouse has made itself at home — dining on toxic plants.” #scicomm #sciencenews #evolution

The world's highest-dwelling mammal is smaller than your hand | CBC News

At the top of a 6,739-metre Andean volcano, where the air is thin, temperatures are almost always below freezing and humans struggle to survive, a tiny leaf-eared mouse has made itself at home — dinin...

cbc.ca

Reading had a good run. RIP @rosehorowitch.bsky.social writes the post-mortem.

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

theatlantic.com

Writing in @sciencenews.bsky.social, @beebrookshire.bsky.social writes about a fascinating new paper arguing that a 1611 Renaissance painting may have documented a bat catching and eating a songbird — more than 400 years before scientists formally recognized the behaviour.

A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting

Renaissance painter Jan Brueghel the Elder painted a bat eating a bird — 400 years before scientists would document the behavior.

sciencenews.org

Preprints don’t change much after peer review — and are rarely retracted. go.nature.com/4pebHmM

Think preprints are unreliable? Analysis of 70,000 studies might change your mind

Preprints don’t change much after peer review — and are rarely retracted.

go.nature.com

This Fossil Might Be the Earliest Known Case of Face-Stabbing in Human History gizmodo.com/this-early-h...

This Fossil Might Be the Earliest Known Case of Face-Stabbing in Human History

If the researchers' hypothesis is correct, the fossil represents the earliest known instance of an injury caused by something sharp.

gizmodo.com

The Hillywood Show has produced a very impressive Star Wars parody set to my mother’s favorite song. youtu.be/GbeYQuUEtwk?...

A Star Wars Parody by The Hillywood Show® │ May The Parody Be With You…

YouTube video by The Hillywood Show

youtu.be

"The fact that the sex differences in the three dimensions studied here—brain activity, brain structure and behavior—do not overlap suggests they don’t reflect a single underlying biological axis". yep.

Laura Helmuth@laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 4w ago

Male brains and female brains are all just human brains.

neither canadian leaders nor the canadian people will ever trust the united states again and they absolutely shouldn’t

Jonesy@loanseyjonesy.bsky.social · 4w ago

Don’t love all this attention.

Today is my last day at Scientific American, which has been sold to LabX media group. For three decades I've led the magazine's coverage of human origins, archaeology, paleontology, animal behavior, ecology, BIRDS. End of an era. Anyway this feels weird to say, but I'm now available for assignments!

Also let me recommend historian Annette Gordon Reed’s “On Juneteenth” for your summer reading list. I felt vindicated reading that Reed, a Texan, always saw Juneteenth as a Texas celebration. Her dive into the complicated history of Texas, slavery, integration & this holiday is riveting.

I've spent the last two months putting together this exhaustive analysis of the New York Times coverage of trans people. It covers 3,242 articles over 12 years. In 2022, the NYT shifted towards a hostile stance towards trans people in their framing. www.thedissident.news/exclusive-ho...

Exclusive: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People

An exhaustive analysis of over 3,242 articles by the New York Times covering transgender issues from 2014-2026 revealed a stark shift towards hostile framing in 2022. In January 2015, the New York Ti...

thedissident.news

Meanwhile, in the Swamps of Sadness.

this is legitimately one of my favorite posts of all time

Rob is reading Macedonian Logistics🧭@robisreading.bsky.social · 2mo ago

All of this.

He Profits Off Raw Milk That’s Making People Sick. The Government Isn’t Stopping Him.

With Raw Farm, the largest raw-milk dairy in the country, Mark McAfee has capitalized on a once-fringe product that’s been thrust into the mainstream in recent years and backed by Health Secretary Rob...

propublica.org

“The first warning in Tofino, B.C., would not be a siren — it would be the ground shaking.” I wrote about a new earthquake study for CBC, showing that when the Cascadia Subduction Zone ruptures, Tofino could face hundreds of deaths and more than $1 billion in damage. www.cbc.ca/news/science...

How ready is Tofino, B.C., for a major Cascadia earthquake and tsunami? | CBC News

A new study on Cascadia earthquake and tsunami risk puts one of Vancouver Island's best-known coastal communities at the centre of a difficult question: How does a small town prepare for a disaster th...

cbc.ca

Important messages I have learned from horror films: 1. Don't be a shitty tourist or anthropologist 2. Don't insult marginalized people 3. Don't let the cute Irish guy inside, even if he has a guitar 4. Chainsaws are good for everything 5. Catcalls will get you gutted 6. Don't make a wish

If you could harness that haters energy you'd power the city for the rest of the yearb

TrumpsTaxes@trumpstaxes.com · 2mo ago

LOL if you thought the Trump boos were loud on TV, wait until you hear them from inside MSG. Video courtesy of Evan Roberts from WFAN on X.

WIRED continues delivering some of the most important investigative work of the current moment.

Andrew Couts@couts.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NEW: A @wired.com analysis of Meta's app for its smart glasses found that the company has been adding code for face recognition since January, while saying that it is still "thinking through" whether to deploy it. @dmehro.bsky.social and @dell.bsky.social w/ the scoop: www.wired.com/story/meta-s...

Super important speech here by NYT Publisher AG Sulzberger. Anyone who cares about the role of journalism in our global society-and democracy in the modern world-should read this/reflect on it. AI giants are in the process of wiping out much of the news industry. www.nytco.com/press/a-i-jo...

Now that Colbert has ended, can we bring @hasanminhaj.com back?

The Mandalorian and Grogu was great television. Is it the future of Star Wars? I don’t know — stop asking dumb questions. The latest entry in the franchise does what it does best: repurposes obscure 80s toys and Clone Wars characters and places them in a new narrative. #filmsky #starwars

Disinformation is deadly.

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A new, well-conducted study reveals that Conservatives “experienced worsening health and higher mortality than Liberals during the 2010s”. The authors concluded that this gap is going to get worse, and that public health officials and doctors will continue to struggle to reach conservatives.

🥁🥁🥁 We’re hiring! The Narwhal is looking for a senior B.C. reporter and a senior national reporter to pursue ambitious journalism about the natural world in B.C. and Canada. More details threaded 🧶: thenarwhal.ca/work-with-us/

Work with us | The Narwhal

Jobs, hiring updates, fellowships, freelancing opportunities and opinion submission guidelines for our environment and energy coverage.

thenarwhal.ca