Colin Marshall    Image via Pompeii Archaeological Park Imagine visiting the home of a prominent, wealthy figure, and at the evening’s end finding yourself in a room dedicated to late night entertaining, painted entirely black except for a few scenes from antiquity. Perhaps this wouldn’t sound entirely implausible...

OC    Last fall, OpenAI started letting users create custom versions of ChatGPT ones that would let people create AI assistants to complete tasks in their personal or professional lives. In the months that followed, some users created AI apps that could generate recipes and meals. Others developed GPTs...

Colin Marshall    If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books. It helps, but it’s not percent necessary: even if you’ve never learned a single kanji character, you’ve probably marveled at one time or another at the aesthetics of Japan’s print culture. Maybe you’ve even...

OC    For Christopher Schwarz, American anarchism isn’t about bombs and leather jackets; it’s about being an independent designer. It’s about working outside massive and dehumanizing institutions like corporations and designing beautiful objects that last. He writes: As a designer of books,...

Colin Marshall    More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day to day...

OC    FYI. Google and MIT RAISE have partnered to create a free course for teachers and educators, one designed to show teachers how they can use generative AI tools to save time on everyday tasks, personaliz e instruction to meet student needs, and enhanc e lessons and activities in creative ways. ...

Colin Marshall    Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis Sébastien...

Colin Marshall    If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from to : barely an existence at all, by the...

OC    If you need six minutes of comic relief, this might do the trick. For those who don’t get the underlying reference, watch here. Enjoy :

OC    So many writers have been gardeners and have written about gardens that it might be easier to make a list of those who didn’t. But even in this crowded company, Emily Dickinson stands out. She not only attended the fragile beauty of flowers with an artist’s eye before she’d written any of her...

OC    You have received those odd text messages from a stranger. Hi, This is Anita. Have you received the Panamera parts yet You know the messages are spam, but you don’t quite understand the angle of the scam. Above, the Search Engine podcast works with Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux to break down...

Colin Marshall    Studio Ghibli fans are still pondering the meaning of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which came out last year. Though by some measure the studio’s most lavish feature yet not least by the measure of it being the most expensive film yet produced in Japan it’s also the one least amenable...

OC    Los Pollos Hermanos, Madrigal Electromotive, Mesa Verde Bank and Trust, Davis Main: Attorneys at Law all of these brands come from the Breaking Bad Better Call Saul universe. They also appear in the Fictional Brands Archive, a website dedicated to fictional brands found in films, series and...

Colin Marshall    Here in the twenty twenties, a hopeful young novelist might choose to enroll in one of a host of post graduate programs, and with luck there find a willing and able mentor. Back in the nineteen thirties, things worked a bit differently. In the spring of , an aspiring writer named Arnold...

OC    Fallacies notes Purdue’s Writing Lab are common errors in reasoning that will undermine the logic of your argument. Fallacies can be either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points, and are often identified because they lack evidence that supports their claim. Avoid these common fallacies in...