Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen.

Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor but because we cannot satisfy the rich.

Martin M. McLaughlin

Ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel becomes the first person to climb Mount Everest and ski back to Everest Base Camp without supplementary oxygen. After nearly 16 hours climbing in the high altitude “death zone” (above 8,000m where oxygen levels are dangerously low), Bargiel clipped into his skis on the summit of the tallest mountain on earth and started his descent via the South Col Route. He reached Camp II that night and rested - the summit ridge and Hillary Step had taken longer than planned, meaning darkness made it dangerous and difficult to navigate further that day. The next morning, he skied through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall - guided by a drone flown by his brother, Bartek - before safely arriving at Base Camp to become the first person to ascend and descend Mount Everest on skis with no supplementary oxygen.

What an absolute madman. This deserves a full two-hour film filled with all the highs and lows. From the overhead shots it looks effortless, but when you see Andrzej’s GoPro footage, he’s struggling to breathe and constantly coughing. It’s somehow one of the most peaceful and most terrifying videos I’ve ever watched.

Rachel Moody in an Opinion piece for The Daily Tar Heel:

Part of that is due to the false perception that these minimum wage jobs are low-skill. But they’re not low-skill. They simply require different skills, ones that not just anyone possesses. I dare anyone who thinks so to work a service job for a few months. They’ll quickly realize it’s not just common sense, nor as easy as they think.

Important to remember that every person who does a job deserves our respect.

Thor Pedersen on the lessons he learned on his epic nearly decade long trip - and the one thing that struck me the most - what you want and what you need are not the same thing:

Just about anything can become routine and begin to feel like work – even travelling to every country in the world. It is rare for people to travel constantly for much more than a year because it wears the soul; most long-term travellers return home exhausted to reflect and recharge.

I pushed myself for nearly a decade. Buses, trains, boats, people, food, unpacking, packing, embassies, borders, bureaucracy – a long tunnel of countries. I hit a wall after about two years, but had to push through it to reach my goal. I learned the difference between what I want and what I need. I learned to live on a rock and how to engage in conversation with absolutely anyone. Once I returned home, I realised the only things that had kept their value were the relationships and conversations I had had. Everything else seemed perishable.

Anil Dash sums up my feelings on the AI bubble perfectly:

What’s amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a “normal technology”, as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist.

Dave Snyder writing for Design Observer:

I’ve been designing digital products for 25 years. I remember when the big decision was going from 800×600 to 1024 pixels. I’ve lived through multiple cycles of VR hype, watched the web go from static pages to social networks to AI everything. I’ve launched products that failed spectacularly and others that succeeded for reasons no one predicted.

Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.

The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.

Donald Trump on his blog:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM - DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

The man is obviously unwell.

Ryan Gould and Liana Baker, reporting for Bloomberg:

Intel Corp. has approached Apple Inc. about securing an investment in the ailing chipmaker, according to people familiar with the matter, part of efforts to bolster a business that’s now partially owned by the US government.

Apple and Intel also have discussed how to work more closely together, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The talks have been early-stage and may not lead to an agreement, the people said.

I have no idea would Intel could offer Apple. There is no way Apple is going back to Intel x86. And Intel’s fabrication capabilities can’t come close to TSMC for fabricating Apple’s own chip designs. This makes for some great tech gossip - but it is not going anywhere.

This is still spot on…

Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be.

Tolkien JRR. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1). HarperCollins UK

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.

The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie.

Alexandra Petri reporting in The Atlantic on Florida’s elimination of vaccine mandates:

Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow. If we lose herd immunity, we will bring back diseases that had formerly been eliminated, and some children who would otherwise have been protected will perish. But no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against decades of lifesaving science. Confusingly, this effort is being taken up at the same time that people are very concerned about dropping birth rates, but it makes sense when you understand that they don’t like the children we currently have. They want us to make other ones instead.

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

Powerful and to the point. Sanders, unlike the nine former CDC directors whose joint op-ed ran the next day, doesn’t pull punches. But there’s no point demanding Kennedy resign, because he won’t. Sanders, and the rest of us, should call on Trump to fire him. The buck stops with Trump. Trump fires his appointees all the time. Almost no one lasted long in the Trump 1.0 administration, and it’s unlikely anyone will last long in the Trump 2.0 administration. (Including, perhaps, Trump himself, who is clearly unwell.) Kennedy ought to be the first to go.

Trump smells it too, hence this “both sides” post on his blog this morning. Public opinion is strongly against this abject vaccine quackery.

The New York Times video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.

Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic:

In the end, the top 400 Americans paid an estimated 23.8 percent of their income to Uncle Sam from 2018 to 2020—down from roughly 30 percent before the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in 2017. They paid 1.3 percent of their total wealth to the IRS in those years, down from 2.7 percent from 2010 to 2013. Their tax rates were lower than the average paid by all American households.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Trump’s signature first-term domestic-policy package, helped these billionaires keep more of their money. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed this summer, extends the TCJA’s tax cuts, creates new business loopholes, and lowers taxes on estates. To help offset the revenue losses, the Trump administration is stripping health coverage from millions of low-income Americans and shrinking the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The rich, including Trump, will keep getting richer. The poor will pay for it.

And yet the poor proudly support Trump and his administration. Truly mind boggling.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch.