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Man sinks in quicksand, rises with a girlfriend
Any millennial will tell you, we thought quicksand was something we’d have to deal with given how all the cartoons warned us about it. We encountered metaphorical quicksand *gestures all around* instead. Well, for one man, he stepped in actual quicksand.
The quicksand depicted in films, when a daring adventurer is suddenly ensnared in a life-threatening vortex of sand, is largely a myth. But that didn’t make it any less scary when Mitchell O’Brien slowly began to sink.
Mr. O’Brien was on Van’s Beach on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan with his friend Breanne Sika last weekend hunting for Leland bluestones, a byproduct of the iron ore furnaces that operated in the nearby fishing village that attract rock hunters.
Some dredging had been taking place on the beach, and Mr. O’Brien, 37, from Traverse City, Mich., said he had thought the sand felt unstable.
“‘That looks really dangerous,’” he recalled Ms. Sika saying. “I turned around and ended up walking right to the spot she said was dangerous.
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Tool Libraries
It’s good for everyone to own a basic set of tools: hammer, monkey wrench, phillips and flathead screwdriver. But not everyone is able to afford those, and most home projects require more. This is where a tool library, where you can check out tools like you can books, can come in handy.
With the price of materials climbing (or set to), many DIY projects have become more difficult to finance overnight. But what if Curtin’s friend didn’t also have to purchase pricey tools to complete the project? What if he borrowed them all from neighbors instead, and returned them when he was finished? And what if those neighbors helped him through the project each step of the way?
This is more or less how tool-lending libraries work.
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The Savannah Bananas on 60 Minutes
60 Minutes hits the high points about the excitement The Savannah Bananas and their style of baseball is bringing to the sport. Athletic, Globetrooter-esque plays, stilts, and innovation to the rules.
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CVE Program saved by private foundation
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exploitations database is a collective and comprehensive database for computer security. It’s critical for maintaining nearly any computing device. The US Government helped fund it as a necessary resource until April 16, 2025. A consortium of partners foresaw this and were prepared, establishing a foundation to keep it running.
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Collaborating with Algorithms
Algorithms are everywhere in our daily life. We can let them roll over us or we can attempt to collaborate and guide them.
It’s not just that Spotify’s recommendations tend to be pleasant because it has a lot of data about me. It’s that Spotify has the listening history of 675 million people, whose interests may overlap with mine in countless different ways. Over the years, I’ve developed a set of habits that help me hone those recommendations — things like making playlists, rejecting recommendations I don’t like, exploring artists’ catalogs, and maybe most importantly, digging through other people’s playlists.
This is what I call lean-forward listening. While it’s easy enough to click on Discover Weekly every Monday, lean back and listen to the whole thing like a radio show, and then move on to the next playlist, the more effort you put into curating your experience, the better the algorithms will work next time. At the very least, you’ll find your way onto a playlist that algorithms didn’t create.
I purposely jump between genres to keep all the various lists and feeds fresh and diverse. It works for the most part. I’d go so far to say this might be an aspect of modern media literacy: possessing an awareness that the media you’re consuming is controlled by others and understanding how you can influence it matters.
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Cover roundup: Glycerine by Bush
Glycerine is a banger from the mid 90s by Bush. Probably the most famous version is the one Gavin Rossdale performed due a rainy 1996 MTV Spring Break.
Allison Lorenzen and Midwife add shoegazey fuzz
Easy listening lullaby version
Acoustic with female vocals
Piano really changes it
Or a string quartet
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The Smithsonian and what is history
The nation’s museum, The Smithsonian, becomes another front in the war on truth.
But even as the social history approach remade American museums, most Americans cling to an understanding of history that prioritizes the very things the social historians criticized. According to a 2021 survey of attitudes to history, conducted by researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association, the vast majority of Americans view history fundamentally differently than historians do. History, for about 70 percent of Americans, is simply what we remember about the past, especially names, dates and other facts. It isn’t, as most professional historians believe, the interpretation of those facts that constitutes history.
“We were always trying to get people to think, ‘What is history?’” Gardner says. “The goal was to think about meaning and perspectives.”
So, there is a paradox: Americans consume and enjoy social history on a daily basis, in museums, books and documentaries, but if asked to define history, they would give an account that sounds more like the rote lessons and recitations of fact that their grandparents and great-grandparents found tedious and boring decades ago.
