For me, New Year’s has always been better suited to rekindling old habits than imagining new ones.

A masonic lodge in Paris ran a murder-for-hire squad employing state intelligence operatives. They are currently on trial, most facing life in prison. I tell the unbelievable story of The Athanor Affair on the latest QAA ep.

The Greatest

Everybody complains about Broadway until somebody gives them free tickets to The Rocky Horror Show. Everybody, in this case, being me.

Mean Joe Greene kicks a guy in the nuts and the entire Cleveland Browns roster comes after him. Man, I miss real football.

Neil Young supposedly wrote "Down by the River," "Cinnamon Girl," and "Cowgirl in the Sand" during a 103° fever. If that's what delirium sounds like, bring on the fever.

A few thoughts from a warm NYC morning after buzzing around on the CBR: iced coffee is a scam, and smartphones are forcing everyone to walk around hunched over like they're searching for loose change.

“Many see as illegal” BECAUSE IT IS ILLEGAL. The West Bank is Palestinian territory OCCUPIED by Israel. Every settlement is illegal.

"Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality." Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95 nytimes.com/2026/05/25/arts/…

“Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. Its goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy.” ― Rick Roderick

how is nyc even real 🤯

A reminder that Mayor Anne Hidalgo will go down as one of the most consequential mayors of the modern time: a mayor who literally built 600 miles of bike lanes and made hundreds of streets car free in her 12 years as Paris mayor. Bravo.

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

In Scarface, when Tony comments on a news broadcast about legalizing drugs, screenwriter Oliver Stone used this moment to slip in his own political views on the war on drugs. Stone explains… "Three or four grams of coke [went] for $12 in Ecuador: it was so pure you’d fall asleep it was so good, [although] they’d cut it and cut it and cut it by the time it got here. It was a big business, and the DEA made it bigger by making it more [so] by getting more involved and raising their own budgets, by passing the RICO Act. The RICO Act was just crap; the [government] used it politically, I mention it in the script: I have Tony say they ought to legalize drugs if they had any brains. The RICO Act is one of the precursors to the Patriot Act; that was the mentality—you turn drugs into a monster, et cetera. So, for me there was a political motive." 1/2 Quote comes from Ken Tucker's book Scarface Nation

It’s the 1970s again, minus the cheap rents and a lower-stress environment

Honestly modern classical music is a lot like modern everything else – after some point in the 1960s, it all becomes self-aware pastiche, Philip Glass, or the sound of a Pentagon contract for a networked computer system. And I am fucking WEARY of Philip Glass

"Checkmate" in Persian is Shah Mat (Persian: شاه مات), which translates to "the King is helpless," "the King is defeated," or "the King is astonished/stunned". It signifies the end of a chess game when the king is under attack and has no safe move.