Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named. The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river. The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn. Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound. "Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever. It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin. "Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet. In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair. And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge. You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain. The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste. I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind. Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again. "Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up. Discipline is a journey.

Your next package might arrive by drone sooner than you think. The FAA is finalizing rules to allow drone pilots to fly beyond their line of sight, a major shift that would expand deliveries, inspections and other commercial drone operations. theconversation.com/drone-us…

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models. No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success. There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price. This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc. I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of David Hockney, one of the most influential and defining contemporary artists of the 20th century. The Yorkshire painter’s seven-decade career was characterised by a multi-media approach to image making and a sustained commitment to celebrating and portraying the world around him. His work will continue to inspire artists for generations to come.

Imagine building a company worth $30 billion... And choosing not to take the money. That's exactly what he did , And says he has no regrets 🤯 Meet Craig Newmark. > Born in Morristown, New Jersey. 1952. > Self-described nerd. Socially awkward kid. > Father died when Craig was just 13 years old. > Buried himself in books and computers. > Spent 17 years working at IBM. > Got frustrated with corporate politics. Quit. > Joined a small tech company in San Francisco. 1993. > The internet was brand new. Chaotic. Exciting. > Wanted to help people around him connect. > Started a simple email list for friends in 1995. > Shared local events. Job openings. Random stuff. > Called it Craigslist. > Word spread. People started asking to be added. > Then more people. Then way more people. > Spent $35 a month on web hosting. That was the entire budget. 💀 > By 1999 — millions of people using it every month. > Venture capitalists started showing up at his door. > Threw billions at him. Told him to monetize everything. > Charge for listings. Run ads. Do the Silicon Valley thing. > He said no. Every single time. > Incorporated Craigslist as a company just to manage the growth. > Never took a single dollar of outside investment. Ever. > Kept almost everything free. > Bankers later estimated he walked away from $11 billion. 🚀 > He confirmed it himself. > Said "That estimate jives with my guesswork." > Still said no. > Today — 250 million monthly users. > More traffic than Amazon in some categories. > Revenue less than $1 billion per year. > Could be $30 billion. Chose not to. > Still looks like a website from 2001. On purpose. 💀 > Craig stepped back from day-to-day operations. > Now spends most of his time donating to journalism and civic causes. > Signed the Giving Pledge in 2025 — gave away most of his wealth. > Said "I don't need billions. I've met a bunch of rich people and none of them are all that happy." > Built one of the most visited websites in history. Kept it free. Gave the money away. Absolute legend 🔥🐐

« Les évènements récents démontrent que la loi ne protège pas suffisamment les lanceurs d’alerte. Le premier réflexe du gouvernement est d’abord de s’en prendre au messager », déplore le président de la Fédération professionnelle des journalistes, Éric-Pierre Champagne.

Today, the goal of the image is to shape reality rather than merely represent it. ↓ About @trevorpaglen’s new book, "How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI" There is no shortage of speculation about what generative AI might mean for culture. Visions range from the “dead internet” to utopian scenarios of redistribution and universal basic income. ⁠ But for more than a decade, before many people had even heard of large language models, artist Trevor Paglen has been making work about what generative AI is already doing to culture. In his incisive new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, Paglen distills key insights from his practice and argues that mainstream understandings of images remain stuck in an outdated paradigm. ⁠ “Paglen’s ideas, collected between two covers, carve a clean, linear path through our messy neural era, engaging in the kind of big-picture sense-making that books remain well suited to do, even as AI encroaches on this terrain,” Louis Bury writes. “Even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts.” ⁠ ↓ Read ARTnews’ review of Paglen’s new book at the link below.

Anthropic is advertising it doesn’t run advertising

RIP @sonnyrollins ma.tt/2026/05/rip-sonny/

Elon Musk’s “baby mama,” Ashley St. Clair, says that almost every MAGA influencer on social media is being paid by foreign countries such as Israel, Russia, and Qatar. She says nothing about them is organic and that everything is guided by a carefully constructed script behind the scenes. “There’s Qatari money flowing in and out.”

"Tout a été fait à la main, toutes les structures." En plein cœur de Paris, l'artiste JR a transformé le Pont-Neuf en caverne de 140 mètres de long. Une œuvre éphémère et immersive, qui rend hommage à Christo et Jeanne-Claude, un couple d'artistes qui, il y a 40 ans, a emballé ce même pont. Notre journaliste Laura s'est promenée avec lui sur les quais de Seine, juste avant l’élévation de la structure gonflable qui doit donner au pont son allure de caverne. Et, à ce moment-là, son projet était loin de faire l’unanimité… La "Caverne du Pont-Neuf" sera accessible gratuitement, 24 heures sur 24, du 6 juin au 28 juin 2026.

Art has always been a consensus, not a set of rules. What counts as art is whatever enough people, at a given moment, agree counts as art. The group doing the deciding changes over time. The mechanism doesn't. 🧵

A media subsidy introduced as part of the massive 2019 newspaper industry bailout could soon be extended to broadcasters, despite them being mostly owned by our highly-profitable telecom companies #cdnmedia canadiandimension.com/articl…