If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage (Josephine Walker, 8/26/26, Axios)
Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night.
These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat. (Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheime, Ronen Bergman, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)
“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.
“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”
For Many Americans, Covid Is Still a Chronic, Disabling Disease. These Scientists Are Working Tirelessly to Bring Them Relief (Mike Mariani, September/October 2026, Smithsonian)
The PLRC and other like-minded groups have outlined more than 200 associated symptoms, including fatigue, muscle weakness, joint pain, sore throat, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, memory issues and post-exertional malaise…
At least pretend it’s physical.
Football Conquered the United States. Now It Wants to Conquer Global Football: Can the U.S. ambition to conquer football on a global scale and to remake the game in American style be stopped? (George Courmouzis and Stephan Richter, 8/30/26, The Globalist)
The U.S. has done something similar, and arguably better, on the women’s side. It was essentially the key driver of the launch of women’s soccer.
U.S. universities’ varsity teams played a major role in bringing women’s soccer from a total sideshow to a significant sports activity, first nationally and then globally.
Spain may currently hold the World Cup in both the men’s and women’s game, but the U.S. tops the all-time list on the women’s side, with four Women’s World Cups.
And it is the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) that has turned that record into the world’s most valuable platform for the women’s professional game.
Just consider that Denver’s 2026 home opener drew over 63,000 fans, a number few European women’s clubs could dream of.
Whatever else the info of American money may do to football, it has done more than any other market to make the women’s professional game a going financial concern.
The game is only understood because American sabremetrics have been applied to it.
Dolly’s theology was love (Brandon Ambrosino, August 28, 2026, Christian Century)
There’s a certain kind of Christian for whom faith begins with an exam (and doesn’t grow much beyond that). Their salvation depends on getting theological answers correct: Is the Son co-eternal with the Father? Does God’s knowledge of the future jeopardize human’s free will? Are the original copies of Scripture free from error?
But there are Christians who are not that concerned about these questions and nevertheless have decided to follow Jesus. Christians like, you know, the first generations of Jesus’s followers. To them, following Jesus meant trusting the God he trusted, meant continuing his ministry to the sick and the poor, meant never giving their complete allegiance to an earthly ruler, meant hoping for God’s future. I think this is the kind of Christian Dolly was. It’s the kind of person Jesus was—the kind of person he calls his followers to become.
I’m a theologian. I’m paid to overthink nebulous, inside-baseball theological ideas, ones that most of Jesus’s followers haven’t heard about and probably wouldn’t ever care to discuss. I think theology is important. Theology is a gift to the church and the world the church is called to serve. But when I start to get bigheaded about my job, as if I’m part of an exclusive group that has been nominated by God to protect Christianity, I’m forced to remind myself that Jesus decided to build God’s kingdom with fishermen and sex workers, that he preferred to tell simple stories without opening a textbook, and that his God will not be bound by my ideas even when power-wielding, self-authorizing groups of educated people call them “orthodox” and “canonical.”
He eventually made His own theology rather easy to comprehend, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”
You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don’t Take My Mix Tape: These objects contain meaning. (Kera Bolonik, 8/28/26, NY Times)
The popularity of home taping exploded in 1979, with the introduction of the Sony Walkman. At last, you could listen to what you wanted when you were on the move.
The music industry wasn’t pleased with this development, blaming it for a pronounced drop in the sales of vinyl records. The British Phonographic Institute, a trade association in London, mounted a campaign with a reproachful slogan: “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.” In the United States, music executives pressed lawmakers to place a fee on blank cassettes and home recording equipment. George David Weiss, the president of the Songwriters Guild, likened home taping to theft.
None of it stopped youthful Gen X-ers from turning themselves into amateur curators of sound. While this new pastime gave them the chance to to hear their favorite songs in the order of their choosing, it served other purposes, too. “I am what I play,” David Bowie sang on the 1979 song “D.J.,” and the living-room D.J.s of the early 1980s used the medium of the mix tape to claim their identities, introduce themselves to others, flex their musical knowledge, telegraph messages and even flirt.
Forty years after I started making and exchanging mix tapes, I can still remember which friend introduced me to which artist. Mix tapes had a way of casting an indelible imprint on our musical taste, fashion sense — even our worldview.
An Insider’s Look at What Happened When Chiropractic Was Evaluated Scientifically, and Why No One Remembers (J. Michael Menke, August 27, 2026, Skeptic)
During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centers.
Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds.2 Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing.3, 4 In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise.
The problem was not only scientific but psychological, cultural, and institutional, which is why supporters and critics could read the same trials as Rorschach blots and come away convinced of opposite conclusions. When one body of evidence underwrites both conclusions, the fault is rarely bias; more often the evidence was never built to answer the question asked of it.5 The remedy is unglamorous: decide in advance which single measure could settle the question, weigh several rival hypotheses at once,6 and recognize when further information can no longer move the decision.7 In short: name in advance the result that would change your mind. Chiropractic, though, thrived in the ambiguity. When outcomes were positive, manipulation worked; when they were negative, prejudice or incompetence was clearly afoot.
So the center of gravity in chiropractic research quietly retreated from the awkward clinical effectiveness question, towards safer, fundable territory: biomechanics, sensorimotor physiology, adverse-event surveillance, health-services research, and broad biopsychosocial models.
Does spinal manipulation itself produce large, reliable, clinically transformative effects beyond natural history and contextual healing?
I eventually tried to answer that question—at scale, assembling a meta-analysis of spinal manipulation for low back pain: a hundred and twenty randomized trials, some nineteen thousand patients, modeled against the natural history of recovery. The results did not rescue the story I had spent my youth defending. Once natural history and contextual healing were given their due, the slight effect we detected turned out to be natural history carrying manipulation for acute pain and a faint placebo carrying it for chronic pain.8, 9 Years later, a contemporary from those reform days, chiropractor, influencer, and fellow researcher Greg Plaugher, remarked to me that “evidence-based chiropractic” was an old and abandoned paradigm.10
The Most Optimistic People in the World, in $1,000 Yurts; At a festival on a disc golf course, on a peninsula in Iceland, waiting for the sky to descend into darkness. (Callie Holtermann, Aug. 27, 2026, NY Times)
The Snaefellsnes Peninsula sticks out from Iceland’s western coast in the shape of a carrot that was peeled during a bumpy bus ride. When I arrived in mid-August, there were 16 hours of sunlight each day. A handsome glacier loomed in the distance, keeping watch over lava fields and clutches of lichen. Arctic terns made lazy circles in the sky. It looked like a cross between Yosemite and Mars.The festival had attracted around 4,200 people who seemed to share an openness to New Age thinking and a degree of financial flexibility. Tickets cost $888 for entry-level participants and $1,444 for V.I.P.s whom festival organizers referred to as “celestial voyagers.” Lodging was extra. I slept in a spacious beige canvas yurt that cost $1,000 for the week.
There were start-up founders and astrologers and eye surgeons and bartenders and literal astronauts. There were Silicon Valley-types in performance synthetics and Icelanders wearing shorts. During a set called “high vibrational fun time abundance of comedy,” the comedian Brent Pella joked that most people in the audience had crystals but no health insurance. In response, a man stood up and waved his hunk of quartz back and forth as if it were a lighter at a Coldplay concert.
Why Asimov’s Foundation series still resonates in the AI era (Chow Chung-yan, 26 Aug 2026, SCMP)
Elon Musk called it a fundamental catalyst for SpaceX. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman credited it with shaping his career. Newt Gingrich made it required reading for his congressional staff, and even Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara was reportedly inspired by it. […]When Asimov began writing Foundation 85 years ago, he was capturing the cutting-edge intellectual currents of his era: mathematical determinism, the quantification of social sciences and the rise of central planning in governance.
Economists such as John Maynard Keynes argued that macro-level human behaviour could be managed through top-down intervention, while Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch were building the first econometric models. Seldon’s psychohistory was essentially macroeconomics and public administration pushed to their absolute logical extreme – individual chaos smoothed out by the predictable behaviour of billions.
Both sides of this coin are incredibly destructive: there are the intellectuals who believe that their social engineering would, uniquely, work and those who think their failed lives must have been engineered from without.
Canadian supercomputers are transforming drug discovery: Can they deliver medicines faster? (Dr. Tim Sandle, August 26, 2026, Digital Journal)
The traditional process of drug discovery is lengthy and complex. Scientists must identify disease-causing biological targets, design molecules capable of interacting with those targets, test thousands of candidates, and then determine whether any are safe and effective enough to progress into clinical development. It is an expensive undertaking that is frequently described as taking around a decade and billions of dollars to bring a successful medicine to market.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being positioned as a solution to this challenge. Across academia and industry, researchers are combining AI algorithms with powerful computational infrastructure to identify promising drug candidates more rapidly.