2026-11-13 05:01:00
Writer and comedian Zach Mander took quotes from Karl Marx and paired them with illustrations from books by Richard Scarry like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go.
See also Mamdani’s Richard Scarry socialism.
Tags: books · illustration · Karl Marx · politics · remix · Richard Scarry · Zach Mander
2026-11-13 03:58:00
Riding the Rails With America’s Last Train-Hoppers. “There are still people today who risk injury and arrest to climb aboard freight trains, still moving through the country in cars designed to carry things rather than people.”
2026-11-13 02:48:00
The corkscrew car jump from the Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun was extensively modelled on a computer in 1974. “McHenry took all the measurements and simulated the stunt using the equations of the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler.”
2026-11-13 01:59:00
“Today’s rich people are richer than ever, and that seems to have made them worse than ever. More shameless. More out of touch. Less empathetic. Thinner-skinned. And…angrier. They’re people who consider equality for others oppression for themselves.”
2026-11-13 00:44:00
As part of the 30 Day Map Challenge, Maxwell Howe created a map of New England places that many out-of-towners mispronounce (Instagram). As you would expect when you start talking about local pronunciations and accents, he’s getting some blowback:
You’re mixing accent with correct pronunciation. It’s only WUH-stah if you have a non-rhotic accent. If a non-native dropped that instead of “WUH-ster” in conversation they’d sound like an asshat. Same with Lem-in-ster et al. You do this correctly when you write Concord as CON-kerd, where the local accent would have it sound like “CON-kid”…. We expect the accent on the first syllable, but not for the R to drop. Source: native new englander with a rhotic accent.
Growing up in the Midwest, we had plenty of our own place names like this: Madrid (MAD-rid) and What Cheer (WATCH-ear) in Iowa were two of my favorites.
As a baseball card collector in my teens, I was familiar with the Rhode Island city of Pawtucket from the minor league stats listings on the backs of the cards of Red Sox players (Pawtucket is the Sox’s AAA team). My friends and I pronounced it like it looked. It was only when I went to a Red Sox game like 15 years ago that I overheard a guy talking about some prospect coming up from Puh-TUCK-it (he made it sound like a single syllable somehow) that my eyes went wide and my brain exploded. That’s how you pronounce it?
Tags: language · maps · Maxwell Howe
2026-11-12 23:27:00
Starting today at 7pm in NYC, 400 volunteers will read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in 10-minute increments for 4 days. They’re gonna livestream it on YouTube.