Annie Rauwerda at Asterisk:
Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time?
Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.
Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.
More here.
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An optical fibre technology can help chips communicate with each other at the speed of light, enabling them to transmit 80 times as much information as they could using traditional electrical connections. That could significantly speed up the training times required for large artificial intelligence models – from months to weeks – while also reducing the energy and emissions costs for data centres.
In the fall of 2012, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the military power now in charge of Syria, was a mere minor terrorist organization, a band of their fighters in Aleppo took me prisoner. Back then they were known as Jabhat al-Nusra. I remained in the group’s custody for two years—often in solitary confinement cells, but not always. During this time, it often happened that news of some stupendous victory would make its way, via the fighters’ two-way radios, into our prisons. It was a surreal experience then to listen as a government checkpoint got blown into the sky, for instance, or a truckload of government troops fell into my captors’ hands.
The thing that had precipitated Warner into the literary limelight, and earned her quite a lot of money, was her novel of 1926, Lolly Willowes. As an assertion of female autonomy and idiosyncrasy, it was both timely and captivating. It was also prescient, with its theme of decamping to the country about to be enacted in the life of its author (though perhaps without so sorcerous a resolution). Laura (Lolly) Willowes is a wry old-maidish lady occupying a rather put-upon role in the London household of her married brother, when she suddenly takes flight to a hamlet in the Chilterns called Great Mop, enters into a compact with the Devil and becomes a witch. Despite its subject matter, the book is not excessively whimsical – or its whimsey is tempered by a stern ironic overtone. A style at once mischievous and elegant is one of Warner’s hallmarks, whether it’s applied to a mediaeval nunnery beset by money worries (The Corner That Held Them, 1948), the beguiling and ruthless Cat’s Cradle Book (1960), or the distinctly unfairylike Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), her last subversive flight-of-fancy, carried out with an eldritch inventiveness.
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Nicole Kidman’s eyes widened. “Haven’t you been to the Rockettes?” she asked. “I go every year. Oh yeah, I’m obsessed!”
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As Donald Trump gets ready to return to the White House on Jan. 20, he must be prepared to tackle one issue immediately: the possibility that the spreading avian flu might mutate to enable human-to-human transmission.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.
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Researchers at Google have built a chip that has enabled them to demonstrate the first ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build 
“Everywhere that humans go, they cause ecological problems. The environmental history is clear about this,” Daniel Capper, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, who is a vocal proponent of such a movement, recently told me. Capper, who has a Walt Whitman beard and speaks with a genial kind of urgency, argues that commonly-held beliefs about the value of land and wilderness on Earth should hold just as much 
If it hadn’t been for a philosophy classmate at the Lycée Jeanne-d’Arc, I never would have entered the municipal library. I wouldn’t have dared. I vaguely assumed it was open only to university students and professors. Not at all, my classmate told me, everyone’s allowed in, you can even settle down and work there. It was winter. When I would return after class to my closet-size room in the Catholic girls’ dorm, I found it gloomy and awfully chilly. Going to a café was out of the question, I didn’t have any money. The thought of working on my philosophy essays, surrounded by books, somewhere that was surely well heated, was an appealing prospect. The first time I entered the municipal library, at once shy and determined, I suppose, I was struck by the silence, by the sight of people reading or writing as they sat at long rows of tables pushed together and overhung by lamps. I was struck by its hushed and studious atmosphere, which had something religious about it. There was that very particular smell—a little like incense—which I would rediscover later, elsewhere, in other venerable libraries. A sanctuary that required treading cautiously, almost on tiptoe: the opposite of the commotion and confusion of the lycée. An impressive and severe world of knowledge. I didn’t know its rituals, which I had to learn: how to consult the card catalogue, separated into “Authors” and “Subjects”; how to record the call numbers accurately; how to deposit the card into a basket, before waiting, occasionally a long time, sometimes shorter, for the requested book. I got into the habit of coming to the library regularly and writing my philosophy essays there.
The Bob Dylan Archive had long been a subject of rumor and legend. Few outside the singer’s inner circle knew for sure whether it existed, let alone what it contained. It was kind of hard to picture Mr. Dont Look Back himself boxing up old notebooks for posterity. But if he didn’t, someone did. When the sale was announced in March 2016, the New York Times described it as “deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work. . . . A private trove of his work, dating back to his earliest days as an artist, including lyrics, correspondence, recordings, films and photographs.”