Mario Vittone at his own website:
The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television.
More here.
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The joke among young men these days is that everybody’s got a little money riding on something: football games, foreign elections, the odds of a U.S. military strike. Except it’s not really a joke. I recently made $3.79 guessing when the United States would attack Tehran. I pocketed $0.85 when To Lam was re-elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I took home $83.64 after the rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the skyscraper Taipei 101 without a rope.
Earlier this year, Anthropic unveiled 
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If you are of a certain age, notice how you are likely using exclamation points more lately. It has become a mark of agreeability in a way that would mystify a time traveler from as recently as a couple decades ago. “See you in a bit!” “I looked for you yesterday but you weren’t there!” I now email like that.
Human-only interfaces are already increasingly being used by both people and computers. But today’s interfaces are generally designed to assume a user in analog physical space is operating them. Skeuomorphic design reinforces this by representing a computer’s internal functions via physical metaphors. We access files via folders located on a desktop. Skeuomorphic graphics often proliferate during moments of technological change; embedding references to the past within the interfaces of new products can help with “easing the transition from the old to the new,” in the 
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Jules Netherland traveled from her home in the Bronx to the New York State Capitol in Albany several times in the past few years, hoping to persuade the Legislature to pass a medical aid in dying bill, allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives with a lethal prescription. She spoke at rallies. With other members of the advocacy organization Compassion & Choices, she visited legislators’ offices. In 2024, as the State Assembly was debating the aid in dying bill, she helped unfurl a banner in the chamber gallery that read, “Stop the Suffering.”
In a scene that could have easily featured in an episode of the US television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the late US physicist Richard Feynman once turned a visit to a Thai restaurant he often dined at into a mathematical riddle: how adventurous should we be in trying new dishes? Feynman promptly solved this on a sheet of paper. Now, behavioural scientists have revisited Feynman’s solution — some of which had been obscured by his inscrutable handwriting — and found that his was indeed the optimal strategy.
At first glance, there is something cold and formal about the portrait. Raphael’s Saint Sebastian in Half-Length, painted around 1503, when the artist was nineteen, departs radically from traditional iconography of the saint. Gone is the dramatic tension, gone are the visual pleasures that made paintings of Sebastian so popular during the Renaissance: no muscly torso pierced with arrows, no wide-eyed gaze directed skyward, no mouth agape in pain or ecstasy.
The principle behind the qanat is simple. A horizontal tunnel, up to ten feet in height and four feet in width, is dug by hand through bedrock or subsoil, until it reaches a vertical “mother well,” which has been sunk into an aquifer. At regular intervals, smaller well shafts are dug from the surface to provide light and ventilation. Though the site has to be chosen with care, a qanat can be dug anywhere the water table is higher than the farms or settlements to be irrigated. Water from the saturated soil naturally collects in the tunnel. The slope is engineered with exacting care: if it’s too great, the flowing water will erode the tunnel floor; if the gradient is too slight, sediment will build up, blocking the flow. Built correctly, though, a well-maintained qanat can provide a reliable stream of fresh water for centuries.
Spend time on social media and you will see debates with titles like “I destroy MAGA mom on vaccines” or “Conservative philosopher owns feminist student.” These popular videos focus on clip-worthy gotcha questions, one-line zingers and screaming matches edited for virality.