The Family Firmament is a planetarium in the ceiling of a late 18th century house in the Netherlands. Great photos! Someone’s decades-long obsession leaves us with a remarkable working artifact of knowledge.
Want to Reach Nirvana? Try a Colonoscopy. Let’s just say it’s the best nap ever.
I avoid linking to everything James Fallows writes, but I read it all, and subscribe. “We’re No Longer Having a Political Debate. We’re Having a Moral Debate.” is from January 27 2026 about Minnesota.
Pubs on the brink: ‘Labour are going to lose the next election – why not be ballsy?’ is from The Telegraph (UK), and behind a paywall. Interesting details on the economics of running a pub, featuring the brilliant The Mall Tavern in Notting Hill, London. “The costs, though, are eye-watering. The rent, paid to pub company
Stonegate, is north of £200,000 a year; food costs have gone up by 60 per cent in the past five years; insurance is £2,500 a month; and a recently agreed utility contract weighs in at about £7,000 a month. That, at least, is less than it was before, for a contract negotiated during the Ukraine-induced energy crisis, which was costing the Perritts £9,000 a month.”
The Means-Testing Industrial Complex with a sub-headline
The vendors getting rich from putting administrative burdens on the poor names Equifax and Deloitte, but the deliberate complexity is not limited to those companies. Appreciate that essay both exposes the problem, with specifics, and then moves to some solutions. These aren’t simple, politically, because we need to fight the incumbent vendors who want to keep their revenue. But it’s taxpayer money being spent multiple times for the same government information. “Today, states can build public income verification services in-house by modifying and using income data that they already collect, instead of relying on a faulty private data broker. This public option could be designed with a privacy-first architecture that minimizes the data stored and shared to foreclose potential punitive uses.”