Recently updated blogs

Last week, my mother and I attended an author event at Boston College featuring Celeste Ng, which we enjoyed. BC has a freshman seminar in which many read Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You. It was great to see several hundred students listening to Ng describe her writing process, including her habit of beginning her books with a very dramatic sentence. I had to check this out:Lydia is …

"where's the forest?" my father asks, while staring at a thousand trees. Why yes, I have been binging Survivor. There was a particular moment in Survivor: Pearl Islands when I realised the desert island had turned into a forest. You’d think it would be an easy border to see — especially from above with the gratuitous helicopter footage — but down on the surface, the lines blur together in fascinating …

Last week, Daniel Bingham announced that peer-review.io, the system he built for crowdsourcing peer review of academic manuscripts, will be shutting down (it seems to be already offline). It was an interesting experiment, and I’m disappointed, but I am also completely, utterly, 157% unsurprised. Here’s why. Peer review is a form of academic service. For […]

I really should say “railway” in Lichtenstein, since there is only one and it just passes through the country.

Ridgeline subscribers! Hello, it is I, Craig Mod, writer of this newsletter. And runner of one membership program called SPECIAL PROJECTS, of which many of you are members (thank you!), and which makes Ridgeline and many other things possible, and which is now — somewhat unbelievably — FIVE YEARS OLD. That is, five years ago I launched this thing. This membership program. Somewhat sheepishly (OK — pathologically sheepishly). And the …

The Daily Telegraph reports that an increasingly abstemious younger generation are blowing a large hole in the government’s revenue forecasts: Clean-living youngsters threaten to blow a multibillion-pound hole in public finances as alcohol and tobacco tax income declines, the head of the spending watchdog has warned. Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), has questioned whether assumptions about future tax income from what are often dubbed “sin …

The mountain got its name in 1911 when students of the local university, named New Mexico School of Mines, climbed up the hill and painted a 50 meter tall letter ‘M’ near the summit. Other Mines schools had their letter, so why not Socorro? And of course it had to be bigger than the other…

Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Dcn Andy Weiss, Deacon in the Diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, via phone call on February 10th, 2024. Some of the questions have been rearranged and edited to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given. Tell me a bit about your faith journey. I was born and raised Catholic. I was in the Air Force and had a …

I have always found it hard to keep a grip on the pension drawdown options. There are so many fiddly yet peskily important details to forget about. So today we’ll try to capture all the crucial drawdown details in one place for future reference. Let’s take it one step at a time… What is a drawdown pension? Going into pension drawdown is one of the options you have when taking …

I've been thinking, especially since the recent Spotify layoffs, that I'm due to delete my Spotify account. I haven't paid for it in years, and I have also significantly reduced my usage. The other thing is that I've had this draft for ages and procrastinated on this topic. Luckily, today, I stumbled across this post from Raed explaining their reasonings for deleting their account. I thought, "Yeah, see, I had …

I don’t know about you folks, but the feed in the social media formerly known as twitter is currently dominated by “cute poop” ads (who seem to have displaced the chemtrailers) and flat earthers. The former is a mildly puzzling Japanese phenomenon, while the latter appears to be dominated by people who have not progressed past a pre-Babylonian view of the world, but who possess P1000 cameras they don’t know …

This past Saturday: finished the #InsideTrail Redtail Ridge 30k #trailRace in 6:00:59.A few notes:This was my first trail race of 2024, and first in over 6 months, since last year’s Marin Ultra Challenge 50k and Broken Arrow 23k races in June¹. Saw pal Henri after changing into my trail shoes in the Lake Chabot Regional Park parking lot. The storms had scared many away, fewer than 100 showed up to …

How we relate to the smell of a perfume can change over time. I purchased Myrrh Casati by Mona di Orio in 2014. There was something about it I couldn't relate to, which is why it was relegated to the back shelf in a fragrance storage closet. After reading mixed fragrance reviews, the only tangible sentiment I had for the luxury perfume was buyer’s remorse. Ten years later, the

Demon Sarcophagus, by SamanVia https://bsky.app/profile/samanbb.bsky.social/post/3klsyw467xv2y

The Lawyer Turns out, the two "heroes" of the Southern Baptist 'Conservative Resurgence' were: a tone-deaf autocrat who specialized in using DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender) to bully sexual assault victims and protect his friends & protegesa deeply cynical lawyer who used his position of power to actively groom and sexually assault young men over decades It's become clear that not only was Paul Pressler (the lawyer) passed …