cara

one of those rare internet personalities who somehow became trusted by both toddlers and exhausted parents at the same time. the videos look extremely simple, but that is kind of the point. slow speech, repetition, facial expressions, songs, pauses, and direct eye contact are all designed around how very young children actually learn language. to a toddler, she is entertainment. to a parent trying to make dinner while their kid learns a new word in the background, she is basically infrastructure.

a term that started as a fairly literal description of someone fighting for social justice and eventually turned into an internet insult.

by the 2010s, especially around online culture wars, “sjw” became shorthand for someone seen as overly performative, moralizing, or obsessed with identity politics. dictionary sources now label the term as disparaging in common usage.

the sociological part is more interesting than the insult itself.

take a college student who cares about racism, sexism, or lgbt rights. activism can start as genuine concern, but once that activism moves onto social media, it also becomes visible to an audience. now there are likes, reposts, status, group approval, and punishment for saying the wrong thing.

at that point, you are not only expressing a belief.

you are also performing membership in a group.

that does not automatically make the belief fake. humans have always signaled values through religion, clothing, rituals, politics, and community behavior.

social media just gave moral signaling a scoreboard.

that is probably why “sjw” became such a loaded term in the u.s. it stopped describing what someone believed and started describing how other people thought they were performing those beliefs.

the gray area between being completely faithful and obviously cheating.

secret flirting, keeping someone around for attention, hiding messages, deleting conversations, or doing things you would suddenly stop doing if your partner walked into the room.

what is something about me you noticed before i noticed it myself?

what is one thing you wish people understood about you?

the person, comment, or moment that walks into a perfectly good vibe and kills it instantly.

everyone is laughing, having fun, enjoying the night.

then someone says, “actually…”

buzzkill.

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a temporary state of being thrown into a world you did not choose, given a body you did not design, surrounded by people you cannot fully understand, and then asked to somehow make meaning out of all of it.

one of those rare people who somehow managed to spend his life thinking about the most abstract questions imaginable while constantly getting involved in very real political fights.

he helped build the foundations of modern analytic philosophy and mathematical logic, coauthored principia mathematica, won the nobel prize in literature, went to prison for his antiwar activism, and later became one of the loudest intellectual voices against nuclear weapons.

what i find most interesting about russell is that he never treated intelligence as an excuse to become detached from the world.

he could spend years asking whether mathematics could be reduced to logic, then turn around and argue about war, education, religion, freedom, sex, marriage, and how people should actually live.

basically, the kind of philosopher who refused to stay in the philosophy department.

karolina olsson went to bed in sweden in 1876 at 14 years old and, according to the historical record, did not properly wake again until 1908, 32 years later. what makes the story even stranger is that after waking she could still read and write, remembered what she had learned before the episode, and was later described as mentally intact.

the part i find most fascinating is that we still do not really know what those 32 years were. sleep, catatonia, an unusual psychiatric condition, something partly performed, or some combination of things? even contemporary accounts left major questions unanswered. there is something deeply unsettling about a life containing three decades that nobody, including the person who lived them, can fully explain.

one of those judges whose name is much less famous than the idea his ruling helped protect. in 1982, william overton struck down an arkansas law that required public schools to give creation science balanced treatment with evolution. what makes the decision especially interesting is that he did not just say creationism was religious. he tried to articulate what makes something science in the first place: it has to deal with the natural world, be testable, remain open to revision, and be falsifiable. a courtroom ended up becoming a surprisingly important place for defining the boundary between belief and scientific inquiry.

i think you should.

back in college, a group of our friends got into a really bad car crash. the mercedes rolled several times and was completely totaled.

there were five people in the car. only one of them ended up spending a few weeks in the hospital because he was not wearing a seat belt and got thrown out through the window.

the other four, including the people sitting in the back, were wearing theirs.

they walked away without so much as a bloody nose.

spending 18 years in the s&p 100 and then basically being told, “you’re not top 100 anymore,” is a pretty brutal slap in the face for nike.

the company was worth around $264 billion in 2021. now it is closer to $57 billion.

the interesting part is not that nike is disappearing. it is that one of the most recognizable sports brands in the world has lost some of its old dominance while hoka, on, adidas, and chinese brands have gained ground.

and nike is still nike. the swoosh is still one of the most recognizable logos on earth.

the problem is not brand awareness.

people just do not seem to have the same “if it is nike, i want it” mentality anymore.

so nike’s real challenge is not being recognized.

it is becoming the brand people actively choose again.

it was the coolest for years...

whatever went wrong, it happened sometime in the last 10 or 15 years.

making a foldable phone and not calling it ifold is a complete lack of vision.

no face id, no haptic feedback, and no earpiece speaker for regular phone calls.

so you are either on speakerphone in public like an asshole or carrying airpods everywhere.