why do scriptwriters hate geologists??

an analysis of found that "geologists die at an alarming rate in the movies"

about one third get killed before the credits roll

item #9 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-46-curse-tablets-a-robot-cellist-and-why/

Excellent @nprofile1q... piece in @nprofile1q... about the cultural shift in real-world and online flyers ...

... as people start posting AI-generated ones that all have the same bland creepy look

https://www.404media.co/we-are-living-in-a-chatgpt-flyer-pandemic/

(unpaywalled just in case: https://archive.is/pNTQh)

the penguins in a japanese zoo have *very* complex romantic lives

poly groupings, broken hearts, lots of side-eye and drams

so the zoo made a chart of it

item #5 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-46-curse-tablets-a-robot-cellist-and-why/

the ancient greeks and romans wrote "curse tablets" ...

... to try and give their enemies bad luck

one cursed a prominent lawyer:

“I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing, and his hands and feet and eyes and mouth. All of these I bind, I hide, I bury, I nail down.”

Item #8 in my latest Linkfest newsletter, free free to read/subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-46-curse-tablets-a-robot-cellist-and-why/

what could possibly go wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/science/spudcells-synthetic-cell.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uVA.3u_u.U4--YC2GN8OJ&smid=url-share

(gift link)

"the world has moved on"

here, @nprofile1q... neatly and quickly distils the reasons the "enshittocene" has arrived ...

... and what to do about it

"I told her that I don’t think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn’t a *market* problem, it’s a *political* problem, and shopping isn’t politics"

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/11/lapsarianism/#nostalgia-is-a-toxic-impulse

Researchers have found that it seems very easy to poison the output of "deep research" AI tools ...

... by poisoning the inputs: Go to Reddit, Wikipedia, Medium (or other "user-generated sites" and write a couple of short lines promoting your product or your idea ...

... and deep-research AI is liable to pick it up and start parroting it

Excellent story on this by @nprofile1q... https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

unpaywalled just in case: https://archive.is/OqOXX

1/4

back in the beforetimes when I was on Twitter, for years I ran a poetry bot

it'd take a huge corpus of lines I'd written -- *very* loosely in emulation of Basho and several lyric poets of antiquity -- and pick three at random, publishing four times a day

after I left Twitter in 2022, I turned it off

but now I just relaunched the bot ...

... on mastodon!

le voila: @nprofile1q...

I dug this piece by Ted Chiang

Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

Unpaywalled just in case: https://archive.is/bcpZl

The Trump administration is dismantling the country’s network of probes that help monitor conditions in the ocean …

… which, among other things, are critical to understanding how the ocean is absorbing CO2

Gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatories-initiative.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.yCRy.FdvoFFZs78ki&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The shuttering — and shrinking — of major scientific projects is going to cause years/decades of damage to American science