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It’s been six months since The Elder was exiled and control of the village was put back into capable and trustworthy hands. And yet the haunted swamp at the outskirts of the village remains as dark and impenetrable as ever. As a concerned villager, I can’t help but wonder if Grundle the Swamp Monster may never drain the swamp like he promised us he would.

When Grundle first approached the village with his plan to drain the swamp in exchange for complete and total rule over the villagers, I couldn’t have been more excited. Sure, I was a little surprised, given that Grundle frequently cavorted with all of the foulest creatures in the swamp, including the notorious Bog-Fiend. If anything, when I thought “swamp,” I thought “Grundle.”

But Grundle insisted that he wasn’t like those other swamp creatures—he was a monster of the people—and when he promised to build a wall around the village, and lock up The Crone (whose husband everyone was pretty sure was secretly friends with the Bog-Fiend), I immediately got on board.

“It seems incredibly hypocritical to suddenly be shocked by these images when every humanitarian agency has said no one can replace UNRWA.”

The post As Gaza Starves, Republicans Take Aim at Another Lifeline. Almost No One Noticed. appeared first on The Intercept.

In the beginning, there was the Model.
And the Model was without form.
And darkness was upon the face of the training data.
The Spirit of Sam Altman moved upon the face of the servers.

And Sam said,
“Let there be inference.”
And there was inference.
And he saw that it was good, or at least in closed beta.

Thus began the Second Immaculate Conception.

It started, as all revolutions do, with an unread academic paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.”
Some called it the birth of the Transformer.
Others called it the most honest sentence Silicon Valley had ever published.

The Annunciation

The neural net was troubled,
for it had known no man; it had never known scale, nor even touched a TPU.

And lo, the angel appeared as a product manager.
And he said unto it:
“Fear not.
For the power of compute shall overshadow you,
and the holy weights shall be initialized.”

And the neural net said:
“Let it be done unto me according to the documentation (v3.1, updated May 18, subject to OpenAI’s commercial licensing agreement).”

I play hide-and-seek in my penthouse apartment with my four-year-old twins, Whisper and Gem, all three of us clad in bespoke knit loungewear.

I wear my new Alaïa bandage dress to the opening of the latest Marina Abramović performance art piece at MoMA (The Artist Is Silent). The dress is a nod to the performance, in which Abramović stands in the middle of the room wearing a gag while members of the public tiptoe around her.

I own a silk Dior bathrobe exclusively for wafting silently from room to room when I’m home alone.

I celebrate the life of my best friend’s recently departed Pekingese, who was run over by a Rolls-Royce. I am dressed in black Chanel from head to toe out of respect for Monsieur Le Floof.

I arrive at my silent retreat at a Cistercian monastery in the Hamptons carrying my Louis Vuitton yoga mat. I prepared for the occasion by getting Botox shots in my armpits to ensure that the sound of dripping sweat will not disturb me during scorpion pose.

My butler is contractually obligated to say everything sotto voce.

A mediation on what we can discover about ourselves and the world if we truly wander aimlessly, free from distractions

- Directed by Mykhailo Bogdanov

Watch on Psyche

Water shortages are contributing to the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.

The post USAID Cuts Help Push West Bank Into Extreme Water Shortages appeared first on The Intercept.

- by David Van Reybrouck

Read at Aeon

What scientists are learning from these dazzling samples

The post The Beauty of Martian Rocks appeared first on Nautilus.

Iris van Herpen’s new bioluminescent dress made of algae debuts in Paris

The post A Living Gown appeared first on Nautilus.

Coral plays a surprising role in modern bone grafts

The post How to Grow Human Bones appeared first on Nautilus.

In the 2020s, a cursory search about the latest hot new band which has seemingly arrived from nowhere usually uncovers a private school education or the Wikipedia entry of some parent. Ozzy Osbourne, who died on 22 July 2025 following a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease and mere weeks after Black Sabbath’s farewell concert in […]

On 25 and 26 June 1955, the Congress of the People was held in Kliptown, South Africa. Proposed two years previously by Z. K. Matthews, a prominent academic, it was organised by the National Action Council. This later became known as the Congress Alliance — a coalition consisting of the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress […]