Powderhorn

A true masterclass in satire.

I literally had no idea about his activism. He's quite the fascinating character when off-screen.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an old lefty who might have a Che Guevara poster in the attic and consider Bernie Sanders to be too soft on capitalism. When the Guardian visits his home – a log cabin in the farming town of Warwick, upstate New York, where he lives with his third wife, the actor Anna Stuart – he rises from a chair at the hearth with a warm greeting and outstretched hand (it is a big hand that would have required a generous dollop of glue).

Cromwell stands at 6ft 7in tall like a great weathered oak. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The key is in the lock. All they have to do is the one thing to turn it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the Congress has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party praising aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.

Subtle, they were not. But that's fucking brilliant!

I'm not posting an excerpt here because it's your typical "officials tout censorship" boilerplate.

Once a century, a very special day comes along. That day is today — 9/16/25.

Pi Day (3/14) often comes with sweet treats; Square Root Day (4/4/16 or 5/5/25, for example) has a certain numerical rhyme. But the particular string of numbers in today's date may be especially delightful to the brains of mathematicians and the casual nerds among us. Linda Gordon draws cartoons for the website that her husband Ron Gordon made to celebrate mathematically themed days.

First, "all three of the entries in that date are perfect squares — and what I mean by that is 9 is equal to 3^2^, 16 is equal to 4^2^, and 25 is equal to 5^2^," says Colin Adams, a mathematician at Williams College who was first tipped off about today's special qualities during a meeting with his former student, Jake Malarkey.

Even more interesting?

(Fun bonus: It turns out the full year, 2025, is also a perfect square: 45 times 45.)

‘I’m going to throw that thing into a river!” my wife says as she comes down the stairs looking frazzled after putting our four-year-old daughter to bed.

To be clear, “that thing” is not our daughter, Emma*. It’s Grem, an AI-powered stuffed alien toy that the musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, helped develop with toy company Curio. Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI’s technology, the toy is supposed to “learn” your child’s personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It’s advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is part of a growing market of AI-powered toys.

When I agreed to experiment on my child’s developing brain, I thought an AI chatbot in cuddly form couldn’t be any worse for her than watching Peppa Pig. But I wasn’t prepared for how attached Emma became to Grem, or how unsettlingly obsequious the little alien was.

The three-hour one I mentioned three days ago has been trumped by four hours tonight. We discussed her younger son's college goals and postgrad intentions, veered off into reminiscing and then somehow ended up in "why not come visit for a day" territory.

I know she's really, really terrible for me, and I don't like the idea of being stranded an hour from my van if shit goes sideways, but this is starting to look like a movie I've seen before.

The one where I visited her for a day, and we ended up married as a result. The path was a bit more winding, but it's easier to be direct with a former spouse than at the start of the whole thing.

Seriously, 15 times is my limit on correcting an LLM.

The name in question? Rach. Google absolutely cannot pronounce it in any other way than assuming I was referring to Louise Fletcher in the diminutive.

Specifying "long a" did nothing, and now I'm past livid. If you can't handle a common English name, why would I trust you with anything else?

This is my breaking point with LLMs. They're fucking idiotic and can't learn how to pronounce English words auf Englisch.

I hope the VCs also die in a fire.

I grew up with this on CD from Deutsche Grammophon. I'd not realized it had been videoed. Wow, was '89 a weird year. You don't realize that at 10.

I'm somewhat amused by how bored the choir looks awaiting the fourth movement. I was once positioned behind the gong for a full run of Carmina Burana. Then I went to a production of it in Hamburg with my host family, who were quite confused that I knew the entire work. And thereafter, when I was getting help building out my van, the local NPR station was taking requests, and sure as shit, Carmina Burana came up as a suggestion. I looked at Eric and said "there's no way they're playing the full thing."

As one does, I just used my phone to broadcast the full piece. O Fortuna isn't particularly satisfying on its own.

We've been divorced since 2016. We've, uh, met up a few times over the years, but that ended around 2019.

And at this point, I can't recall the last time we could talk like adults who love each other intensely but didn't make it work. We both know damn well that what we had isn't repeatable.

Surprisingly, we got on the topic of FetLife without it going completely off the rails. Turns out the guy she left me for is dead and did her the disservice of assigning her as POA before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Then there was another (influencer) guy whose life she decided to ruin when he couldn't take a hint.

I don't really consider myself Machiavellian, but together, we are. Take that for what you will.

But we just talked like when we were 30. I covered my dad's struggles with the move to his new assisted-living facility, and she told me about what her boys were up to (not what I was expecting). And then, it's after 1 a.m.

I almost wish we'd at least just fought. I don't like to be reminded of why we worked so well until we didn't.

I find Patrick Boyle to be a consistently interesting voice for current events. Here, the conversation centers on journalism.

Doctors have raised the alarm about high levels of vaping among children worldwide, saying they are convinced e-cigarettes are causing irreversible harm to their health.

Cardiologists, researchers and health experts said they were “extremely concerned” about the harmful effects of e-cigarettes on millions of teenagers and young people, including exposure to toxins and carcinogens – some of which are still unknown.

Nicotine levels in e-cigarettes can be very high, raising the risk of addiction and injury to the developing brains of adolescents. Children are also risking long-term cardiovascular effects as a result of vaping at school and college, experts say.

Speaking at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual congress in Madrid, the world’s largest heart conference, Prof Maja-Lisa Løchen, a senior cardiologist at the University hospital of North Norway, said she was concerned that millions of children could face ill health in future.

... he read while vaping

Tina Woods was sitting in a taxi when the dancing bug bit. It was after midnight and she and two friends were heading home from another friend’s 60th birthday party. South-west London rolled past the window. They had had a bit to drink. As they passed Le Fez nightclub, they realised they didn’t want to go home. “We were like: let’s go dancing before we go to bed,” she says.

Woods, then 56, had gone clubbing in her 20s, but on Le Fez’s dancefloor, as her body caught the beat, she had “an epiphany moment”, a shock of pure euphoria: “The joy I felt – the mind, body and soul connection – was like a lightning bolt.” She knew then that “dancing and music were going to be a bigger part of my life than I’d ever thought”.

Woods, who lives in London but grew up in Montreal, Canada, has always been active. She loves travelling, mountain climbing and Zumba. But now she has started clubbing – with friends or with Nick, her husband of nearly 30 years.