Sunday Reads...

An irregular roundup of thought-provoking reads. Most made me go “hmm…”

Quote of the Day:

 "A mistake repeated more than once is a decision." - Paul Coelho

• YouTube remains the top-rated platform.

• Parents now dominate dorm decorating, hijacking a rite of passage from their children.

• The top 20% of income households are holding the U.S. economy afloat per this reporting.

• WARNING: Those whose spending presently accounts for 80% of consumer spending are starting to falter.

• Rolling Stones lists the top 25 content creators.

• Unpacking the sweet history of Ice Cream Trucks.

• Mapping the “average” U.S. income by state.

Average income by U.S. state

• CNN data geek notes that the Democrat brand is in deep “doo doo.”  Meanwhile, the GOP brand is a mere one step above.

• Remembering the “New Deal” lessons.

• A long list of Democrats behaving badly revisited.

• Kindergarteners who wrote their letters by hand had better decoding cognition skills later than those who learned letters by typing, according to the research.

• Truth in the age of feelings: a discourse with Robert George.

• Where do you rate on the “Sports Misery” Index?

• More good news: U.S. Coast Guard captures record amount of drug cartel cargo.

• Surreal pictures of a recent dust storm that hit Phoenix, Arizona, here.

• K-Pop Demon Hunters Soundtrack is topping the charts – aka – Pop gone wild.

• Turning bad schools around starts with fixing bad “adult culture,” this essay argues.

• How Stem Cells help your body reboot, watch.

• What does a bald eagle really sound like?

• Touring America’s most expensive home, here.

• MORE GOOD NEWS!  Three ways in which the world has improved.

• Did Dr. Seuss coin the term “nerd?”  Only nerds know.

• Goodbye: Formal dining rooms are going bye-bye according to design trends.

• The Pope’s boyhood Chicagoland home became a pilgrimage site.

• Why does the Hammerhead Shark have a hammerhead, you ask? There are theories.

• 101 top movie performances from the past 25 years are listed.

• 80’s movies that this essay argues could not be made today.

• The sound of elites losing their curatorial power can be read here.

• How Alfred Hitchcock changed cinema, here.

• Revisiting the musical invention and talents of Benjamin Franklin that eventually become a medical hoax!

• The history of the Frisbee, here.

• COUNTER NARRATIVE: Giving young families more money does not necessarily increase outcomes for kids. This has been a public policy trope for years.  But as usual with public policy, we find lazy thinking often drive mantras not facts.

• AI:

  • Popular LLM platforms get tested for their bias on public policy think tanks.  Spoiler alert, they lean to the Left.

  • The AI body count continues to stack up. And it is only getting started.

  • Goldman Sachs says AI will boost productivity in a big big big big way.

  • AI has come for the starter jobs at software development firms.

  • Chat-GPT usage plummets when school is out.

• TRAVEL:

  • Why Moscow is so big and weird. Noted here.

  • Ranking America’s top 25 pizzerias.

  • The most delayed airports ranked.

  • Are you ready to survive in the wilderness?  Take the quiz.

• The top paying jobs matched to Myers-Briggs type.

• A journalist spends a summer with Islamic Nazi’s.

• The “Endless Summer” poster that is taking over American dorm rooms.

• The history of the Guinness Book of Records, here.

• Yodeling, the history of:

Sunday Reads