Ardent Crayon

There was nothing like rolling out of bed at age three, wiping the sleep out of your eyes, and thinking “I gotta mow the imaginary lawn today.”

Eli Lilly released retatrutide Phase 3 data yesterday. 28% weight loss in 80 weeks. The most powerful obesity drug that’s ever been tested. And today the cancer signal drops. 12,112 patients. Seven tumor types. GLP-1 users had half the lung cancer metastasis rate (10% vs 22%). Breast cancer: 43% cut. Colon cancer five-year mortality in a separate study: 15.5% vs 37.1%. Cancer joins a list that already includes heart disease (SELECT, 20% MACE reduction), kidney failure (FLOW, 24% slower decline), sleep apnea (SURMOUNT-OSA, FDA-approved), addiction (BMJ, 600K veterans, 18-25% reduction across substances), and liver disease (86% fat clearance). Tumors express GLP-1 receptors. Activate them and NF-kB drops, apoptosis rises. The drug isn’t just shrinking fat. It’s talking directly to the cancer. One drug class. Designed for blood sugar. The biology keeps finding uses the designers didn’t predict.

There are days when I miss being an editor and I particularly loved writing headlines. Whoever did this, I hope they took the rest of the day off.

Now that a lot of primaries are over, we might see a few senators who count as vertebrates

CLIENT: These federal charges seem serious. What kind of sentence could I get? LAWYER: Depending on the next presidential election, you're looking at somewhere between life imprisonment and becoming a millionaire.

my 5-year-old just came home from school crying. this is the new classroom rug. something has to be done about this

this cat is literally :3

Any institution that protects its members from corruption and incompetence is doomed to fail, often spectacularly. We're now paying the price for decades of immunities and protections granted to federal officials under the ridiculous presumption that real accountability would make it more difficult for them to do their jobs. I continue to think that the single-most important structural reform we can undertake is to enhance legal accountability in government.

It's been a long time since I've seen so much useful advice in one place. I think I'll have a pickle. (Richard Scarry, author and illustrator)

Like all the newly-retired lawmakers who pull me aside and say "now that I'm out of office, I can push for bold deficit reduction." Dude, you had a whole career to do the right thing when it mattered. You're just admitting that you knew better but didn't have the courage.

I was in the green room at a con last year and I let Peter Weller go ahead of me on the coffee line and he turned and said, “thank you for your cooperation” and i was made whole

Now we gotta hear about how Betty Boop is the cornerstone of Western civilization or some shit.

Also, both sides of this argument seem to assume that Gen Z is suffering mightily, and are arguing over whether the culprit is neoliberal capitalism or Zoomers being coddled idiots. But it's not clear to me that Gen Z is doing any worse than previous generations.

How about we ban water use on lawns, which provide zero value to humanity besides looking pretty, in contrast to AI data centers that will save billions of lives? We can also grow fewer almonds & play less golf to save our water & stop mowing, it’s terrible noise & energy waste!

Just now learning LOTR was an adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird

I'm proud of how we came up with Hank Scorpio because he's actually the result of a few conceptual ideas that worked together perfectlly (when being voiced by @AlbertBrooks, of course): - What if Homer had a boss who actually gave him respect? -What if this boss was one of those "modern" Silicon Valley jeans-wearing bosses? (remember, this is 1996) -What if this type of boss was actually a Bond villain but his villainy is only ever in the background?

Imagine if Congress had any self-respect. I mean just a little.

Weird, people say that ice cream helps you cool down, but it's clear that buying ice cream raises the temperature?

Obviously you should not cite a source that no one on the author list has read, and it is gobsmacking that so many intelligent academics are suggesting that lol of course no one reads their own citations. Academic publishing norms are fundamentally broken.

on AI and water use. You could ask a frontier model 4 questions per day every day for a year. Or you could eat a single solitary almond.