The Fastest and Easiest Second Passports for Americans in 2025
I qualify for Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, if I can get the paperwork to prove it. I presume Julie qualifies too, as my spouse.
I’m not planning on going anywhere, but if things get extremely DOGE-MAGA, a second passport might be a useful thing to have.
‘I’m proud of its wonderful teens’: Amy Heckerling on how Clueless revolutionised the high-school comedy. I loved “Clueless” and I’m man enough to admit it.
Startup Lonestar Data Holdings is catching a ride on a SpaceX rocket to put a mini data center on the moon — a proof-of-concept for the real thing. I get the technical and legal benefits of putting a data center in space, but why the moon? Why not in orbit, where it would be closer to home and more easily serviced?
Burritos, AI art, corporate fascism
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: “You ordered a private taxi for your burrito.” Also: " … AI art is the aesthetic of 21st-century fascism the same way Italian Futurism was in the last century."
Also: “The Washington Post as a tool of fascism:”
As Juniper wrote on Bluesky, “I think everyone needs to stop framing what’s going on as ‘bending the knee’ and what’s really happening which is ‘they’re finally feel free to do what they’ve always wanted to do.’”
Oh, and by the way, totally unrelated. I’m still working my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just got to the section where all the German industrialists that supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power because he was anti-union get their companies nationalized and they all get thrown in jail.
More than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube every month. This seems bonkers to me. Podcasts aren’t for watching. They’re for listening to, while walking the dog, driving or doing chores around the house. And yet YouTube is apparently now the most popular podcast platform by far.
Prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, pitched a plan for mass deportations calling for ‘processing camps’ and a private citizen ‘army’.
“The idea of forcibly removing 12 million people from the United States is not just operationally impossible — it is a moral and economic catastrophe in the making,” said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration.
RIP Michelle Trachtenberg, 39. She played “Dawn,” the younger sister on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and also appeared as a villain on “Gossip Girl.” Her death is apparently from natural causes. She recently had a liver transplant.
A company looks to relaunch the commercial airship business with a design that looks like a flying butt
A British company hopes to launch commercial airships to carry cargo and up to 130 passengers on relatively short trips, replacing regional airlines and ferries.
This is very cool, but it feels like I have read an article like this every five years, and the businesses never take off (so to speak). Airships seem to be just plain impractical.