Andy Hunter, CEO and founder of indie bookseller Bookshop.org, talking recently with Shannon Cudd of Fast Company: “People are really galvanizing around bookstores as a force for good in our culture,” he says. “You see that in the fact that there are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the...

Even after Friendster stopped being a social network I still checked in on the website from time to time. It’s evidently been a while since I did that though. Last time I looked, Friendster — having gone through a number of changes in direction — was a gaming platform, but, as I’ve learned, ceased operations in...

David Malouf, the Miles Franklin and Booker Prize winning author, died last week, Wednesday 22 April 2026, in the Australian state of Queensland. If you’re unfamiliar with Malouf’s work, Sydney Morning Herald writer Nell Geraets has complied a list of seven “must-read” Malouf titles.

Canadian author and researcher Kathryn Jezer-Morton documented friction-maxxing in an article (paywalled) for The Cut, in January this year. Weeks later, a Wikipedia page was published about the phenomenon. Is that, then, why friction-maxxing is now referred to as a cultural trend? For the uninitiated, Wikipedia...

Nearly missed this, staying focused can be tricky, to say the least, at times like these. The book crawl was established just last year by Federico Lang, who works at Librería Luces, an independent bookstore in the Spanish city of Málaga. I’m told this year about one-hundred-and-fifty Australian booksellers are...

Brian Fagioli, writing for NERDS.xyz: Something interesting is happening inside Mozilla, and it is not your typical browser update story. With Firefox 150, the team says it fixed 271 vulnerabilities after turning AI loose on its own codebase. That is not a typo. Two hundred seventy one. Mozilla engineers uncovered...

If you subscribe to the notion that the presence of em dashes (—) in a body of text means — in the AI age — the piece must have been composed by an AI agent, you could consider using am dashes instead. Yes, that’s right: an am dash, as opposed to an em dash. The am dash looks a little like a tilde (~) but with a...

Spotify members in the United States and United Kingdom will soon be able to buy paper, or physical books, through the music streaming app, by way of a partnership with Bookshop.org, supporters of local and indie bookstores. With just over seven-hundred-and-fifty million monthly active Spotify users, the partnership...

This is where we’re at now. Your website needs to be AI agent ready, or it presumably no longer makes the grade. I scored eight out one-hundred. Can I get a badge? I’m not sure though disassociated is a website AI agents have any interest in anyway. In any event, AI agent readiness is the new SEO. Since responses to...

From the European Space Agency (ESA) blog: The “lunar hay fever”, as NASA astronaut Harrison Schmitt described it during the Apollo 17 mission created symptoms in all 12 people who have stepped on the Moon. From sneezing to nasal congestion, in some cases it took days for the reactions to fade. Inside the...

That’s the upshot of what Rothman, CEO of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, said at CinemaCon, held in Las Vegas, in the United States, this week, says Brent Lang, writing for Variety: At CinemaCon, the annual exhibition industry conference unfolding this week in Las Vegas, Rothman bluntly told the cinema operators in...

Not good news. Word that the university, located in the American state of Massachusetts, is to close. I didn’t go to university after leaving high school, couldn’t decide what to study, but maybe a liberal arts degree might have been a good fit. If I’d known, back in the day, such courses even existed. And while a...