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Our society has only recently come to terms with the fact that maybe placating young children by getting them hooked on touchscreen devices with unfettered access to the internet was bad for their brains. Now, with the rise of human-like AI chatbots, a generation of “iPad babies” could seem almost quaint: some parents are now encouraging their kids to talk with AI models, sometimes for hours on end, The Guardian reports. Others are using the soothing voice of a chatbot to put their kids to bed — all evidence of how this experimental technology has become a part of many...

Virginia Giuffre was a "huge Trump fan," according to the woman who helped write her posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl. Giuffre's ghostwriter, Amy Wallace, spoke with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith about the book, as well as Giuffre's feelings toward Trump, a former friend of Epstein. "She was a huge Trump fan, because he campaigned on releasing the Epstein files," Wallace revealed in the interview, which was broadcast on Oct. 19. "She was very excited that he had made that one of the main planks of his campaign, and she felt validated by it." Giuffre did not implicate Trump in...

Fantabulous timing for a book like this. A book, I say, that you cannot miss. A newly-discovered @DrSeuss manuscript that celebrates the United States is going be published next year, just in time for America’s 250th birthday. Featuring the @CatInTheHat, "SING THE 50 UNITED STATES!" helps teach readers the names of all the states. 🇺🇸https://t.co/AetyDXJkG8 pic.twitter.com/rO5XkIZZI1— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) October 29, 2025Yes, adult children, we're getting a brand-new Dr. Seuss book in the summer of 2026, written by the man himself, Theodor Geisel! The manuscript was discovered earlier this year at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego. The text...

Pay attention to those around you on their phones. Supposedly, the common habit of doomscrolling — endlessly scrolling on your phone, consuming negative content — could indicate someone’s income bracket. “Do you know what I think will be one of the biggest class indicators going forward, not even that long from now, I think in the very near future? It’s going to be overreliance on the use of technology,” a woman named Jamie said in a recent Instagram post that has since gone viral. Jamie went on to explain how these days, most people have a dopamine addiction and scroll...

The Landlady's Tale By SWORDMAKER copyright 2000Preface The following story was told to me by the woman who rented my parents their first home in California when they moved to Sacramento in 1939. A devout Catholic (so much so that although she had been divorced by her husband, she did not consider the divorce valid and did not remarry until her husband died many years later) the landlady swore on her Bible, in front of my sister and me after she told us the story, that it was absolutely true. She was quite serious about it.In the 1970s, I personally...

A Video is at the link-click, but if you have young children or grandchildren, it would be worth your while to get the book, work out how to perform it as poetry, and read it to them yourself--they'll always remember it. This is avowedly biased on the side of Rudolph Flesch's 1955 "Why Johnny Can't Read"; if you're hydrophobic/distempered about this topic, please don't bother with any flaming in the comments. This is just Dr. Seuss fandom, no fanaticism intended. Bruce Deitrick Price's "Science of Illiteracy" is in the 1st comment, for those who maintain an open mind. That damned...

Trump-hating author Stephen King clearly lives in the world of fiction because he proved on Sunday that he cannot distinguish between satire and reality. King and some of his fellow leftists thought they saw an opportunity to dunk on President Trump for a post he allegedly wrote about the World Series match-up between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. Here is what Trump supposedly wrote, which had TDS clowns up in arms. No matter who wins, I will refuse to invite either baseball team to my ballroom as they are both run by highly inept officials from...

Long before mass surveillance, social credit systems, and the algorithmic manipulation of truth became part of our daily lives, Russian writers were warning us. Not with data charts or manifestos—but with novels, plays, and poems that seemed to peer through the veil of their own turbulent times and glimpse something terrifyingly familiar: our present. ...They didn’t predict flying cars or space tourism. Instead, they foresaw how totalitarian regimes would manipulate language, how the human spirit could be engineered, and how the very idea of truth could be dismantled and rebuilt at the whim of the state. ...Yet, their work is...

In another big and bold move from the new Paramount regime following the Skydance merger, the studio is in final negotiations to board Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, with Johnny Depp set to star and Ti West on board to direct. Andrea Riseborough has also signed on, with the studio dating the film for November 13, 2026. Nathaniel Halpern penned the script with Emma Watts producing. The classic Charles Dickens story has seen its fair share of retellings over the years with its tale of an elderly miser visited by the ghost of his former business partner and the spirits of...

Bean's 'One does not simply walk into Mordor' moment became a quintessential memeNEED TO KNOW -Sean Bean opened up about starring in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as Boromir -Bean explained that some of his “gravitas” in his delivery of his now-iconic line “One does not simply walk into Mordor” was because he was reading his lines off a card -Bean said writer and director Peter Jackson was re-writing his monologue until the last moment Sean Bean had one of the most famous moments in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, but it almost...

Look out, Frodo!A bright galactic nucleus with a supermassive black hole that spews out cosmic radiation is pointing straight at us. Thankfully, the object, unimaginatively dubbed “PKS 1424+240,” is located roughly 7.4 billion light-years away and likely won’t pose much of a danger. But that hasn’t stopped a group of excited astronomers from renaming it: the “Eye of Sauron,” the symbol adopted by the Dark Lord in JRR Tolkien’s epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. A new image of the object was recently unveiled, revealing a bright, hot center with cosmic waves spinning around it, spewing a jet of plasma...

Molly Lee is talking to me about the tales her aunt Nelle, known to the world as Harper Lee, would weave for her when she was a little girl. "She was just a great storyteller," says the 77-year-old from her home in Alabama. That's an understatement if the success of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird is anything to go by. Since its publication in 1960, when it was an instant hit, the book has sold more than 42 million copies worldwide Based around the story of Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of rape, it's...

Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia millions of people treat as an authoritative source of information, is systemically biased against conservative, religious, and other points of view, according to the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger.Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and former philosophy professor, among stacks of reference books at a library in Columbus, Ohio, on March 26, 2007. Kiichiro Sato/AP PhotoSanger, 57, who now heads the Knowledge Standards Foundation, believes Wikipedia can be salvaged either by a renewed emphasis on free speech within the organization or by a grassroots campaign to make diverse viewpoints heard.Failing that, Sanger said, government intervention may be...

The Israeli military conducted strikes against Hamas in Gaza after accusing the terrorist organization of repeatedly violating its ceasefire agreement on Sunday. An Israeli military official confirmed the strikes to Fox News on Sunday, pointing to attacks by Hamas since Friday. The official says the attacks on Israeli forces all took place beyond the line behind which Israel had withdrawn under the terms of the agreement. "The terror organization Hamas carried out multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line. The attacks included an RPG shot at a military force, and a sniper fire against a military force," the...

We shall have no kings.

The journal iScience recently published a study showing that the share of Americans who read books for pleasure has fallen 40 percent over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, this decline has endured for generations. For example, among high school seniors in 1976, 11.5 percent did not read a single book for pleasure; by 2021, this had risen to 41 percent. It’s a similar situation in Britain. A recent survey revealed that 47 percent of adults do not read books by choice—roughly half the population of England. More worryingly, two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds describe themselves as “non-readers” or “lapsed” readers....

The small church of Domine Quo Vadis, which is situated on the Via Appia, at the junction with Via Ardeatina, marks the spot where, according to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, Christ met Peter as the latter was fleeing Rome. Its official name is Santa Maria delle Piante (St Mary of the Soles of the Feet)

For the best part of two centuries, Britons have been flocking to the genteel seaside town of Bournemouth. Such was its place in the national affections that the resort, with its balmy weather and elegant Edwardian architecture, became known as the retirement capital of Britain, perfect for the twilight years of the nicely spoken. Fast forward to 2025, however, and the town is in the throes of a story with a very different accent.

The sudden closure of one of the country's very first Whole Foods stores has rocked the upscale Bay Area town of Mill Valley. Residents say Amazon has abandoned the beloved neighborhood staple that defined their community for more than three decades and are furious despite there being another store a mile away. The California store first opened in 1992 and became a local institution where the town's 14,000 residents caught up in the aisles and kids grabbed snacks after school. But after a rodent infestation and roof repairs forced a temporary shutdown over the summer, locals expected the market to...

(I don't believe people who just happened to be born on any of 365 days, deserve any special notice for it, but their Mothers do. My Mother, born in 1912, gave birth to me this day in 1954. So, to indulge myself, I thought I'd pass along this comedic poem from her birth year, 1912, from a children's book.) The Rocket Book (1912) by Peter Newell. Narrated at the click-link at Librivox by Phil Chenevert. The Rocket Book by Peter Newell at Gutenberg(Twenty-one comedic illustrations) [pg] The ROCKET Book by PETER NEWELL HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK [pg] COPYRIGHT, 1912,...