“The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced…” Among the authors nominated are Marlon James, M. John Harrison, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout.

Please Use AI. “Be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail…”

Word nerd Rob Watts explains where the names of all the European countries come from.

Which country is the “land of the rabbits”? Why does Germany have so many different names? Where do the Dutch actually live? What links Croatians and neckties?

(via open culture)

Tags: Europe · language · Rob Watts · video

30 notable sales of rare books by AbeBooks over the past 30 years, including first editions of Moby-Dick, Winnie-The-Pooh, and Leaves of Grass.

19th Century Japanese Woodblock Prints Creatively Illustrate the Inner Workings of the Human Body. Love these.

Here’s a map of the 21 US cities that used to have a population of 100,000 people but don’t anymore. Many of these are Rust Belt cities, in which manufacturing employment fell steeply during the latter part of the 20th century.

The thread at Reddit mentions Detroit and St. Louis as two other cities whose population has dropped during that same time period. Detroit went from 1.85 million in 1950 to 639,000 in 2020 and St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 300,000 over the same time period:

St. Louis was once the country’s 4th largest city. Worlds Fair and Olympics in 1904. Two Major League Baseball teams. It didn’t boom as much as the Great Lakes cities in between the wars and it declined just as much after.

Tags: demographics · maps · population · usa

How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed, and What That Says About Us. “The shifts reflect a life that moved further from its own making: less tied to tools, animals, food…; more tied to global institutions, categories, systems…”

Don’t use AI until you’re 40. “We have been so quick to treat access to new technology as an inevitability that we have failed to question whether every powerful tool should be placed in the hands of every developing mind the moment it becomes available.”

We Used to Be Able to Buy Things in This Country. “Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy.”

The European Central Bank is providing a sneak peek at the next design of the Euro banknotes. From a shortlist of 10 designs created by artists and designers from across the EU, one will be selected as the basis of how Euro banknotes from €5 to €200 will look in the future. Here are a few I pulled out from all of the designs:

It’s notable (*cough*) that some of the banknotes are designed vertically vs horizontally. The influence of portrait mode on smartphones?

Tags: currency · design · European Union · money

“Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype’s ligature substitution does the rest.”