Scientists spot the most luminous object ever detected in the known universe, with a brightness equivalent to 500 trillion suns. / BBC News

Yulia Navalnaya, Alexei Navalny’s widow, urges the world not to recognize Russia’s election, scheduled for March. / Reuters

Related: Britain and France have 500 nuclear warheads between them. Russia has nearly 6,000. / The Economist

Unrelated: President Biden’s former Cadillac sedan is up for auction. / cars & bids

Farming accounts for about 10 percent of climate pollution in both Europe and the United States. / Grist

Research finds that green technologies are beginning to spread in a self-reinforcing manner. / Noema Magazine

A vast reforestation of the eastern US has helped stall the effects of global warming. / The Guardian

See also: “The hottest trend in US cities? Changing zoning rules to allow more housing.” / NPR

Quentin Tarantino opens a coffee shop in Los Angeles dedicated to Pam Grier. / Eater

A new tour offers “an in-depth exploration” of Tokyo’s public toilets, or, “the crossroads of public hygiene and architecture.” / Spoon & Tamago

An assessment of cuteness in contemporary art. Also, an assessment of why people esteem hotel merchandise. / Artsy, The New York Times [+]

Thom Browne would like to see more men in mini dresses. Ideally, they won’t be “starvemaxxing” to achieve the look? / GQ, Business Insider

The best thing we read over the weekend was Becca Rothfeld on David Cronenberg and transformative sex. / The New Yorker

“It takes away the pain of being dead.” In defense of eating brains. / Gastro Obscura

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Making the case that Vladimir Putin assassinated his imprisoned rival Alexei Navalny. / Why It Matters

See also: Navalny seen in video a day before his reported death. / BBC News

How Alexei Navalny organized anti-Putin Russians—who remain and are in larger numbers than ever. / Foreign Affairs

Tucker Carlson’s quip on Monday, that “leadership requires killing people,” takes on a more chilling tone. / The New York Times [+]

Gaza cease-fire protests disrupt the tiny farming/tourist town of Ojai, Calif. / The Los Angeles Times

Eight artists deface their own work, saying a San Francisco institution asked them not to advocate for Palestine. / Hyperallergic

Related: For hundreds of years, people thought California was an island. / Atlas Obscura

Unrelated: California teenagers are suspicious of adults who drink espresso—and other things recently overheard. / Meditations in an Emergency

A financial columnist tries to understand how she was conned into giving a stranger $50,000 in cash. / The Cut

For the past hundred years, people have championed value-adding design “for objects that did perfectly well without it.” / Misfits’ Architecture

If AI is about to upend everything, how do you prepare your children to live—never mind work—in that world? / Otherwise

“It’s nice to get a text that says only ‘splat’ and means ‘I love you, let’s hang out.'” On the joys of playing Splatoon with your family. / The Verge

Reeling from a layoff, a writer creates a new children’s show. / The Most

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A family struggles amid health issues, financial turmoil, and an unsupportive state government: the year after a denied abortion. / ProPublica

Yesterday, SpaceX launched a lunar launder that, if successful, will be the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. / Quartz

See also: The legal and ethical tug of war over what can (or should) be left on the lunar surface. / Reuters

Oh and also: “Amazon joins Elon Musk’s SpaceX in mission to destroy federal agency protecting workers.” / Motherboard

On the history of “robots.txt,” the file search companies agree dictate whether they’ll crawl a site—but it’s not legally binding, and AI companies are now ignoring it. / The Verge

Sora, OpenAI’s new video generation model, is eye-poppingly impressive, but the research paper on it shows usefulness beyond “making cool videos.” / OpenAI

“It was all—in air quotes—legal.” This is insanity: the mothers in Guatemala who are fighting to get their trafficked and illegally adopted children back. / The Dial

A new bill introduced in the House would require ERCOT, which manages Texas’s power grid, to connect to the nation’s major grids. / CBS Austin

Naomi Fry: Trump’s fundraising emails “offer a kind of D.J.T. greatest-hits package, wildly mixing and remixing favorite phrases and styles into a fevered Surrealist cut-up.” / The New Yorker

“The closest instance I can find of Goodreads having a direct, discrete and quantifiable impact on a book’s success happened back in 2015.” / Misshelved

Brian Wilson’s family is seeking a conservatorship, saying the musician is living with a neurocognitive disorder and is unable to care for himself. / Pitchfork

“Do not reply to teach me about capitalism or enshittification. I know.” Warning signs for those who might reply to your social media posts. / Self Aware Soup

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Britain and Japan fell into technical recessions in the final quarter of 2023. / ABC News

See also: The sneaker resale market is plummeting. / Business of Fashion

“Tooth fairy inflation” refers to parents competing over Gen Alpha’s average payout per lost tooth. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

“People are more likely to engage with content that feels like a FaceTime call.” TikTok advice from Generation Z to the White House. / Politico

Vladimir Putin takes the time to troll both Tucker Carlson and President Biden. / Politico, The Associated Press

Meanwhile, after a win in New York, Democrats feel like they’ve found an immigration message. / Semafor

A moon lander launches from Florida, looking for the first lunar touchdown by a private business. / Reuters

Parts of New York City are sinking over 3 centimeters per decade. Hotspots in Maryland are sinking over 10 centimeters. / The New York Times [+]

A person in Oregon acquires bubonic plague from a sick cat—the same plague that killed millions in the 1300s. / The Los Angeles Times

Related: So you think you know all about the plague? / Goats and Soda

A brief history of how the workplace messaging app Slack was built. Also, how Showmax dethroned Netflix in Africa. / building slack, rest of world

Unrelated: What it’s like to be a photographer’s muse. / It’s Nice That

Bookstores dedicated to romance novels are opening across the United States. / The Guardian

Imagine there was a machine that could give you any experience you desired—would you plug into it? Studies find 84% of people would not. / Philosophy Break

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The United States CDC plans to drop its five-day COVID-19 isolation recommendations. / Reuters

Michigan becomes the first state in decades to repeal the union-restricting law known as “right-to-work.” / The Associated Press

See also: A day in the life of the US’s “most prolific” professional bridesmaid. / The Hustle

Gaza cease-fire negotiations continue, but fail to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Thomas Friedman: This may be the best opportunity for a two-state solution since Oslo. It also may be the last—since Hamas and Netanyahu’s government don’t want it. / The New York Times [+]

Hannah Ritchie: China can build more plants while burning less coal—because based on data over the last decade or two, that’s exactly what’s happening. / Sustainability by Numbers

More than 37,000 Chinese migrants were detained at the US’s southwestern land border in 2023, nearly 10 times the 2022 tally. / Nikkei Asia

“If you want good schools, public transport or public safety, San Francisco is not the place for you.” But apparently it’s the right place for AI start-ups, who are giving the city an economic boost. / The Economist

Penn becomes the first Ivy League school to offer a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence. / The Daily Pennsylvanian

A college professor says even smart and motivated students struggle lately with longer reading assignments. One reason? “Vibes-based literacy.” / Slate

A Swedish team designs a chatbot to replicate a teenager who spends all of her time on social media. / The Daily Beast

See also: “The happiest kids in the world have social safety nets.” / Mother.ly

Unrelated: Chairs made from thousands of pieces of paper. Also, some pretty drawings of pretty chairs. / dezeen, It’s Nice That

A man runs an investigation into his wife’s ability to smell eggs when others don’t. / Experimental History

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South Africa says it’s sending 3,000 troops to fight groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. / Reuters

In 2022, the DRC produced almost three-quarters of the world’s cobalt—”essential in the green-energy transition.” / Semafor

Taylor Swift’s private flight to the Super Bowl suggests what’s wrong with carbon removal: leaving it to the private sector to solve. / Grist

Related: Conservative news commentators condemn Taylor Swift for drinking beer. / Media Matters

Unrelated: Nuclear weapons laboratories don’t often help solve serial-killer cases, but sometimes they do. / Undark Magazine

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologizes to his family for a Super Bowl ad based on a storied JFK commercial. / The Wrap

All four of Donald Trump’s criminal cases reach “clarifying inflection points” this week. / Politico

A new dating app debuts for Americans who can show they have good to excellent credit. / The Financial Times

Fewer cousins? A study projects a 38% global decline in living relatives for individuals aged 65 by the year 2095. / Radio-Canada

Critic and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist asks any artist he meets to write something on a Post-it note. / Artsy

See also: “Everything is a screensaver.” / The Trend Report

From October, an experiment suggests your sense of consciousness may be a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe. / Popular Mechanics [+]

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Even as guns remain a cornerstone of Republican politics, the NRA is in decline, losing more than a million members over the last five years. / The New York Times [+]

According to a new report, climate change is erasing many of the gains in air quality over the past few decades. / The Verge

Reversing a four-decade-plus trend, more US teens are taking after-school and summer jobs—but along with that has been a spike in child labor violations. / The Week

“Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.” Enshittification is coming for everything. / Financial Times

When trying to make photos of bad rentals look good, realtors and landlords are turning to AI, which doesn’t always respect the laws of physics. / VICE

See also: “Angry humans surrounded and executed a self-driving taxi in San Francisco’s Chinatown.” / Boing Boing

Using VHS footage to recreate a lost Nintendo game from the ’90s. / Press the Buttons

Warner Bros. again appears set to choose a tax write-off and kill Coyote vs. Acme, which was originally supposed to premiere the same day as Barbie. / TheWrap

Some background on Roy Lichtenstein’s two-dimensional “House” installations, which appear to become three dimensional when viewed at different angles. / Laughing Squid

“Here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question ‘Why have a personal website?’ with ‘Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.'” / Rachel J. Kwon

How a hot wing travels through your body, imagined as a processing plant. / The Washington Post [+]

Making a cube that can balance on one point. / Willem Pennings

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“Part of the reason why our immigration debate is so bad is the perception among many people that there is a fixed number of jobs in this country.” / How Things Work

Thirty seconds of Super Bowl advertising alone is not worth $7 million. / Axios

See also: A Super Bowl Sunday spent trying to persuade Manhattan bartenders to switch the TV to the Puppy Bowl. / The Morning News

A map of where Americans prefer boneless versus bone-in chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday. / Axios

Taking a deep dive into mustard brand packaging. / Unbox Inbox

We all know about binge watching, but when you really love a show and don’t want it to end, that’s when you opt for stinge watching. / Kottke

Renting your music means accepting that it will disappear. / Cory Dransfeldt

How Condé Nast bought and destroyed Pitchfork, which not so long ago represented the company’s digital future. / Semafor

Damo Suzuki, the singer from the iconic krautrock band Can, has died at 74. / Rolling Stone

“Most of the industry is about hiding money, misrepresentation, and general malfeasance.” A high-end art dealer, busted for fraud, opens up about the business. / Mother Jones

A profile of the oldest person in the US, Edith Ceccarelli, who turned 116 this month. / The New York Times [+]

“My reading of the great works of Western literature was over by the time I was 20.” J.G. Ballard’s favorite books. / The MIT Press Reader

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In describing Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the special counsel’s report opened a new front in the election. / Vox

See also: “[The special counsel], a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.” / Politico

Inside the Maryland clinic that has become a destination for desperate patients in need of late-term abortions. / The New Yorker

Months after mistakenly paying at least nine teachers tens of thousands in bonuses, Oklahoma’s Dept. of Education is demanding they return the money. / NPR

New York therapists say that since the pandemic, they’ve been treating more and more children for subway anxiety. / Curbed

The demand for e-bikes means cheaper models—some of which can have dangerous batteries—are flooding the market, and raising fire concerns. / BBC

Um: “Chinese hackers infiltrated plane, train and water systems for five years, US says.” / The Guardian

To try and read the Herculaneum papyri, scrolls that were frozen in time when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, a contest among technologists and whatever methods they dream up. / Bloomberg

See also: Here’s the first round of winners. / Vesuvius Challenge 2023

“You can wear them everywhere, even at a party.” The $1.50 sandals that are the preferred footwear for street soccer in Ivory Coast. / The New York Times [+]

What led to Buddy Holly’s death: a poorly planned tour in a single bus criss-crossing a frozen Midwest made the allure of a chartered plane too much to resist. / Can’t Get Much Higher

On dancing CEOs: “It was still fun to watch your boss dance.” No, no it was not. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

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For the first time on record, global warming has exceeded temperatures of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over a 12-month period. / Al Jazeera

An unlikely coalition behind the White House’s natural gas pivot: climate activists and manufacturing facilities. / Grist

The proportion of buildings destroyed in Gaza is said to now approach “that of Guernica, Hamburg, or Hiroshima.” / The London Review of Books

In multiple replays of a wargame simulation, OpenAI’s chatbot elects to launch nuclear attacks. / NewScientist

Unrelated/related: Can AI art be copyrighted? Recent guidelines from the Copyright Office “reaffirm that purely generated images are in the public domain.” / Newart

Uber posts its first full-year profit since going public in 2019. / The Hill

Credit card balances increased by $50 billion to $1.13 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2023. / Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Unpacking four ways the Supreme Court may rule regarding former President Trump’s name on the Colorado ballot. / Vox

A publisher retracts two studies that a Texas judge cited last year while suspending approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. / Reuters

FYI: That smart toothbrush botnet story you may have seen is not real. / 404 Media

Danielle Cohen unpacks the many reasons, as a person who knows nothing about football, why she plans to watch the Super Bowl. / The Cut

The San Francisco 49ers bring a tactical twist to the big event: bunching together their offensive line. / The Wall Street Journal [+]

Unrelated: “There’s no butting out on Nextdoor, only butting in.” / The Washington Post [+]

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