A Scottish king mocked England as empty of soldiers, hours before his own army was routed outside Durham. Arrows, a five-hour standoff and a fight so brutal both sides stopped to lean on their weapons sealed his capture.
— via The Conversation — History, Alex Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History, Durham University
Ukrainian engineers have swapped air-filled tires for 3D-printed airless wheels built around a flexing internal lattice, aiming to keep resupply and evacuation robots rolling after hitting shrapnel or barbed wire. The design is already on the front lines, and soldiers can swap damaged rims with hand tools instead of a repair shop.
— via Popular Science, Mack DeGeurin
A publicist wanted a hot take on "real rural America." Instead: a defense of JD Vance's graveyard, a Ph.D. in philosophy, and a hard pass on speaking for anyone but herself.
— via Literary Hub, Amy Olberding
New open-weight models from Reflection, Aleph Alpha and Mistral are pitched as secure alternatives to Chinese AI, but they still trail China's top systems on performance despite having more resources. Four of the five top-ranked models on OpenRouter's leaderboard last week were Chinese, and LiveBench found China's best models now lag U.S. rivals by just 3% on benchmarks.
— via Rest of World, Rina Chandran
The new Apple TV 4K adds far-field mics already found on HomePods, a faster chip whose gains show up mainly in gaming nobody mentions, and a remote feature that should've shipped in 2022. The real headline: the base price just jumped to $300.
— via Daring Fireball, John Gruber
San Jose hits 86 Thursday before a sharp reversal: highs drop to 80 Sunday, 70 Monday, then rain moves in Tuesday. Dry, breezy conditions are also raising fire-weather concerns in higher Bay Area elevations through Friday.
— via Hoodline, Eric Tanaka
Katie Zacharia failed the bar exam. She's still calling herself a lawyer, and a judge somewhere is probably taking notes alongside the one who just invoked the Lorax to smack down Trump's rushed tree removal.
— via Above the Law, Above the Law
Forget the "ChatGPT moment" hype: a former NVIDIA robotics marketing lead says the field is still stuck assembling basic parts like actuators and safety standards. On Equity, she explains why one foundation model won't fix robotics yet, and where she's cutting first checks as a new VC.
— via TechCrunch, Theresa Loconsolo
A woman in a blue Honda smiled at a man in a vintage red BMW at a four-way stop in northeast Seattle, and now she's asking him to ride into the sunset. This round of I Saw U posts also has a cheese-counter meet-cute at Trader Joe's and fish earrings on the Link, plus a sunburn photo shared over eclipse binoculars.
— via The Stranger, Anonymous
This weekend's low-fuss picks range from cheering on giant gourds at the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta to a Vote Early: No Kings Rally, Holman's Dolly Day and Bread Fest. Friday's pick is Cowlitz comedian Joey Clift discussing his book on Native history with Gabe Colhoff of Portland punk band 1876, free at Literary Arts.
— via Portland Mercury, EverOut Staff
I can't write a deck for this one. The excerpt contains only a stray editor bookmark tag, a donation appeal for 3QD and navigation text, with no story content to draw on. If you send the article's actual text, I'll write the deck from that.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
At the Walnut Street Theatre through Nov. 1, Wednesday Addams is the one who falls for a boy from a "normal" family, and the plot hinges on his parents coming to dinner at the Addams home. Abbie Parker, 17, plays her in a Walnut debut, and says Wednesday's classic emo self lasts only two scenes before she's pulled out of it.
— via Billy Penn, Jane M. Von Bergen
German storks turning up with African arrows in their bodies in the early 1800s gave scientists their first hard proof of migration. Two centuries on, trackers, feather chemistry and millions of birdwatcher sightings are finally revealing the full routes, since only 6.5 million of 79 million banded birds were ever recovered.
— via The Conversation — Science, Peter P. Marra, Dean of The Earth Commons, Professor of Biology and the Environment, Georgetown University
Crews at the former Pfizer Building will jack up sagging floors in increments of 1/64th of an inch, eventually lifting them about 7 inches, after two unreinforced columns buckled and sparked collapse fears. The developer has scrapped its original plan to rebuild the damaged section entirely.
— via Gothamist, David Brand
Sheriff's detectives are treating the death of an adult man found submerged in the backyard pool of a Weston home owned by singer Gus Ormo as a suspicious incident. It's unclear whether Ormo was home or lives there, and his representatives haven't responded.
— via Miami New Times, Allison Beck
About 1,400 households hit by the Eaton and Palisades fires are set to lose their disaster case managers by month's end, after California says FEMA left most of a promised $13.2 million unpaid. The state says it can no longer front the costs; 700 more families are still waiting for help.
— via LAist
I can't write a deck for this one. The excerpt contains only a stray editor bookmark tag, a donation appeal for 3QD and navigation text, with no story content to draw on. If you send the article's actual text, I'll write the deck from that.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
Mode.Inc is offering law firms cash to license their internal emails, messages and project histories to AI labs, promising to scrub client names first. Privilege belongs to the client, Model Rule 1.6 covers all information relating to a representation, and referrers can collect the greater of $50,000 or 6% of a firm's payment.
— via Above the Law, Kathryn Rubino
Since about 2011, global farm output growth has slumped as productivity gains have dropped sharply, and extra land and inputs have only partly filled the gap. Regional growth, in South Asia from added inputs and in sub-Saharan Africa from added land, shows the same dependence on expansion rather than efficiency.
— via Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist
Areymá hung a handwritten list of goals on her wall when she moved to Boulder in 2023, and releasing her debut EP, "in my room," was the last one left. The five bedroom pop songs follow a long relationship from the first cracks to the final goodbyes, and she began writing them in New Jersey while that relationship was ending.
— via Westword, Cleo Mirza
The Savannah Bananas are moving up to Soldier Field for 2027, their biggest Chicago venue yet after selling out Sox Park and Wrigley Field. More than 182,000 people fought over 81,000 tickets last year: this time the team's using a lottery instead.
— via Block Club Chicago, Rory Quealy
Barnes & Noble just named its best books of 2026, in October, across 17 categories including a baffling "eBook Series" list that seems to exist mainly to remind you they sell ebooks. One pick, London Falling, is filed under Mystery & Thriller despite being true crime.
— via Book Riot, Community
Two Democrats are competing for the District 12 seat, with no other party fielding a candidate in the race.
— via KQED, Keith Mizuguchi
First Light Books, which opened in a converted Hyde Park post office in August 2023, is taking over a former United Methodist church in Clarksville that closed in 2024. The new store will have a café and more floor space than the first, and the owners hint that the old church's pumpkin patch could return.
— via KUT, Wynne Davis
A computer scientist who calls benchmarks "the mistake that made machine learning" argues the whole system has been broken since 1959, kept alive mostly by luck. He explains how a 1987 speech-recognition test helped trigger a 25-year AI winter, and what might fix benchmarking now.
— via Quanta Magazine, John Pavlus
