Today's Articles (26/5/2025)

May 26, 2025

In a new edition containing additional material that was published in 2021, Tatsuki said the next major disaster would occur on 5 July 2025.
Tatsuki’s dreams have been given credence by her previous reference to March 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 18,000 people in north-east Japan and triggered the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The impact of her latest prediction is being felt most in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, which used ForwardKeys data to gauge the impact on airline bookings. Average bookings from Hong Kong were down 50% year-on-year, it said, adding that those between late June and early July had plummeted by as much as 83%.
The trend is out of sync with a tourism boom that has seen record numbers of people visit Japan since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Modern Mrs Darcy Round-up (link)

Of the fifteen books recommended in the list, a full ten of them are entirely made up.
You can't fire all your fact-checkers and editors and then act shocked when nobody catches glaring errors before publication. You can't replace experienced journalists with AI and expect the same quality. And you certainly can't expect overworked, underpaid freelancers to carefully vet every piece of content when they're responsible for filling 64-page supplements basically on their own.
The part that really gets me is that this wasn't complex investigative journalism. It was a summer reading list. If AI can't get that right—and a human can't be bothered to check if books actually exist before publishing—how can we trust these same systems and workflows for anything more substantial?

Despite grumbles that no one reads anymore, Circana BookScan data shows book sales are up—there were more than 797,000,000 print books sold in the U.S. last year, up 2% from 2023 and 14% from 2019.
Reid’s books are also, as more literary readers might say, “easy to read,” often looked down upon by highbrow critics. [...] Writing a book that’s easy to read, Reid contends, is extremely difficult. She has to think about the reader’s experience on every page. “I’m chasing a feeling,” she says.
In the Penguin Random House antitrust trial three years ago, the publishing giant revealed that only 35% of its books are profitable and of those, 4% bring in the majority of profits, suggesting that the company runs on the success of just a tiny handful of authors.
She studied the works of Andy Weir, read about Apollo 13, and pored over NASA documents. Paul Dye, a retired NASA flight director, helped her untangle the technical details.

Understand your tolerance spectrum: Use these questions to discern when the discomfort is generative:

So this is your invitation: choose the good over the easy. Embrace the friction. Lean into the awkward pause. Linger in the extra moment. Say yes, even if it takes a little more effort. Let yourself be interrupted—because sometimes, the interruption is the sacred thing.