(December needs to be a low-key fundraising month here at the blog so, again, here’s my PayPal link, and my Venmo: @George-Clark-61. Thanks.)
• “A teenager redrew the Alabama voting map – and it’s now state law.”
• “Why This Nineties High School Punk Band Is Suddenly Bigger Than Ever.”
Bunch of high school friends in Arkansas had a punk band. They wrote some songs. Played some gigs. Then they went off to college or to work and went on with their lives. The drummer stuck with a music career, but most of them just, you know, did what 99% of everybody who was ever in a band — even a good band — winds up doing eventually.
But then somehow some of their old music found its way online and kids on the other side of the world started listening to it and liking it and they got, literally, Big in Japan. Now they’re touring. Good for them.
• “A Headless Mystery.”
Andrew Curry writes for Science about “the Linear Pottery culture (or LBK, after their German name, Linearbandkeramik).” This was a Neolithic farming culture that spread across central Europe around 5500 BCE, forming settlements that flourished across “an estimated 700,000 square kilometers of Europe,” from the Black Sea to what is now Northern France.
Archaeologists long believed the LBK era was a sort of early Eden. There are few signs of inequality or competition for resources. People lived on small family farms without social hierarchy or accumulated wealth, using stone axes to clear forests and wood or bone implements to plow fields. The sword wouldn’t be invented for 2,000 years. “When you see an agrarian society with no specialized weapons,” Furholt says, “it’s easy to imagine it’s peaceful.”
These communities prospered and grew for hundreds of years until sometime around 5000 BCE, when … well, when something really bad happened. The evidence for this is found in mass graves filled with headless bodies — sites found at LBK excavations all across Europe and all dating to right around this same time period.
Archaeologists have found many more mass graves across Europe, all dating to roughly the same time. Many, like Talheim, looked at first like the results of small-scale raiding or local conflicts.
But as more burials emerged, those easy explanations faded. If conflict was a regular part of LBK life, the graves should appear throughout the culture’s 400-year span instead of only at the very end. And each new LBK massacre site seems to have its own distinct character and particular details that suggest some mysterious constellation of brutal practices, not competition for land or mates. “What we see is different from anything we see before. It’s an indication of an end phase, where people turn to rituals and odd beliefs,” says Leibniz Center for Archaeology archaeologist Detlef Gronenborn. “Then it breaks out in an orgy of violence. Then it stops, but it’s too late.”
Something happened that brought about the end of that civilization, something very bad and apparently involving a sudden turn to “rituals and odd beliefs … an orgy of violence.” It’s a haunting story.
• Mardi Gras in a tiny town in Appalachia: “The Women Who Saved the Fasnacht Festival.”
• Nicolas Hune-Brown writes for The Local about “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era” (via).
Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud — where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.
Freelance journalism in 2025 is an incredibly difficult place to build a career. But, it turns out, it’s a decent enough arena for a scam. On their website, Outrider says they pay $1,000 per article. Dwell’s rates start at 50 cents a word—a fee that’s difficult to justify if you actually want to interview 10 of the top designers in the world, but a healthy payday if you only need to enter a few words into ChatGPT.
Hune-Brown’s detective work cannot prove one way or another whether his scammer is a real individual or just “one of a dozen bylines used by a content farm somewhere, maybe London, maybe Lagos.” But he thinks he glimpses a real person, somewhere, behind the scam, and laments the writer she might have been.
• Even if that AI-scamming freelancer was really some kind of “content farm” collective, that wouldn’t be nearly as horrific as the slave-labor, criminal camps behind many “Pig Butchering” scams online (Alexander Clapp for the London Review).
• The Old Library at Trinity College Dublin was built between 1712 and 1732 to house the collection of the university, which was founded in 1592:
The library’s holdings include 30,000 books, pamphlets and maps acquired from a prominent Dutch family in 1802; the largest collection of children’s books in Ireland; and the first book printed in the Irish language, which dates to 1571. Other highlights range from Ireland’s only copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio to national treasures like the Book of Kells, a stunning medieval manuscript.
And all of that is going to have to be moved and stored while the building is renovated and upgraded: “Go Behind the Scenes at an Iconic Irish Library as Staff Move 700,000 Historical Treasures Into Storage.”
• If they found a cache of old gold coins buried underneath that museum. “The Buried Treasure of Baltimore“
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