'The AI does not get tired'

'I have P16 squamous carcinoma at the base of my tongue'

'Mainstream news still does a very good job'

'They are now preparing themselves better'

There is an unmistakable intensity in Brandon Lake’s rise, the kind that comes from an artist who built his career on worship leadership long before major awards began to follow him. He grew up surrounded by church music and eventually stepped into a leadership role at Seacoast Church, which became the foundation of a career rooted in songwriting, worship collaboration, and ministry. His early work caught the attention of Bethel Music, which led to a recording contract and the beginning of a national profile that expanded quickly once he began releasing his own projects. Lake made his full-length debut with The post Complete List Of Brandon Lake Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Sabrina Carpenter first caught national attention at age twelve when she placed third in Miley Cyrus’s “The Next Miley Cyrus Project,” a moment that pushed her onto Disney’s radar and opened the door to her future recording career. That early spark led to acting opportunities that connected her to millions of young viewers, beginning with guest appearances on major television shows before she secured her breakout role as Maya Hart on Girl Meets World. The combination of acting visibility and a natural pull toward music set her on a dual career path that would define her teenage years and shape The post Updated Complete List Of Sabrina Carpenter Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

News knives out Beignet Blanc Stars in Surprise Sesame Street–Knives Out Crossover Short The best part might be the consideration given to Cookie Monster’s nostrils By Molly Templeton | Published on December 2, 2025 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix No, that’s not a typo. We’re not talking about Benoit Blanc, the drawling detective played by Daniel Craig in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films. We’re talking about Beignet Blanc, who investigates a different sort of crime in “Forks Out,” a charming short from Netflix, which is home to both Wake Up Dead Man (the latest Knives Out mystery) and Sesame Street. And over on Sesame Street, someone has eaten Cookie Monster’s pie. Who could it be? Oscar the Grouch, perhaps, whose sardine pie looks quite delicious, really, if you’re into that sort of thing? Rian Johnson? Did Cookie Monster steal his own pie? With drawl and charm, Beignet gets to the bottom of the pie pan, uncovering a solution that’s about as sweet as pie, and entirely appropriate to Sesame Street. This is utterly charming, but it has one flaw: Why not get Daniel Craig himself, real human Daniel Craig, to play Beignet? Like, in person, with the puppet residents. It would be incredible. I demand a remake! (The Reactor staff is not convinced that it is actually Daniel Craig doing the voice of Beignet, but we do not know who is doing it. Netflix has not been helpful with details.) This is not exactly the Muppets crossover folks have been asking for, but it’s not that far off. Knives Out creator Rian Johnson—who’s shot down the Muppets idea, gently and correctly pointing out that no one wants to see Muppets get murdered—has given the short the seal of approval, writing “This brings me so much joy” in a post on the website formerly known as Twitter. With knives and forks covered, one can only assume “Spoons Out” is coming soon. Wake Up Dead Man is currently in (some) theaters, and will be on Netflix December 12th.[end-mark] The post Beignet Blanc Stars in Surprise <i>Sesame Street</i>–<i>Knives Out</i> Crossover Short appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Infernal Gravity and the Logic of Death Scenes: Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance A fascinating look at how societies manufacture the myth of a Golden Age By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on December 2, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. It’s a book about why societies invent Golden Ages, what they get out of them, and the real changes that grow from these myths. It’s also full of really juicy gossip about the Medici family, explanations of what the hell Machiavelli was thinking, and descriptions of how badly it sucks to get your arts funding from oligarchs. What It’s About At the start of the COVID pandemic, people kept asking Ada Palmer—history scholar and science fiction author—whether this new plague would lead to a new Renaissance, just as the Black Death led to the original Renaissance. This book is her answer, and her explanation of all the levels on which that question is not even wrong. It starts with the fuzziness of what we mean by “the Renaissance.” Different historians list time periods that barely overlap, depending on what region they study and, more importantly, what development they consider the key shift toward modernity. Artistic flourishing? Modern-ish banking? The birth of nationalism? Each of these changes is its own myth, used to claim legitimacy for later powers in later ages: if the “X-factor” is banking and trade, then the capitalist side of the Cold War can claim the Renaissance and progress, and consign communism to the (imaginary) Dark Age that clouded men’s minds between antiquity and rebirth. This kind of story starts in Renaissance Italy itself, with Petrarch’s proposal that reclaiming and teaching the wisdom of antiquity could pull society out of its war-torn dystopian morass, and create a new golden age echoing Rome’s old security and unity. This had real impacts—we can read Homer again—but did not precisely achieve its goals: In 1506, Machiavelli received a letter from a friend, who had recently read the first part of his history of the decade they’d just lived through. The friend urged Machiavelli to write more. Why? Because, he said, without a good history of these days, future generations would never believe how bad it was, and would never forgive their generation for losing so much so quickly. This was the same decade in which Michelangelo carved the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, yet living through the years that laid these golden eggs felt like an apocalypse. Machiavelli then goes on to create a theory of scientific realpolitik, of picking political strategies based on what appears to work rather than what sounds good in Cicero—strongly influenced by following Cesare Borgia as he commits what we’d now consider to be war crimes. But his goal was still the preservation and improvement of (Florentine) civilization. Per Palmer—biased herself, as she points out, like any other historian—the Renaissance X-factor is this kind of societal self-examination, and this ability to imagine that if we try new things we will get new, maybe even better, results. It’s doing this desperate experimentation in the middle of apocalypse. And it’s fuzzy at the edges: everything that happens in the Renaissance can be found during preceding centuries, but in this pressure cooker becomes “ever so much moreso.” I have a choice here between focusing on the book’s overarching thesis and the delightful details, and have mostly done the former. But in the course of Palmer’s cohesive argument, we get rich bios of thirteen “friends” who provide very different views of the Renaissance, ranging from mercenary Montesecco to composer Josquin des Prez to charismatic religious martyr Savonarola. We get an explanation of different types of ethics so that we understand what was so innovative about Machiavelli, and also so we understand why Shakespeare’s death scenes are so drawn-out. (Whether you go to heaven or hell depends on your final thoughts! You can’t know how to feel about someone’s death if you don’t get that monologue!) We get the history of how Florence convinced everyone that they were an irreplaceable center of art and culture, such that damaging the city would be a crime against all of humanity. (It worked—not only did it discourage invasions at the time, but they still have all their Renaissance architecture because no one bombed them during the world wars!) These are all intrinsic to the book’s overarching argument. They’re also necessary to understanding that argument, because they illustrate just how much of another country the past really is. History isn’t divided into the period before and after people took up recognizable modern beliefs. Ultimately, the great project of trying to make a better world can be effective. It won’t, however, always be effective in the way you’re aiming for. Petrarch wanted to end war, and that hasn’t happened. But the movements he started eventually led to vaccines and antibiotics, and the Black Death is now easily treatable. We can all hope that, in 500 years, someone will write about us as historical friends, and trace the unexpected changes resulting from our efforts. Buy the Book Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age Ada Palmer Buy Book Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age Ada Palmer Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Ada is a friend, and I got to read a partial draft of this book three years early as prep for an instance of the LARP described in Chapter 65. One usually worries about reviewers being biased by real-life friendship, but I suspect I am much more biased by having spent a few days playing Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. (Cesare Borgia’s not that bad! He convinced his father to give me partial control of Milan, allowing me to restore my family fortunes! I’ve just arranged a marriage alliance with Cardinal della Rovere, what do you mean he’ll be Battle Pope II?) Anyway, this book is very much like the delightful experience of hanging out with Ada at a con, talking about theories of societal change, or getting her personalized tour of the Uffizi, or, presumably, sitting in her classroom. It’s chatty, deep, thought-provoking, and an excellent illustration of Jo Walton’s assertion that history is the secret weapon of speculative fiction writers. It feels like a friend coming up to you at recess, hands cupped around some secret treat, going GUESS WHAT I FOUND IN THE WOODS??? Palmer has a mycologist’s enthusiasm for the brightly-colored fungus of the Renaissance, and it’s infectious. As someone who studies present-day interactions between story and society and technology, the history of these mythmaking processes fascinates me. It’s good to have a reminder of how long-lasting the effects can be, but also how far they evolve and adapt over time. There’s continuity between the people thinking it doesn’t have to be like this in 1500s Italy and 2000s America—but also vast differences in our understanding of how and why change can happen. The gap is both daunting and reassuring. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Patrons and Saints. One thing that gives Palmer’s students trouble, when trying to play realistic characters from 1492, is the patronage system. Renaissance European society is built around the idea that you have someone richer and more powerful than you who can call on your loyalty, and who provides you with financial and social support. They, in turn, have a patron, who has a patron, on up to emperors and popes. This is mirrored in the sacred Court of Heaven, where saints advocate for the groups of which they’re patrons, and beg favors of their own deific protectors. Your patron can speak for you in a court of law, and ask for mercy when you break the rules. The entire justice system is set up to allow and account for this, and to provide an earthly lesson about heavenly justice. The natural/official punishments are severe and terrible; you are meant to depend on patron intervention and mercy from the top in order to avoid them. If you aren’t embedded in this protective hierarchy, it’s only natural that you fall prey to the worst consequences. This is (1) the complete inverse of the logic by which modern democratic, secular justice systems are designed, and (2) clearly the model that some people have in mind when they demand harsh punishments in written law, but expect that police, judges, and juries will show mercy when there are mitigating circumstances, or mitigating in-group memberships. Or when they bribe officials, using methods that would have been perfectly legitimate and legal five centuries ago. It’s easy to take for granted assumptions that are very modern and local, and assume that they’ll apply in Middle-earth or on Alderaan. But many possible attitudes toward hierarchy and justice are dreamt of in our philosophy—and this diversity should show up in our worldbuilding as well. Faith as Physics, Physics as Faith. Renaissance Europe, and Italy in particular, is extremely Christian. However, breaking with modern assumptions, there’s no sense of conflict between Christianity and scholarship. Rather the reverse: it’s taken for granted that the Platonic Truth is out there, and that study will eventually produce common insights from all sources of truth. This assumption is extremely important, not because scholars expect to eventually come up with vaccines, but because correctly understanding the truth is necessary for eternal salvation. And the truth is expected to be physics. Heaven and Hell and Purgatory are specific places, the soul has mass based on its sin and virtue; you get where you’re going after death due to gravity. Thus those Shakespearian death scenes; the groundlings have to know which direction your soul is pointing at the moment of departure. This confidence in one cohesive truth, reconcilable across multiple types of inquiry, gave scholars confidence and occasionally surprising leeway, but also made certain types of truth harder to notice. If confident 20th-century scholars could measure non-existent differences in skull volume across ethnicities, imagine how long it took to admit that Aristotle wasn’t completely compatible with Plato—or that individual observations could be more accurate than Aristotle. As I mentioned in our last column, it’s hard to get more science fictional than imagining the implications of different physics—or of different assumptions about how those physics should be studied. New Growth: What Else to Read Palmer’s Terra Ignota series is science fiction that mines the big philosophical-physical questions of the Renaissance. It also has flying cars. Dante was a science fiction author by Renaissance standards, writing about Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory based on the best physics of the time. Other excellent readings of the (broadly-defined) era include Petrarch’s letters, and Machiavelli’s. Annalee Newitz’s Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind is a very different take on how societies produce, and change in response to, national mythologies. Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe does an excellent job of deconstructing the myth of the Dark Ages, a necessary precursor for deconstructing the myth of the Renaissance. What are your favorite “the past is another country” historical facts? Are there old friends you’d like to introduce everyone to? Share in the comments.[end-mark] The post Infernal Gravity and the Logic of Death Scenes: Ada Palmer’s <i>Inventing the Renaissance</i> appeared first on Reactor.

A large majority of Americans no longer think it’s affordable to raise children. According to data from the 2025 American Family Survey, 71% of participants said it’s not affordable for most people to raise children. This is a 13-percentage point increase from 2024 and a 20-percentage point increase from 2015. Along similar lines, the most common barrier to having children cited by the survey’s participants was insufficient money (43% chose this as at least one of the barriers among a list of options presented). Adults ages 18 to 29 and those ages 30 to 44 were most likely to cite this as a reason for limiting the number of children they have or plan to have.   It’s not surprising Americans’ concerns about the costs of raising children have climbed recently. Inflation has been at historic highs for several years now, and despite declining from its peak in 2022 inflation remains well above pre-pandemic levels. And housing prices are off the charts, hitting an all-time high in 2023 and not declining much since then.    On a more upbeat note, perspectives about the cost of raising a family were more positive when American Family Survey participants were asked specifically about their own family situation, compared to perceptions about families in general. While 49% of respondents said the cost associated with raising a family ranked in the top three concerns for families in general, only 25% said it ranked as a top three concern for their own family. Although 25% is still a significant share of people, survey participants seemed to have a more negative view of family affordability conceptually than what is happening on the ground for them.   It’s also notable that while people commonly cite affordability as a barrier to having children—and not only in the American Family Survey—U.S. birth rates were declining even before inflation and housing prices were soaring. Even in strong economic times during the last decade, birth rates continued to fall. The American Family Survey also shows that the share of people reporting that not having enough money was a reason for limiting the number of children they have or plan to have doesn’t vary much across income levels. Forty-seven percent of people with incomes under $40,000 cited insufficient funds as a barrier to having children, not much different from the 43% of participants with $40,000 to $80,000 and the 42% with incomes above $80,000 per year that said the same thing.   Median household income in the United States has increased steadily for several decades as well, even in the last few years, despite dropping some during the pandemic. Median incomes among men ages 25-29 and ages 30-35 specifically (since men are most likely to be the primary breadwinner in the home) have also trended upward in the last few years. So, while high housing costs and inflation could explain recent declines in births, they probably aren’t a particularly good explanation for the longer-term trends of declining birth rates.   Other factors besides hard numbers are likely driving concerns about the costs associated with raising children though. Expectations about what is required to raise a child have increased over time. Parents feel more pressure to invest greater time and resources into their children than past generations of parents did. Another factor is that opportunity costs associated with having children have also grown. During the past several decades educational and career opportunities have increased, particularly for women. And the greater economic well-being the country has experienced over time increases the freedom people have to do things like travel, pursue personal goals, and invest in self-improvement. While the economy is certainly part of the story when it comes to adults feeling concerned about raising children, it will likely require more than just economic reforms to change perspectives and behaviors surrounding family formation. Cultural norms and infrastructures that make it easier to raise children will likely also be necessary. For example, workplace norms that support employees in being able to spend time with their families, more realistic material expectations about what is needed to start and raise a family, laws and cultural norms that give parents more freedom in how they raise their children (e.g., Free-Range Kids laws), educational choice options for families, and communities that provide places for families to gather easily and affordably are also necessary components. The last few years especially have increased economic pressure on families. Smart economic policies that drive down pressure on the housing market and help reduce inflation are crucial for families. Such economic reforms must be coupled with cultural reforms though if we hope to see change in perspectives and behaviors surrounding bearing and raising children.    The post New Survey Shows Increased Concerns About the Cost of Raising Children appeared first on The Daily Signal.

I'm Still Furious About the COVID Gaslighting, and You Should Be Too