The New York Times: Climate Change Fueling Europe’s Ferocious Heat Wave, Scientists Find A rapid scientific analysis concludes that this June’s scorching heat in Western Europe would not have been possible without human-caused climate change. Even in today’s climate, a heat wave this widespread and intense is still rare for June — with a less than 1% chance […]
links: 23.06.2026
The New York Times: X-Ray Specs for the World’s Oldest, Sealed Letters A team of historians, scientists and engineers has built a portable X-ray scanner that can read 4,000-year-old letters without breaking open the clay envelopes they were sealed in. More than half a million cuneiform artefacts have been found across the Middle East, but many went unstudied […]
links: 21.06.2026
LSM: Turning all of Pārdaugava into one big Victory Square? An interview with researcher Skaidrīte Lasmane Skaidrīte Lasmane — an emeritus professor, philosopher and historian at the University of Latvia — discusses the history of Riga’s Victory Square (Uzvaras laukums) and the grandiose construction planned under Kārlis Ulmanis, which was deliberately turned into a nationwide volunteer effort, a […]
links: 19.06.2026
Wired: How the Peter Thiel-Linked Dialog Club Secretly Ranks Its Members WIRED has obtained internal data from Dialog, the private club co-founded by Peter Thiel — dossiers on nearly 200 prominent people, complete with home addresses, private phone numbers, dates of birth and even food allergies. It turns out the club secretly grades its members by wealth and […]
links: 18.06.2026
Wired: Silicon Valley’s Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different WIRED talks to two wealth advisers serving Silicon Valley’s high-net-worth tech clients about how the new generation of tech millionaires handles its sudden fortune as SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic head toward liquidity events. The very scale of wealth has shifted — the average client is […]
links: 16.06.2026
WIRED: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’ Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, in an internal memo to staff, admitted the company did an “atrocious” job rolling out its new artificial-intelligence division — after WIRED revealed widespread discontent inside the roughly 6,500-strong “Applied AI” unit (one worker called it “a gulag”). Bosworth promised more stability, […]
links: 15.06.2026
TechCrunch: The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg Last month the tech sector cut more jobs than in any month in two years — nearly 40,000 — and for the third month running AI was the most-cited reason. Yet a growing chorus argues AI is merely a convenient excuse, and the real cause is pandemic-era overhiring […]
links: 14.06.2026
LSM: President Čakste’s daughter who feigned insanity in Siberia for her children’s sake. The story of Maiga Šīrone’s self-sacrifice Pianist Maiga Šīrone, a daughter of Latvia’s first president Jānis Čakste, was deported to Siberia with her two children in 1941. Realising that her children could only be sent home if she herself were declared legally incapacitated, she deliberately […]