A MILLION LITTLE PIECES – GoodReads Best Books of the 21st Century
Controversial 2003 Memoir Named a ‘Best Book of the 21st Century’ By Goodreads
The scandal caused the author to be dropped by his literary manager and lose a 7-figure two-book deal.
American author and memoirist James Frey burst onto the literary scene in 2003 with his memoir titled A Million Little Pieces. The book is marketed as a story of addiction, crime, mental health, rehab, and eventual sobriety, detailing Frey’s recovery at 23 from drug addiction and alcoholism. The memoir goes through Frey’s time in a facility and a 12-step program, and the different characters he meets on his journey of recovery.
Upon its publication in April of 2003, A Million Little Pieces was selected to be a part of Oprah’s Book Club, skyrocketing sales. The memoir shot to the number-one paperback non-fiction book slot on Amazon, and it topped The New York Times Best Seller list for fifteen straight weeks at the time.
As of 2026, the book is still immensely popular among readers, with Goodreads ranking it as one of the “Best Books of the 21st Century.”
Bye-bye Books?
THE END OF READING IS HERE
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.
Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.
CavemanGPT
Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs
by JOSEPH COX
Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and more “Hulk smash.”
Use of the caveman plugin is in direct response to the skyrocketing and unpredictable cost of AI.
The Tactile Generation
How we lost our sense of touch
Touchscreens made life frictionless. They also flattened our relationship with the physical world.
I was the kind of kid who dug holes, the deeper the better. I vividly recall the ecstasy of once splaying out my fingers in a bucket full of backyard dirt, a bliss punctuated only by a sudden burning sensation in my right hand that turned out to be my first-ever encounter with a fire ant.
The textures of my childhood loom larger in my memory than sights or sounds. My first paper cut, on a piece of sheet music, and the rush of cold water my older sister used to wash away the blood. The warmth of my mother’s hug and the tender squeeze of my grandmother’s hand in mine. The whoosh of air I’d get from barreling a scooter down a hill, and the pristine crunch of stepping out into a winter’s first snow.
This was the world where many of us grew up, one in which we felt our way toward understanding, sometimes playfully, sometimes a little painfully, sometimes both. To make a phone call, you once had to rotate a dial. Entering an apartment building meant turning a key inside a wobbly knob. Calculators and cameras used to be clunky, and writing was something you did with a pencil you sharpened yourself.
The Closest Frontier
First new open-ocean subsea research habitat in 40 years launched
The ocean floor is a vast source of potentially revolutionary scientific discovery – yet it remains largely inaccessible. For many marine scientists, they could only dream of living and working underwater. That changes now.
n this video, New Scientist CoLab partners with ocean engineering company DEEP to follow the deployment of Vanguard, the first open-ocean, ambient-pressure subsea research habitat built in over forty years. The site is Tennessee Reef off the coast of the Florida Keys. Vanguard will allow scientists and researchers to break free from the strict time limits of traditional surface diving. Featuring an integrated moon pool for entry and exit, it lets aquanauts camp out in the marine canopy of the ocean, embarking on daily 6-to-8-hour dives and processing scientific samples directly inside the habitat without bringing them to the surface.
Welcome to the new era of aquatic humanity.
The Golden Volcano
There’s a Volcano in Antarctica Spewing Gold Crystals Into The Atmosphere
Lava. Ash. Horrifying death.
All are known and expected outputs from an active volcano.
But one volcano deep in the farthest, frozen reaches of our planet marches to the beat of a slightly different drum.
On Ross Island in the Ross Sea, a deep bay in Antarctica, Mount Erebus fumes about 1,350 kilometers (840 miles) from the Geographic South Pole. The world’s southernmost active volcano, it bubbles with a permanent lake of blazing lava.
And in the gas constantly pouring forth from this gate to the underworld, scientists found microscopic particles of crystalline, elemental gold.
According to a 1991 research paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Erebus belches out about 80 grams (2.8 ounces) of microscopic gold dust per day, scattering it as far as 1,000 kilometers away – maybe even farther.
Hockney Gone
David Hockney, whose art celebrated sun-drenched Los Angeles, dead at 88
By Jessica Gelt and Barbara Isenberg
David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88.
His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist Erica Bolton.
Calling himself “an English Los Angeleno,” Hockney immortalized the city’s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.
“Los Angeles will always be thought of by many people worldwide through the images that David created,” said Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of the modern art department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which holds more than 150 works by Hockney in its permanent collection. “But for me one of David’s greatest gifts was his ability to look at the world with wonder and joy in whatever medium he decided to work in. … He was fearless in his embrace of technology, and I think that enormous curiosity ran throughout his career, and continued to the end. He was involved in looking at art history and the future simultaneously.”
Pacifica Pier Going
The Pacifica Pier is becoming an historic artifact before our very eyes
by Chris Hunter
What many people are only learning now, in addition to the official name of the pier, is that it was built to carry a sewer outflow pipe from the Sharp Park Sewage Plant deep into the Pacific Ocean in 1973.
That purpose created what’s called an “enterprise fund” which paid for city maintenance of the pier itself. When Pacifica built a brand-new sewage plant 26 years ago and put it in the Rockaway Quarry, the city didn’t need that outflow pipe since the new water treatment plant directed its treated sewage into the ocean through the Rockaway Creek. The enterprise fund went to the Calera Creek Water Recycling Plant instead of the pier outflow system. Because it was more highly treated at the tertiary level, the new outflow could run directly into the ocean instead of being piped a half mile out. No other dedicated fund to maintain the pier was ever created, although various grants and public works budgets have helped to some degree. A $19 million repair need was identified in recent years, but was not funded.
After it was built, the concrete pier immediately became a very popular fishing and tourism destination, in addition to its municipal purpose. It’s free to fish and drop crab nets off the pier, so you can easily imagine how successful that lure became through the years. You need a fishing license to fish from the beach. In the 1990s, Pacifica saw more salmon catches than just about any public pier in the world. It made it into National Geographic in 1995 when a thousand salmon were caught in one day.
CODEX ATLANTICUS Completus
Leonardo’s ‘Codex Atlanticus’ Is Complete for the First Time in 400 Years
The Galileo Museum’s Leonardotheka 2.0 reunites the artist’s landmark manuscript with the 550 pages a 16th-century sculptor cut from it.
A 400-year-old act of editorial vandalism has finally been undone online. Florence’s Galileo Museum has reunited Leonardo da Vinci‘s Codex Atlanticus with more than 500 pages that were later cut from it, restoring for the first time the full sweep of the master’s largest surviving notebook.
Today, the museum launched Leonardotheka 2.0, adding the 550-odd pages Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni excised from the Codex Atlanticusin the late 16th century—now owned by the U.K.’s Royal Collection Trust—to the 1,119-page tome held by Milan’s Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus is the largest of over a dozen codices containing the thousands of pages of notes he made. Its contents, produced between the 1470s and Leonardo’s death in 1519, include some of the artist-engineer’s best-known inventions, like his flying machine and his harpsichord-viola.
Donkeys Are The Therapeutic Balls
Patients find help with therapy donkeys at psychiatric hospital near Paris
NEUILLY-SUR-MARNE, France (AP) — Therapy donkeys are helping patients with mental health conditions recover in a psychiatric hospital unit outside Paris that’s unique to France.
The 19th century farm buildings and wooded surroundings are a haven within the Ville-Evrard hospital complex in Neuilly-sur-Marne. On Friday, patients took the five donkeys for a walk and cared for them. Some confidently lifted their hooves to remove dirt. Many ended the session with a hug.
The couple behind the program say more scientific evaluation is needed of animal therapy, which is practiced around the world. They would like it to be formally recognized by the psychiatric community as a complementary form of care, citing their experience with patients and caregivers.
Pick’em Up, Drive’em Out.
To Sell Trucks, Break Out the Cowboys and Wrap Them in Old Glory
Americans — especially American men — love trucks, and high gas prices aren’t swaying automakers. Ram has a new line of fuel-guzzling muscle trucks, and some in-your-face ads to sell them.
By Roy Furchgott
With fuel prices stubbornly high, it would seem a bad time to unleash new gas guzzlers. But Ram, Stellantis’s badge for brawny pickups, has introduced a line of muscle trucks, betting that most buyers are more concerned about their manliness than the price of gas.
It’s not a bad bet. At the risk of turning off some, Ram knows its buyers: American men (mostly) whose taste — reflected in ads — runs toward the Ultimate Fighting Championship, comely cowgirls on mechanical bulls, a Guns N’ Roses soundtrack and unapologetically large, loud trucks.
The Beard Says E.T. Is Real
Steven Spielberg rejects Disclosure Day alien conspiracy theories
by Brooke Ivey Johnson and Tori Brazier
For decades, one of the internet’s favourite conspiracy theories has been that Hollywood is secretly used to acclimatise audiences to major future events before they happen.
The theory has attached itself to everything from pandemic movies and political thrillers to films about government corruption, nuclear war, and alien invasions.
In its most extreme form, believers argue that filmmakers are fed information about future disclosures and then package those ideas into entertainment to make the public more accepting when the truth eventually emerges.
Mo’ Mo’ Bots
Bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows
Cloudflare says 57.4% of requests to a selection of websites it hosts are now automated bot requests, while 42.6% are human-generated.
By Samantha Elkins
Website traffic from AI agents and bots has eclipsed its human-generated counterpart for the first time, according to Cloudflare, an earlier-than-expected milestone that speaks to AI’s rapid advance and impact.
“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, one of the largest internet hosting services, wrote Thursday on X.
“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027,” he continued, “but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”
The rise is attributed to the continued proliferation of AI agents, largely autonomous programs that use tools that collaborate with high-level programs and data, with little human feedback.
Cloudflare, which has a feature to display bot versus human-generated search requests, says 57.4% of requests are now initiated by bots, compared with 42.6% coming from humans.
Oops!
Sonny Rollins Gone
Sonny Rollins Dies: Jazz Giant Was 95
By Tom Tapp
Sonny Rollins, a giant of jazz who was often called the music’s “greatest improviser” died today at his home in Woodstock, NY. That, according to a post on his official social media. He was 95.
The tenor saxophonist’s 60-plus year career saw him record 60-plus albums. His compositions “St. Thomas,” “Oleo,” “Doxy” and “Airegin” are jazz standards. In its obituary, the New York Times observed, “Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out.” The Associated Press called Rollins “the restless genius of jazz.” Undoubtedly that restlessness helped fuel his work over the decades.
Dangerous Readers
Summer Skate by Sean Avery and Leslie Cohen
Captain Outrageous
Ted Turner, Entrepreneur of His Age
The creative destruction triggered by Ted Turner’s wild gambits left the tyranny of licensed, bureaucratic TV in rubble.
Ted Turner, who just graduated from this earthly academy at age 87, was a bon vivant, Playgirl‘s man of the year, and a public embarrassment. He made billion-dollar deals when, you know, a billion was a really big number. He sailed the seas as a champion of the yachting crowd, winning the 1977 America’s Cup aboard the Courageous. He married a beautiful actress, made her do the politically incorrect Tomahawk chops to cheer his Atlanta Braves, and cycled through the ideological spectrum from Randian to Mouth of the South to globalist U.N. benefactor to environmentalist rescuing bison. Jane Fonda, his third wife, deemed him a “romantic swashbuckling pirate” and “my favorite ex-husband.”
The cartoon character he cultivated was for fun and to amortize the lithium load. His real role was Entrepreneur of His Age. Turner held the lead spear when the Late 20th Century Barbarians stormed the gates of the Old Order in American media. Meeting the moment at the perfect instant—when a “deregulation wave” was opening doors long shut—Turner flipped the script on “public interest” regulation concocted during the Progressive Era. Intellectuals largely bemoaned the passing of the administrative state, and the Cronkite audience it favored, devoid of controversy and offered as the “news from nowhere” (as a CBS executive bragged). But the closed-loop spoon feeding was inimical to freedom, open inquiry, and honest debate.
Goodyear
What Humans Did For 200,000 Years That We Stopped Doing In 1842
For 200,000 years, every human alive slept in direct contact with the Earth. Then in 1842, one invention severed that connection — and chronic disease rates have climbed ever since. Here’s what we lost. And how to get it back tonight.
By Dr. R. Caldwell, MD
For 200,000 years — every single generation of humans that ever lived before your grandparents — slept directly on the ground.
On grass. On animal hides laid over dirt. On straw mattresses pressed against earthen floors. On wooden cots inches above bare soil.
It didn’t matter which continent. It didn’t matter which century. From the African savanna to the Roman countryside to the American frontier, every human body spent 8 hours a night in direct electrical contact with the Earth.
And then, in 1842, one man invented something that severed that connection forever.
[ click to continue reading at The Grounding Report ]
Suicide By Jet
Disturbing moment person sucked into Frontier Airlines engine at take off
The collision caused a brief fire, which the airport said was quickly extinguished
Disturbing video captured the moment a Frontier Airlines aircraft struck a pedestrian on the runway at Denver International Airport on Friday night.
The plane, which was traveling to Los Angeles, “reported striking a pedestrian during takeoff” at about 11:19 p.m., according to the airport’s official X account. The video shows the plane going down the runway until a loud bang is heard – with Fox News host left in disbelief over the horror incident after transport secretary Sean Duffy’s family road trip.
Several passengers could be heard gasping while one person screamed in shocked. According to the airport, the pedestrian was killed after the collision. It comes after the horrifying control tower audio was released with a chilling 6-word comment about ‘limbs’.
Adidas Magic
How Adidas created its 1:59 marathon super shoe: From ‘unreasonable ambition’ to ‘actual magic’
By Liam Tharme
No sooner had Sabastian Sawe broken the tape at the London Marathon than the Kenyan was posing for photos, proudly holding up his Adidas shoe, with “1:59:30” and “WR” written along the sole in black ink.
History had been made, a significant barrier surpassed, the first legal sub-two-hour marathon. He did not just break the world record, he obliterated it, beating Kelvin Kiptum’s mark (2:00:35 at the 2023 Chicago Marathon) by more than a minute. Yomif Kejelcha, coming home second, also ran under two hours, finishing just 11 seconds behind. Tigst Assefa lowered her own world record by nine seconds (to 2:15:41) in the women’s race.
All three are Adidas athletes and all raced in the Pro Evo 3. It was an incredible debut for a shoe that Adidas says is the lightest and best it has made — testing data shows 1.6 percent running economy improvements compared to the Pro Evo 2.
Stick Figure GPT
This Reggae Band Is in a Nightmare Battle Against AI Slop Remixes
When Stick Figure’s seven-year-old song shot up the charts, the band was thrilled. But its viral moment was spurred by unauthorized AI remixes.
by KATE KNIBBS
THE CALIFORNIA-BASED REGGAE band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like “Angels Above Me” did this past week.
The seven-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” according to Woodruff.
Stick Figure has had plenty of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae category, and hit singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the speed at which this track went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks about it, gushing with enthusiasm. “It was exciting,” Woodruff says. “But then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it’s saddening.”
[ click to continue reading at WIRED ]
Ted Turner Gone
Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87
As one of the most important figures in media history, he oversaw a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels.
By Jonathan Kandell
Ted Turner, the media mogul who cut a brash and vivid figure on the American scene of the late 20th century by dominating the cable television industry, creating the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, and extending his restless reach into professional sports, environmentalism and philanthropy, died on Wednesday at his home near Tallahassee, Fla. He was 87.
Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. Mr. Turner announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.
Mr. Turner’s signature creation was CNN — the Cable News Network — which revolutionized television news in 1980 by presenting it all hours of the day and eventually inspiring other media operations to follow suit. But his portfolio of business ventures bulged with much more, and their impact on American culture was considerable.
As a spinoff of CNN, Mr. Turner created the channel CNN Headline News and CNN International. He founded the cable and satellite sports and entertainment “superstation” that became known as TBS and spawned a sister channel, TNT, both of which continue to reach millions of homes.
James Frey with Zibby Owens
Apophis 2029
A ‘Potentially Hazardous’ Asteroid Will Pass Close to Earth in 2029 — and It Has an Alarming Nickname
This occurrence will be the closest approach to Earth by an asteroid of this size that scientists have known about in advance
By Lexi Lane
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A “potentially hazardous” asteroid is scheduled to pass by Earth in 2029, marking the “closest approach” to the planet by one of its size.
The asteroid is called Apophis, a name that comes from the ancient Egyptian god of chaos, according to Britannica.
However, despite the alarming-sounding name, NASA’s website noted it will “safely pass” about 20,000 miles from Earth on April 13, 2029.
NASA added that this distance is “closer than the distance of many satellites in geosynchronous orbit.”
FraudGPT
Deepfakes Are Coming for Your Bank Account
OpenAI made the perfect tool for scammers.
By Lila Shroff
Donald Trump is on TikTok doing his morning routine. “Get ready with me for a big day 💄🇺🇸,” reads the caption, as the president holds a makeup brush to his cheek. The scene is a still, ostensibly a screenshot of a TikTok clip. Like so much other AI-generated slop coursing through the internet, the image is fake and ridiculous. It also looks unnervingly real: There are no hands with six fingers, physics-defying angles, or other flagrant signs of AI-generated imagery. At quick glance, it really looks like the president is putting on bronzer.
I made this deepfake with OpenAI’s new image-generation model. ChatGPT Images 2.0, released last week, can create photorealistic visuals that are noticeably more convincing than what its predecessors might have produced. The tool has flooded the internet with hyperreal fakes: for example, Jeffrey Epstein as a Twitch streamer. I created the “screenshot” of Trump’s fake TikTok after encountering a similar image on the ChatGPT Subreddit, and I’ve since been able to use Images 2.0 to create all kinds of alarming deepfake images—including of Elon Musk getting whisked away by the FBI, world leaders suffering medical emergencies, and top American politicians donning Nazi paraphernalia (none of which I’ve shared anywhere).
Derby Luxe
Kentucky Derby’s $400,000 suites sell out in bigger luxury bet
By Aysha Diallo, Bloomberg News
This year’s Kentucky Derby will be the most luxurious ever – part of a nearly $1 billion investment plan to fortify horseracing’s marquee event as the sport faces declining interest.
Churchill Downs Inc., the publicly traded owner of the Derby and other racetracks, is offering ever more lavish experiences for deep-pocketed fans, including $400,000 suites at the finish line.
The demand is extremely strong for our luxury and high-end segment,” said Sarah Contardo, senior vice president for sales and strategy at Churchill Downs.
The company aims to keep boosting that supply after announcing a strategy in early 2025 to add more premium experiences over the next few years. That includes a revamped five-story terraced structure on the first turn and adding suites on the home stretch. Even the infield, the general admission section known for drunken and mud-soaked partying, is getting upgraded with pricier amenities such as rooftop views.
Gates of Fire
Art and War with a Master Storyteller
A novelist writes to move someone.
He begins by probing his own feelings—the things he loves and the things he hates. The things that pique his interest and pierce his heart; the things he fears but will never admit. He distills these insights into a story about life, and through his words seeks to induce a feeling in the reader, to make the reader love or hate or identify with people who do not exist. The novelist entertains, delights, grieves, and consoles us. Ultimately, the great novelists cause us to reflect on our own lives and, on occasion, to change them.
By this measure, Steven Pressfield is a great novelist. Pressfield is the author of more than 10 nonfiction books, several Hollywood films, and, with the publication of The Arcadian this month, 12 novels. From his pen has flowed millions of dollars in sales of books and movie tickets. But it was one book – Gates of Fire (1998) – that cemented his legacy.
“The Music is Black: A British Story”
From reggae to grime: how black music became synonymous with a British sound
As a major exhibition retracing how music from Africa, the Caribbean and North America merged to make a distinctly British sound opens in London, Spotlight on Africa looks at a century of black music in the diaspora.
V&A East, the latest offshoot of the world-renowned Victoria & Albert Museum, opened in Stratford – the area regenerated by London’s 2012 Olympic Games – on 18 April.
Its inaugural exhibition, entitled “The Music is Black: A British Story”, charts the rise of black music in the UK, from early drumbeats brought over from Africa to the present day, in which African and Afro-Caribbean music reflect British multiculturalism.
From Africa via the Caribbean and North America, the contribution of musicians of African descent still resonates in the United Kingdom – from reggae to rap and grime, a contemporary black British musical genre born in East London, which has allowed young people to create a sense of belonging, while connecting to a global audience.
Ms. Einstein
‘New Einstein’ vows to find ‘source code of universe’ and change everything
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski said, ‘I don’t want to make billionaires richer. I want to understand how the universe works’. She rejected Jeff Bezos and wants to understand how the universe works.
by Emilia Randall GAU Writer
32-year-old Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, built a plane when she was 12, was rejected from MIT, persuaded MIT to take her anyway, graduated top of her class in physics, and went on to study at Harvard.
But she rejects the Einstein moniker. She said: “When Harvard University called me ‘the next Einstein’, I expressed my rejection of that title, stating, ‘I am just a grad student. I have so much to learn. I do not deserve the attention'”. It comes during an alarming time for scientists, with a sinister kidnap conspiracy theory emerging over one who burned to death in a Tesla.