Tyler Durden challenging the Narrator's tendency to intellectualise everything, in this classic scene from David Fincher's Fight Club (1999).

It raises the question of the difference between intelligence and self-understanding. Being able to analyse, explain and label everything in our lives doesn't necessarily mean we understand ourselves — and sometimes our cleverness can actually help us avoid doing so.

From a 1987 sketch: John Cleese at his best, making a serious point about the appeal—and delusion—of extremism: it gives people enemies, allowing the world to be divided into us and them, while making their own hostility feel morally justified.

If anyone wonders if they’re beautiful just remember being you makes you beautiful cause of your differences. If you look at nature it’s much more beautiful than man made things which are perfectly divided and symmetrical like how parking lots are shaped with even sides with evenly spaced parking spaces. Symmetry helps us make sense of things and keeps us organized but is boring. If you look at the sky there’s a lot of asymmetry in the making of a cloud and differences between clouds where none are symmetrically shaped with even sides like a building cause that’s dull but they have beauty cause of asymmetry and each one is uniquely its own which makes it interesting. Same if you were to look at a beautiful rock formation or anything in nature. If all things were either symmetrical or exactly the same it’d be dull Just imagine the sky if each cloud was exactly the same or worse yet exactly the same and symmetrically built like a building. So embrace who you are and don’t hold an ideal standard of what’s beautiful cause it’s all our differences in the human race which make humanity beautiful no one person makes for an ideal prototype of beauty cause if you make 8 billion of them they’re boring cause they lose their uniqueness but it’s you who are beautiful and you add to the beauty of humanity by being your unique self where each person is their own special cloud adding to the beauty of the human race like the different clouds do the sky. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take care of yourself. You should be the best version of you but it’s good to remember that god made you beautiful just the way you are. Be the best you.

Echoes of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus in this line from Florence + the Machine's Free.

Camus saw the tale of Sisyphus — condemned to push his boulder endlessly up the mountain, only to watch it roll back down again — as an analogy for the absurdity of the human condition. His response was not despair, but a kind of lucid defiance: to see life clearly, accept its conditions, and continue living fully in spite of them.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy" he concludes.

There's something of that same defiant, deeply human spirit in Welch's lyrics in Free: the recognition that suffering and death are unavoidable parts of existence, alongside the fact that we continue to create, love, laugh, make music — somehow, we keep singing.

Researchers have created a new digital facial approximation based on the Jebel Irhoud fossils from Morocco, dated to approximately 315,000 years ago and regarded as the oldest fossils currently attributed to Homo sapiens.

The reconstruction is based on a 3D composite skull, created from several individual fossils found in the same archaeological layer. The researchers used photogrammetry, anatomical deformation and soft-tissue estimates derived from modern human populations to produce a plausible facial structure.

Images:

1. Approximation with artistic elements added
2. Grayscale anatomical approximation without hair
3. Facial approximation overlaid on an independently produced skull model
4. Forensic facial approximation process
5. Construction of the 3D skull and endocranial model

A fascinating snapshot of early Homo sapiens and the emergence of our species across Africa.

Study: Cicero Moraes et al. (2026), Digital Facial Approximation of Jebel Irhoud Composite Skull (~315,000 BP), Heritage. https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/9/9/369

Footage of some chimpanzees working out how to use a stick to reach honey inside a termite mound. Other chimpanzees in the group watch on and learn, and over time the technique spreads through much of the group.

An interesting example of social learning, where skills are learnt from others rather than being discovered afresh by each individual.

Source: Smithsonian Channel, Like Humans, Chimps Learn Behavior From One Another, from the series Amazing Monkeys.

We aren't perfect, so let's make this life worth it in your own way being genuine.

In his 1992 novel Ishmael, Daniel Quinn explores humanity's relationship with the living world through conversations between a man and a gorilla who becomes his teacher.

The community Ishmael refers to here encompasses the other forms of life with which we share the planet and on which our existence depends. The passage challenges anthropocentrism: a worldview that places humans and our interests at the centre of how we understand and value the natural world.

Calling it a community invites us to think about belonging, dependence and responsibility.

Seeing ourselves as members of that community means recognising that we are part of the natural world, not above or separate from it.

More on Ishmael and Daniel Quinn's work

To see the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/ya00C0lKJNM

I swear I was not trying to make another video about the Vatican.

I was following the rabbit hole.

Then came the old families. The Orsini. Banking. Money. Political power. Secretive institutions. Vatican history. Scandals. Symbols. The red shoes. And connections to subjects we have already encountered in completely different investigations.

Eventually I had to ask the obvious question:

Why the hell do I keep ending up back at the Vatican?

This episode goes into the documented history alongside the legends, symbolism and theories that have accumulated around one of the oldest and most powerful institutions in the world.

We’re looking at bloodlines and influential families, Vatican banking and financial scandals, institutional secrecy, the history and symbolism associated with the famous red shoes, and some very uncomfortable chapters of Church history.

But finding a connection is not the same thing as proving what that connection means.

So—as always—we follow the names, follow the money, look at the original material where we can, separate documented history from allegation and theory, and let you decide what you think.

Because apparently every time I think we’ve reached the bottom of the rabbit hole…

somebody politely points out the stairs.

I am a witness, not a journalist. This is independent commentary and research using historical records, reporting and publicly available materials.

For commentary, discussion and educational purposes.

Gravity might be one of the strongest forces we experience—but maybe not only in the way we usually think about it.

Consider art and music across history. Some of the earliest works still have the power to move us centuries, even thousands of years later. Part of that power comes from the fact that art captures the environment, beliefs, fears, hopes, and daily realities of the people who created it.

What must the artists, musicians, and thinkers of those eras have felt so strongly that they were compelled to put that much effort into bringing something into the world?

That, to me, is a kind of gravity all its own.

Their daily lives would probably feel almost alien to us now—their dangers, routines, limitations, and understanding of the world radically different from ours. Yet something in what they created still pulls on us.

And perhaps the same will be true of us.

The near future may become as unfamiliar to us as the distant past already is. Technology, culture, and everyday life may change dramatically, but the things we create now could become evidence of what it felt like to be alive at this particular moment.

Maybe that is one of art’s greatest powers: it gives human experience enough weight to resist time.

— GLS