Welcome back to Tidings! In this issue you'll find stories about AI, VAR, a puffin-inspired robot, and even lichen. If you're lichen this newsletter, share it with a friend! These links were all shared by our community on Seabird, our minimalist platform for sharing links. Sign up to check it out on web or mobile.

​Ctrl-Z-the-world​

A brief history of the undo button.

Mercury | Deena Prichep

​I got slopped​

A reporter discovers she is the subject of a new biography sold on Amazon and sloppily generated by AI. She then meets the prolific "author" of 445 books who AI to self-publish up to ten volumes a week.

The New York Times | Kashmir Hill [Gift link]

​VAR is my mortal enemy​

Heading into the final match of the World Cup, an entertaining case against VAR and for preserving the pleasure of watching an uninterrupted game of soccer.

The Ringer | Brian Phillips

​How BlackBerry staged a comeback​

BlackBerry phones were all but wiped out by iPhones and Android devices, but the company behind it is a quietly successful tale of reinvention. These days it's even turning a profit.

The Walrus | Solarina Ho

​Watching the mind build a world​

A case for serious study of lucid dreaming: "These instabilities often resemble familiar glitches in artificial-intelligence-generated images and videos: unstable features, morphing objects, repeated attempts to recreate the same image that never quite succeed. And, perhaps most famously, hands with the wrong number of fingers."

The Transmitter | Magdalena Paluchowska

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​Graham Platner was the perfect Twitter candidate​

A lesson in how Elon Musk's capture of the social media platform creates a "reality distortion field" not just for Republicans, but also for Democrats. (If you're looking for a healthier social media platform, may we suggest Seabird?)

Slate | Alex Kirshner

​What to do with Dr. Seuss?​

On the author and illustrator's decidedly mixed record of work.

USA Today | Clare Mulroy

​No return​

Reporting from the trial of Thomas Plamberger, accused of negligently—or worse—leaving his girlfriend to die on a climb of Austria's tallest mountain.

The New Yorker | William Finnegan

​How Vandy bested the Ivies​

A Vanderbilt alum examines the university's transformation from tongue-in-cheek "Harvard of the South" to a more cosmopolitan student body with outposts around the US.

New York Magazine | Claire Suddath [Free link]

​How Amsterdam invented the fire department​

How seventeenth century Amsterdam innovated solutions to disastrous urban fires.

Works in Progress | Virginia Postrel

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​What makes humans stupid?​

"One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel."

Nautilus | David C. Krakauer

​See the whole world in lichens​

An ode to lichens, particularly the ones growing in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific NW Magazine | Lynda Mapes

​The fascinating sex lives of high Cascade toads​

In Oregon news: a peek into the romantic overtures and lifecycles of Western toads.

OPB | Jule Gilfillan

​All the cool kids are birding​

And in bird news, you know we have to share this dispatch from the World Series of Birding, which includes a search for "several crucial seabirds."

The Atlantic | Rachel Gutman-Wei [Gift link]

​A new kind of robot swims the seas and soars the skies​

Bonus bird link: this puffin-inspired robot may be the coolest thing you see today.

NPR | Ari Daniel

Tidings is edited by Jacob Grier. The links in our newsletter were all shared first on Seabird, our minimalist platform simply designed for recommending worthwhile links. Learn more about us here and join to discover and share articles like these every day. Your recommendations may appear in a future edition of Tidings.