I want to humbly submit Ravyn Lenae's "Love Me Not" as the perfect bubble gum pop song, and that's not an honor I bestow lightly.

Here's a version without the video, because I actually think that the video detracts from the sheer bubble gum of it. It needs way more dancing! But it did clue me in that Ravyn does interesting things and makes good music that is mostly not bubble gum.

*Pokey told me that "bop" now means someone who sleeps around. I don't mean the young'n meaning. Nor the Cyndi Lauper meaning.

Sam Wang and his Princeton folks have issued a redistricting report card for all states. Also he has a substack now.

Pretty sure the NYT is negging me. I like to think of myself as being in pretty good shape, and I think I'd fail all four of these "tried-and-tested self-assessments for strength, balance and cardiovascular fitness." Let's all complain a lot.

Via E. Messily, Leaked 'Gaza Riviera' plan dismissed as 'insane' attempt to cover ethnic cleansing.

The highly fanciful prospectus - subtitled "From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally"- appears to have been drawn up by people with no physical knowledge of Gaza, the politics of the Middle East or the likely challenges in attempting to rebuild the territory as a multibillion-dollar tourism and technology hub that would inevitably compete with Israel.

The scheme, described as requiring no US funding and intended to be funded by investors to the tune of $100bn, envisages a bustling port city bisected by a watercourse and bordered by up to eight leafy AI-powered high-tech megacities, apparently modelled after Saudi Arabia's troubled Neom project.

It also envisages an "Elon Musk" manufacturing park located - without irony - on the ruins of the Erez industrial zone, which was built with Israeli investment to exploit cheap labour in the Palestinian territory and subsequently closed and destroyed by Israeli forces.

It's "circulating at the White House".

Two links from Mossy:

1. Sci-Hub Case: Whats Really at Stake is Future of Rsearch in India

Basically, a Delhi court has blocked Sci-Hub due to copyright infringement, which kinda makes scientific process grind to a halt.

2. When The Library Went Dark: What The Sci-Hub & LibGen Ban Means For Indian Students

A short first person narrative on the topic.

I mean, the journals system has been broken for a very long time, and I'm not really mad to see it undermined. (There was a post a few years ago - which now I can't retain enough detail to locate it - making a much stronger "BURN DOWN THE PEER REVIEW PROCESS!" claim. I wasn't entirely persuaded, but it moved the little internal Overton window in my soul a little further towards Journal destruction.)