Where are my “read wildly inappropriate books for my age because nobody thought to check what the kid reading six grades ahead was actually reading” people?

I know you're old... But are you Danny Devito, Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas singing and dancing with Billy Ocean, old?

I wrote a long read for the Guardian about the evolution of the British trap house, focusing on the story of a friend of mine who was 'cuckooed' twice in London. The first time was grim, but the second cuckooing sparked a fascinating friendship. theguardian.com/news/ng-inte…

The best video you'll see all day

What a crazy time this was

Told a guy about how we used to record music off the radio onto cassettes and he looked at me like I saw Lincoln get shot live

Getting stung by a nettle is one of the most misunderstood sensations in nature, and the chemistry is exactly why Jiri wakes up feeling reborn instead of wrecked. Every nettle leaf is covered in trichomes: microscopic hollow hairs tipped with silica. Brush against one and the tip snaps off, leaving a glass needle that punctures your skin and injects its payload under pressure. He didn't rub a plant on himself. He gave himself thousands of tiny hypodermic injections. The payload is the interesting part. Histamine, serotonin, and acetylcholine. Your body already runs on those exact molecules as neurotransmitters. The plant weaponized your own signaling chemistry and fired it back through your skin, plus formic acid for the initial burn. That explains the "all night body tingling." Common nettle also carries oxalic and tartaric acid, and those two are the ones researchers pinned as the long-lasting agents. The histamine flush fades in an hour. The acids keep the nerves firing for hours after. The "cleansed and reborn" feeling the next day has a mechanism too. Flooding a region with that much irritation overwhelms the local pain fibers and forces a systemic response: blood rushes to the area, the body dials down inflammatory prostaglandins, and you get a rebound of relief once the storm passes. Pain nerves fatigue. Anti-inflammatory chemistry floods in behind them. This has a name. Urtication. Roman legionaries flogged their limbs with nettle to keep circulation up in cold campaigns. Culpeper prescribed it in the 1600s to "draw blood to the place." A 2000 randomized trial had 27 arthritis patients press fresh nettle to painful joints daily for a week, and it beat the placebo on pain and disability. Jiri thinks he found a warrior ritual. He rediscovered a 2,000-year-old anti-inflammatory delivery system that happens to run on his own neurotransmitters.