"Give all your fucks to the living."

Mandy Brown on—well, the renewal of the soul, in a different register, I think—through devotion to the genuinely alive.

"if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft."

https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unified-theory-of------

The Many Myths of the Boston Tea Party

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-many-myths-of-the-boston-tea-party-180983399/

#history #americanhistory #ushistory #smithsonian #teaparty #boston

K, I apparently am late to the "sharks have been around for a ridiculously long time" thing. I mean, I know they're ancient, but I really did not have a clue just how ancient, relative to other "things that have been around forever".

The one that blew my mind is the age of sharks relative to the existence of the universe.

By our best understanding, the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. Sharks have existed on Earth for about 450 million years. That means sharks have existed for approximately 3% of the entirety of the existence of the Universe.

Standard "some things that sharks are older than" list:

• Saturn's rings (~100 million years old)
• The Pleiades cluster (75-150 myo)
• One galactic orbit of the sun (200-225 my)
• North Star, aka Polaris (estimated at ~70 myo)
• The Atlantic Ocean (~150 myo)
• Pangea (formed ~335 million years ago)
• Trees (390 myo)