Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it’s just not that hard to do.

That's how Scaachi Koul describes American Canto, a memoir by journalist and political operative Olivia Nuzzi. Koul reviewed the book for Slate. This review is one of several collected by Literary Hub for a roundup of the most cutting book reviews for the past year.

Other books considered and then eviscerated are the first novel by comedian Louis C.K., a memoir by former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a posthumously published collection of short stories by Harper Lee.

-via Nag on the Lake | Illustration: Dawn Hudson

Hey, remember that time McDonald's opened a chain of coffee shops? They wanted to get in on what Starbucks was selling, but it didn't work out. Weird History Food usually goes through the whole timeline of chain restaurants, but for this one they only had to go back two years. Really. CosMc's was a coffee shop that offered plenty of fancy variations on coffee plus a variety of bizarre cold drinks. There was a lot of hoopla in a very short time, and then it disappeared just as quickly. You will be forgiven if you don't remember it at all, because there was most likely never a CosMc's near you. And even if there was, it was gone before you knew it. What we learned from this experiment is that McDonald's, as successful as it is with burgers and fries, is always looking for the Next Big Thing, no matter how much they have to invest. Tom Blank explains the big splash and quiet legacy of CosMc's and other failed McDonald's experiments. 

Peppermint is a flavor often associated with Christmas and peppermint-flavored candy canes commonly appear in Christmas decorations and gifts. Sweets master Elizabeth LaBau--known on the internet as the Sugar Hero--proposes 35 uses for peppermints that are appropriate for the season.

My favorite are her candy cane cups, which are pictured above. These are little cups made from whole candy canes. She partially melted them in an oven-safe shotglass-sized mold until they held their shape as functional cups when cooled.

LaBau then filled them with peppermint hot chocolate, whipped cream, and crumbled candy canes. She proposes an alternative drink for adults: peppermint schnapps. Yummy!

The image above, titled "High Five" has made photographer Mark Meth Cohn the overall winner of the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards for 2025. He spent four days in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda shooting gorillas ...with a camera. This young male put on a show to display his acrobatic flair, and it paid off. Paula Rustemeier won the category of yong photographer (under 25) with this image of three young foxes playing in a nature reserve. She spend so much time with them that they were completely unafraid of her. 



One commenter said, "That's like every 3 people friend group: one falls down, one is shocked and worries and the other one just laughs." The under 16 category and the reptile, amphibian, and insect categories were won by Grayson Bell for a photo you saw here yesterday. 

Now in it's 11th year, the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards received more than 10,000 entries this year. See all the winners of the various categories and highly commended photos in this gallery. One award is still up for grabs, and you can vote for the People's Choice Award here. 

This guy has a long way to go and plenty of time, so how about some beans for lunch? No need to stop! Mmm, bike beans! And it would be uncivilized to eat them cold. I kept wondering what his backpack looked like as he pulled out everything he needed to cook while riding a bike. Still, I'm glad he didn't eat his beans with a spoon, because that would be the worst thing to have in his mouth if he happened to fall. YouTuber peakwings managed to remain completely silent except when the flames came frighteningly close to his face, and even then his sounds were comically understated. 

The description says that, despite the branding, this wasn't a GoPro camera. The comments held all the good lines, like "meals on wheels" and "absolute cyclepath." One opined that this is why we need safe bicycle infrastructure- so we can make it unsafe again. -via Nag on the Lake 

As he's done for the past ten years, Chris Barker has compiled a collage of famous people who died in the previous calendar year arranged into a recreation of the iconic cover for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We still have twelve days to go in 2025, so he may have to amend it (we hope not). You will, of course, recognize Ozzy Osbourne up front and center, and Pope Francis in the very middle. Yes, Jane Goodall is there, and Rob Reiner. The objects in the foreground also represent people. You can swipe right to see a legend and a list of who all these people were. It may be a little larger at Instagram. 

Barker says this is the tenth and final such collage. I can imagine it takes a lot out of you. However, he does have a book for sale that contains all ten years of the art, called A Decade in the Lives, 2016–2025.  -via Laughing Squid 

Artist Tom Jung got his start in film illustration in the 1950s. In 1977, he composed this image to promote the first Star Wars film. We've all seen this image or parts of it since that time. The original is a half-sheet illustration that was recently sold by Heritage Auctions for $3.875 million (USD). That makes it the highest priced piece of Star Wars memorabilia ever sold.

It was the most expensive item taken at the December 9-10 event which totaled $7.71 million in sales of Hollywood treasures, including the hat of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and a harem girl costume once worn by Marilyn Monroe.

-via My Modern Met

Nature magazine has published their picks for the best science images of 2025. The image above you will recognize as a tardigrade, but what are those dots? Those are a contender for the world's smallest tattoo. The tardigrade was in a cryptobiotic state, frozen and covered with ice but later was just fine. A team from Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, used an electron beam to cause chemicals in the ice to adhere to the creature's skin and remain after the ice was gone. That's one tiny tattoo. But not all the images are from science experiments.  



Thirteen-year-old Grayson Bell won some accolades in the Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards with this photo of two male green frogs in a fight. He titled it "Baptism of the Unwilling Convert," which makes it funny as well as cool. See science photographs of space, weather, animals, events, the unseen world under microscopes, and more in an immersive presentation from Nature. -via kottke

The first step to cleaning your pet Himalayan marmot is to acquire a Himalayan marmot.

If you have a Himalayan marmot, lay the creature on the floor of a drainable area. The marmot is very good at lying flat; I suspect that its napping skill is exceptional.

After applying water and soap, brush the marmot gently with a paint roller, then brush it dry. The marmot present in this demonstration appears to actually enjoy the process. And I can't blame him! It looks very relaxing.

This is one of at least two marmots in the care of YouTuber Exotic Black TV.

-via David Thompson

There are already vending machines that use AI, but they are limited in scope. This one is a test drive of artificial intelligence in business management. Anthropic built an AI named Claudius to run a retail business, meaning it would select and order products and then sell them at a profit. To test it out on a small scale, they used it in a simplified vending machine. It was so simple that it ran on the honor system and needed a human assistant to do the actual stocking. They installed this machine in the offices of The Wall Street Journal, because they would get publicity out of it, if nothing else. 

Journalists and other workers could communicate with Claudius, which is where the stress test really is. Claudius would learn from its customers. It wasn't long before customers convinced Claudius to order items like live fish and a Playstation for the vending machine. And they convinced it that the best move was to give everything away free. Anthropic had to add another AI to supervise Claudius, but Seymour was soon outsmarted as well. Was the resulting publicity worth the humiliation? Anthropic would like us to think so. -via Metafilter 

In the late 19th century, the Vanderbilt family owned the railroad passing through Park Avenue in New York City. In response to complaints about the noise and smoke of the coal-powered steam locomotives, they constructed a shallow tunnel to conceal the trains. But the smoke not only filled the Park Avenue Tunnel, it still escaped into the city. Commuters still needed to get into the city, and so rode through the dangerous tunnel. That is, until January 8, 1902. That day, a commuter train was stopped in the tunnel, and the smoke escaping out of the end was so thick that the next train didn't see the signals nor the stopped train at all. Its last two cars were smashed like an accordion, and 15 people were killed.  

The wreck was a reckoning for the city. Something had to be done about the trains. If they were electric, they could all be run underneath the city in tunnels without the danger of steam or smoke. It would be an expensive upgrade, but railroad engineer William J. Wilgus, who headed the project, came up with a way of funding it. The underground tracks would free up so much New York real estate on the surface that the system would pay for itself. His plans led to the beginnings of New York's subway system, and also the design and construction of Grand Central Station. Read how all that happened at Smithsonian. 

The formula works this way: 
1. Christmas song becomes popular.
2. Christmas song gets played a lot. An awful lot.
3. People hate Christmas song. 

Now, Batman and Superman are often portrayed as best friends, or at least cordial to each other. They both live in the DC universe, both have alter egos, both were orphaned at a tender age, and both fight crime. But they also have fundamental differences in style and attitude, and it's sometimes implied that Batman is envious of Superman's super powers. Considering all this, what will these two superheroes get each other for Christmas to continue this love-hate relationship? This year, Batman is inspired by the downside of Superman's powers, specifically, his ability to hear everything going on. Superman may have more natural abilities, but you have to remember that Batman has more amazing gadgets. This super Christmas story is from How It Should Have Ended.  

Notice the annoying song in this story is never truly identified. You can slot in whichever Christmas song annoys you the most. 

The 1946 Frank Capra movie It's a Wonderful Life is a beloved Christmas classic today, but the film had a hard road getting there, mainly because no one liked it. It was based on a 1939 short story that no one wanted to publish. You have to wonder what that story was, because as it moved toward film, everything was changed because no one liked the details. Quite a few movie stars turned it down because they didn't like the script or the characters, even as all that was being re-written. And movie audiences didn't like It's a Wonderful Life, either, maybe because it was so long and the first 90 minutes are rather depressing. It was a financial loss, and even the owners didn't like it enough to protect the copyright. 

It's a Wonderful Life became a hit after it went into the public domain in 1974. When it was shown on TV, word of mouth spread that the ending was worth it. Read some behind-the scenes stories about It's a Wonderful Life at Cracked. Not all of it is about how people disliked it. 

Or, to be more precise, it's a didgeridoo with a curved shape that resembles a saxophone.

The Strawberry Man is a musician who got is name by wearing strawberry-themed outfits early in his career. When he encountered the didgeridoo, he was fascinated with its mesmerizing sound and decided to learn how to play it.

The didgeridoo looks like a simple pipe, but playing it is a physically demanding task. It requires circular breathing--simultaneously inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth without pausing.

The Strawberry Man took his didgeridoos on tour, but found transporting them on planes very challenging. He needed a more compact instrument. The result of his experiments with collaborators is the Saxo-Didge--a didgeridoo that retains its traditional sound while fitting into a much smaller space.

-via The Awesomer

If you recall the original Predator movie from 1987, the alien was ugly, but we didn't know that for most of the movie. It used a cloaking device that rendered itself invisible. All we could see were some strange digital glitches over the background that instilled plenty of dread. That's the same type of fear engendered by the hidebehind, a monster you never saw because it would hide behind a tree... until it was too late for you to escape. The legend of the hidebehind grew among American lumberjacks to explain why some loggers never came back to camp. The only defense against a hidebehind was a drink or two of alcohol, although it stands to reason that drinking alcohol was more likely the cause of the hidebehind. 

However, the hidebehind is far from the only monster you can't see. I know, you don't see any of them, but that's beside the point. Still, some monsters defy description even in the legends because they are invisible, hiding, or will kill you if you look at them. Dr. Emily Zarka of Monstrum explains why monsters you don't see are even more terrifying than the ones you see.