If you transitted through Vienna today and are missing a green suitcase, I can report that it's enjoying the sun on the tarmac outside of Gate 61.
Hope it finds you again!
I realized recently that Germany has a database with
-all hospital admissions (any cause)
-by diagnostic code
-by outcome incl death
The death rate among admissions for SARI (severe acute resp infx: J9-22) shows something much more severe hit Germany in 2020
What could it be?🤔
Russia Could Just Be Normal. But Here We Are.
Russia has a choice. It always has. It sits on more land than any country in history, stuffed to the permafrost with oil, gas, and minerals of every conceivable variety. Brilliant engineers. World-class mathematicians. The finest vodka ever produced by human civilization.
And what does it do with all of this? It invades its neighbors. Like a drunk uncle at Christmas.
Because here is what Russians are missing. That first evening in Rome, when the sun drops behind the rooftops and the whole city turns the color of warm honey, and you are sitting outside with something cold and local, and the air smells of coffee and something frying in olive oil, and you think: this is the whole point of being alive. Or New York in October, the light doing something extraordinary between the buildings, eating a pastrami sandwich the size of a small child, feeling genuinely optimistic about the human race. Or a rainy London pub. Nowhere to be. A pint slightly too warm. The irreplaceable comfort of being somewhere ancient and unhurried.
Russians could have all of this. Instead, the Kremlin has turned the largest country on Earth into a geopolitical pariah, weaponizing its own citizens’ futures for an empire that exists mostly in the fever dreams of one increasingly peculiar man in a very large building.
Funny how every American who visits Russia comes home convinced that Putin is misunderstood. Nobody visits France and comes back defending Macron’s right to annex Belgium. France does not do that to people.
The rest of us are just outside somewhere warm, drinks in hand, watching the sun go down, absolutely baffled.
And a little sad, if we are honest. Because some of the finest people I have ever met are Russian. Warm, funny, generous people who deserve that Roman evening and that New York October and that rainy London pub just as much as anyone. People I miss. People a lot of us miss. Who knows if it ever comes back. Who knows if the thing that was broken can be unbroken. But somewhere out there, a table has an empty chair. And the drinks are getting warm.
Before I leave Ireland, I want to place on record that in the last 24 hours I have received constant stalking and death threats for my reporting. However I will not be intimidated.
What I have uncovered is deeply troubling, and the effort to silence it only makes that clearer.
LEGO just dropped its largest set ever: La Sagrada Familia.
It has 12,060 pieces and costs $800. The set comes 100 years after Antoni Gaudi’s death (June 10, 1926).
The details are insane including spires, carvings and interior with light shining through stain-glass windows.
In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:
1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.
2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.
3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.
4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.
5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.
6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.
7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.
8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.
9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.
it’s ‘i got sick because of the air conditioning’ season!! no you didn’t, you got sick because someone infected you. you can sleep with your fan on all you want, you won’t get sick if you wear a respirator in public spaces.