iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Frederick Douglass, responding to hecklers during Colored American Day at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 25 Aug 1893, Chicago. From Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (2016)

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Nostalgia for an only slightly less stupid timeline:

One year | spent months getting Pence a seat at a leaders' meeting on eliminating terrorist and violent extremist content online, alongside heads of state including King Abdullah II of Jordan and then-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Pence was the vice president, not a head of state. Getting him that seat was unusual. I was proud of securing that one for the U.S. delegation. Then Pence dropped out at the last minute. His chief of staff was focused domestically and didn't understand what it took to get that seat, or why having the American vice president there mattered.

So we sent Kash Patel.

Yes, that Kash Patel. The one now running the FBI who spent part of a congressional hearing last week explaining why bestiality is no longer, in certain circumstances, an automatic disqualifier for an FBI applicant.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Nick Lane with a masterful cliffhanger at chapter’s end. Fantastic science writing & storytelling that adds another jolt to “the thrilling question of the origin of life” he’s tackling in #Transformer:

Could it be that the origin of life structured metabolism through the reactions of H, and CO,, to form Krebs-cycle inter-mediates? That this biosynthetic engine was hard-wired into life from the beginning, the driving force that gave rise to genes and proteins? That billions of years later, as the atmosphere filled with oxygen, the Krebs cycle flipped its direction, creating an extraordinary opportunity to strip and burn organic molecules in a brave new high-octane world? That this reversal placed a tension on the heart of metabolism, which was now obliged to create and destroy from the self-same molecules - a case of having your cake and eating it? That this tension is at the root of ageing and diseases such as cancer, where the fragile balance between energy flow and growth is paramount? Read on.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Just one example of why I’m willing to weather the twiddly bits of molecular-level organic chemistry in Nick Lane’s “Transformer”—the spark of life, indeed.

Regardless of his errors, Mitchell's conception was just magnificent. The energy released by the reaction between 2H (extracted from Krebs cycle intermediates) and oxygen is transduced into an electrical charge on the membrane. This charge is awesome. It might not sound like much - just 150-200 millivolts - yet the membrane is extremely thin, only 6 nanometres in thickness as noted earlier. This means that the electrical field strength (what you would experience as a molecule in the membrane) is about 30 million volts per metre, equivalent to a bolt of lightning across every square nanometre of membrane. And the area of electrically charged membrane in the human body defies belief. If we were to iron out all the mitochondrial membranes in the body, so they were flat, they would cover an area equivalent to about four football pitches - all charged with the power of a bolt of lightning.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

No cheating. Share the last photo of the sky from your camera roll (if you feel like it) My lucky day: ῥοδοδάκτυλος dawn near Ulaanbataar #UNCCDCOP17

Dawn breaking over the mountains en route to Ulaanbataar from its airport

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Place looked a lot bigger in the listing.

For sale sign hanging outside a balcony next to a children’s playhouse

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

post a perfect album from the 2000s (2000–2009)

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Update of the Paul Wolfowitz course on personal grooming just dropped

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Is the emergency podcast klaxon working @thebugle.bsky.social ? youtu.be/ECjPsX-gQc8?...

Mark van Bommel
appointed new Belgium head coach
Van Bommel reached the World Cup final with the Netherlands in 2010 Tom Goyvaerts/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty
Images
By Leon Imber
July 24, 2026

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Seeing the ease with which the Revolutionary allies disowned and dispossessed my Oneida ancestors who fought with them, I can’t say Emmitt Rensin is wrong: “The United States commands the world from atop a mountain of skulls.” @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/dang...

via remote control. The age of reasonable and ordinary politics had proved so effective that the liberals had joined the reactionaries in their enthusiasm for spying, lawfare, and ideological policework and had voted, via their representatives in the allegedly liberal party, to support bombing campaigns, dissident liquidations, and outright invasions of El Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya again, Bolivia, Iran, Panama, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, Irag again, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan again, Yemen, Iraq for a third time, Pakistan, Somalia again, Iraq for a fourth time, Syria, Yemen again, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia again, Afghanistan again, Somalia again, Yemen again, Venezuela, Ecuador, Gaza, and Iran (again).

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

The inimitable Robert A. Caro: come for the analysis of power, stay for the masterclass on…ecology?!?

Screenshot from Robert A. Caro (1982) The Path to Power, p.22: Sometimes it happened almost before a man's eyes; one afternoon, there would be soil on a hill, soil in which he hoped that next year at least grass would grow and he could graze stock there; then a thunderstorm, and the next morning when he looked at the hill he would see a hill of bare white rock. The steep hills went first, of course, but even shallower slopes washed fairly soon—it all happened so fast. That rock was the reality of the Hill Country. It had taken centuries to disguise it with grass, but it took only a very few years for that disguise to be ripped away. Even on the shallowest slopes, on which grass remained, in a very short time the richness of the land was gone.

Screenshot from Robert A. Caro (1982) The Path to Power, p.24-25: The Hill Country had been a beautiful trap. It was still beautiful-even more beautiful, perhaps, because woods covered so much more of it now, and there were still the river-carved landscapes, the dry climate, the clear blue sky—but it was possible now to see the jaws of the trap. No longer, in fact, was it even necessary to look beneath the surface of the country to see the jaws. On tens of thousands of acres the reality was visible right on the surface. These acreshundreds of square miles of the Hill Country-had once been thickly covered with grass. Now they were covered with what from a distance appeared to be debris. Up close, it became apparent that the debris was actually rocks-from small, whitish pebbles to stones the size of fists—that littered entire meadows. A farmer might think when he first saw them that these rocks were lying on top of the soil, but if he tried to clear away a portion of the field and dig down, he found that there was no soil—none at all, or at most an inch or two-beneath those rocks. Those rocks were the soil-they were the topmost layer of the limestone of which the Hill Country was formed. The Hill Country was down to reality now-and the reality was rock. It was a land of stone, that fact was plain now, and the implications of that fact had become clear. The men who had come into the Hill Country had hoped to grow rich from the land, or at least to make a living from it. But there were only two ways farmers or ranchers can make a living from land: plow it or graze cattle on it. And if either of those things was done to this land, the land would blow or wash away.

Book cover: Robert A. Caro (1982) The Path to Power

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

« La disparition », par la Mairi d’Paris, 6th arrondiss ment

Photo of a street sign in the 6th arrondissement in Paris that honors novelist Georges Pérec, a founding member of OuLiPo whose novel La disparition was written without using the letter “e”

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

"…advances in data, monitoring and AI are giving leaders a more reliable fact base for decision-making…" It's distressing to read McKinsey blithely suggesting that #AI is as reliable as data and monitoring, but use of a phrase like "fact base" is the chef's kiss 😘 www.mckinsey.com/capabilities...

Animated GIF of Big Bird from Sesame Street singing, "One of these things is not like the other…"

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Languages be easy like that.

Image of a sign in Cyrillic script in a restaurant window in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, offering hot dogs

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Quote post with something good that lasted longer than the Confederacy (1861-1865) The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (ca. 1450–present) THE North American confederacy

Haudenosaunee flag, purple field with five simple figures in white: square, rectangle, tree, rectangle, square, linked as if in a wampum belt

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Competing first drafts of history in my timeline:

Screenshot of two adjacent posts in a timeline: the first showing a correction of a New York Times headline to reflect Israel’s lethal attack on Lebanon, the second headline from the Guardian that reads, “Middle East crisis live Red Cross outraged as Israel, strikes Lebanon kill at least 254…”

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

📢 Your attention, please: would the owner of the Cristiana bike, Illinois six seven one, eight oh seven B, please move? Du er parkeret i en læssezone… Cc: @bginchi.bsky.social

Cargo bike parked in Copenhagen with an Illinois license plate

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

“Everyone’s a cousin in this world.” —Jim Harrison

I went to Tucson and it gave me a headache. I don't know how.
Everyone's a cousin in this world.
I drove down a road of enormous houses that encompass many toilets. Down hallways, leaping left or right, you can crap at will.
A mile away a dead Mexican child slept out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.

Jim Harrison, “After Ikkyū: 16”

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

#HoosierDiaspora the sun is shining, windows and doors are open, and…

Indiana’s state dish: breaded tenderloin sandwich, with French fries, condiments and Cincy Light lager

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

I wanted to say I was excited to cadge a copy of the @newyorker.com with Dexter Filkens’ recent profile of Marco Rubio, but suddenly, a scalding hot shower sounds good…

"The one constant in Marco Rubio's career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principle he's ever had in order to claim power for himself," a political figure in Miami told me.

Once in a while, if you listen to Rubio, you get a sense that deep down, somewhere, there is still a person there, under a very thick layer of whatever it is that's covering him.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Fantastic, provocative post for the wider @gbif.org network (we really should be testing #ccSignals imho). As I find myself tasked with returning to the question of commercial vs. non-commercial use, this bit makes me feel more than a bit seen: creativecommons.org/2026/02/12/h...

Open should not be a purity test.

The open movement has had incredible success creating global standards, and this has helped make it so successful. But the emphasis on standardization has led us to hyper-focus on definitions, and this focus is distracting us from the bigger picture. What matters is not open versus closed, or even abundance versus scarcity. We need to focus on values, not prescriptions. Open licensing has always been conditional, and it has always been a spectrum. This means we have to accept that there will be gray areas. What we lose in certainty, we will gain in relevance and moral clarity. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Categories are where thoughts go to die.”

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

During a brief pause in the action at #IPBES12 @phylojoe.bsky.social & I had the chance to welcome Ethiopia as @gbif.org's the newest participant! 🇪🇹 🎉 Tesfu Fekensa & his colleagues at #EBI are eager to get the national GBIF delegation and node that they host up and running #ForNature !

Three men standing together in the old Manchester Central train station that now serves as a large meeting space

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

This image…two close associates of Jeffrey Epstein—convicted sex criminal Donald J Trump and disgraced pedophile and former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson—enjoy a laugh together in the Oval Office in May 2025. How can only one government will face consequences? 📸 Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

Two close associates of Jeffrey Epstein—on the right, convicted sex criminal Donald J Trump; on the left, a disgraced pedophile and former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson—enjoy a laugh together in the Oval Office in May 2025.
Photograph by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

So much for anyone striving to be fully human to savor and return to in this beautiful essay by @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social in my local paper for the week (thanks @theguardian.com !)

“There is no shortage of human beings. As with most problems with capitalism, there is only a distribution problem. The same industry that has done so much to undermine our relationships to self and others is pushing Al, in part by ignoring the possibility of other solutions, deeper social changes. It is a problem dressed up as a solution.” Rebecca Solnit

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Jim Harrison, savage sadhu.

After Ikkyū: 3
by Jim Harrison

I've wasted too much moonlight.
Breast beating. I'll waste no more moonlight,
the moon bullied by clouds drifts west
in her imponderable arc, snared for a half
hour among the wet leaves in the birdbath.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Louis MacNeice, Epitaph for Liberal Poets (1942)

If in the latter
End-which is fairly soon-our way of life goes west
And some shall sav So What and some What Matter,
Ready under new names to exploit or be exploited.
What, though better unsaid, would we have history say
Of w who walked in our sleep and died on our Quest?

We who always had, but never admitted, a master,
Who were expected-and paid-to be ourselves,
Conditioned to think freely, how can we
Patch up our broken hearts and modes of thought in plaster
And glorify in chromium-plated stories
Those who shall supersede us and cannot need us—
The tight-lipped technocratic Conquistadores?

The Individual has died before; Catullus
Went down young, gave place to those who were born old
And more adaptable and were not even jealous
Of his wild life and lyrics. Though our songs
Were not so warm as his, our fate is no less cold.

Such silence then before us, pinned against the wall,
Why need we whine? There is no way out, the birds
Will tell us nothing more; we shall vanish first,
Yet leave behind us certain frozen words
Which some day, though not certainly, may melt
And, for a moment or two, accentuate a thirst.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

In honor of a snowfall that’s sticking… Louis MacNeice:

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

—Louis MacNeice

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or Alice In Chains.

Album cover of Midnight Vultures by Beck

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Get a load of the new neighbors in Amerika Plads #Copenhell #Copenhagen

Sunset view toward the south in the harbor basin near Amerika Plads, Copenhagen

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

And Guantanamo is essential because…why? www.wsj.com/world/americ...

In America, captured drug lords face a choice: Snitch or suffer.
Under pressure from the Trump administration, Mexico turned over 55 imprisoned cartel leaders to U.S. authorities this year in two airlift operations kept secret until the planes crossed the border. The prisoners represent the top echelons of Mexico's biggest criminal organizations. Rival drug lords who had ordered the killing of thousands of each other's men sat side-by-side during the transfer. U.S. officials expect many of the prisoners will share firsthand knowledge about the operations of Mexico's underworld in the hopes of getting reduced sentences and more comfortable prison conditions.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied. Are you satisfied?

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Unexpected surprise last week, seeing a Camões sonnet in the São Paolo metro.

Soneto

Quem vê, Senhora, claro e manifesto
O lindo ser de vossos olhos belos, Se não perder a vista só em vê-los, Já não paga o que deve a vosso gesto.
Este me parecia preço honesto;
Mas eu, por de vantagem merecê-los, Dei mais a vida e alma por querê-los, Donde já não me fica mais de resto.
Assi que a vida e alma e esperança, E tudo quanto tenho, tudo é vosso, E o proveito disso eu só o levo.
Porque é tamanha bem-aventurança
O dar-vos quanto tenho e quanto posso, Que, quanto mais vos pago, mais vos devo.

—Camões (1524 - 1580)

Whoever sees, Lady, clearly and manifestly
The beautiful being of your lovely eyes,
If they do not lose their sight just by seeing them,
They no longer pay what they owe to your gesture.

This seemed to me an honest price;
But I, to deserve them more,
Gave more my life and soul for wanting them,
From which nothing more remains to me.

Thus, life and soul and hope,
And all that I have, all is yours, And the benefit of it I alone take.

For it is such great bliss
To give you all I have and all I can,
That the more I pay you, the more I owe you.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Sadly we HAVE been here before. Melanie Cervantes, Ya Basta (2017). Now one of many amazing works showing in São Paolo at a #COP30-adjacent exhibit, Histórias da Ecologia (Histories of Ecology), at @maspdobsky.bsky.social .

Art print by Melanie Cervantes from 2017 with the headline that reads Ya Basta That’s Enough, above a mother holding a child and pointing defiantly above a caption that reads The U.S. government is abducting children and locking them in cages, while two figures labeled Border Patrol and Police Ice fall into a dumpster labeled Basura or Trash.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Question for the #HoosierDiaspora of @bginchi.bsky.social @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social @mattseybold.bsky.social et al.: Is it just me, or is this an odd name and logo for a joint that, given its emphasis on “auténtica comida indiana,” must have a menu focused on catfish and pork tenderloins?

Sign for a (Southeast Asian) Indian restaurant in São Paolo, Brazil

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

TIL the only way to make this nugget of etymological wisdom from Eleanor Barraclough’s fascinating book, Embers of the Hands, more fitting would have been to read it yesterday, lordag.

…the importance of Saturday for bathing and washing is preserved in its Old Norse name, Laugardagr, which means 'bath day'. It's still there in the word for Saturday in all the languages of the Nordic world: Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, even borrowed into Finnish.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Fond of the idea that the first female PM of #Japan shares her first name with a dear friend and teacher, #Sanae Tokizane, literary critic and scholar of #Faulkner and the epistolary form who left this Easter egg of an inscription in my copy of her book, Faulkner and/or Writing: On Absalom, Absalom!

Photo of handwritten note reading next a book by the notewriter: “To Kyle: / With the Compliments / Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. / Absalom, Absalom! / 9/18/89 Sanae”

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Re: "hot things can look cold": cf. García Márquez G (1967), ch.1: "Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately. 'It's boiling,' he exclaimed, startled.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“‘Thinky think’ before ‘grabby grab’.”
Nature has tapped into its global community of readers, writers, friends and colleagues to compile a list of 99 lab tips to help make scientists’ working lives better. One, sent in by a chemist who has been burnt before, is simple: hot things can look cold.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Convenient development at @gbif.org as I pack for a flight Lenapehoking and #ClimateWeekNYC. Not much time left to cram, though, so maybe stick to the highlights: www.gbif.org/resource/sea...

Screenshot of landing page highlighting the more than 3,000 peer-reviewed research articles that use data from the GBIF network. Text reads: "Biodiversity loss and climate change interact in many ways, reflecting two sides of the same problem: humanity’s unsustainable relationship with the natural world. Explore the research relying on data from the GBIF network to understand and assess the growing impact that changing temperatures, precipitation and other climate-related phenomena are having on biodiversity."

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Hegseth’s Pentagon continues its stellar work on comms opsec: wapo.st/45Yk0vl

A National Guard official acknowledged the documents are authentic but downplayed their sensitivity, saying the assessments are intended for internal use and were inadvertently emailed to The Post last week. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an unspecified policy. It is unclear how many people mistakenly received the documents.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Nikolai Yezhov (right) was unavailable for comment.

Two photos of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin beside the Moscow Canal, the first including Nikolai Yezhov, the second with Yezhov erased.

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Congratulations, @gaia.eco on establishing a niche as a #reseller of #openData on #biodiversity from @gbif.org. Why acknowledge the cow (or credit the community that cares for it) when you can charge scale-dependent pricing tiers for the milk?

screenshot of pricing tiers for a startup reselling scale-dependent access to open data on biodiversity without acknowledgement or attribution

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

This tracks, given that Marco Rubio himself seems at best a simulation of a human being…

Screenshot of Breaking News alert notification:
A Marco Rubio impostor using Al has contacted three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor and a member of Congress

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Lawdy, lawd: can you imagine paying for #tradprof “culture” pieces like this from the @wsj.com ? Should come with a complementary set of pearls to clutch at Hillsdale alumni events…

Mr. Conn's book (complete with 24 color reproductions of Sully's portraits) plays down those aspects of Philadelphia that earned it the nickname "Sin City" long before Las Vegas existed. In contrast to its aristocratic exterior, Philadelphia's street life was bawdy and unruly, with taverns and brothels to match. Even so, Mr.
Conn's depiction is a welcome rejoinder to historians' recent habit of debunking America's achievements. Sully's Philadelphia added class and style to the nation's birth. Mr. Conn's book will be a useful guide to anyone hoping to catch a glimpse of the Liberty Bell during the semiquincentennial.
-Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the author of "Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant" (2021).

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Samples from this week’s opportunistic harvests: opium poppy seedhead from Linnaeus’s garden in Uppsala, bread wheat from the margin of a nearby farm, and a raspberry-boysenberry cross from our backyard. Sorry, I ate all the cherries picked along the way…

opium poppy seedhead, bread wheat, and a hybrid raspberry-boysenberry

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

What species of pastry be these?

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Live look-in, midsommar eve, Stockholm archipelago

Northern sky after midnight, 20 June 2025, 59.7 N latitude

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

The latest by @fotoole.bsky.social is more compelling for the long-term perspective it offers, imho: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

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Kyle Copas @kylecopas.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Can’t decide between: He Stoops To Conquer, or 🎶 I can’t stand up For falling down 🎶 📸 Stefan Rousseau, AP

British Prime Minister and former prosecutor Keir Starmer kneels to collect papers and abases himself before convicted felon Donald Trump at the G7 meeting in Alberta

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