Substack zero, one-star reviews, hsbd-iryt

Ana Marie Cox runs the numbers on Substack:

The Substack bust will not just take out a few hot-take merchants and media dilettantes. It’s going to take down a lot of working journalists who’ve built modest, sustainable incomes as well as the fragile public sphere we’ve been piecing together in the ashes of Twitter and the twilight of traditional journalism.

Eloise Wood on authors getting voted down on Goodreads before they're even published:

"I had a one-star rating for a book that hadn’t even been seen by my copy editor."

Scientists have recreated the "lost" pigment of Egyptian blue, hsbd-iryt.

The human-created pigment made blue objects possible throughout the Mediterranean region. Ancient Greeks wrote about the varieties of the pigment, including natural philosopher Theophrastus (in his On Stones) and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History). Later, Roman artists would also used the pigment in mosaics, frescoes, and architectural projects. But with the fall of the Roman Empire, the pigment fell out of use, and by the Renaissance, the recipe was all but forgotten.