This question comes to xkcd from David, who asks: What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw?

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a Tennessee law banning transgender medical procedures for adolescents in the state is not discriminatory, ruling 6-3 to uphold the law. At issue in the case, United States v. Skrmetti, was whether Tennessee's Senate Bill 1, which "prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow 'a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex' or to treat 'purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor's sex and asserted identity,'" violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Pew Research Center has issued a new report which aggregates data they have collected over the last few years on Catholics in the USA. The date within the report is insightful for those of us who are watching trends in the Catholic Church as well as in the wider culture. While I recommend a close reading of the entire report, I want to highlight some of the things that I find most interesting and add my own comments.

I’m a sucker for history because it’s a great teacher. And I talk a lot about the Reformation because, while our world today and the world of the Reformation era are very different, they also share some striking similarities: political and social turmoil; big changes in technology that reshape how we learn, think, communicate, work, and believe; and a pattern of ambiguity and battles within the Church. Names from the Reformation era like Thomas More, John Fisher, and Erasmus are widely known...

Each time we read through the Bible, different passages claim our attention. There are probably a well-coordinated set of reasons for this, beginning with the shortness of the human attention span, and ending with the interior grace of the Holy Spirit as we read. I hope I am not entirely alone in my ability to say prayers or even read Scripture while thinking about something else. But if we keep at it, new insights do come to mind. Thus it was yesterday when I began reading the Book of Amos...

Visitors clutching fans and umbrellas waited patiently in long lines recently outside the Italian Pavilion at the Expo 2025 on a scorching afternoon on Yumeshima Island in Japan. Inside, a rare sight awaited them: “The Entombment of Christ” by Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio, popularly known as Caravaggio. The painting went on display in Japan for the first time.

Summertime soaks in the pool often leave fingertips shriveled and pruney. Each time someone goes for a dip, their digits wrinkle in the exact same patterns, researchers report in the May Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. That’s because the folds follow the paths of blood vessels below the skin’s surface, which generally stay in place.

Pope Leo XIV has named Bishop Shane Mackinlay — an influential voice in the Synod on Synodality — as the next archbishop of Brisbane, Australia. The 60-year-old prelate succeeds Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who is retiring after 13 years of episcopal leadership. Mackinlay will be installed at St. Stephen’s Cathedral on Sept. 11...

Imagine showing up to Mass on Sunday and seeing hundreds of men wearing the exact same shirt. This happened at St. Ann Catholic Parish in Coppell, Texas, after wives pranked their husbands on Father’s Day. It all started about a week and a half ago, when a small group of moms from the parish had the idea to have their husbands all wear the same polo for Mass on Father’s Day...

One of the main points of every Jubilee Year is to invite the Christian faithful to come to Rome to pray in the heart of the Church. Holy Year doors are opened at the four patriarchal Basilicas precisely for people to pass through them, symbolically leaving their old life on one side of the door as they enter into a new life with Christ and the Church on the other.