🐐 The Goat Still Stands
Every December, a straw goat in Sweden becomes one of the most watched objects on Earth.
In Gävle, Sweden, a giant straw goat is built in a public square. It has lights, guards, barriers, a 24/7 live webcam, and an online audience quietly tracking its fate. Some years it survives the season untouched. Other years, it doesn’t. The goat has been burned, smashed, rammed by cars, sabotaged with fireworks, stolen, dismantled, and once even attacked by a bird. Every outcome is logged. Every year is remembered.
This year, the goat is still standing.
Which somehow feels more unsettling than if it had already burned.
That uneasy tension runs through many of the stories below. Hospitals now use AI to watch patients while they sleep. Robots follow safety rules—until a prompt bends them. Satellites narrowly miss each other in orbit. Ancient humans made fire far earlier than we thought. Meteors quietly land on rooftops while nobody notices. Heroes step forward. Systems fail. Patterns repeat.
This isn’t a collection of “news.”
It’s a record of things we’re watching closely… and things we somehow keep missing.
👉 Read today’s full newsletter here: https://strangesounds.substack.com/p/the-goat-still-stands-and-everyones
(and join thousands of readers who prefer the strange, the overlooked, and the unsettling)
Hussein protected girls from pedophiles and Yazidis and Christians from massacres.
If all American soldiers were like Tim Waltz, Hussein would still be in charge of Iraq.
Imagine that you are American soldiers and you have to be on a dead watch along with members of ISIS and al-Qaeda, not to mention 9/11.
Can you imagine ISIS and al-Qaeda walking around a military base carrying weapons?