A story about what being neighborly is all about. “I reported back to the neighborhood text thread, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. What came back, from one neighbor after another, was the same question: what can we do to help?”
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The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent. The 747 is being phased out for newer and more efficient jets. Ian Bosost takes a look at how the massive plane, which took flight only 5 months before “Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon”, came to be.
It’s America’s Birthday. What Are We Celebrating? Some good thoughts in here from Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jamelle Bouie, M. Gessen, and Lydia Polgreen.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listA Bob Ross painting of a mountain summit is being auctioned off soon. “Sale proceeds will benefit Ball State University. Ball State University owns WIPB, the PBS station where Bob Ross filmed thirty seasons of The Joy of Painting.” $50-70K esitmate.
“Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other.” Cool feature where people visiting this website can chat in a virtual Town Square: “a small strip populated by stick figures…at the bottom of every page”. See you there?
Sad news: long-time tech journalist, blogger, and entrepreneur Om Malik passed away yesterday aged 59.
“Although fleeting, [sports] have the enduring power to inspire. For a few moments or a few days, divisions crumble, replaced by the beauty of kinship.”
Deep dive: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt.
Criterion’s Massive Stanley Kubrick Box Set
Good god, The Complete Kubrick from Criterion.
Collected here for the first time are Kubrick’s thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, with their original soundtracks alongside the 5.1 mixes, restored and remastered; over twenty-five hours of interviews, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes materials; and deluxe packaging illustrated with rare photographs, artwork, and documents annotated by Kubrick himself, all housed in a singular box inspired by the director’s legendary archive.
Altogether it’s 30 discs, $480 if you pre-order, and it’ll be out in mid-October.
P.S. While it’s not a fancypants box set, the KDO tag page for Stanley Kubrick functions pretty well as “DVD extras” — and it’s free. (via df)
Apple Just Raised Prices. But Deals Are Still Available.
Apple raised their prices on their laptops, iMacs, and iPads today due to the high cost of memory (driven by AI demand). The Macbook Neo’s price went up $100 with most other machines getting a $200-500 bump.
But those prices have yet to take effect at Amazon, where Apple computers are still cheaper than the old prices. Macbook Neo for $590, MacBook Air M5 for $1150, and the M4 iMac for $1150. You can check other models (MacBook Pros, etc.) and their pricing here. Not sure when RAM costs are going to come down…these might be the lowest prices you see on Apple machines for quite awhile.
2000-Year-Old Roman Theater Hosts World Cup Watch Party
Fulfilling the purpose for which it was built almost 2000 years ago, football fans packed the Roman Theatre of Amman to watch the Jordan v Algeria World Cup match. I don’t know whether Roman rulers, builders, and architects envisioned their works would remain standing & useful millennia after their construction, but longevity is certainly not a priority these days.
Here’s a video of Jordan fans watching their opener vs Austria in the theater:
Update: I’ve learned something today: a theater and an amphitheater are two different things. I’ve corrected my post. (thx, francesca)
Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger
This is a five-minute video of Andy Warhol eating a Burger King hamburger accompanied by Heinz ketchup.
The scene is part of a film done by Jorgen Leth called 66 Scenes from America.
Leth had his assistant buy some burgers and directly advised him to buy some in halfway neutral packaging as Leth was afraid that Warhol might reject some brands (Warhol always had an obsession with some of his favorite brands).
So Andy Warhol finally did arrive at the studio, of course along with his bodyguards, and when he saw the selection of burgers the assistant had brought he asked “Where is the McDonald’s?” and Leth — slightly in panic — was immediately like “I thought you would maybe not like to identify…” and Warhol answered “no that is the most beautiful”. Leth offered to let his assistant quickly run to McDonald’s but Warhol refused like “No, never mind, I will take the Burger King.”
(via bon appetit)
Mentioned this in passing a few months ago, but wanted to remind you that The Art of Star Wars: Andor is coming out in about a week. Looks great.
Did a medieval flying monk spot Halley’s comet, twice? It’s complicated. Halley’s Comet came around in 1066 and it’s likely Eilmer of Malmesbury saw a different comet in 1018, not Halley’s in 989.
How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People. No surprise: it became much more negative, less affirming/protective and more skeptical/restrictive.
Lifts in Film: a collection of movie & TV scenes featuring elevators, including Speed, The Shining, Drive, Mad Men, Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, The Silence of the Lambs, and many more.
Gerrymandle is a daily game where you “draw electoral district lines to win more seats than your opponents and win the election”.
Kelly Hayes interviews Rebecca Solnit. “There is no rewind button on history. Once people have power & agency, and have seen what it’s like to have rights, voting rights, reproductive rights, they’re not interested in going back. And we’re the majority.”
Cow Trip: A Retired Dad Agrees to Rescue a Baby Cow
This is one of those videos that you start watching and then can’t really stop until you’ve finished. Cow Trip tells the story of an effort to save a baby cow by driving it (and another baby cow rescue) in a not-huge SUV 600 miles from Vermont to a sanctuary in Maryland.
A calf in Vermont hits the lottery when a farmer decides to save him. But someone has to drive the baby cow 600 miles to his new home. A freshly retired doctor and his filmmaker daughter volunteer for the job, but nothing goes as planned. What emerges is an unlikely story of a community of people who will do anything to give one calf a real home.
I think maybe this needs to be a children’s book?
Tesla Launches New Model Of Explosions. “What’s different about the XP is that they’ve actually borrowed some of the same technology used by SpaceX, incorporating it as well as a whole slew of other safety features that are basically non-existent.”
How We’ll Fight the Platform War Against Big AI. “Here are some of the proven tactics that have helped shift the balance of power in prior tech reckonings…”
Not surprising to KDO readers and I don’t really know who still needs to hear this in June 2026 but: the US is in the middle of a “rolling coup” by ultra-conservatives who are “well along the path of destroying our democracy”.
Yet another unsurprising article about how bigger SUVs and trucks have resulted in more pedestrian deaths in the US over the past two decades.
Room Tone
For each of their on-camera interviews with filmmakers, actors, critics, and other film nerds, Criterion records 30 seconds of “room tone” that is used to cut the footage into a seamless video.
When trying to explain what room tone is to someone unfamiliar with the concept, I reach for an architectural metaphor. If words are the bricks of a scene, then surely room tone is the mortar that binds them together. It gives sonic coherence to an edited piece built from different takes within the same location.
Asking a cast and crew to observe a moment of silence is an acknowledgment that room tone cannot be faked. You cannot substitute it with a recording from another production, and you cannot generate it using artificial intelligence. It is something you capture at a specific time and place that has not occurred before and will not occur again. This is our attempt at freezing such fleeting moments — and welcoming those to come.
And then at the end of each year, they cut the room tone recordings into a compilation video; here’s 2025’s video:
I find these videos equal parts charming and meditative. As movies & TV become ever-more fast-paced and our attention bent to black rectangular pocket casinos, it’s increasingly rare to witness people sitting still with only their thoughts to occupy them. We see Humans Frantically Doing everywhere these days, but these room tone videos are a good reminder that Humans Just Being is an essential part of life as well.
Giant Banana Pulled Over in Montana: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s Of Times. “The reason I pulled you over, that light back there, you peeled out.”
Some Great Deals on Tech Stuff
Amazon is doing their Prime Day sale again this summer and for those with Prime memberships, it’s a chance to upgrade some tech items at rarely seen prices. Here are a few items I’ve got my eye on:
- The AirPods Pro 3 are still my daily headphones; I really do love them so much. They’re $180 right now, which I think is the lowest price they’ve been.
- Apple’s AirPods Max 2 headphones are on sale for a ridiculous $400 (27% off)…the lowest price ever.
- I do not have the latest Kindle Paperwhite, but I just now bought one for $125 (22% off). After a long period of foundering, I’ve gotten back into reading again and want an upgrade over the four-year-old Kindle I’m currently using.
- I don’t have one of these and reviews have been mixed (some ppl love them and some are lukewarm on them), but the pocket-sized X4 E-Book Reader is on sale for $55 (20% off). It’s so small you can attach it to the back of your phone.
- My finger is hovered over the “add to cart” button on the 15-inch M5 MacBook Air ($1150, 20% off). I have the 15-inch M4 Air and absolutely love it…but I wouldn’t mind something a little beefier for some of the programming stuff I’ve been doing lately.
- While not exactly “tech”, it is technology: the KitchenAid 5.5 quart stand mixer is 40% off ($300).
Regarding the Apple stuff on the list, it’s helpful to keep in mind that Tim Cook recently said in an interview that Apple is going to be raising their prices “to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips”. It’s unclear when this will happen, but it makes all the current Apple deals look even better.
Brexit vote: 10 years on. “‘Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,’ says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.”
Plane Lands/Takes Off In Only 20 Feet
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall speed and short take-off and landing distances. But I had no idea you could land and take off in one in the space of 20 feet.
Never seen a plane do that before…well, aside from tiny model planes. What an incredible power-to-weight ratio that plane must have. You can seriously land these things anywhere, almost like a helicopter. Wanna go fly fishing? Just set it down on the banks of a stream:
Or on a gravel bar in a river:
These planes are referred to as STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft; here’s some detail on how they work. (via @alper)
Update: Is this the shortest takeoff in history?
Six feet. Six. (via @mikebee)
I love this playable 3D-rendered reel-to-reel player made by Dunstan Orchard and Kristina Dutton. Despite their virtuality, the buttons are delightfully clicky and the attention to detail is impressive.
Step into a virtual Criterion Closet. “A walk-in closet of 1,327 real Criterion editions, shelved in spine-number order — exactly as a true collector keeps them. Look around, read the spines, and pull any one off the shelf to inspect the case.”
Scientists have found evidence of mass death due to the plague 5000 years ago, which goes against the prevailing theory that plague wasn’t that deadly until more recently.
A long oral history of Steven Spielberg and his career. “He’s a terrific collaborator. He himself is a continuous lightbulb flickering on and off with one idea after another, but he’s not terribly protective of an idea.”
Meet the Man Behind the Most Beautiful Books in the World
I appreciate what 2K/DENMARK’s Klaus Krogh says about their ambitions when he and his wife started the company:
When I started this company together with my wife, I said we got to become a very very small company. Why? Because we are going to put so much effort into each and every assignment that nobody’s going to pay for it. So we are not going to grow any. Now almost 40 years later, we have the very best customers. We have customers in 43 countries. We do typesetting in Chinese and Japanese. Why? Well, because we take care. We do our very best every time.
The trailer for Klara and the Sun, directed by Taika Waititi and based on the bestseller by Kazuo Ishiguro.
AI Economics for Dummies. “The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.”
Great piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on how “the portrait of America as an imperial power cuts against its self-image as a righteous cradle of democracy” and what that means for the next Black president.
A new seismic phenomenon: seismic waves from the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake ricocheted off the Earth’s core and shifted the entirety of Japan 6 millimeters to the east, enough to disrupt GPS measurements.
America vs Europe: Two Ways to Build a City
Architect and urban & computational designer Abhinav Bhardwaj made this great set of slides comparing urban design in the US and Europe, peppered with pithy observations like:
- European space is shaped on purpose: American open space is what’s left over.
- Small blocks make more corners, more routes, more street life.
- A fine grid offers hundreds of routes; the tree offers one way out.
(thx, meg)
Are You in the Weights? “LLMs encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called ‘the weights.’ ‘In the weights’ means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web search.”
Human brains were not designed to deal with an endless supply of bad news. “We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.”
“Henry v Lalas Is the World Cup’s Most Compelling Battle”
Although I’ve seen a highlight or two, I have not overcome my FIFA+Fox+Trump disgust to watch any of the World Cup so far. MAGA dipshit Alexi Lalas is high on the list of reasons not to tune into any of Fox’s braindead coverage, but it sounds like he’s being dragged on the regular by Thierry Henry. The French Aristocrat and the All-American Idiot: Henry v Lalas Is the World Cup’s Most Compelling Battle:
Lalas enjoyed a solid playing career, but he’s obviously not in the same league as Henry, widely considered the greatest footballer in Premier League history. This vast gulf in on-field pedigree has become more awkward as the tournament has progressed, with Lalas retreating into a meek silence whenever Henry reveals his depth of footballing experience. In a conversation where his co-panelist is casually reminiscing about his days playing alongside Messi or exchanging shirts with Ronaldo Nazário at the World Cup, what exactly is Lalas going to talk about — coming on as a second-half substitute for Earnie Stewart in a friendly against Scotland in 1998? Helping the Kansas City Wizards finish last in the 1999 MLS Western Conference? Did Lalas enjoy an elite playing career? No. But does he do the background reading that could compensate for his relative lack of standing in a conversation with titans like Henry and Zlatan? Also no. But is he charming or funny or charismatic or otherwise magnetic on screen? Eh, no.
Savage. Here’s Henry and Zlatan kicking the ball around in the studio and pointedly not letting Lalas have a go:
The Side That Won the Civil War is Now Banning Books About Why the Civil War Was Fought. “It is a well-known feature of civil society that nervous middle managers often act far more radically than top executives out of a sense of self-preservation.”
Record winter temperatures in Antarctic raise fears over speed of climate breakdown. “This is absolutely crazy. It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
Monty Python: The Philosophers’ Football Match
As the World Cup gets underway here in the Americas, here’s a look back at a football battle for the ages: Germany vs. Greece in The Philosophers’ Football Match. Germany’s lineup included Nietzsche , Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Marx while the likes of Plato, Socrates, Sophocles, and Archimedes took the field for Greece.
Hegel is arguing that reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant — via the categorical imperative — is holding that ontologically, it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.
(thx, meg)
“The prevailing emotions among scientists right now are rage and shock.” U.S. Science Is in Chaos. “This compact that has existed since World War II, that made the U.S. the successful, prosperous nation that it is, is being dismantled.”
The Founding Story Behind Japan’s Oldest Whisky Maker. “Success in the Japanese market required a lighter, more delicate flavor profile than Western spirits typically offered.” And so Suntory was born.
Supermountains, the Boring Billion, and Their Connection to Life on Earth
Twice in the Earth’s history, massive ranges of supermountains have formed on ancient continents.
Studies like these point to something we do know for sure: from the highest peaks to the smallest cells, geology and biology are deeply intertwined. And while it’s often said that we are stardust — built from elements forged in the hearts of dying stars — in a sense, we also might be supermountain dust.
They were perhaps as tall or taller than Everest but their distinguishing feature was their massive breadth — we’re talking ranges 5000 miles long, three to four times the length of the Himalayas — just a unbelievable volume of earth. And their formation may have “fueled two of the biggest evolutionary boom times in our planet’s history”.
That’s a lot of rock to erode — and, according to the researchers, that’s why these enormous mountains are so important.
As both mountains eroded away, they would have dumped tremendous amounts of nutrients like iron and phosphorus into the sea through the water cycle, the researchers said. These nutrients could have significantly sped up biological cycles in the ocean, driving evolution to greater complexity. In addition to this nutrient spillover, the eroding mountains may have also released oxygen into the atmosphere, making Earth even more hospitable to complex life.
I also learned about the Boring Billion from this video, a billion-year period of relative “tectonic stability, climatic stasis and slow biological evolution” nestled in-between the two supermountain eras.
Due to FIFA’s poor security practices, this person stumbled into their wide-open broadcast portal w/ full access. “An attacker could have rickrolled the entire FIFA World Cup. Or played Subway Surfers gameplay. Live. On every TV network worldwide.”
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