Homer’s Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad. Where the Greek ships that set out for Troy were from and what they may have looked like. “No Homeric ship survives. What we have are pictures: a handful of painted sherds of the twelfth century BC…”
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Practical Engineering: Are beavers actually good at building dams? (A: Yes, duh.)
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. Brad Pitt returns as Booth, the character he played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but 8 years later. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listTrace is a daily puzzle game where you build a “recipe” of up to 4 steps to turn a starting set of numbers into another set of numbers.
The lessons four Islamic polymaths — al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi — hold for students today: “breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way”.
50 Songs That Explain America. “The songs were chosen on the basis that they told me something, sonically or lyrically or emotionally or vibrationally, about America and the idea of America.”
The 🔥🔥🔥 New Social App: NPR Podcasts Comments Section on Spotify
{Ira Glass voice} On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript:
And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of any of them. They’re just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like— it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it’s a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.
They tracked down one of the participants and interviewed her:
Ira Glass: And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?
Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.
Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.
Ella: Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.
Ira Glass: I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.
You can listen to the whole episode here (or wherever you get your podcasts) — it’s the very first segment — or watch a shorter version of it on Instagram or YouTube. (thx, alana)
How to rescue an orphaned baby elephant. “The baby elephant needs a mother to run to. And the fact is that the mother is a 30-year-old Nigerian man right now.”
Jimbōchō Book Town
I visited Jimbōchō today, a neighborhood that’s home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in English or sell magazines, posters, or visual books that are interesting to browse no matter what language you speak. I visited maybe 20-30 of the stores; here are four of my favorites.
Sawaguchi Book Store features larger format books on art, design, photography, fashion, and architecture. The walls of the staircase are covered in wonderful posters; it took me awhile to climb those stairs. On the second floor, I found a Princess Mononoke movie poster for ¥50,000; tempting. Also on that floor, there’s a small seating area where you can enjoy a beverage out of their two vending machines and quietly read a book or look out the window.
Kitazawa Bookstore. A beautiful old bookstore selling mostly English titles. I spent a lot of time in here browsing. I found a nice leather-bound Pride and Prejudice and a copy of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from the 40s. They had these little notes scattered amongst the shelves gently reminding patrons of the store’s guidelines: “Here, silence helps words to grow. How eahc book with both hands, as if to embrace it.” Another one: “Don’t rush or force the pages wide. Stories, too, are most beautiful when they open slowly.”
Komiyama Shoten is another bookstore specializing in books about art, arcitecture, design, photography, and fashion. I found a cache of old Raygun magazines from the 90s along with a ton of other design books & magazines — on the third floor, I think. On that same floor, they have a collection of erotica and LGBTQ+ books, including a couple of amazing books by Tom of Finland. Lots of great posters throughout the store as well, including a poster for Kids (1995) signed by Larry Clark.
Ohya Shobu features books, woodblock prints, and maps from the Edo and Meiji periods. Super old stuff. The huge map of Edo (Tokyo) in the window is worth the trip by itself. Because everything was so ancient and presumably delicate, I was a bit timid about picking stuff up to look through it, but I’m gonna go back when I’m feeling bolder.
Robert Eggers is doing Romeo & Juliet. “When it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Elizabethan English (aka early modern English), with lines straight from the play.”
Play Solitaire Alone Together. “It’s Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet.” A little more social than solitaire, but not by much.
The Museum of Time-Based Art. “My idea for this site is to build an exhaustive, authoritative compendium of every art project that uses time as part of the work.”
I can’t remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.
When’s the Last Time You Cried?
For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive).
I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t totally surprising; by this point, I hadn’t cried for more than three years.
I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.
I started taking an SSRI a few years ago with the goal of giving me enough space to approach life’s challenges without feeling completely overwhelmed (by anxiety, by depression). The medication didn’t “fix” me…it just kept the train from derailing all the time (sometimes over the smallest things) and gave me the freedom to work through things on my own and with my therapist.1
I was lucky to land on a good med/dose combo on my second try — the first pill I tried made me feel jittery and more anxious than I already was. But my current med does come with a couple of side effects. My sex drive is lower than it was (although that could also be age), which is not altogether unpleasant — a quieter mind in charge of things instead of a libido. The other side effect is that I don’t cry anymore, at least not as easily.
Crying is something I took up after my kids were born. Not often, but once every few weeks maybe. I cried when things got hard and for awhile, things were hard a lot of time: pandemic, parenting insecurity, divorce, living somewhere that really didn’t suit me, and always always the website & the discomfort of being an odd sort of “public figure”. Watching any movie with parents and kids (esp. dads and sons) got me — heck, even some Marvel movies got me. In sessions with my therapist, I cried when we’d hit a particularly tender vein of pain. As Gould says, the crying was cathartic and felt necessary — I always felt better and clearer afterwards.
But that’s mostly stopped since I’ve been on my meds. I still get sad, although less so, but I don’t cry. Movies don’t really get me going anymore. When my kids are struggling (in school, with friends), that gets me the closest. I miss that release — I feel a little pent-up sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade crying again for how I felt in the Before Times. I’m ok not having access to crying — at least for now.
I don’t usually talk about this sort of thing on the site and I don’t quite know why I’m talking about it now — Gould’s openness makes it easier maybe. And it may help someone else to hear about my experience? ↩
Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.
Can You Draw a Perfect Circle?
This maddening little web toy on vole.wtf challenges visitors to draw a perfect circle and judges them on how well they do. After dozens of tries with a mouse, I could only manage 92.9% perfection (which looks more like 80% tbh).
Then I tried it on a touchscreen and got much closer: 95.2%. Several more tries with an Apple Pencil bumped it up to 97.7%, after which I retired so as not to waste the entire rest of my afternoon on this.
And of course, here’s the classic video of Alexander Overwijk drawing a perfect freehand circle on the blackboard in about a second.
I love everything about this video — the way he swings his arm to warm up, his drying-the-blackboard flapping motion, and the ease of his perfection. 100.0%. (via sam potts)
Some advice on giving good advice. “Not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”
The Earth in the Sky
I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson.
A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the world’s largest known example of columnar jointing. Its massive stone columns, as much as 10 feet in diameter, formed as magma cooled and contracted, creating great stress that the rock alleviated through fracturing. The columns come in 5, 6, and 7 sided varieties.
These photographs were captured over the course of 3 days with the ultimate goal of capturing the full moon streaking behind the tower. The black and white images in this series were captured late in the day while waiting for the moon to rise. These photographs were captured in 830nm infrared and helped create intense contrast between direct sunlight and shaded regions of the image. The resulting set of photographs are a study of afternoon light and shadow on the surface of the tower.
If you ever get the chance to see Devils Tower in person, I recommend it. (via colossal)
TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterflies…just take a look at this repair video.
Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? was made. “To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion.”
The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever. “It didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.”
Some Newsletter Tidying
Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a few hours after posting this), you might need to sign up again. Sorry for the inconvenience — my email account got flagged and I needed to rectify this pronto. 🙏
For the rest of yous: you’re doing great, stay the course. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter and you like reading things in your inbox for some reason, you can subscribe as well. The newsletter goes out twice a week and includes links to everything I post here. Thanks.
A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes movies. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.”
Mary Cassatt: The Impressionist Who Painted The Mind
I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects.
Like Manet, she’s dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she’s exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric. And she’s experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles.
But Cassat isn’t just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She’s putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet’s methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity.
3D models for every single object in Katamari Damacy, all 1680 of them. You can download models and animated gifs of each one.
Ross Anderson on NASA’s recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which may “be able to deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light” as well as measure the effects of dark energy.
Canyon Groove. What if the grooves on a record were shaped like actual canyons? What would that sound like? “The floor sets the key. The shape of the walls sets the mood. The width sets how long one pass takes, and the depth sets the echo.”
Dimensional Drawings of Apple Products
So that companies can use them to make accessories like cases and bands, Apple maintains a collection of downloadable dimensional drawings and tech specifications for many of their products, including the iPhone, AirPods, Watch, and iPad. They are beautiful.
I love their corner & edge measurements…you can see how fiddly Apple is with their curves. Curiously, the only Mac listed is the Macbook Neo. I guess that’s the only one that needs accessorizing?
Also, I presume if you’ve got a 3D printer, you could use these to make your own very precise accessories?
What’s your “origin” video game? “I’m talking about the game that flipped that little switch in your brain and made you into a life-long gamer.” Mine is Lode Runner. Reflexes + puzzles + constraints + make-your-own levels = hooked for life. You?
TIL Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was written in part to help save the cathedral from demolition.
“The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big AI needs to follow all current laws—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t. When Big AI breaks those laws, they must face prosecution and penalties—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t.”
Ed Sheeran tried to stay neutral on a moving train. “If [celebrities] remain neutral (silent), they won’t offend anyone and they will, hopefully, appeal to everyone. They use the facade of neutrality as shelter, as a place to take refuge.”
Monopoly as a metaphor for racial inequity. “During the first half of the game, we said that Cas and I could buy property, but you could not, then halfway through the game, we say, ‘Now the rules are even. Now the rules are the same for everybody.’”
Relationships are key to human happiness. “The top five [determinants of subjective well-being], ranked in order of impact, were romantic and familial relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and health.”
Cars, New York City (1974-1976)
In the 70s, photographer Langdon Clay took photos of cars parked on NYC streets at night and compiled them into a project: Cars, New York City | 1974-1976.
Using his Leica CL, Kodachrome 25, and a 40 millimeter lens, Clay traversed the streets of 1970’s Manhattan finding automobiles that paralleled their environment. The cinematic images are a result of time exposure, sodium vapor street lights, and the tenacity of youth.
Luc Sante wrote about Clay’s car photographs for the New Yorker:
One of the things that used to make America so distinctive was its cars. If you lived there, you would really have to go abroad for a while and then come back to appreciate the difference. In most countries of the world, cars were modest things, little bean-shaped units designed to take two or three people from here to there. In America, cars were real estate. They were enormous boats in which you could eat, sleep, make love, change clothes, throw parties, maintain an office, practice unlicensed dentistry—or take your six best friends out for a spin. They were a testament to America’s unlimited natural resources: oil, steel, rubber, naugahyde, and, above all, space. American cars could be so huge because the nation’s highways were endless, its city streets were wide, and there was abundant free parking everywhere you went. And that included New York City then, since most of its population took the subway.
A 2016 book featuring these images is out of print, but you can find copies for several hundred dollars. (via atlas obscura)
The Film Experience is a free online course from MIT about movies & cinema. “This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers…”
I didn’t know Beehiiv had a program to support independent journalists. Members get access to tools, a health insurance stipend, legal protection, and waived hosting fees. Oh, and they don’t proudly host Nazis like Substack. ✌️
Imagine playing chess against a seven-year-old who’s dancing around and barely paying attention to the board (bc it’s all in her head) and she just casually checkmates you like this. Oof.
Gorgeous Nerikomi Pottery
Oh my goodness, I love the look of these cups.
They were made by Indonesian potter Nabila Nareswari using the nerikomi technique. From her about page:
Nerikomi is a technique in pottery that creates decorative patterns by stacking, rolling, and slicing colored clay. Patterns produced by it are structural rather than painted on, which allows the potter to make detailed images or complex repetitive patterns on both sides of the clay slabs.
Nareswari posts videos of her process on Instagram; it is painstaking.
Nerikomi takes a lot of patience and heart 🤍
I think Iris is the epitome of trusting a process. No other work of mine takes as much patience as these lovely mugs and cups do. There isn’t really a shortcut to having them done quicker, you just have to do one thing after another, after another, and before you know it, it’s there in your hands! Albeit two months later😜
She has a shop but all of her Iris collection is currently sold out.
In Prison, White Supremacist Literature Is Required Reading. “White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.” Excerpted from Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration by Joseph Margulies.
“Starring Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston, and Willem Dafoe, Tenzing follows the true story of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s historic first summit of Mount Everest. History remembers the summit, but not always the man who made it possible.”
Music for the Dyeing
I believe I have featured login.jp_ here before — they pair electronic music with different locations around Japan to highlight the Japanese experience. For their latest video, they had English DJ & producer Bonobo play some downtempo ambient electronica in a Shinjuku dyeing workshop.
Standing on a street corner in the middle of Shinjuku, Fujiya Senkobo has preserved one of these techniques, known as hikizome or brush dyeing, for over 70 years. Dyeing is a traditional local industry in Shinjuku dating back to the Taisho period, and about 40 dyeing workshops still exist in Shinjuku Ward today. Composing patterns in his mind and dyeing extended fabrics with a brush, Takatoshi Nakamura, the third generation owner, states that staying sharp and maintaining perfect physical health are essential in hikizome, where mistakes are simply not permitted.
This story, about a dressage trainer who shot his female student and got away with it, is completely bonkers. “Largely through the medium of Facebook, Kanarek had driven Barisone mad.”
I am stunned that we are still finding new species of cat in 2026. “The analysis revealed that the sanctuary cat belonged to a previously unrecognized species whose lineage split from its relatives about 1.4 million years ago.”
Cole Escola’s Broadway smash Oh, Mary! is coming to HBO in 2027. Excited for this…I’ve never seen the play.
Amazing piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones about the betrayal her child felt at her school choice. “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
New novel from Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven): Exit Party. “Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted.”
Wes Anderson’s Criterion Closet Picks
Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys.
One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark.
One surprising thing about this video: I was expecting Anderson to go for Kurosawa, Tati, Truffaut, Welles, and some other of his big influences but instead selected family friendly fare suitable for a trip. The man has a wide array of influences. Here’s the full list:
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
I love seeing Flow on there. What a great little film.
See also Wes Anderson Talks Up Some of His Favorite Movies in a Parisian Video Store and this delightful video from 20 years ago or so featuring Anderson and Jason Schwartzman picking out music & movies in a Borders:
“The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government” are striving to make the world safe for grift, corruption, and theft, with their mob boss president leading the way.
Walking Men Worldwide
Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide.
I love all of these little people. The Warsaw one reminds me somewhat of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Some of the ones from smaller places have more personality, but I feel like the New York and Boston ones are my favorites aesthetically. Weirdly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here.
A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the Walking Men Worldwide website. (via @jessicabrillhart)
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