From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps.
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A collection of photos from the 70s & 80s of kids jumping their bikes, sometimes over other kids. In that first pic, there is no way the two kids at the end of the row didn’t get stomped by that landing.
I had no idea Subaru actively courted lesbian car buyers with targeted ad campaigns in the early 90s; here’s a 2016 Planet Money episode about it: When Subaru Came Out.
The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack. “The hawk appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is…more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.”
Photos Show the Vast Scale of China’s Solar Power Projects
Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy.
As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.
74% of all construction projects worldwide! This pairs well with Bill McKibben’s recent article for the New Yorker, 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment.
People are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power — which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
Let Your Kid Climb That Tree. “Your fear that your kid will get hurt is depriving them of something they’ll never get back.” (The bit about “kinematic movers” is really interesting.)
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness. “My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence.”
Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White. “A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.”
A great look at how Baltimore’s investment in an “ecosystem of community–oriented interventions” has drastically reduced violent crime in the city by treating crime as a public health crisis.
Bloc Party’s Tiny Desk Concert
Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert.
To celebrate, this Tiny Desk set begins with the super catchy and energetic pop anthem “Banquet” from Silent Alarm. The band continues with a couple songs from 2008’s Intimacy: the shimmery, glockenspiel-forward “Signs,” then “Mercury,” where we give a sneak peek of Okereke’s vocal effects rig under the Desk. Bloc Party closes with “Blue,” a sweet song on the slower side of the band’s catalog. It ends quietly, yet powerfully, as Okereke sings, “I fall asleep on your sleeve / with those three words in my dreams.”
Still bangs. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)
A map of the best places to see the Northern Lights. “Kuril’s analysis culminated in a map highlighting the locations with the best potential to see the northern lights.”
CEO Tony Stubblebine shares how Medium went from the brink of shutting down to being profitable for almost a year now. “In 2022, Medium was losing $2.6M each month. We were also losing subscribers…”
After dealing with years of “Xfinity’s bullcrap” as customers, a pair of brothers built an all-fiber ISP that’s cheaper & faster to compete with them.
Best of Luck With the Wall
In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite images of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — but one that delivers a powerful feeling of how large the world is and how meaningless borders are from a certain perspective.
The project started from a really simple place. It was about looking. It was about the pure desire to understand the visual landscape that we are talking about when we are talking about the southern border of the United States. What does the southern border of the United States actually look like? And in that sense it was a very simple gesture to try to see the border in aggregate. If you were to compile all 2000 miles and try to see it in a short space — what would that look like? In another sense it grew out of the discourses as you suggested. The way migration is talked about in our contemporary moment and in particular the way migration is talked about in terms of the southern border of the U.S. So part of this piece is a response to the way migrants and borders are talked about in our politics. And it’s also just a way of looking at landscape as a way to think about some of those things.
The online version of the film is 6 minutes long, but Begley states that longer versions might make their way into galleries and such.
“BuildMyTransit is a web app to design, visualize, and simulate New York City subway systems. Perfect for exploring ‘what-if’ scenarios.” You can design new routes, add/remove trains, and run simulations.
Historical Tech Tree. “The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1890 technologies and 2192 connections between them.”
The Best Brushes Are the Ones You Make Yourself
Wanting to get away from manufactured perfection, artist Wang Mansheng makes his own paint brushes.
Manufactured things are, you know, have a certain form. Like a manufactured brush; they’re all really fine. The factory trying to make as fine as they could, but when you use it, all the lines come out smooth and beautiful. But sometimes, I think it’s too perfect, because I really love the rough surface of a rock or the big tree trunk.
Wang’s work is currently on display at The Huntington near LA in San Marino, CA.
Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor. “He has betrayed the very system that made his success possible; the system in which he and a handful of others like him have profited disproportionately relative to their contribution.”
Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning. “The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn’t making that clear.”
Good lord, the World Cup is going to be a total shitshow next year. And the 2028 LA Olympics. A jingoistic facade papering over a faded superpower careening towards ruin.
This is great: a proposed “poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts”.
How Was the Wheel Invented? “How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not?”
“Fed up with big legacy news? Here are 13 independent, worker-owned outlets to support.”
The Media’s Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work. “The only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings…”
The Cheese Was Free
I am only a couple of chapters into James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (loving it!) and in the first chapter, there’s a relatively short passage about some cheese, Jesus’s Cheese, that comes into the lives of the members of the book’s community that is a first ballot Hall of Famer for the best depiction or description of a foodstuff in literature. Here it is:
The cheese was free. It came like clockwork for years, every first Saturday of the month, arriving like magic in the wee hours in Hot Sausage’s boiler room in the basement of Building 17. Ten crates of it, freshly chilled in five-pound hunks.
This wasn’t plain old housing projects “cheese food,” nor was it some smelly, curdled, reluctant Swiss cheese material snatched from a godforsaken bodega someplace, gathering mold in some dirty display case while mice gnawed at it nightly, to be sold to some sucker fresh from Santo Domingo.
This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese.
It’s even better when narrated by Dominic Hoffman. “Moo-ass cheese” is going right into the regular rotation.
If you somehow missed Deacon King Kong — it was on every 2020 best of list — you can get it at Bookshop (paperback & ebook), Amazon (paperback & ebook), and Libro (audiobook, read by the aforementioned Dominic Hoffman, who is amazing and also narrated James).
A lovely, beautiful, and uplifting obituary of poet and activist Andrea Gibson. “One of the last things Andrea said on this plane was, ‘I fucking loved my life.’”
DOJ Removes All Mentions Of Justice From Website. This Onion article got me for a sec; totally plausible. Wouldn’t be surprised if they actually changed it to the Department of Jesus or something.
Photos From the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition
Here are some of the winners, finalists, and nominees from the 2025 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition and their People’s Choice Awards. Photos by (from top to bottom): Simon Biddie, Kat Zhou, Zhou Donglin, Jonas Beyer, and Hitomi Tsuchiya.
A Ghost goby (Pleurosicya mossambica) conspicuously camouflages against coral. While small and unassuming, these cryptic fish are abundant and protein-rich, making them a critical part of reef food chains. But naturally, they’ve evolved to evade predators, the Ghost Goby in particular being partially translucent—allowing him to blend in perfectly with surrounding coral.
Photographer Kat Zhou was diving off the coast of Florida when friends alerted her to this female octopus and her eggs tucked into a pipe of some sort, perhaps a remnant of a shipwreck. Zhou returned four times, trying to capture the mother’s determination to protect her young when they’re most vulnerable. She hopes her work inspires empathy for marine life, including an animal whose behaviors differ wildly from our own but whose maternal instincts are entirely familiar.
The Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) pictured here broods just a few hundred large eggs. Once she lays her eggs, the female stops eating and guards her growing offspring day and night. Her babies will emerge as fully developed, miniature versions of their parents, ready to change color, squirt ink, hunt for food, and live as small but full-fledged octopuses in the shallow seas around the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Their mother, in contrast, having exhausted herself to ensure her offspring’s survival, will die shortly after they hatch.
Lemurs are remarkably lithe creatures. With long tails providing balance and powerful, slender limbs outfitted with opposable thumbs and toes, they move with ease through the craggy limestone spires of western Madagascar’s Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Still, leaping over a 30-meter (100-foot) ravine with a baby clinging to your back seems like a daring choice.
To capture this scene, photographer Zhou Donglin had to do some mountaineering of her own. Setting out before sunrise, Donglin spent an hour scrambling to the top of a rocky peak, praying that the elusive brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) would show. After a day of disappointingly distant sightings, Donglin finally found some luck as a small troop descended through a forest of stone, glowing gold in the late evening light.
A pod of Beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) gracefully glides through the frigid waters of a broken fjord, their white forms contrasting against the deep, icy blue. As they move in unison, threading their way through the maze of shifting ice, they embody the resilience and adaptability needed to survive in the ever-changing Arctic.
At the southern tip of Kyushu, Japan, a Green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) swims in a surreal scene just offshore of the volcanic island of Satsuma-iojima. The photographer attributes the fantastical colors to an “underwater aurora” composed of volcanic material, likely influenced by wind direction, water temperature, sunlight, and the tides. She notes that no single moment in the water during an aurora is the same thanks to these fluctuations, meaning this image is as dreamy as it is utterly unique.
(via my modern met)
America is Losing Its Soul in Brown-Skinned Screams and White-Skinned Silence. “The greatest, most grievous failure of America in this moment isn’t legislative but moral. The soul of this place is dying in screams and silences.”
Skater Demarcus James is skateboarding across the entire United States, from Oakland to NYC, to spread awareness about mental health. Check out his GoFundMe to support his journey.
Taking Journalism’s ‘Experts Said…’ Chicanery About Facts to Its Natural, Absurd Conclusion
Yesterday, the NY Times published an article about Donald Trump’s threat to take away citizenship from a US-born citizen: Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship. The Times Bluesky account posted a link to the article accompanied by this text:
President Trump said on Saturday he was considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship. Trump has feuded with the comedian and actress since before he became president. Experts said the president does not have the power to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise. To aid the paper in steering their readers away from notions of objective truth, here’s a suggested rewrite of that Bluesky post:
Donald Trump, who experts said is president of the United States, which experts said is a sovereign state on the planet Earth, which experts said is an oblate spheroid and revolves around the Sun, which experts said is a G-type main-sequence star about 93 million miles from us, said on what experts said was Saturday that he was considering revoking (which experts said is a process of making invalid) the U.S. citizenship of a person with the last name of O’Donnell, who experts said is a living human person and U.S. citizen with the first name of Rosie (which experts said is a diminutive of Roseann). Trump, who experts said has feuded with the person who experts said is a comedian and actress since, experts said, before he became president (again, experts said this, that Trump is the president and that also there exists a time (which experts said i— {Do we really need to cite someone on the concept of time here? Surely, time is just time and everyone kinda sorta gets that? -ed}) before he was president). Experts said the president, who experts said doesn’t simply float away into the cosmos because of the mutually attractive force of gravity between him and the Earth, does not have the power (which experts said is whatever Robert Caro said it was in that heavy book about Robert Moses; the experts honestly did not make it through the whole thing) to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Or, I guess you could do it the easy way:
President Trump said on Saturday he was considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship. Trump has feuded with the comedian and actress since before he became president.
Experts saidThe president does not have the power to take away the citizenship of a U.S.-born citizen.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
PS. Rolling Stone did waaay better with this story: Trump Thinks He Can Take Away Citizenship From Anyone He Doesn’t Like. And see also the NY Times Pitchbot if you are unaware of its existence.
PPS. The image is a political cartoon from 1894 — you can see the full version at the Library of Congress.
Not a joke: there is a new Commodore 64 coming out. “The glowing, translucent Commodore 64 isn’t a software emulator — it’s the first official C64 in over 30 years, with a few new tricks.” You can preorder now & cancel before shipping for a full refund.
Maya Ruler’s Tomb Is Unearthed in Belize, With Clues to His Ancient World. “This is the first of its kind in that it’s a ruler, a founder, somebody so old, and in so good a condition.”
Scrappy is a prototype tool for building “little apps for you and your friends”. Shades of Robin Sloan’s An app can be a home-cooked meal.
Mend is a project based in Syracuse, NY that publishes the “creative work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as well as individuals who have been impacted by the criminal justice system”.
The Best Stunts of All Time, Over Nearly 100 Years of the Oscars. Buster Keaton, King Kong, Errol Flynn, Ben-Hur, Bullitt, Smokey and the Bandit, Top Gun, Speed, The Matrix, Kill Bill, Unstoppable, Mission Impossible, etc.
When the Klan Got Kicked Out of Town. “More than 500 Lumbee men and women showed up, many of whom were war veterans. Some came with shotguns. Some came with baseball bats.”
The Art of Roland-Garros. Each year since 1980, the French Open has selected an artist to make an official poster for the tournament; this site displays all of the posters from 1980 to 2025.
Shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Competition
In looking over the shortlist for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 competition, I thought about how I’ve seen thousands or even tens of thousands of incredible astronomical images and yet there are always new, mind-blowing things to see. Like this 500,000-km Solar Prominence Eruption by PengFei Chou:
Or Close-up of a Comet by Gerald Rhemann and Michael Jäger:
Or Electric Threads of the Lightning Spaghetti Nebula by Shaoyu Zhang (Lightning Spaghetti Nebula!!!):
Or Dragon Tree Trails by Benjamin Barakat:
Teasingly, the official site only has a selection of the shortlisted entries but if you poke through the posts at Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography, you can find some more of them. (via colossal)
New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source. “Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding.” I love reading about science/math breakthroughs…
No One Else Has a Bike Like Mine. “The most elaborately decorated e-bikes often include colorful adhesive ribbons wrapped around the posts, seat tube and headset, spoke covers and LED lights…” How NYC delivery folks trick out their bikes.
The Bayeux Tapestry is returning to the UK for the first time in more than 900 years. “The huge embroidery - which is widely believed to have been created in Kent - will go on display at the British Museum in London next year.”
A New Genetic Map of Human Disease for the Past 37,000 Years
Carl Zimmer writes about the results of a new genetic study of humans and the diseases that afflicted us over the past 37,000 years. It’s a really fascinating read — in part because of how scientific results can defy our expectations. For instance, the researchers expected to find the plague when people first started domesticating animals 11,000 years ago. But they didn’t:
But the ancient DNA defied that expectation. The scientists found that plague and a number of other diseases jumped to people from animals thousands of years later, starting about 6,000 years ago. And those microbes did not jump into early farmers.
Instead, the new study points to nomadic tribes in Russia and Asia. Thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture, those nomads started rearing vast herds of cattle and other livestock.
And then:
Those epidemics were so intense that they changed the genetic profile of the nomads. Last year, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues found that the nomads experienced a spike in mutations that boosted their immune system and that may have helped them resist the diseases they contracted. But their active immune systems may have also attacked their own bodies, producing chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
These diseases might have played a part in Bronze Age history. In previous research, Dr. Willerslev and other scientists have found evidence that nomads expanded from the steppes of Asia into Europe about 4,500 years ago.
The study published on Wednesday suggests that the nomads may have gotten help from their pathogens. European farmers and hunter-gatherers had not evolved resistance to diseases such as plague and may have died off in huge numbers, making it easier for the nomads to move in.
Read the whole thing — it’s interesting throughout.
Craig Mod: Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses. When your bar gets TikToked: “The only reason he opened the bar, he said, was so locals and friends like her would come. Now, all he had were customers he couldn’t talk to.”
“Lately, it has been difficult to ignore a tendency at the NY Times to make astonishingly bad news judgments. As Republicans increasingly circulate insane conspiracy theories and racist nonsense, the cult of centrism has taken a self-destructive turn.”
What If You Replaced the Moon With a Black Hole?
A question from a viewer of XKCD’s What If? series: “What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? And what would a lunar (“holar”?) eclipse look like?” The answer to the first part of the question is: not that much. But the explanation of why that is is fascinating.
It’s worth reading the comments on the post as well…XKCD brings out the nerds and their interesting observations:
Imagine if a species grew up on a planet that had a black hole moon the mass of the moon. They’d have tides, they’d have an unobstructed view of the night sky, and they’d have no clue about this behemoth out there and would be unable to explain these bizarre perturbations in Earth’s orbit when they finally worked out Earth’s orbit.
EDIT: To everyone mentioning lensing effects: no. The eye can discern about 1 arc minute which at the distance of the moon is 280km. The lensing effect is detectable generally about double the event horizon. If the event horizon is about the size of a grain of sand, doubling it is not going to come close to being detectable with the naked eye from Earth. It is probably safe to assume that the same would be true of captured dust — that the particle size is too small to be detectable to the naked eye.
Another commenter points out that the video never explicitly answers the second question:
It never answered the part of the question about the eclipse. A grain of sand passing in front of the sun wouldn’t be visible, but if it’s a black hole, would lensing effects do anything weird?
The consensus in the comments seems to be that the effect would be minor and nearly imperceptible:
Lensing is dependent on two things: Mass of the object around which light passes, and how close by light passes. Since the black hole is one lunar mass, a very small mass on gravitational level, the lensing would be minor. Light could get a lot closer to the black hole, though. You might see a very slight “shimmer” at the edge of the sun when the black hole passes by the edge, but not much more than that. If the black hole happened to perfectly pass in front of a star that you’re observing with a telescope, you might very very briefly see a small ring instead of a point of light, but that’s about it.
Science!
When Moderation Becomes Appeasement. “Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do.”
4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment. “Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel — the control of which has largely defined geopolitics — we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.”
Wow, Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 earbuds are $149. That’s $100 off…the lowest price I’ve seen on the best earbuds I’ve ever owned.
Cool Anatomical Sculptures of Lego People
Artist Jason Freeny is making these neat anatomical sculptures of Lego people.
You can see more of his work in progress on his Facebook page. Reminds me of Michael Paulus’ work. (via colossal)
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