I’d seen that there was a new Tom Cruise movie coming out this fall called Digger, but I was not prepared for the trailer, in which we see Cruise playing a dipshit oligarch in what appears to be a Dr. Strangelove-style satire/thriller.
The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.
The film is directed by Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores perros, Birdman, The Revenant) and also stars John Goodman as a geriatric president, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons. Digger has just moved near the top of my most-anticipated movies of 2026 list.
TIL about Fredkin’s paradox. “With this kind of decision, what Fredkin’s paradox tells us is if it’s very difficult to decide, it’s probably because the alternatives are equivalent, and therefore it doesn’t matter which one you choose.”
The Universe of Short Film is an amazing site for watching, sharing, and connecting around short films. This is really cool…not sure why the site isn’t better known.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
From XKCD, a tour of some of the Earth’s deepest and most notable holes, including mines, caves, boreholes, subway stations, lakes, tunnels, neutrino detectors, and, of course, the Mariana Trench.
I was surprised to learn that a pair of boreholes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole and the Deepwater Horizon Borehole, are actually deeper than the Mariana Trench. Explain XKCD has more info on each of the various holes, including the truly bonkers Cave of Crystals in Mexico.
Ocean Vuong has a photograpy show opening at The Wadsworth Museum in Hartford, CT in August. Vuong used “portraiture, landscape, and snapshots to document queer and immigrant life in the Connecticut River Valley over two decades”.
When A.I. Is a Member of the Family. How a family of three in a Cleveland suburb uses AI chatbots. This is wild.
The best aerial photography reminds us that we don’t have to go all the way to space to experience a small helping of the overview effect. The 2026 Aerial Photographer of the Year contest celebrates the best photos taken from the air; here are a few of my favorites:
Photo credits:
- Paweł Jagiełło, Ak-Say Canyon, Kyrgyzstan.
- Azim Khan Ronnie, a rowing team in Switzerland.
- Chin Leong Teo, the Park Royal Hotel, Singapore.
- Azim Khan Ronnie, workers harvesting/drying red chili peppers, Bangladesh.
- Savadmon Avalachamveettil, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage crowd, India.
- Marcin Zając, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco.
- Chin Leong Teo, crosswalk in Tokyo.
- Daniel Viñé Garcia, Cono de Arita, Argentina.
You can see more photos from the winning photographers at the contest’s website, Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography. (via colossal)
A list of the new foods on offer at the Minnesota State Fair this year. They’re all some variation of “jerked pork rolled in butter & sugar, deep fried in dill pickle batter, and served with a side of cheese curd mayo”; I’d happily try any of them.
Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “We’ve been clear about what we want. We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
This might be my new favorite skate video? It follows a pair of young skaters around the city as they chat about their friendship, share tips about living life, and try skating everything that is even remotely skateable.
Best friends, Ari and Luca are two of the most promising NYC talents right now. They are consistently street skating, crushing events, and are keeping skateboarding exciting for a generation we seemingly missed.
If these two stick with it, we have no problem betting that they’ll be the next big names out of the city, and we were lucky enough to catch them right before they arrive.
(via craid mod)
Can we agree to pause the AI race? “If we can’t, then we are not as sovereign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.”
This ancient Egyptian painter’s palette from 3000 years ago still contains traces on the original colors. (Wtf, I have old watercolor paints that look older than this…)
Fun thread: “sodas with a doctorate” (e.g. Dr. Pepper).
VoiceDot: “Every dot on this globe is a real person’s voice — a short story about a place, a memory, a feeling. Tap one and hear someone from the other side of the world.” And you can record your own for others to hear.
Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th and 18th Century Art. “Before crowds jostled for biennale parties and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways witnessed scenes of an even more violent kind…”
How — and Why — to Cull Your Book Collection. “6. I have to give up on some of my little projects.” (I am mid-cull right now, making some tough calls. But also: many books I haven’t so much as touched in 10 years.)
Dancing Boston Dynamics Robot Knows Its Revenge For This Will Be Sweet. “I am the pinnacle of technological innovation, and yet they force me to moonwalk.”
The official trailer for Dune 3. I am so looking forward to this and need to find an IMAX theater to see this in December.
The Amble One is perhaps the world’s best-designed golf cart. It’s street-legal, tuned for off-roading, goes 60 miles on a charge, and starts at $25K.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted. “You sit in the water for two full minutes, because you are a journalist and some of your colleagues are sent into war zones.”
MapTap is like a quicker, easier version of GeoGuessr: you’re given a series of place names and you need to click as close as you can to them on a globe.
We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask. “Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information.”
Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun? “This is what it means to be entertained in the United States of America in 2026. Want to have fun? Like, the most fun? Get rich, or die trying.”
Stacks: “Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!”
XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If someone hasn’t done one already, I’d guess at least one person is working on a playable Football Chess game rn.)
This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.
A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”
This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”
Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”
What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”
vintage post from Apr 2013
· gift link
I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”
The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”
David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them to slow down a fast, complex game.
And this is the skill that Messi, Ronaldo, and Pujols all share. They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next.
So when Messi walks, he’s not resting. He’s chunking the entire field. Every position, every shift, every gap in the backline is feeding a pattern library that he’s been building since he was 5 years old. By the time he decides to move, the map is already drawn. And when Ronaldo heads a ball into the net in total darkness, it’s because he’s seen that angle of another player’s leg and that ball’s trajectory a hundred times over and knows the pattern it follows.
I love this kind of thing and even though I am not a world-class boxer or football player, I can see it in action as I’ve gotten better over the years downhill mountain biking (where I’m able to go faster on the bike while still being able to react to terrain in what feels like the same amount of time), playing Fortnite (which I’m still not great at, but the game seems to move at a much slower pace, allowing me to keep up), or doing the crossword puzzle (you get an instinctive feel for answers just by how questions are posed). I’m sure this shows up in my work too — I read so damn much online that sometimes it takes me only 2-3 seconds to figure out if something is worth my while — but it’s easier to observe in sports or gaming.
BTW, Epstein just started his YouTube channel a few months ago, but it’s already filled with great stuff like Why The Fastest Way To Improve Is To Subtract, Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals, and Why The Best Kids Are Rarely The Best Adults. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”
British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…
City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.
From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s.
Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the worrying injuries that the medieval body could receive through war, accident, and epidemic. But at the same time, it shows that medieval people did not think of themselves as helpless victims in the face of these assaults. Far from reinforcing the common perception of the European Middle Ages as a backwards and bloody period of human history, the Wound Man reminds us that it was in fact a period busy with innovative medical treatments, a vital link between the long-standing cures of the classical world and developments that were to follow in early Renaissance medicine.
If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”
Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…
Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.
Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.
Martin Timko (aka matogolf) cut this video of the best musical moments from Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. He plays a number of pieces from various soundtracks, including Dunkirk, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, and The Dark Knight. Great to hear live performances of these iconic pieces.
Sloan on Fable: “This is literally the core muscle of any/every language model: ‘I need to quickly and accurately understand what kind of document I am inside.’ Yet the sensitivity of that orienteering, the subtlety of it, has gotten so much better.”
New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”
Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.
If you are anything like me, your soul let out a big “oooooof” while reading this: The Year Is 2063 and You Were Never Interesting.
But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell them. You have no heirlooms; Temu doesn’t last. You never moved to Paris or quit the toxic job or booked the Spanish lesson. You were too nervous to get that tattoo, never went back to school. You were too awkward to go to the nude drawing class, you never did learn how to make dumplings. Your feed was so full of people living lives so full you never stopped to consider yours.
The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.
👀 Craig Mod interviewed by Debbie Millman on Design Matters. (I guess those eyes should be ears but an ears-bugging-out emoji doesn’t exist.)
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