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Entries for July 2025
Two Ways To Film The Same Scene
In a review of City of Angels, the 1998 Hollywood remake of Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, Roger Ebert says:
To compare the two films is really beside the point, since “Wings of Desire” exists on its own level as a visionary and original film, and “City of Angels” exists squarely in the pop mainstream.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak leans into the vast gulf between the two films to “explore the differences in cinematic cultures and styles”. He takes a close look at the same scene in both films and what they reveal about Hollywood on the one hand and European art cinema on the other.
Two of the most promiscuous snack brands, Oreo and Reese’s, are teaming up to bring the eating public two new treats: the Oreo Reese’s Cookie and Reese’s Oreo Cups. 🫱 Is this… 🦋 innovation?
The Rule of Law Is Dead in the US. “I did not write an ‘end of term’ Supreme Court review piece this year because… what’s the point? [Critiquing individual cases] feels like a guy on the Titanic complaining about the song selection from the band.”
How to Upload an Image to a Bird
Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.1 That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯
That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.
Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.
P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:
So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!
Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.
yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution
A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.
Can you run Doom… on a bird?
- You’ll recall that this is how the Merlin Bird ID app cleverly identifies bird calls: by the image of a call’s spectrogram.↩
Motherfucking windfarms. In Europe, they’re called Royale with Breeze. (I stole that joke from Bluesky.)
Always Stand on the Side of the Egg
In 2009, novelist Haruki Murakami controversially accepted the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in the aftermath of Israeli military action in Gaza. In his acceptance speech, he related a story about something he keeps in mind while writing:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.
This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.
You can read the whole speech here. (via @robinsloan)
Forthcoming book from Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun. “Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history — if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.”
Bill McKibben: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? In many countries, getting rooftop solar or “balcony solar” can be as easy going to the store, buying some panels, and plugging them in. In the US, it’s not so easy.
Rebecca Solnit: The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology. “It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved so much progress in so little time.”
The End of America as a Center of Science
Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the conservative regime.
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science — the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others — and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility — or else be subject to correction by political appointees.
And so:
Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since [World War II]. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”
Side effect of the Tour de France: pro riders gobbling up all the Strava top times (King of the Mountains) across France: “1,809 KOMs nabbed by the pros during the three weeks of racing”.
How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic. “Evidence hasn’t emerged” to support that idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Here’s what the evidence says.
The Wirecutter’s list of the best canned cocktails. Very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. None of these are available at my local liquor store, but we do have Barr Hill’s canned G&T, which is the best canned cocktail I’ve ever tasted.
How to Leave Substack. “Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation. You should probably leave Substack.”
“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.”
Photos: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza. “Israel’s blockade of most food and aid, along with distribution difficulties inside the Gaza Strip, have driven many of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to the brink of starvation.”
Covid safety measures drastically reduced flu deaths, but the fatality rate has risen sharply again. “90% of reported pediatric deaths this season have occurred in children who were not fully vaccinated against influenza”.
Weird & Wonderful Historical Photos From the 20th Century
From Alan Taylor at The Atlantic, whose curatorial eye I’ve always admired, “a grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century”, including photos of the world’s largest banjo, diving archery, death-defying photography, and underwater alligator racing.
Zim&Zou’s ’80s-Inspired Paper Cassettes and Boombox Radiate with Color. Strange, now I have a hankering to watch an entire papercraft version of Do The Right Thing.
Someone Played a Perfect Game of Tetris
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop a sequence of moves and timing to score a perfect game, proving that it was possible. But could a human do it just by the playing the original game in the way it was intended? Well, you’ve got to watch the video to find out.
I’ve said it before — I love these Tetris analysis videos. Both aGameScout, who did the video above, and Summoning Salt (who made this feature-length video about the history of Tetris world records) are world-class at using video to explain the innovation, competition, and cooperation that allow these players to keep pushing higher and faster, past what anyone thought possible even a few years ago.
Thinking back to the Jackson Goldstone post, what I really want is a aGameScout- or Summoning Salt-caliber video about the differing riding styles of mountain bike riders, how each of them uses their own style to go faster, and where the innovations are happening. I’m sure these videos exist and I just don’t know where to find them, but if they don’t, this would be a hell of an opportunity for someone with ace communication & video editing skills.
Note to self: spend some time checking out Tapestry, Iconfactory’s universal feed/social reader app. (Old heads will remember FriendFeed…)
Substack sent a push alert promoting a Nazi blog. “Substack is primarily funded by Andreessen Horowitz, a firm whose founders have pushed extreme far right rhetoric.” There was *an actual swastika* in the push alert!
Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse, a documentary film on the comic artist who created the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.
Archaeologists Discover a 2,400-Year-Old Skeleton Mosaic That Urges People to “Be Cheerful and Live Your Life”. This skeleton is a whole vibe.
I’m Giving My Kids a ’90s Summer — the 1890s. “Just like the 1890s and the 2020s, they’ll play with the unvaccinated kids down the street and drink raw milk until dark.” Dangerous factory jobs too!
Macbook Air M4s Are on Sale
I bought a 15” Apple Macbook Air M4 a few months ago and I love it. Of course, I loved my previous computer (an M1 Macbook Air) too, but bumping up the screen size and quality has been a game-changer for me. More speed and memory is great too for running virtual machines and waaayyy too many tabs in Chrome. And it’s still super portable.
Just the other day I urged a friend (hi, Alex!) to upgrade from an older Intel Air, so when I saw that Amazon was selling M4 Airs for a discount, I figured I’d share the good word with you folks as well:
- Apple 2025 MacBook Air 15-inch Laptop, M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Storage. $1,199.00 (-14% off). This is the one that I have, in sky blue, which really isn’t blue so much as a vibrant, slightly shimmering gray.
- Apple 2025 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop, M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD Storage. $799.00 (-20% off). This is the 13-inch base model and $800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer, especially in the age of the mad king’s tariff scheme.
If you click through to either of those, there are more models with differing amounts of memory, hard drive, etc. Oh and all of them come with a 12-megapixel camera so you’ll look sharper on the screens of others during Zooms or FT calls, for better or worse. (via daring fireball)
Video Mashup Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne
Last week, I linked to a video mashup by Bill McClintock of several metal songs, saying “although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers”. This morning, YouTube helpfully informed me that McClintock had since done a proper tribute in the form of a compilation of every Ozzy/Sabbath-related video mashup he’d ever done.
Rest in darkness, Ozzy. 🤘
XKCD: Kite Incident. “I don’t know. Lemme look up a map of where the jet stream goes.”
Oooh, George Saunders’ next novel comes out in January. “Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life.”
Science Is Winning the Tour de France. Data, nutrition, equipment, and training are propelling riders to performances that best the dopers of yesteryear. “In other words, Armstrong on dope then would be an also-ran next to Pogačar today.”
The Set Design of Sesame Street (Feat. Jane Jacobs)
An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which informed the set design:
“Even if you hadn’t read Jane Jacobs, that book was so huge that it was in the air,” said Benjamin Looker, who is the author of “A Nation of Neighborhoods” and an associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University.
The show’s creators, he said, were “assimilating some of the popular notions that she put into play about the value of the sidewalk and street life.”
On Sesame Street, the stoop, the outdoor-dining space in front of Hooper’s convenience store, and Elmo’s wide-open window blur the boundaries between public and private space, fostering neighborly interactions between characters.
Street noises in the background and neighbors hollering through windows signal to viewers that this block is not a wealthy one. The streetscape, Mr. Looker said, “is an extension of people’s homes.”
A friend shared that they recently visited the Sesame Street set and that is something I would very much like to do someday.
An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.”
Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to feature an episode where all the characters are Muppetized (with puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop). I love this show.
A list of the top 100 “most innovative, influential, and informative” podcasts of all time. The list includes 99% Invisible, The Big Dig, Code Switch, Heavyweight, In Our Time, Radiolab, Slow Burn, and You’re Wrong About.
Is This the Best Downhill Mountain Biker in the World?
Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten:
Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m funning you a little bit because that was several years ago and Jackson is starring in GoPro videos at the age of 10 and riding the hardest trails faster and better than many adult riders:
I mean, I think Jackson could really be world-class some da— Ha, more tricks! Jackson is actually 21 years old here in the present of 2025 and is actually now one of the best downhill mountain bikers in the world. Here’s the POV video from a recent win of his:
There are a couple of notable things about this video:
1. Watch the way he goes through a bunch of tree stumps at full tilt at ~1:10 by basically jumping over the whole thing with a couple of quick hops. Adjust the playback speed of the video to 0.5 or 0.25 to see how he does it. I’ve watched this like 10 times and it’s still bonkers.
2. And then at ~1:52, he screams through a tunnel and gaps directly onto a wooden berm — and you can hear how the crowd reacts. Here’s another view of that same gap and the rest of his run:
Other riders clear that gap too, but somehow not as big or direct as Jackson does it. I don’t actually know enough about mtn biking to know how Goldstone is doing what he’s doing, but if you want a hint, check out the “Bike Jesus” section of this video that starts at ~5:30:
3. Oh yeah, and just how ungodly fast he and the other riders are going past trees and through rocks and all sorts of other lurking assailants. Blimey.
Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear. “Israeli officials have, for months — indeed, since the start of the war — not only admitted to working to restrict the aid that makes its way to Gaza, but bragged about doing so.”
Another piece from Hitler scholar Timothy Ryback that is uncomfortably resonant today: What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker.
José Andrés: The World Cannot Stand By With Gaza on the Brink of Famine. “There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.”
TIL the etymology of boycott. “When Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants, the locals had had enough. The Mayo branch of the Irish Land League urged Boycott’s employees to withdraw their labor and began a campaign of isolation against Boycott.”
All the Dogs, Explained
From MinuteEarth, a quick tour of all the different kinds of dogs in the world, wild & domesticated, and how they are related to each other.
Great Danes are the tallest dogs in the world. Standing on his hind legs, the Great Dane Zeus was taller than Shaq. He could drink directly from the kitchen sink.
Watch this: Chinese EV maker BYD built a driverless car that can *jump over potholes*, has a top speed of 243mph, and can charge from 30% to 80% battery in 10 minutes. It’s a Mario Kart World kart IRL — hold ZR to Charge Jump!
New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution”. “The president, tiptoeing precipitously down the sidelines of legality, inadvertently ran the constitutional football out of bounds.”
“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.”
Is this the beginning of the end of HIV/AIDS? Lenacapavir “offers 100% protection” against contracting HIV and there are already 6 generic manufacturers lined up to produce the drug under royalty-free licensing agreements.
Hard Things Are Supposed to Be Hard
Hard things are supposed to be hard.
Changing old patterns, ending relationships you’ve outgrown, raising children, creating from your core, letting go, stretching, growing, and stepping into the unknown.
The more worthwhile endeavors require you to show up vulnerably & honestly, and they leave space for something new to happen.
From the description:
All of my familiar self-protective parts are showing up to remind me of the vulnerability that is required when I step into new places. When I let myself be someone new in the world.
I feel the anxious thoughts creep in about what could go wrong, about how I might be judged, about what could happen, about how unsafe it is to expose myself.
And then I remember that this is a normal part of the growth process, especially when you’re stepping into something you’ve never done before. My wonderful, protective, survival-oriented little brain is trying to keep me safe by pulling me back into familiar territory.
Yep. Yeeeeeeppp. Yep yep yep. (via @tressiemcphd)
Carbon chauvinism, perhaps coined by Carl Sagan, refers to the narrow-minded view that extraterrestrial life must be based on carbon because all life on Earth is.
Gorgeous New Covers for Nabokov by Na Kim
Na Kim is one of the best book cover designers out there, and I love her set of covers for four of Vladimir Nabokov’s books being released in advance of the 70th anniversary of Lolita. Pictured above are her covers for Pale Fire (Bookshop, Amazon) and The Defense (Bookshop, Amazon).
The full official trailer for Tron: Ares. I want this to be good. Can this just be good, you know, as a treat?
Artist Amy Sherald has canceled her solo show at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because “she learned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty might be removed to avoid provoking President Trump”.
Slow Light
Slow Light is an animated short film about a man whose eyes are so dense that light needs seven years to travel across them. Everything he sees happened seven years ago, like a very precise, obligatory memory playback.
I feel like this is related to whether or not you can visualize things in your mind and also Braid, a video game where you can collaborate with your past self. (via colossal)
Six Films Better Than the Books They’re Based On. Including Jurassic Park, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Social Network. What are some of your favorite films that hold their own with the books they’re based on?
They’re Made Out of Meat, a classic sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson. “Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal!”
Glacier funerals have been held in countries like Iceland, the US, and Switzerland. These memorial services can help us mourn nature and move through the process of ecological grief.
The Kottke.org Rolodex
Over the weekend, I added a new feature to the site that, for now, is only accessible from the front page of the site, right after the third post on the page. It’s a list of websites and people that I follow — “kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators”. It’s a blogroll, but I’m calling mine the Kottke.org Rolodex. Here’s what it looks like:
AI slop content increasingly proliferates on the internet and traffic from large tech companies like Google and Meta continues to fall off. In just the last two days, The Verge and Wired have launched new features that aim to strengthen their direct relationships & trust with their readers. From Wired’s announcement:
The platforms on which outlets like WIRED used to connect with readers, listeners, and viewers are failing in real time; Facebook traffic disappeared years ago, and now Google Search is dwindling as the company reorients users to rely on AI Overviews instead of links to credible publishers. More and more users are also skipping Google altogether, opting to use chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude to find information they once relied on news outlets for. Meanwhile, AI-generated slop and mis- and disinformation are seeping into the internet’s every pore, polluting social media feeds and drowning out news and human-driven storytelling.
At WIRED, our solution to this so-called “traffic apocalypse,” and the AI sloppification of the internet, is simple: connect our humans to all of you humans.
Some of the sites on the Rolodex have been moving in this direction as well — and KDO has too of course: with the membership program, comments on posts, the redesign, and some of the other social features that have been creeping in here and there, as well as some tried-and-true methods of direct connection like the twice-weekly newsletter, the RSS feed, and syndication to social sites that don’t devalue links, like Bluesky and Mastodon.
The Rolodex is part of this “strategy” of relationship-building and strengthening of trusted sources of information. You readers are curious about what I read and pay attention to, I enjoy linking to things I like (duh), and I believe it’s more important than ever for those sites who traffic in knowledge & curiosity and care about humans to acknowledge and stand with each other. As I wrote last year, we are not competitors; we are collaborators:
I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators.
So pop on in to the front page of the site and scroll down a bit to take a look. Clicking the “refresh” link will load five more sites from the list. I hope you find something you like.
That’s not all I’m hoping to do with the Rolodex, but it’s a good start. Feedback, etc. is welcome.
In her last column for WaPo, columnist Catherine Rampell shares some advice for aspiring pundits. “Know your immovable principles and red lines — journalistically, ethically, ideologically — and why you’re columnizing in the first place.
A lovely trailer for a documentary called The Nettle Dress. “Allan Brown makes a dress by hand just from the fibre of foraged stinging nettles over 7 years. A modern day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft.”
After Paramount cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert after he criticized the network’s $16 million bribe to Trump, David Letterman’s YouTube channel uploaded this 20-minute supercut of archival Letterman footage trashing CBS. That’s the stuff.
Wilmer Chavarria, a US citizen from VT, was detained for many hours by US immigration, who suggested his job as a school district superintendent was fake. Chavarria said the ordeal was “nothing short of surreal and the definition of psychological terror”.
Killing in the Name of a Terrible Holy Lie
This is a great 5-minute mashup of several metal and metal-adjacent songs from artists like NIN, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, KISS, Dio, Black Sabbath, and Soundgarden. Even if you don’t care for metal, I feel confident that you’ll enjoy this anyway — it’s a bop. Here’s the track list:
Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
Dio - Holy Diver
Soundgarden - Outshined
Judas Priest - Hot Rockin’
KISS - All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose
Pantera - 5 Minutes Alone
Black Sabbath - Into the Void
Billy Squier - The Stroke
Judas Priest - You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
Alice in Chains - Them Bones
Metallica - Sad But True
Although the video was posted a day or two before Ozzy Osbourne died, it feels like a fitting tribute to one of metal’s true pioneers. (via neatorama)
Trump Action Tracker. “Each action is mapped to one or more of five broad domains of authoritarianism, helping to make sense of a deeply concerning political trajectory.”
Insane Fictional Traffic Patterns
In this video entitled Rush Hour, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists have been edited together to produce dozens of heart-stopping near misses.
Reminds me of the world’s craziest intersection, traffic organized by color, intersections in the age of driverless cars, and the dangerous dance of NYC intersections. (via colossal)
Author Kate Broad writes about the role of indie bookstores in a time when public libraries are under attack. “This fight for free speech isn’t new, and independent bookstores have been fighting it for a long time.”
I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here. “I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.”
“We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!”
Health Insurers Are Hiking Premiums as Their Profits Balloon. “The US’s six largest health insurers reported massive profits last year, doling out billions on stock buybacks and dividends.”
Ozzy Osborne died today at the age of 76. His farewell concert a few weeks ago was the highest-grossing charity concert of all time, raising more than $200 million.
A Behind the Scenes Look at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts
Follow Architectural Digest as they head behind the scenes at the offices of NPR Music to see how the now-iconic Tiny Desk Concerts come together. My favorite bits are the callouts of all the stuff on the shelves behind the artists: Adele’s water bottle, Sabrina Carpenter’s bedazzled martini glass, a Green Bay Packers helmet signed by Harry Styles. And: “Chappell Roan’s wig is actually sitting on Cypress Hill’s skull.”
Coming Soon: Your Professional Decline
I stumbled across this July 2019 article by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline and it gave me lots to think about: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. One of the takeaways is that different stages of your life require different approaches; I liked this anecdote:
Recently, I asked Dominique Dawes, a former Olympic gold-medal gymnast, how normal life felt after competing and winning at the highest levels. She told me that she is happy, but that the adjustment wasn’t easy — and still isn’t, even though she won her last Olympic medal in 2000. “My Olympic self would ruin my marriage and leave my kids feeling inadequate,” she told me, because it is so demanding and hard-driving. “Living life as if every day is an Olympics only makes those around me miserable.”
I wasn’t aware of the formal concept of crystallized intelligence, but I was talking to my therapist last week about exactly this:
A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems — what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.
Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.
Anyway, the piece is interesting throughout and one I’ll be returning to as I ponder whatever’s next for me.
P.S. I included the illustration by Luci Gutiérrez from the article because I think it perfectly captures the gist of it. That’s me on that 50 stair!
Since 2004, new editions of the Choose Your Own Adventure books have included branching diagrams of all of the possible paths through the books.
Rival Consoles — Soft Gradient Beckons
I love the look of this black & white animated video made by Anthony Dickenson from thousands of hand-painted frames for Rival Consoles’ song Soft Gradient Beckons. Stick around after the song ends for a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made.
If I plan too much, it’s often disappointing. It’s much nicer if I just let it go the way it wants to go. But obviously sometimes it just doesn’t work and, you know, that’s okay. Sometimes, the mistakes are the bits that really reveal kind of new techniques. I love these little moments of imperfection. Otherwise, you know, you might as well just build it in AI.
The skateboard dolly! (via colossal)
Programmer Przemysław Dębiak recently defeated an advanced OpenAI model in a coding competition. “The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s.”
Anil Dash on seeing Wu-Tang Clan in 2000, the last time all nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan appeared together on one stage together. “At the time of the performance, [O.D.B.] had been on the run…”
Today (July 22) will be the second-shortest day since 1973. “The difference will be just 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours.” (Also, the Earth is spinning faster and we don’t really know why?)
The Most Observed Plants & Animals in Each US State
XKCD mapped the most observed plant and animal for all 50 US states as reported by iNaturalist users. I had no idea bumble bees were such a popularly observed animal — the common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) is most-observed in Vermont, Wisconsin, Maine, Connecticut, Illinois, and Minnesota. Also popular: white-tailed deer, bison, milkweed, honeysuckle, and robins.
A look at 40 years of Rembrandt self-portraits. “Rembrandt documented his face as it aged through time, from the fresh-faced playfulness of youth to his careworn old age.” He did about 100 self-portraits in total.
When the Icebergs Came to Town
A few weeks ago, a pair of icebergs drifted close to Innaarsuit, Greenland. Photographer Dennis Lehtonen captured the visit — you can see the photos on Instagram or in the Arctic gallery on his website. From Colossal:
A couple of weeks ago, Lehtonen and locals spotted an iceberg floating a few miles away, and even from the distance, he could tell it was large. Days later, it — actually a pair — slid into Innaarsuit, dwarfing the fishing village’s modest wooden houses.
The municipality was warned to be careful when on the coast and not to travel in large groups. Fragments occasionally broke off as the iceberg moved, creating a reverberating sound akin to thunder. Many locals also documented the phenomenon, despite being more accustomed to icebergs. “They would also tell me that this is the highest they have ever seen an iceberg rise above the houses,” Lehtonen says. “So it was definitely a special event.”
The images, especially the first one with the icebergs in the fog, reminded me of an alien visitation, like in Independence Day or, especially, Arrival. Cue the Jóhann Jóhannsson. (via colossal)
Gregor Formanek is likely the very last SS guard of a concentration camp to be charged by German prosecutors. “Did he enjoy the power he had? Did he care? Did he find it boring? Did it make him uneasy?”
How to Flood-Proof a Hurricane-Prone Florida Town
In Florida, flooding is a huge cause of death and destruction from hurricanes. This video looks at how a town called Babcock Ranch was designed to withstand hurricane flooding through some smart engineering.
Yet this one town, Babcock Ranch, has been hit by four hurricanes and basically came out unscathed. There was no flooding at all. So we asked the engineer who helped build this town to break down its hidden designs.
Related: John Seabrook’s piece in this week’s New Yorker, In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods? (archive).
Vermont feels like the frontier of climate change in the Northeast. Farmers in the bottomlands, who previously planted wheat and barley, are beginning to plant rice, which can be underwater for two days without damage to the crop. The old roads that early Vermont settlers hacked out on hilltops, which lasted for more than two hundred years, are melting back into the forest. Extreme-rain events scour the roads down to bedrock ledges, rendering them impassable, and, because no one then uses them, any blown-down trees don’t get cleared. The next storm brings more blowdowns. A road that I went mountain biking on ten years ago, when it was a distinct pathway with old-growth trees on each side, lined by aged stone walls, is now such a tangle of fallen trees, branches, and rocks that it’s hard to tell a road was ever there.
Vermont is the second least populated state, after Wyoming, with fewer than six hundred and fifty thousand residents; it is also the fourth highest in disaster-relief funding per capita, nearly all of it flood-related. Washington County ranked first nationally in disaster declarations between 2011 and 2024. Annual precipitation in the state has increased six inches since the nineteen-sixties, and heavier-than-normal rain events in the Northeast are expected to increase by as much as fifty-two per cent by 2100. Vermont is a laboratory for the study of intense rainfall in steep terrain, and a proving ground for scientists, policymakers, regulators, and land-use planners who are on the front lines of a recurring catastrophe that traditional methods of prevention — dredging a river’s bottom, armoring its sides, berming its banks — have only made worse.
I live in Washington County so how communities are attempting to mitigate flooding is of great interest to me.
“The Alamo announced Friday a whimsical and nostalgic new addition to its growing collection: the original, screen-used stunt bike from the beloved 1985 film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” Round of applause for everyone involved.
Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book is both a memoir and a novel, does not have a beginning or an end, and is “readable from either side”.
Intricate Drawings by Shunshun
I am totally smitten with the intricate drawings of Japanese artist Shunshun. It’s worth clicking through to see them in detail. Here’s a look at his process:
You can follow Shunshun on Instagram.
“Terrible night’s sleep? Here’s how to make it through the day…” Maybe hold off on caffeine, limit carbs + easy energy, “snack” your exercise, get out in the sun, nap (but not too long), and head to bed at your normal time.
A remake of The Thomas Crown Affair with Michael B. Jordan, Danai Gurira, Kenneth Branagh, and Lily Gladstone? Yeah, I’m into that.
CBS cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert just days after he criticized the $16 million bribe the network paid to Trump. Here’s why “Colbert’s cancellation is a dark warning”.
Fascism For First Time Founders. “Let’s have a little chat about why embracing fascism is probably the worst possible business strategy for anyone actually trying to build something innovative.” 💯
“The extreme sports pioneer Felix Baumgartner, famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space, has died in a paragliding accident.”
Next year, “the average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium” because of “the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets”.
Contemplative Landscapes by Noah Kalina
Noah Kalina is uploading videos of the “long photograph” variety of peaceful & contemplative nature scenes to YouTube. 4K. No AI. “Press play and walk away.”
Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles. “Collectivist bosons account for the forces that move us while individualist fermions keep our atoms from collapsing.” (Honestly, same.)
From Beautiful Public Data, a look into the Internet Archive’s collection of 5000 images from the NASA Ames Research Center. “Browsing through this amazing archive gives you a unique view of decades’ worth of breakthrough research.”
How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene. “The music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening — vibe music before vibe became a buzzword — means people aren’t paying as much attention to what’s real and what’s not…”
The Surreality of Japanese Playgrounds at Night
For years now, photographer Fujio Kito has been documenting cement playground equipment in Japan, often capturing them at night, lit up in captivating ways.
(via laura olin and present & correct)
Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trump’s Actions. “I’m developing new neural pathways each time I shrug off Trump’s clear violations of the Constitution and his total contempt for our system of checks and balances.”
Iceland’s 36-hour workweek has been a huge success. “On his free days, he loves to sleep in, then to make long phone calls to his fellow pigeon fanciers while cleaning the kitchen…” Sounds like a dream!
A comprehensive illustrated article on how screens work. This is the first part of a new work-in-progress called Making Software that aims to explain how software systems & tools work from the ground up.
The Design Museum’s Upcoming Wes Anderson Exhibition
I don’t think anything could be more up my alley, in my wheelhouse, in my lane, my cup of tea, my speed than this upcoming retrospective of Wes Anderson’s work at London’s Design Museum.
The Design Museum has been granted unprecedented access to Wes Anderson’s personal archives, which the filmmaker has built up over three decades. This is the first time most of these objects will be displayed in Britain.
This landmark exhibition will chart the evolution of Wes Anderson’s films from early experiments in the 1990s to recent productions as well as collaborations with key long-standing creative partners. Explore the design stories behind award-winning and iconic films such as ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’, ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’, ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and ‘Isle of Dogs’.
The exhibition starts on Nov 21, 2025 and runs through Jul 26, 2026.
The winners of Core77 Design Awards. Categories include apps, packaging, transportation, branding, consumer tech, and more.
Finding of a recent survey of 90,000+ trans Americans: “trans people who go back to living as their sex assigned at birth do so because of transphobia, not because of doubts about gender or transition”.
I haven’t watched the NBA in years and I only know about Joel Embiid by media osmosis, but for some reason I spent 45 minutes this morning reading this profile of him.
From Smithsonian Magazine, the story of how Reading Rainbow came about, in part as an effort to combat schoolchildren’s summer reading slumps.
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 solar & wind 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)
Who Goes MAGA? “His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ or ‘Against the Grain.’ He has an advanced degree & a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.”
Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World. “Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future.”
“REFLECTIVE URBANISMS: Mapping New York Chinatown is an interactive web project that maps Manhattan Chinatown through its architectural changes.” The project combines 3D maps, photos from the 1940s, and community stories.
When Your Baggage Goes Through an Insecurity Inspection
Baggage is a short, stop-animation film by Lucy Davidson about the sometimes unpleasant experience of being seen — when going through airport security and also just generally.
Three girlfriends check in their baggage at the airport, but one is carrying a little more than the others. As they travel along the conveyor belt to security, can she hide what’s inside?
(via colossal)
On the Expert Generalist. “We’ve seen this capability be an essential quality in our best colleagues, to the degree that its importance is something we’ve taken for granted.”
Vintage recordings of J.R.R. Tolkien reading (and singing, in Elvish) selections from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed. “Platforms routinely claim they merely reflect user behavior, yet […] toxic content often gets a boost because it captures people’s attention.”
I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable. “Because we appear online, we’re assumed to be free.”
From Marcin Wichary, a history of Mac settings (1984-2004). The article includes several embedded emulators, so you can actually use the setting panels under discussion. Amazing.
A Masterclass on Status, Power, & the Economy with Tressie McMillan Cottom. I’ve only started listening to this podcast, but it’s so good already and I’ve heard only great things about it.
Did Shakespeare Write Hamlet While He Was Stoned? Examining the evidence that the Bard smoked weed and that he was aware of its effect on his creativity.
ChatGPT kept directing people to use a non-existent feature on Soundslice…so the team built it. “To my knowledge, this is the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. (Yay?)”
This Breakthrough Sponge Could Change How the World Gets Clean Water. “A team of scientists has developed a groundbreaking sponge-like aerogel that can turn seawater into clean drinking water using only sunlight.”
100 Years of World History, As Told By 100 Movies
This is a unique look at the history of the world from 1925 to 2025, told through the lens of movies whose plots take place in those years. For example, the WWII era is represented by The Sound of Music (1965), The Pianist (2002), The Darkest Hour (2017), Casablanca (1942), The Thin Red Line (1998, Come and See (1985), Son of Saul (2015), Oppenheimer (2023), and Godzilla Minus One (2023).
As the video goes on, more and more of the scenes depict imagined past futures from films like 1984, Transformers: The Movie, Blade Runner, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Johnny Mnemonic.
In the end, it’s not a happy video — lots of war, both past and future. Hollywood does like to dwell on our worst times.
How Four Masters — Michelangelo, Donatello, Verrocchio & Bernini — Sculpted David. I saw Bernini’s David recently and it’s an amazing sculpture.
I Deleted My Second Brain. Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save. “Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.”
When in doubt, go for a walk. “Walking won’t solve everything. But it won’t make anything worse. That’s more than you can say for most things we do when we’re stressed, tired, or lost.”
The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program
In 1966, Huey Newton & Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party and wrote a 10-point manifesto of what the group stood for and what they wanted. Here’s the full text of the plan.
4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
Medieval Murder Maps. “Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities. Click on a pin to read the story based on the original record written down in the rolls of the coroner.” (Fascinating…)
A Swim Through Jellyfish Lake
Jellyfish Lake in Palau is home to approximately 13 million jellyfish. Their mild stings mean you can snorkel in their midst and capture beautifully surreal scenes like this:
If I had a bucket list, I think a swim in Jellyfish Lake w/ classical accompaniment might be on it. (via colossal)
How Silicon Valley Got Rich. “When Apple went public in 1980, it created 300 millionaires. When Microsoft did in 1986, 3,000 employees became millionaires. After Google’s IPO in 2004, 1,000 employees held stock worth more than $5 million.”
“All games are cooperative. The very act of agreeing to & honouring rules, & the deeper compact, of temporarily engaging in the roleplay that the drama taking place on the table is *important* - this is a fundamentally cooperative enterprise.”
Bookshop.org’s 100 Bestselling Books of 2025 (So Far)
Online bookseller bookshop.org recently released a list of their bestselling books of the year (so far). The list is quite a bit different than what you might see from larger booksellers and looks more like what your local bookstore has on their bestseller list. The top five:
- On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. “Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. “An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.”
- Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. “As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances.”
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. “In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ books may be unmatched.”
- We Can Do Hard Things by Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle, and Glennon Doyle. “When you travel through a new country, you need a guidebook. When you travel through love, heartbreak, joy, parenting, friendship, uncertainty, aging, grief, new beginnings — life — you need a guidebook, too. We Can Do Hard Things is the guidebook for being alive.”
Others on the list that caught my eye:
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. “From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values.”
- James by Percival Everett. “A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.” (So, so good.)
- Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba. “What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.” (Buy direct from the publisher.)
- The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. “A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist’s Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.” (I think I saw, via Insta, Doechii reading this recently.)
- Bad Company by Megan Greenwell. “A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.”
Always worth a read: the latest issue of Jodi Ettenberg’s The Curious About Everything newsletter. (I have so many tabs open to read now… 🎉🫠)
Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson
Clocking in at almost an hour, this “definitive interview” with Wes Anderson by Vanity Fair about all 12 of his films is perhaps only for Wes stans or cinephiles, but then again, listening to thoughtful, creative people talking earnestly about their work is almost always worth the time.
Hi, I’m Wes Anderson. I have made, apparently, 12 films and I’m now going to walk us through every one of them in some way.
(via open culture)
“The fundamental dilemma [of media like NYT]: journalism is, by its nature, supposed to be on the side of accuracy, against lies & liars, but the GOP is lies & liars top to bottom. And for reasons of power & access, journalism can not say so.”
Here’s what Tom Holland’s lip-sync of Umbrella can teach us about stormwater management. “So set designers must have accounted for the flow to go somewhere, but not all residential or commercial properties are so well drained.”
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette reflects on the 30th anniversary of Apollo 13, including the movie’s realism “The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.” I love Apollo 13.
A Great Art Explained Book? Sign Me Up!
Ah, this is awesome: Great Art Explained is one of my favorite YouTube channels and there’s a book version coming out in the fall.
Art can be thrilling, and resonate on a deep personal level. It is how you view the work, place it in context and understand its history that makes an artwork truly come alive.
A fresh approach to a classic subject, James Payne’s no-nonsense analysis sheds new light on 30 masterpieces from around the globe and reveals what makes them truly timeless works of art.
Each chapter delves into not only the art itself but also the artist’s life, as well as the work’s place in their wider oeuvre; in other words, what makes it “great.”
You can preorder Great Art Explained from Bookshop or Amazon.
The detention center in Florida easily fits the definition of concentration camp. “This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.” Alligator Auschwitz.
Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident. “The last thing I want is a flimsy sedan that takes out Mommy and Daddy in the front seat but leaves behind a couple of orphans in the back…”
NPR Tiny Desk Concert by the cast of Buena Vista Social Club, a hit Broadway musical about the Cuban musical ensemble.
An original technicolor print of Star Wars (before all of Lucas’s tinkering) was recently shown in Britain. “It was very clear — without a doubt — that Han shot first.”
Hued is a daily game in the vein of Wordle/Spelling Bee where you have three guesses to match a target color.
French artist Mantra paints photo-realistic murals that look like massive butterfly specimen display frames. Fantastic.
There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy
Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, posted this to Bluesky yesterday:
I’m going to be very honest and clear.
I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. But I am almost 50 years old. It will take so long to do anything with this mess that this is the new normal for *me*.
I do hope a lot of you run. I hope you vote, sure. Maybe do a general strike or rent strike. All great!
But I spent the last week reading things and this is not, for ME, an electoral fix. So now I will spend time reflecting on how to integrate this normal into my understanding of the future.
Most of this will be personal. Some of it will be public — how we move in the world.
Right now, I know that I need to make a decision on my risk sensitivity. How much can I take? I also need to meditate HARD on accepting the randomness of that risk. No amount of strategy can protect me.
Those are things I am thinking about.
In response, Anil Dash posted:
Yeah, I keep telling people this is a rest-of-my-life fight, and… they do *not* want to hear it.
I’ve been thinking something like this for a few months now. We will fight, we will resist, etc. But we will also not live the lives we picked out and planned on. They’re not available anymore.
Therapist and political activist Leah McElrath:
Since Trump regained office, I’ve talked about this both gently and bluntly to try to help people understand that we lived in one era but we’re going to die in another.
I am, at least. I know my probable life expectancy and, at 61, have about 15 years left.
We’re all going to have to start planting shade trees we fully know we’ll never sit under.
Cottom nails how I’ve been feeling for the past few months (and honestly why it’s been a little uneven around KDO recently). America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.
Since then, I’ve been recalibrating and grieving. Feeling angry — furious, really. Fighting resignation. Trying not to fall prey to doomerism and subsequently spreading it to others. (This post is perhaps an exception, but I believe, as Cottom does, in being “honest and clear” when times call for it.) Getting out. Biking, so much biking. Paying less attention to the news. Trying to celebrate other facets of our collective humanity here on KDO — or just being silly & stupid. Feeling overwhelmed. Feeling numb. But also (occasionally, somehow) hope?
All of this is exhausting. Destabilizing. I don’t know what I’m doing or what I should be doing or how I can be of the most service to others. (Put on your oxygen mask before assisting others, they say. Is my mask on yet? I don’t know — how can I even tell?) I barely know what I’m trying to say and don’t know how to end this post so I’m just gonna say that the comments are open on this post (be gentle with each other, don’t make me regret this) and I’ll be back with you here after the, uh, holiday.
I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes. “Look, if you give people homes, the next thing you know, they’re going to start to get their lives together and then get jobs and start organizing.”
Diogo Jota, Liverpool and Portugal footballer, dies aged 28 in car crash. This is sad news. Jota was a favorite player of mine; he brought a positive energy to the pitch.
Kilmar Ábrego García says he was tortured in El Salvadorian prison. Hundreds of people are still there, sent there from the US by the Trump administration to be tortured, all sanctioned by the Supreme Court and Congress.
Wanna Sit Down? You Gotta Solve The Rubik’s Cube Chair.
If you want to sit in this chair, you have to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube because the chair is a Rubik’s Cube. (Ok, technically it looks like you only need to place the four leg corners of the chair correctly, but we’re not going to pick nits on this because it is fun and loooorrrrrrrd do we all need some fun right now.)
Oh and I like how the unsolved chair in the last photo looks like it’s striking a break dancing pose. Fresh! (via moss & fog)
American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history. “Over the first half of 2025, the US has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science may be a gift to the rest of the world.”
Architect David Romero has built several digital models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized buildings, including a mile-high Chicago skyscraper with 528 floors.
8 Forgotten Figures From the American Revolution, including Margaret Corbin, Joseph Brant, James Armistead Lafayette, and Joseph Plumb Martin.
On global homogenetic culture. “GHC is Trader Joe’s bags outside of the States. GHC is people en masse wearing the same exact outfits on accident in public. GHC is adult dorms. GHC is a Louis Vuitton in every city. GHC is Shake Shake going global.”
The Kindly Brontosaurus
I read this piece by Jessica Winter a few months ago and it’s come in handy a few times so I thought I’d share. If you want something from someone, adopting the pose of the Kindly Brontosaurus might go a lot further than throwing a fit.
A practitioner, nay, an artist, of the Kindly Brontosaurus method would approach the gate agent as follows. You state your name and request. You make a clear and concise case. And then, after the gate agent informs you that your chances of making it onto this flight are on par with the possibility that a dinosaur will spontaneously reanimate and teach himself to fly an airplane, you nod empathically, say something like “Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work this out,” and step just to the side of the agent’s kiosk.
Here is where the Kindly Brontosaurus rears amiably into the frame. You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision-close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him-but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.
Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik.
Before he died, David Lynch talked to Natasha Lyonne about AI. “Natasha, this is a pencil. Everyone has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. It’s how you use the pencil. You see?”
That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose. “Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers [can mean] many of the calls disconnect on their own.” 🤬
Editorial Template for Every Time the United States Goes to War. “President [GUY WHO HAS COMMITTED MULTIPLE WAR CRIMES], a [REPUBLICAN / DEMOCRAT], sidestepped his [COMPLICIT / COWARDLY / TOTALLY INEPT] Congress…”
“The plot of this movie aged extremely well.” A remake of The Running Man directed by Edgar Wright? Yes, please. Here’s the trailer.
Living Colour’s Tiny Desk Concert
Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.1 They still got it!
- I probably saw their performance on Arsenio as well, but the SNL set is the one that sticks in my brain.↩
Slice of Life
Slice of Life (trailer) is a feature-length documentary about the American Dream through the lens of former Pizza Huts that have been transformed into everything from bars to churches to candy stores to cannabis dispensaries. A woman who runs an LGBTQ+ church out of a former Pizza Hut says:
It’s the stained-glass windows that draw people and touch people, and I think really takes it out of the realm of a Pizza Hut. It’s the power of transformation. When things continue to transform, beauty can come from it, good things can come out of it.
You can rent or buy the film from their website.
I’ve written before about how Pizza Hut was a special place to visit when I was a kid:
Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut.
John Nichols remembers his colleague & friend, the legendary journalist Bill Moyers. “I can’t help but think that Bill Moyers was the best president we never had.”
“[Showing] people they are not alone in caring about an issue” is an important and overlooked function of protest. “Silence begets silence, which begets further misunderstanding about what a society actually collectively believes or wants.”
“When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”
ImillaSkate: The Cholita Skaters of Bolivia
ImillaSkate is a Bolivian female skate collective whose members dress in traditional cholita clothing. This is a great short documentary about the group, the challenges they face, and the change & joy they’re trying to bring to their communities.
Some people in my generation are embarrassed to wear a pollera [traditional skirt]. Because the pollera highlights your features. Your indigenous features. Highlight what we are as indigenous people, as the daughters of women of polleras. It’s a part of my family legacy. And without my family, I’m nobody. It’s about giving the pollera new meaning.
I wrote about ImillaSkate a few years ago as well. I poked around to see if they were raising funds for their activities (lessons, building a skatepark) because I wanted to contribue, but didn’t find anything — if anything pops up, I’ll let you know. You can follow their adventures on Instagram and via their website. (via @lizziearmanto)
Busting the Top 5 Myths About the Big Bang. “Even asking this question relies on a misconception: a misconception that the Big Bang was like an explosion. As we’ve just covered, the Universe didn’t explode; it simply expanded.”
The Internet Archive estimates the Wayback Machine will hit a lifetime total of 1 trillion archived web pages later this year in October.
Now that summer is in full swing, you might need this Comprehensive Guide to Yellow Stripey Things, so you can tell harmless bumblebees (you can pet them!) from “asshole” yellow jackets.
“He Painted Bugs Like Jewels”
In a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Evan Puschak made a video about 16th-century Dutch artist (and all-around polymath) Joris Hoefnagel, who painted some of the first dedicated and detailed images of insects in the world. His paintings were so accurate that if he’d lived 200 years later, you would have called him a naturalist.
I love how some of the caterpillars in the last image are crawling along the “frame” of the painting — that strikes me as a modern flourish.
From The Marvelous Details of Joris Hoefnagel’s Animal and Insect Studies:
These watercolors served as sources for a series of 52 prints engraved by Hoefnagel’s teenage son, Jacob. That series, Archetypes and Studies, offered the earliest printed images of dozens of species.
The relatively cheap prints enabled little beasts to multiply and crawl out into the world. They inspired a broader interest and study of nature which continues today.
Some of Hoefnagel’s insect images are on display at the NGA in the Little Beasts exhibition, which runs through Nov 2, 2025.
Trying to cut back on social media? The methaphone is a phone-shaped slab of clear acrylic that you can carry instead of your phone to “help you manage cravings and withdrawal symptoms”.
Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers. “We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”
“The Big, Beautiful Bill assigns each American a billionaire who will live the American dream for you. You can check in on your billionaire at intervals and see how he is using your money. Maybe he’s building a 19th pool…”
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