Here’s the trailer for Bugonia, dir. by Yorgos Lanthimos & starring frequent collaborator Emma Stone. “Two conspiracy obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.”
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Entries for August 2025
I Am An AI Hater. “But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Dan Wang on his forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. “China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society…”
A group of 15-20 families in South Portland, Maine have installed landlines for their kids instead of giving them cellphones. The landlines “helped their children become better listeners and more empathetic communicators”.
These contact lenses give their wearers the ability to see infrared light, even with their eyes closed. Sign me up!!
A collection of kooky-but-rideable bikes (treadmill bike, pull-up bike, etc.)
Light pollution has lengthened birds’ days. “Their day is almost an hour longer. They start vocalizing about 20 minutes earlier in the morning and they stop vocalizing about 30 minutes later in the evening.”
Hear a Prehistoric Conch Shell Musical Instrument Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years. “The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, likely made of a hollow bird bone.”
Kevin Kelly recently published a guide called “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing”. “The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle.”
“The world’s biggest frogs build their own ponds” is art as a headline because it sounds like an adage your grandfather would tell while fishing one afternoon, but also oops the adage has now been corrupted by grind culture tech bros.
“More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.”
Just wanting to let y’all know the cops have never had to chase a bear out of my ice cream shop, though I suppose that’s what an ice cream shop would say if they had had to have cops chase a bear out of it at some point.
Are the AirPods Pro 3 coming soon? Here’s what the rumors say. “Apple is said to be testing a faster audio chip that drives ‘much better’ Active Noise Cancellation than the already‑impressive AirPods Pro 2 manage.”
This hilarious commercial for a 90s mail-order punk CD is for a compilation with hardly any punk music on it.
McSweeney’s Author Cards, Collect ‘Em All!
I love these author cards from McSweeney’s in the style of baseball cards.
For years you’ve seen athletes, web-slinging superheroes, orcs, and pocket monsters get the trading-card treatment, while you’ve sat in your room hoping upon hope that the heroes of magical realism or giants of New Journalism would get their own. The wait is over, friends.
They have three sets: the first set is a part of their 74th issue, series 2, and series 3. The authors featured in the sets include Octavia Butler, Judy Blume, Lauren Groff, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent. It’s nice to hear that ordinary citizens still have some power and some sense in wielding it.
“The evidence for millionaire tax flight is scant. If high earners were truly fleeing high taxes, low-tax states would be swarming with millionaires. Instead, the highest concentrations of millionaires are found in high-tax states.”
A thoughtful post by Philip Bump on the careful use of your power. “[Substack authors] have transferred their power to a company that has used it to promote toxic rhetoric in the guise of ‘having a debate.’”
Rock guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) has made a playlist called Fuck ICE, “a rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood”. Springsteen, Public Enemy, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, etc.
Artist Amy Sherald: Censorship Has Taken Hold at the Smithsonian. I Refused to Play Along. “History shows us what happens when governments demand that museums perform loyalty. Nazi Germany weaponized them. So did the Soviet Union.”
“Welcome to the Atlas of Space — an interactive visualization to explore the planets, moons, asteroids, and other objects in the Solar System.”
Silicon Valley is full of wealthy men who think they’re victims. “I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.”
The Art of Street Typography
I don’t know exactly what my expectations were of how lettering is painted on city streets, but this was not it. The level of precision and artistry is surprising.
Reminds me of this video of a hand-lettering master at work.
Update: Sure, he’s using a vehicle, but this guy is pretty good at line painting as well.
The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz profiles Patricia Lockwood. Regarding her forthcoming novel: “‘I wrote it insane and edited it sane’; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her.”
The Armed Takeover of US Cities by the President Is Not a “Distraction”
Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country.
From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents.
That to me is the big story of American politics right now: a mad king openly exerting tyrannical power over Americans and threatening further tyrannical power against other Americans, all under a pretext of crime reduction.
Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.”
I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is. “So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make, I think Inglourious Basterds is my masterpiece but Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is my favourite.”
TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Raised lines and textures represent roads, pedestrian paths, and railways.
Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? “Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.”
Video: “Environmental police in Rochedo, Brazil stumbled on an unexpected sight: thousands of orange-and-black bumblebee catfish scaling the slippery rocks behind waterfalls on the Aquidauana River.”
Christian Marclay, Doors
Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.
In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”
The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:
Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:
It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.
Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)
P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.
American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate. “In 2023 there were about 700,000 “missing Americans” — those who died in 2023 but would be alive if they had lived somewhere else.” And it’s not a pandemic thing.
21 Ways People Are Using AI at Work. A high school music teacher used the prompt “make it more Gen X” for helping her write rejection letters that were direct and “thoughtful, but didn’t sound like Mr. Rogers on molly”. 😂
Still one of my favorite McSweeney’s articles: E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone. “[email protected]”
From John Ganz in Nov 2024: “a list of things I thought the fascism theory of Trumpism predicted could happen”. Many have come to pass. The obstinance in recognizing what’s plainly happening here is upsetting — it wasn’t hard to see it coming.
“We’re seeing an escalation of authoritarian power on many fronts that has grown unmistakable.” Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five-Alarm Fire”.
How to Make Sense of Trump’s Voting Rights Chaos. “It matters that when the president reaches for a strategic distraction, he chooses one that matches Project 2025’s goals.” (Maybe DC’s occupation is, in part, voter intimidation?)
Full Match: Barça 5-0 Madrid (2010 El Clásico)
The other day I was surprised to learn that several years ago, FC Barcelona streamed the entire match of their Nov 2010 5-0 dismantling of Real Madrid to YouTube and you can still watch it in its entirety.
The El Clásico match was notable not only for how much Barça dominated the game1 but also for who played (Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Puyol, Busquets, Abidal, Villa, Valdés for FCB; Ronaldo, Di Maria, Benzema, Özil, Xabi Alonso, Sergio Ramos, Casillas for RM) and coached (Pep Guardiola for FCB and José Mourinho for RM).
I remember watching this game. Messi didn’t score because the Madrid defense was trying to put him in the hospital but he assisted on two goals and famously walked off the pitch near the end of the match, right past Cristiano Ronaldo, looking at the scoreboard and grinning.
The teams met four more times that year, in just a span of 18 days: a 1-1 La Liga draw, a 1-0 Real Madrid victory in the Copa del Ray final, and a pair of matches in the Champions League semis that ended with an aggregate score of 3-1 in favor of Barça, who went on to a dominating 3-1 win against Man United in the final. That 2010-2011 Barcelona club is considered one of the best club teams of all time.
- From ESPN’s game commentary: “It’s hard to articulate just how excellent Barcelona have been tonight. The way they knock the ball around so audaciously is thrilling to watch. Xavi and Iniesta have never looked like ceding control.”↩
James Dobson Is Dead, Was A Monster. “The world is a much worse place as a result of his life’s work; it would be a better place had he never been born.”
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad. “It is worth taking the time, in light of the president’s recent words, to revisit some of…the first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people discussing the myriad horrors they endured.”
“For many, the idea of a ‘frog sauna’ might sound bizarre,” but this simple solution is saving some Australian frogs from a deadly fungus.
Has anyone tried these replacement memory foam ear tips for AirPods Pro 2? Greedy for (even) better noise cancellation and sound quality…
The Four Players That Span the Entire History of the NBA
Yesterday I posted an incredible fact about LeBron James: he has played against 35% of all of the players that have ever played in the NBA. Wondering about the Great Span of the NBA, I looked for the oldest player from LeBron’s rookie season, then for the oldest player in that player’s rookie season, and so on.
What I found is that just four players span almost the entire 79-year history of the league: Bob Cousy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kevin Willis and LeBron James.
- The NBA was founded in 1946
- Bob Cousy, played 1950-1970 (14 seasons)
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, played 1969-1989 (20 seasons)
- Kevin Willis, played 1984-2007 (21 seasons)
- LeBron James, played 2003-present (22 seasons)
What’s more, all four are still alive: James is 40 years old, Willis is 62 years old, Abdul-Jabbar is 78 years old, and Cousy is 97 years old. Collectively, the four of them have either played with or against almost all of the players that have ever played in the NBA. Incredible.
Is It Time to Move On From Dr. Seuss? “Isn’t 65 years of Green Eggs and Ham enough? What new books will become beloved for generations? ‘We need to let go of the idea that the lone white male author represents the pinnacle of children’s literature.’”
Cognitive resistance training is the defense against slop and brainrot. “Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn’t do, a pattern your neurons didn’t carve deeper.”
The Hand-Painted Storefront Signs of Detroit by Ron Miller
Ron Miller is one of the most prolific sign painters in Detroit. Photographer Andrew Anderson has collected dozens of images of Miller’s signs from Google Street View.
Ron Miller has been painting signs since 1978. He loves adding color to the neighborhood with his work. He has no website, no email and works all by word of mouth in Detroit.
Anderson also made a map of the locations of Miller’s signs. And here’s the man himself:
(thx, jordan)
John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America. “The Supreme Court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the President, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.”
Israel Says It Killed a Hamas Commander. It Killed a Pulitzer-Winning Journalist. “The Israeli military made no attempt to obscure this brazen strike on civilians, which is a war crime.”
Daniel Day-Lewis stopped acting in 2017 after Phantom Thread. He’s unretired to star in a film called Anemone, co-written by Day-Lewis with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who also directed. Here’s the trailer.
Much Ado About Vibe Coding
Lauren Goode convinced her editors at Wired to let her spend a couple of days at a tech company called Notion learning how to vibe-code (i.e. AI-assisted computer programming): Why Did a $10 Billion Startup Let Me Vibe-Code for Them — and Why Did I Love It?
Expanding a mermaid diagram or alphabetizing a list of dog breeds hardly seemed like sticking it to the coding man. But during my time at Notion I did feel as though a trapdoor in my brain had opened. I had gotten a shimmery glimpse of what it’s like to be an anonymous logical god, pulling levers. I also felt capable of learning something new — and had the freedom to be bad at something new — in a semi-private space.
Both vibe coding and journalism are an exercise in prodding, and in procurement: Can you say more about this? Can you elaborate on that? Can you show me the documents? With our fellow humans, we can tolerate a bit of imprecision in our conversations. If my stint as a vibe coder underscored anything, it’s that the AIs coding for us demand that we articulate exactly what we want.
During lunch on one of my days at Notion, an engineer asked me if I ever use ChatGPT to write my articles for me. It’s a question I’ve heard more than once this summer. “Never,” I told her, and her eyes widened. I tried to explain why — that it’s a matter of principle and not a statement on whether an AI can cobble together passable writing. I decided not to get into how changes to search engines, and those little AI summaries dotting the information landscape, have tanked the web traffic going to news sites. Almost everyone I know is worried about their jobs.
One engineer at Notion compared the economic panic of this AI era to when the compiler was first introduced. The idea that one person will suddenly do the work of 100 programmers should be inverted, he said; instead, every programmer will be 100 times as productive. His manager agreed: “Yeah, as a manager I would say, like— everybody’s just doing more,” she said. Another engineer told me that solving huge problems still demands collaboration, interrogation, and planning. Vibe coding, he asserted, mostly comes in handy when people are rapidly prototyping new features.
These engineers seemed reasonably assured that humans will remain in the loop, even as they drew caricatures of the future coder (“100 times as productive”). I tend to believe this, too, and that people with incredibly specialized skills or subject-matter expertise will still be in demand in a lot of workplaces. I want it to be true, anyway.
A very interesting read. Over the past several months, I have been reading a lot about LLMs and coding, particularly pieces by experienced coders who have switched to using LLMs to code. There is a lot of silly (and perhaps dangerous) hype around AI, but over the past several months, LLMs and supporting tools have gotten unnaturally good at programming, when directed properly. Here are some of the things I’ve read recently in case you’re curious about what’s possible now:
- My LLM codegen workflow atm
- Waterfall in 15 Minutes or Your Money Back
- An LLM Codegen Hero’s Journey
- Basic Claude Code
- How I Use Claude Code
- Amp Is Now Available. Here Is How I Use It.
- Claude Code is My Computer
- Claude Code Experience
- Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs
- As an Experienced LLM User, I Actually Don’t Use Generative LLMs Often
- AI Changes Everything
- Agentic Coding Recommendations
- Become an AI-augmented engineer
- Using the plan/execute cycle with agentic LLMs
- Baby steps into semi-automatic coding
- Vibe Coding and The Illusion of Progress
I’m curious to know if any experienced (or inexperienced) coders among you have tried any of the recent suite of AI-assisted coding tools and what your experience has been. (Your general thoughts about AI — particularly its potential downsides, which have been amply documented elsewhere — are best left for some other time & place. Thx.)
I love stats like this: LeBron James has played against 35% of all of the players that have ever played in the NBA. I’m curious if there’s an older player who played with James in 2003 and how much of NBA history the two of them collectively span.
I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did.
I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.
Fantastic. If you enjoyed the Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement video, you will probably like this one:
Wanting to get the most out of my new machine, I wanted to look into purchasing what’s called a drag knife. It’s a tool that would go in where the bit is that would allow you to create very precise cuts on things like paper or film. And after realizing I’d have to pay over $150 for one of these things, I thought, maybe I could make one. So that’s what I did. For me, one of the most satisfying things is using a machine to make more tools or features for that machine.
I’m not saying I want to buy myself a CNC machine, but I’m not not saying it either. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
Lauren Groff: “In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I’d become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji.”
NIN’s Closer & the Ghostbusters Theme, Together at Last!
William Maranci took Nine Inch Nails’ Closer and mashed it up with Ray Parker Jr’s theme song to Ghostbusters and it’s maybe a little bit genius and a little bit cursed? Like one commenter says, it’s “the musical equivalent of cats and dogs living together”.
See also Eminem’s Lose Yourself mashed up with ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky.
This is cool: Internet-in-a-Box. “Up to 32 users who are within about 100m of the hotspot can connect to the device and access or download the content that exists on the device: Wikipedia slices, medical knowledge, videos, and books.”
An incomplete list of things Jane Austen disliked, including “people who pretend to like music too much” and “practical marriages”. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”
How NASA’s Juno probe changed everything we know about Jupiter. And also: “Juno may be a scientific mission, but it also revealed Jupiter as a living van Gogh painting hanging in the sky.”
Yoyo Elevated to Performance Art
As an occasional yoyo-er, I’ve watched a fair amount of yoyo routines, but this championship-winning routine by 8-time world champ Hajime Miura is the best one I’ve ever seen. Miura’s routine falls somewhere on the spectrum between magical illusion & performance art; even the music is perfect. The result is mesmerizing. (via the kid should see this)
Gutted: How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies (ProPublica). “Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.”
David Garry accidentally bought over 10K Greg Briley baseball cards. “The cards were all perfect. The overall impression was as if someone in 1989 had a hazy vision that someone on the 1989 Mariners was going to be an all-time great.”
Notes from a Burner Phone 101 workshop. Participants learned about “phone-related risk modeling, privacy-protective smartphone practices, the full spectrum of burner phone options, and when to leave phones behind entirely”.
“You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and soldiers from the National Guard.”
Refusing to Choose Is a Choice
I recently found this quote on social media and quite liked the sentiment:
You can say “all are welcome,” but if wolves and sheep are both welcome then you’re only going to get wolves. The smart sheep will go somewhere else and the naive sheep will be eaten and processed. If you welcome Islamophobes and Muslims then you’ll get Islamophobes. If you welcome Klan members and people of color then you’ll get Klan members. If you welcome nativists and immigrants you’ll get nativists.
Refusing to choose is a choice. It’s a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.
The quote didn’t have a source but was attributed to someone named Adam Bates. With the sorry state of Google and glut of people sharing it out of context, it took me a little while to track down the original quote on Facebook; it’s part of a longer post denouncing anti-LGBTQ+ & anti-immigrant sentiments within the libertarian movement.
See also Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance:
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway:
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naive version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
And how not to become a Nazi bar:
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
“you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
(via @tressiemcphd)
I’m sorry, what? Platypus locate prey through electro receptors in their bills which detect “tiny electrical currents emitted from muscle contractions from their prey (like a heartbeat)”. Wow!
Joe Caroff, Who Gave James Bond His Signature 007 Logo, Dies at 103. He was paid $300 for the Bond logo.
Getting Back to Yourself
Writer & designer Frank Chimero took the summer off (“I quit my job at an opportune moment and called it a sabbatical”) and wrote a short post about the experience:
The summer is now mostly spent, and I am writing to say: not much has happened. I swept away the everyday to make space for the profound, and my days refilled with everyday things. No a-has, no takeaways, no transformation, no strong convictions about the future of technology, design, or Frank. But also: no crises, no existential dread (at least about myself), and very few reservations about quitting as the right choice. I am more spacious inside and enjoying a refreshed ability to attend to the things in front of me. Most people call this a vacation, I guess.
I never really wrote about the seven-month sabbatical I took three years ago because, as Chimero notes, not much happened. Or perhaps more accurately, the changes that took place didn’t reveal themselves or manifest for months (or even years) afterwards. As I wrote after being back to work for a year:
I still haven’t written too much about what I did and didn’t do during my time away — I thought I would but found I didn’t have a whole lot to say about it. The truth is I’m still in the process of, uh, processing it. But it’s clear to me that the extended time off was an incredible gift that has revitalized me — I’m really enjoying my work here and have great plans for the future that I can’t wait to get going on.
While I can tell you with absolute certainty that my sabbatical was transformative, pinpointing the critical things I did or didn’t do during my time off is still difficult. All I can say is: if you feel like you need one and have the opportunity, take a sabbatical. Just don’t expect your life to change that quickly because of it.
Fun & simple little browser game: Dodge This. “Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?” My high score so far is 76.6 seconds.
The newly launched Eclipse Atlas website contains “over 2,000 historic and modern eclipse maps dating from 1654 to the present” as well as maps & guides for future eclipses. (The 8/2/27 eclipse will last for 6m23s near Luxor in Egypt!)
The Covid Vaccine Situation for the Fall Is a Complete Mess
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina (aka Your Local Epidemiologist) has a frustrating update on how Covid vaccines are probably going to work this fall under the ideologically corrupt Trump regime.
The FDA is expected to license the Covid-19 vaccine. Word is that the label will be restricted to adults 65+ and people at high risk.
The Vaccine Integrity Project and professional organizations likely won’t align with RFK Jr.’s FDA license, which will cause confusion.
If you’re younger than 65 and don’t have a chronic condition, could you still get it after the label change?
Yes, but it will be complicated. While a provider could prescribe it off-label, in practice, it’s likely that most people won’t be able to access it that way.
Jetelina continues:
If you’re under 65 and not high risk, the window to get a Covid-19 vaccine is right now — before the FDA label changes. Once it happens, access will be limited immediately (if it isn’t already). CVS is no longer booking appointments. As far as we know, Walgreens and local pharmacies still are.
That was as of Monday — no idea if that’s still the case. And of course, because this is the United States, insurance will probably be a mess too:
Recommendations from these two organizations are really important for insurers. The hope is they see them and cover all vaccines, regardless of what RFK does. It also provides extra information to physicians who will prescribe off-label if RFK Jr’s FDA changes the label (as expected) this Friday.
We will not know if any of these recommendations affect insurance coverage until insurance companies confirm coverage.
[insert a lot of profanity here; seriously, this makes me so incandescently mad that if I wrote anything more it would contain every fucking swear word I know and then some]
Sources: Aug 18 thread on Bluesky, Aug 20 thread on Bluesky, Aug 18 newsletter.
What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom. “Was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? […] At the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.”
The World Is Burning, But Want to Meet Up for Thirty-Four-Dollar Cocktails? “Nothing makes me want to drink a fancy aesthetic cocktail more than what’s happening right now.”
Slow Start to the Week
Hey folks. I’m dropping my son off at college today1 so the site is going to be a little slow until I get back midweek. In the meantime, you can check out some of the great sites on the KDO Rolodex on the front page of the site (scroll down some), and I’ll see you back here sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. 👋
- What?! I know! College already. I’m so excited for him but also just wondering how this happened so fast.↩
“Venus Williams is making history in her return to the U.S. Open later this month as the oldest singles player to take the court in more than 40 years.” Go Venus!
Max Cooper, Repetition
This music video, directed by Kevin McGloughlin for Max Cooper’s song Repetition, features remixed fractal-like forms from the constructed world (roads, skyscrapers, wind turbines, etc.) interspersed with scenes from nature. Totally mesmerizing. (You’ve got a give it a minute to get going though, especially if you’re not a fan of gradual repetitive music. I was in a trance by the end. 😵💫)
Kieran Healy recently became a US citizen. “I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen.”
Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement
Giles Clement tends to go a little overboard with his hobbies. During the pandemic, he taught himself to repair old watches and then decided to try building one himself. Taylor Scott Mason made a short documentary about Clement and his effort to build a watch from scratch in his basement:
Aside from the movement, Clement builds every component of his watches completely from scratch. He even constructed two of his milling machines and designed the typeface for the numbers on the watch face.
My shop is built around two 3 axis CNC machines which I built from scrap steel, surplus parts and a bunch of cussin. The larger of the two has an epoxy granite frame which gives a sturdy platform for cutting titanium and stainless cases, case backs and crowns. The smaller machine sports a 100k RPM spindle and the ability to cut extremely fine details needed for the hands and dials.
I’ve also built a pad printing machine for dials a polishing lathe, a lume injector for hand and dial applications and several drawers full of jigs and fixtures needed to manufacture parts.
You can read more about Clement’s process on his website and buy one of his watches from his online shop. Prices start at $2250.
Michael Chabon on the time he tried to get hired to write the script for a Fantastic Four movie (in 1995). “What are you doing here? I mean, you’re, like, a serious writer.”
Generous Media
In the latest issue of his monthly newsletter, Robin Sloan shared a quick reflection on why the Criterion closet interviews are so effective, entertaining, and worth participating in for celebrities (emphasis mine):
Let’s think about the format that is the Criterion closet:
1. Makes people look smarter, rather than dumber;
2. invites them to praise other artists, other work; and
3. demonstrates the way in which praise is reflected back upon the giver, a positive-sum game, with no limit to the size of the pie.
His observation immediately reminded me of how Sloan — and many other of my favorite curators/writers/bloggers/link sharers — writes his newsletters & blogs posts. That kind of generosity, in some ways a result of the connective nature of hypertextual media, is a big part of what first attracted me to the open & personal web and keeps me engaged ~30 years later. And as someone who tries to adhere to #2 as much as possible these days, I can tell you that praising the work of others is great for one’s soul.
What other examples of generous media can you think of?
From the inbox: “ldial is a website for listening to a curated list of community radio stations from across the US. I took efforts to make it super fast. To me, the random button feels like magic.”
“If you want to fight for what’s right in this moment, and forge politics that exist in opposition to what Trump represents, you must protect anyone chased by the fascists.”
Radiohead: Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009)
Radiohead dropped a surprise album yesterday, a live album of songs from Hail to the Thief. You can find the album on various streaming platforms, including Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. The band’s lead singer Thom Yorke says of the album:
In the process of thinking how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail to the Thief theatre production I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs.
I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played and it really helped me find a way forward.
For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways…
Anyway we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job.
It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.
Radiohead is great live — they should rerelease live versions their whole discography. I’m listening to this right now, thinking about a friend who is no longer with us; they would have loved this album.
“Competitive authoritarianism [can be seen as] a prevalent form of government throughout American history — one which we have only tentatively started to move away from in recent decades.” Interesting historical context.
On the disorienting thrill & agony of picking up a new sport (or relearning an old one) in midlife. “Falling as an adult means calling friends and family to tell them ‘I had a fall.’”
The Red Onion Font
The latest post from The Pudding starts off about as good as possible to attract the likes of me: “This is a project about onions and math.” I mean, yes. I’m in. And I enjoyed the interactive article, Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way, but the design was absolutely delightful and onion-y:
They even used an onion gradient for the border of the page. This must have been so fun to work on! Initially, I thought they’d designed the onion font, but a quick search turned up Handmadefont’s OnioType Font:
From the description, it sounds like the letterforms are made from real onions:
Each letter is lovingly crafted from a perfectly sliced red onion, where nature’s concentric rings do most of the design heavy-lifting. Vivid purples, tender whites, and sudden flashes of yellow form shapes so unexpectedly elegant, you’ll never look at a salad the same way again.
But I dunno…Photoshop might be a better guess. Still! I love this font and kudos to The Pudding for putting it to good use.
The Colors of the World, Seen From the International Space Station. “Recent photographs from crew members aboard the ISS show some spectacular views of auroras, moonsets, the Milky Way, and more, seen from from their vantage point in orbit.”
Silicon Doodles & Microchip Art
Back in the earlier days of microchips, the designers would sometimes add tiny images to the chips, for fun. From NPR:
Many of the doodles came from engineers who weren’t doing it for an audience.
“We did it for ourselves,” said Willy McAllister, a retired electrical engineer who worked for more than a decade at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and helped craft a chip with the sleek image of a cheetah on it. “Nobody ever expected it to be cracked open 10 years later and marveled at. That was never the point.”
The cheetah was picked as a visual representation for an HP project code named after the world’s fastest land animal.
And from a recent NY Times story:
“They were the maverick days, like the early days of flying,” Mr. John said. “At that time, it could do no harm to the chip, so it was purely creative expression.”
Mr. John tried, with mixed results, to recreate a yacht from the period’s Old Spice advertisements. Another colleague who was thin drew elaborate muscles. The doodles were drawn with a chip design tool.
The most important reason behind the covert graffiti, Mr. John added, was for the doodles to say: “I’m signing my name on this chip, so it’s got to mean something.”
You can find many more microchip doodles at Silicon Zoo.
Dictators love a crisis. “For reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”
The Story of the Chinese Farmer
In a talk about Taoism called Swimming Headless, Alan Watts shared with his audience the parable of the Chinese farmer.
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. Ran away. And all the neighbors came ‘round that evening and said, “that’s too bad.”
And he said, “maybe.”
The next day, the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came around and said, “that’s great, isn’t it?”
And he said, “maybe.”
The point, according to Watts’ interpretation of Lao Tzu’s teachings, is “to try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage”.
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune. Or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
I read the Tao Te Ching in an English class in college, and I remember not getting it. It was a small class, only six students, and none of us white midwestern kids had ever read any Eastern philosophy before and didn’t really understand it, to the professor’s frustration. I wish I could take that class again; I’d get so much more out of it now. (via @sausaw)
“Today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order. It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities.”
The ‘What It’s Like To Be…’ podcast features interviews with people about their jobs (recently: a deli owner, a harbor pilot, a hospice nurse, and a brain surgeon). The host told me it’s “Studs Terkel meets Ted Lasso”.
A forthcoming book from long-time technology writer David Pogue: Apple: The First 50 Years. “Deeply researched & lavishly illustrated, Apple: The First 50 Years includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak…”
A 90-minute video of making a batch of woodblock prints “from blank paper to finished print” from the printer’s POV. Relaxing & ASMR-adjacent.
“‘This Show Felt Like It Was Falling Out of Me’. Six female artists on how they prepared for their major solo debuts this fall.”
I love that The Kid Should See This has dozens of videos about poop, including a recent one about why poop is brown.
At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers. Sara Burnett took a free diving intro course and a year later she competed in a world championship for the US team. “Why am I doing an extreme sport at this age?”
If you’re still back-to-school (or racing-the-tariffs) shopping, these M4 Macbook Airs are somehow still on sale. “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer.”
Car and plane travel from Canada to the US has dropped sharply year-over-year, with a 37% drop in July car trips and 26% drop in air travel. Not sure why they call it a “boycott” — the Trump regime’s outright hostility to outsiders is the cause here.
The Lego Game Boy
Lego is coming out with a near 1:1 replica of Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld video game system. It’s not playable, but you can insert & remove Lego game cartridges and use different lenticular screens to pretend. Here’s a short video showing how it “works”:
You can preorder the kit from Amazon; the price is $60, which is only $30 less than the actual Game Boy cost when it was released.1
I still have my original Game Boy from 1989 — it’s sitting on a table near where I’m typing this. I played so so much Tetris on that thing… (via moss & fog)
- Although $90 in 1989 is $235 in 2025 dollars, which is right around what the Playdate handheld costs.↩
A Man Read 3,599 Books Over 60 Years, and Now His Family Has Shared the Entire List Online. That’s roughly a book a week. The list runs over 100 pages and he checked most of the books out of the local library.
The Boston Globe’s Prescient 2016 View of Our Trumpist Future
On April 9, 2016, several months before Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, the Boston Globe ran an editorial entitled “The GOP must stop Donald Trump”.
Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.
It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.
It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.
As part of the editorial, they imagined a Globe front page one year into a future Trump presidency:
Some of the headlines read “Deportations to Begin: President Trump calls for tripling of ICE force; riots continue” and “Markets sink as trade war looms”. They may have gotten the timeline and some of the details wrong, but many of the Globe’s fake headlines now read as tame.
In his second term, Trump has removed any pretense of governing and is full steam ahead on indulging his bigotry, filling his coffers, playing Big Boy Diplomat, and replacing the American system of democracy with a conservative authoritarian government. And as the editorial notes, all you had to do to predict it was to take Trump at his word. (via @epicciuto.bsky.social)
Wplace Is Exploding Online Amid a New Era of Youth Protest. “Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.”
The Iron Chef Opening Theme Was Composed by Hans Zimmer?
Today I learned that the opening theme song for the original Iron Chef TV program was adapted from a song composed by Hans Zimmer, who has done scores for films like Interstellar, Dune, Blade Runner: 2049, Inception, and Dunkirk. Perhaps even weirder, the name of the theme song is “Show Me Your Firetruck”. (The song is from Zimmer’s score for the movie Backdraft.)
Vote for the 2025 Tiny Awards Site of the Year! This looks like a fantastic group of nominees that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”.
This website is for humans. “I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them.”
Reddit will block the Internet Archive. “The company says that AI companies have scraped data from the Wayback Machine, so it’s going to limit what the Wayback Machine can access.” AI scraping will kill the open web — everyone’s shutting the gates.
Roll On, You Crazy Tire!
The team at Tuk South visited one of the tallest sand dunes in Chile and did the obvious: threw a tire down it and followed it with a drone to see how long it would roll. The answer: almost three minutes. Take a break from whatever shit you might be dealing with at the moment, set your troubles aside, and watch this simple story of tenacity and gravity.
And yes, they went to retrieve the tire after it stopped: “Fear not. We collected the tyre. Leave only tuk tuk tyre tracks, take only memories.”
(I would like to see a Nolan cut of this, where it’s ambiguous if the tire stops at the end or not, like Cobb’s totem at the end of Inception.)
Welcome to the Era of Big Stupid in America. “When you make smart and ambitious young people feel unwelcome in America and give them no indication that they’ll have a job in this country at all…they may eventually decide not to come here.”
I Spent 6 Years Building a Ridiculous Wooden Pixel Display. “I built the world’s most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it.”
The Lord of the Rings Audiobook Is Fantastic
Just the other day, I learned that Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in the LoTR movies, did an unabridged audiobook version of the original trilogy, as well as one of The Hobbit:
The Hobbit (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible)
The Fellowship of the Ring (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible)
The Two Towers (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible)
The Return of the King (Libro.fm, Amazon, Audible)
I’ve listened to about three hours of Fellowship so far; it’s very good. Serkis is an exceptional voice actor who doesn’t so much narrate as perform the book. The whole trilogy clocks in at around 65 hours1 but I’m immersed already so it can go on as long as it wants for all I care.
And if you’re super hardcore, there’s also a Serkis-narrated version of The Silmarillion that clocks in at more than 19 hours. That is a lot of Middle Earth.
- 75 hours if you include The Hobbit. You can shorten your listening time if you skip over the singing like I’ve been doing.↩
Scientists have found a “robust” candidate for a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, the Sun-like star closest to our solar system. “Not only that, but it orbits the star in its habitable zone, meaning the temperature isn’t too hot or too cold…”
Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About — I Did NOT Use AI to Write My Wedding Vows. “Do you remember when we moved in together and spent that whole first weekend building furniture? This is an example of an anecdote you could include.”
In a preseason game yesterday, Jacksonville Jaguars kicker Cam Little nailed a 70-yard field goal. The official NFL record is 66 yards.
Smokey Bear Through the Years
This is a fun new website featuring 80+ years of artifacts & memorabilia related to Smokey Bear, the famous spokesbear for the US Forest Service.
In 1944, the USDA Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, and Ad Council launched the first poster featuring Smokey Bear, asking Americans to recognize their personal responsibility in preventing unwanted wildfires.
Over eight decades, Smokey and his tagline, “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires,” have become a pillar in the protection of our nation’s wildlands and an American icon. He’s thrown out first pitches at baseball games, met presidents, been to space, and become a part of our lives and homes on games, hats, toys, and apparel.
During the course of writing this post, I visited Wikipedia and found out that there was an actual bear named Smokey:
The living symbol of Smokey Bear was a five-pound, three-month-old American black bear cub who was found in the spring of 1950 after the Capitan Gap fire, a wildfire that burned in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico. Smokey had climbed a tree to escape the blaze, yet his paws and hind legs had been burned.
At first he was called Hotfoot Teddy, but he was later renamed Smokey, after the character created a few years prior.
This Smokey lived at the National Zoo in Washington DC, where he had his own zip code for the massive amounts of mail he got, died in 1976, and had obituaries published in many newspapers, including the Washington Post, the WSJ, and the NY Times.
Karen Attiah: I Gained 20 Pounds of Muscle. Here’s What I Learned. “Weightlifting embodies a form of female expression that society is not quite ready for: physical power that we define on our own terms.”
“You cannot keep your soul intact while building the Torment Nexus. The Torment Nexus is, by definition, a machine that brings torment onto others. It destroys souls. And a soul cannot take a soul and remain whole.”
American neo-Nazis love the Trump era. “[Trump] awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”
Israel’s right-wing government has murdered five Al Jazeera journalists in a deliberate attack targeting front-line journalist Anas al-Sharif.
Great new t-shirt for Gracie’s Ice Cream features a Jaws-shaped cone about to chomp a cherry.
“James Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 who helped turn a failed moon mission into a triumph of on-the-fly can-do engineering, has died. He was 97.”
The Danish post office will stop delivering mail (but not parcels) at the end of 2025. “Letter volumes have decreased by over 90 percent since 2000”. But over 100 million letters were delivered in 2024…that’s still a tremendous number.
“New FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s” but the media disproportionately covers crime, so most Americans aren’t aware of the decrease.
Why wildlife crossings and crucial for animals and humans: they embiggen habitats and greatly reduce vehicle-animal collisions.
From the Phonograph podcast, a look at the early days of 99% Invisible (as that podcast’s 15th anniversary approaches).
Tractor beams exist in the real world. They use ultrasound to hover and manipulate tiny objects. “It can be thought of as an acoustic hologram. It’s a shape that exists in space but is made of sound.”
Vintage Bike Tricks, Circa 1965
Lilly Yokoi was an acrobat who specialized in performing on a bicycle. During her career, she toured around the world and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show three times. In this performance from 1965, Yokoi does some seriously before-their-time tricks on her Golden Bicycle, including a no-hands handlebar spin, a no-hands wheelie, a handstand over the handlebars, and several other tricks…all in chunky high heels, mind you.
Here’s an even earlier performance, from 1961. See also some bike tricks filmed by Thomas Edison in 1899.
Substack’s extremist ecosystem is flourishing. “The Nazi push alert was only possible because of Substack’s continued commitment to not only hosting but actively promoting authoritarian, Nazi-sympathizing, and other bigoted forms of extremism.”
Emily Wilson’s current project is translating The Odyssey (again). “I am doing a fully revised re-retranslation, to align my Odyssey translation more closely with my Iliad.”
The Bluesky Dictionary is tracking every single word used on the social media service. As of this writing, almost 40% of the dictionary has been covered, including recent additions like “boneshakers”, “microscale”, and “striations”.
There’s a Bend It Like Beckham sequel in the works, says director Gurinder Chadha. “I didn’t want to do anything because I didn’t have a story. And then I came up with a great story, really super-cool story. So now I’m inspired.”
My Recent Media Diet, the Resistance Edition
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these but I’m gonna skip the apologies and get right into it. Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past several months. Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!
Dinosaur. It’s a huge pigeon on the High Line — what else do you need to know? (A-)
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Entertaining and engaging. It’ll make a good TV series. (B+)
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I hadn’t seen this in several years but I still knew all the words. (A-)
My Brilliant Friend (season four). If there’s one thing I’ve watched in the past several years that I wish had gotten more attention from viewers, critics, and awards panels, it’s this wonderful show. (A+)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow might be the most perfectly cast role in the history of cinema. Great story too. This movie surprised me when I saw it in the theater in 2003 and it’s still in the top tier of action/adventure movies. (A)
Andor (season one). A rewatch to prep for season two. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about this show the first time around, but this second viewing was a revelation. Andor is easily the best Star Wars thing since Empire. (A+)
Galleria Borghese. As previously discussed, the Bernini sculptures were a highlight of the summer. (A+)
Caravaggio 2025. Fantastic exhibition. (A)
The vivid blue color of the Mediterranean. (A+)
La Vita è Un Mozzico. We waited for an hour for sandwiches and it was probably worth it? (A)
Black Doves. British spy thriller? Keira Knightley? Ben Whishaw? Twist my arm. (B+)
Captain America: Brave New World. I’m sorry Sam Wilson / Anthony Mackie, there’s a “we have the Avengers at home” vibe here that’s hard to shake. (B)
Music to Refine To: A Remix Companion to Severance. I love this album; one of my favorite things of the past several months. (A+)
Mickey 17. It was fine? I was distracted while watching it in the theater, which is never a good sign. My favorite Bong Joon Ho film is still Snowpiercer. (B)
Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Absolutely fantastic. (A+)
The French Dispatch. This has quietly become a favorite of mine among Anderson’s films. (A)
The Royal Tenenbaums. However, this is still my favorite. (A+)
Paris Is Burning. Classic documentary of a bygone NYC era & a subculture that is now both flourishing and threatened. (A-)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season two). I love these characters, always the sign of a good Trek. The crossover episode with Lower Decks was delightful even though I’ve not watched any of the animated series yet. The musical episode I liked less (not a showtunes guy) but I appreciated the experimentation. Bring on the Muppet episode. (A)
Severance (season two). Perhaps not as good as the first season — there was a lot in the mid-season episodes that didn’t land for me. Still, I always watched when a new episode dropped. (A-)
Army of Shadows. Part of the unplanned resistance film festival I’ve been screening for myself recently. Not quite as good as I remembered it, but it’s nice to watch something that doesn’t just lay everything out on a platter for you so you can emote properly. (A-)
Best in Show. So many lines from this that I use in my daily life. (A-)
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker. This is such a good series with fantastic guests about a legendary book. Who knew that Roman Mars was such a gigglepuss though? (A)
Johnny English. I didn’t find this quite as delightful as my family does. I prefer Mr. Bean. (B+)
Paddington in Peru. Not quite the magic of the first two, but entertaining. (B)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I have likely said this before, but while Raiders is likely the best Indy movie, Last Crusade is my favorite (probably due to Tom Stoppard’s heavy rewrite of the script). (A+)
Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. It’s interesting to watch the original trilogy having seen so many subsequent movies & TV series.
Ocean’s Twelve. The dancing lasers scene is completely ridiculous. (A)
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Well, I wasn’t expecting a critique of AI and the role of technology in society from this animated feature, but maybe I should have? (B+)
A Complete Unknown. Liked this more than I thought I would. (A-)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Just a wonderful book — witty and fun. (A)
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Fantastic book. Listen to the audiobook version if you can — Scott Brick’s narration elevates the story. (A)
A Quiet Place: Day One. I only watched this because I was on a plane. (B)
Severance (season one). After watching the second season, I rewatched season one. There was apparently much I missed the first time around. (A-)
Black Bag. Soderbergh is always worth watching, especially when he dips into Ocean’s Eleven territory — although this was more serious. (A-)
A Minecraft Movie. The first half was tolerable, enjoyable even. And then not so much. (C+)
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Watched this in the theater for the 20th anniversary. There are some good bits in here, but some of the acting really stinks. Folks in the theater cheered when Anakin slaughtered the younglings, which is probably some sort of meme that I don’t want to know about. (B+)
Sinners. I loved this movie. (A+)
Thunderbolts*. Thought I would like this more than I did. (B)
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The last scene is a masterclass in not having the faintest idea how to end a movie. (B+)
Andor (season two). Only a slight dip from season one. Overall, the series was a brilliant look at radicalization, the messiness of rebellion, and the oppressive flatness of authoritarianism. (A+)
There There by Tommy Orange. Devastating. (A-)
The Fear of Never Landing. Good album to chill out to by Marconi Union, who previously brought you the most relaxing song in the world. (A-)
Novocaine. This was bad. (D+)
Glass Onion. More Benoit Blanc mysteries please — I love watching Daniel Craig and his CSI: KFC accent chewing scenery. (A-)
The Gorge. Half of this was great and the other half was just another pseudo-horror action thing. (B-)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Marvelous. (A)
Andor: The Rogue One Arc. This fan edit of Rogue One in the style of a three-episode Andor arc is as Gilroy-esque a cut as you’re ever going to get. (A-)
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. I had been kinda ambivalent about the M:I movies, but Fallout converted me, so now I’m slowly making my way back through the back catalog. (B+)
Via Carota. Best meal I’ve had in a long time. The tagliatelle was better than any pasta dish I had during my trip to Rome — it’s true, don’t @ me! And the roast chicken was perfect. (A+)
V for Vendetta. Underrated. (A-)
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I’m going to tell you the embarrassing truth: I thought this was about actual samurai and perhaps related to the Tom Cruise movie. It is very much not. I gave it a real shot but ended up abandoning it about halfway through. (C)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Still a marvel of animated creativity. (A)
The Phoenician Scheme. Didn’t vibe with this at all. (B-)
Downhill mountain biking. This is giving me so much life right now. (A+)
Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death. Not my favorite W&G but still. (B+)
F1. Like Top Gun: Maverick crossed with Ford v Ferarri but Cruise and Bale played the aging outsider role much better than Pitt. Is Pitt even a good actor or is he just extremely charismatic? (B+)
Superman. I thought it was fine but didn’t like it as much as others seemed to. Better than anything Zach Snyder did for DC though. (B)
Shōgun. Rewatch with my son. Just an incredible show all the way around. (A+)
The Last of Us (season two). This show was always fighting an uphill battle with me — I don’t like zombie media and I dislike characters (Ellie!) who wouldn’t survive/thrive in the situations that they’re in with their personalities & characteristics. And I finally won. (C+)
The Handmaid’s Tale (season six). *sigh* No idea why I started watching (and then finished) this season; I’m a sucker for closure I guess. (C)
Nintendo Switch 2. I bought this to play Kart with my kids and also for a better Fortnite experience. So far, so good. (B+)
Mario Kart World. I haven’t played a ton of this, but it’s good so far. Free roam mode is pretty fun. I’ve gotta write up my Kart wishlist sometime…Nintendo only checked off one or two items in World. (B+)
Sargent and Paris. Caught this on the very last day of the show and hoo boy was it crowded. (A- for the show, C+ for the crowds)
Let God Sort Em Out. Need to listen to this one a few more times but I’m liking it so far. (B+)
Right now, I’m watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three, listening to Deacon King Kong on audiobook (fantastic, a lock for an A+), rewatching Wandavision, and picking at Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane.
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
Potatoes are tomatoes! Ok not exactly, but scientists have worked out that modern potatoes evolved, in part, from an ancient tomato plant. “Dipping fries into ketchup just got a little more mind-bending.”
Jamelle Bouie on the Death of the Fourth American Republic
This is a great piece from Jamelle Bouie on the likely death of the Voting Rights Act and, zooming out, the end of an era in American society that began with the Act’s signing.
Americans pride ourselves, by contrast, on our undivided history under one Constitution — a single, ongoing experiment in self-government. But look closely at American history and you’ll see that this is an illusion of continuity that belies a reality of change, and sometimes radical transformation, over time. There are several American republics and at least two Constitutions, a first and a second founding. Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha argues, by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception” of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a newly open door to the world.
America’s fourth republic was one “built on multiracial pluralism” and it’s under siege by the Trump regime, which wants to return control of America to white men.
It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.
Watchdog Group Downgrades U.S. From Democracy To Whatever Political System Lobsters Have. “There’s just too much scuttling in American politics to call it anything other than a flawed lobster republic.”
The official online copy of the US Constitution is missing some critical parts. “Article I, Section 9 contains some of the most important safeguards in the Constitution, including the Writ of Habeas Corpus…” Nothing to worry about I’m sure!!
Classical Statues Dressed Up As Hipsters
Photographer Léo Caillard makes images of classical statues dressed up as hipsters.
I analyzed more than 100 extremist manifestos: Misogyny was the common thread. “Misogyny now acts as a ‘gateway drug’ to broader extremist ideologies. This is particularly true in digital spaces where hate and grievance are cultivated algorithmically.”
The case for memes as a new form of comics. “Memes — specifically, image macros — represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.”
From restitution to confronting authoritarian regimes, here are five ways museums can be more ethical. This list is from Gareth Harris, author of the book Towards the Ethical Art Museum.
“As a clinical psychologist, I was curious: Could ChatGPT function like a thinking partner? A therapist in miniature? I gave it three months to test the idea. A year later, I’m still using ChatGPT like an interactive journal.”
Matt Webb on copyrighting your faults. “I think part of growing up is taking what it is that people tease you about at school, and figuring out how to make it a superpower.”
mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people. “Two vaccine candidates using mRNA technology elicit a potent immune response against HIV, according to an early-stage clinical trial.” The good news lately re: HIV is incredible. Fund this!
“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines.” This, like many other Trump regime actions, will result in easily avoided deaths.
Molly White: Curate your own newspaper with RSS. “What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper?”
The McDonald’s Quarter Pounder With Cheese Is a Lie. A Delicious Lie.
Some facts about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese:
1. As you can see in the photo above, purportedly taken in 1974, there was originally a Quarter Pounder without cheese, which was scrubbed from the menu at some undetermined point (even though you can still order one sans cheese at the counter).
2. The patty on the Quarter Pounder with Cheese does not weigh a quarter of a pound. It weighs 4.25 oz after it was subtly micro-supersized in 2015.
3. The 4.25 oz is actually the pre-cooked weight anyway. The on-bun weight is more like 3 oz.
4. When I’m traveling a significant distance by car, on a trip that requires stopping for food, my go-to meal is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, fries, and a Coke. Don’t judge.
5. The Quarter Pounder has been discontinued in Japan. No one knows why.
6. In the US, the Quarter Pounder comes with pickles, raw onion, ketchup, and mustard. But in NYC, they omit the mustard. That sound you heard was me slapping my forehead after learning this just now after years of not being able to figure out why my Quarter Pounders sometimes had mustard and sometimes didn’t. (I prefer them without.)
What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones. “This generation of digital natives still longs for what most of their parents had: time with friends, in person, without adults.”
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery. “The math world was taken aback when Cairo announced her counterexample to the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.”
Philip Bump on the results of a recent poll. What Makes an American? Three in 10 Republicans Say: Being White.
The Case of the Terrifyingly Affordable Flashlight
In this video, Maurice Moves highlights a pair of flashlights that are extremely useful & well-designed but also shockingly affordable.
Most people never think about flashlights, but as someone who uses one daily for work, it’s always top of mind, and the tech, value, and products are proof that modern flashlights are absolutely insane and defy logic and manufacturing economics.
The two flashlights he featured are the WUBEN G5 Rechargeable EDC Flashlight ($20) and the Nitecore EDC37 8000 ($140) — the Wuben in particular would be affordable at twice the price given how nicely designed and engineered it is.
I feel like this about Apple’s M4 Macbook Airs; as I wrote last week, “$800 is an absurdly low price for so much computer”.
See also No One Knows How to Make a Pencil. (thx, dunstan)
Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it’s shutting down (due to a lack of continued federal funding). Just catching up from last week and this one fucking stings.
Lonely Avenue
Jon Batiste & Randy Newman team up for a song called Lonely Avenue. This is lovely. (via craig mod)
I’d like to say that I’m a proud member of The Great I Haven’t Economy™ — “owning zero Labubus, consuming zero matchas, having zero dating profiles, eating zero Dubai Chocolates, owning zero Stanley Cups” — but more likely I’m just old.
The Panama Playlists is a collection of the Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists (JD Vance, Pam Bondi, Marc Andreessen, etc). “The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes.”
Cory Doctorow is coming out with a book on enshittification in the fall: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
“If the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.”
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