I really appreciated this thoughtful piece about Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ezra Klein. Andrea Pitzer says “lost” folks like Klein “don’t have a clear idea how this moment fits into history and what it is exactly that they’re doing”.
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Entries for September 2025
12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots. “There are kitchen tables, laptops open amongst the charming chaos of daily life, and desks appropriately equipped with the tools of the job, from laptop stands to ergonomic office chairs.”
This question from Ta-Nehisi Coates in his recent conversation with Ezra Klein re: Charlie Kirk’s death jumped out at me: “But was silence not an option?” Too much attention-seeking and not enough meaning-making by our media & punditry.
The Future Was Then: an Exhibition of Fascist Italian Posters
Speaking of Benito Mussolini and fascism, the excellent Poster House museum in NYC has a new exhibition on for the next few months: The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy. It features “some of the best posters produced during the worst period in modern Italian history”.
In a fascist movement inspired by art, how does the fascist government influence the artists living in its grasp? This exhibition explores how Benito Mussolini’s government created a broad-reaching culture that grew with and into the Futurist movement to claw into advertising, propaganda, and the very heart of the nation he commanded.
That Lubrificanti Fiat poster is incredible. The Future Was Then is on view at Poster House until Feb 22, 2026.
How to actually live like a local. “The thing is, nobody ever actually wants to ‘live like a local’ when they are traveling. Instead, they want to live like a romanticized, idealized version of a local that they have in their head…”
A long profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW. “Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least $1600.”
Mister Rogers Visits Sesame Street (1981)
On May 22, 1981, for the finale of the show’s 12th season, Mister Rogers visited Sesame Street. With apologies to the Avengers, this has to be the greatest crossover event in history.
In the episode, Rogers agrees to judge a race between Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, a character that no one on the show but Big Bird has seen. When BB tells his friends he met Mister Rogers, they don’t believe him, including Mr. Snuffleupagus! Later, BB & MR have a conversation about what’s real and what’s make-believe. Here’s more on the episode from the Neighborhood Archive and the Muppet Wiki.
Mr. Rogers comes to visit Big Bird at his nest. Big Bird wonders if Mr. Rogers is really here, because no one believed him before. Mr. Rogers observes that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and suggests that they both pretend some more. Big Bird imagines a teddy bear riding a race car, and realizes that he can’t touch him — except in his imagination. Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, is real. They both share a hug.
A couple of weeks later, Big Bird visited the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. There’s no good clip of this on YT, but you can see some of the footage here and the full episode on Mister Rogers’ official site.
Big Bird didn’t visit Mr. Rogers directly (in the real world) because of the two shows’ differing views on make-believe:
Caroll Spinney agreed to appear in the episode as Big Bird after some dialogue with Fred Rogers; when Spinney originally received the script for the show he saw it required him to remove the costume and discuss the inner-workings of the Big Bird puppet. Spinney protested, as he didn’t believe in ruining the illusion of Big Bird for the children. Rogers agreed, but only under the stipulation that Big Bird’s appearance was restricted to the fantasy segments of the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe,” as he didn’t believe in perpetuating the deceitful blur of real and pretend to children that occurred when presenting the character as real in the “real world.”
While Sesame Street Unpaved mentions that Rogers understood Spinney’s concern over showing the children how Big Bird works, Spinney said at some of his book signings (promoting his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird) that he and Fred Rogers argued over the phone for roughly twenty minutes over whether or not to have him tell the kids how he performs Big Bird.
And then there’s this, included here because I ran across it on YouTube: Arsenio Hall gifts Fred Rogers a very fly jacket.
New book from Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain): London Falling, “a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.”
Yes, this exactly: “The government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government.”
Huh, the original version of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale is a bit different: “An impudent old woman enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears…”
A Tour of the New David Bowie Archive
A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc.
The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, including 414 costumes and accessories, nearly 150 musical instruments and other sound equipment, designs, props and scenery for concerts, film and theatre. Bowie’s own desk is part of the archive, alongside notebooks, diaries, lyrics, correspondence, fan mail and over 70,000 photographic prints, negatives and transparencies.
The Centre is brought to life with a series of small, curated displays. Highlights include 1970s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto, a film showcasing performances from Bowie’s career, and an installation tracing his impact on popular culture.
Last week, Open Culture linked to this video tour of the Bowie collection by Jessica the Museum Guide:
I imagine it’s not quite like being there in person, but still. (via open culture)
Mussolini: Son Of The Century
Antonio Scurati’s 2018 “documentary novel” M: Son of the Century was a worldwide bestseller about the early political career of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in post-WWI Italy. Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Darkest Hour) has adapted the book into an 8-part TV series called Mussolini: Son Of The Century. Here are a pair of trailers:
One commenter on this YT video says “it’s Cabaret meets Clockwork Orange, meets Metropolis…” I stumbled across this via Carla Sinclair, who writes:
It is, unsurprisingly, violent and gritty, highlighting Benito Mussolini’s rise to power that began in the year 1919, when he founded the National Fascist Party in Italy. But it’s also beautifully shot, with military and fight scenes stunningly choreographed to electronic music by Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers. At times it feels like an intense musical — without the song and dance.
If you’re in the US, you can stream Mussolini: Son Of The Century on Mubi — four of the episodes are available so far and the new ones debut on Wednesdays.
Natalia Newsome is a 5’11” sophomore volleyball player for SMU; she’s got a 40-inch vertical and can touch almost a foot above a regulation basketball hoop. It is bananas how high she rises when spiking the ball.
Bisa Butler, Hold Me Close
Bisa Butler makes quilted portraits and recently debuted a show with some of her newest work called Hold Me Close. From her artist’s statement:
This body of work is a visual response to how I am feeling as an African American woman living in 2025. We lived through COVID and witnessed the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, only to arrive at a time when many of the civil rights I grew up with are being challenged and reversed. Protections and programs for non-white Americans, women, queer people, poor people, and people with disabilities are under attack, and it has left me feeling destabilized. Watching immigrants being hunted, chased down, and kidnapped by masked men horrifies me. The thought of people being gunned down and starved for political agendas is the stuff of nightmares. I’ve been looking for solace and turned to my work like a visual diary.
Colossal has a good gallery of images from the show and Butler did a video tour where you can see how shiny & glittery some of the pieces are:
Hold Me Close is on view from September 13 to November 1, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles.
Ismail Ibrahim worked as a fact checker for an unnamed magazine (it was the New Yorker). “Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.”
In post-Soviet Russia, Sauron is good actually? “It became a story about hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men oppressing the not-so-evil Sauron and his nation of Mordor.”
M. Gessen: This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well. “When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the bipartisan tributes of Charlie Kirk & the mainstreaming of extremist, bigoted speech. “You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he lived, not as he died.”
An asteroid discovered in 2024 has a small chance of hitting the moon in 2032. “Lunar ejecta could increase micrometeoroid debris flux in low Earth orbit up to 1000 times above background levels.” Scientists say we may be able to nuke it.
Taking the Day
Hello fronds and anemones. Tomorrow is my birthday so I am taking today off. I’ll see you back here on Monday.
But before I go: I pushed some changes to how videos work on the site (after a bunch of feedback). The default behavior is now: you click on a video and it plays. If you hold “b” (for lightbox) while clicking, the video will play in a widescreen lightbox. Also, the escape key will now close the video and the lightbox is better about resizing so that the bottom of the videos don’t get cut off (thanks to Christophe for the CSS fix).
I don’t think this is the forever solution (it doesn’t address folks who want to open the videos on YouTube or Vimeo in a new tab), but I wanted to get something out there while I figure out the rest.
For more than a century in the 18th & 19th centuries, an edited version of Romeo & Juliet, with “a 67-line final conversation between Romeo and Juliet”, was more popular than Shakespeare’s original.
A four-year-old mystery finally solved: who was the awkwardly tall stranger at our wedding? “Who was the tall man in a dark suit, distinguished by the look of quiet mortification on his face?” Love the reason he was there.
Engineering Lego Cars to Climb Increasingly Tall Walls
I haven’t gotten my Brick Technology fix in awhile, so here’s a video featuring a series of more and more capable Lego vehicles climbing over taller and taller walls. As I have written before, here’s what makes these videos so compelling:
They’re not even really about Lego…that’s just the playful hook to get you through the door. They’re really about science and engineering — trial and error, repeated failure, iteration, small gains, switching tactics when confronted with dead ends, how innovation can result in significant advantages. Of course, none of this is unique to engineering; these are all factors in any creative endeavor — painting, sports, photography, writing, programming. But the real magic here is seeing it all happen in just a few minutes.
See also their recent video about Lego cars crossing a treadmill bridge. (via the kid should see this)
From Eater, a list of the 38 most essential & influential US restaurants of the past 20 years. The list includes Momofuku Ssäm Bar, Via Carota, Husk, Alinea, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, Mission Chinese Food, and Gjelina.
How to Be a Good Literary Citizen (in Seven Easy Steps). “The most important rule of literary citizenship is to show up. Showing up can mean a number of things: attending events at your local bookstore or library, volunteering…”
The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology. Astronomers may have found a primordial black hole, perhaps formed by quantum fluctuations during post-Big Bang inflation “before any stars had yet appeared”.
Former NBA star Reggie Miller’s neighbors got him hooked on mountain biking. “I was still in basketball shape. And they destroyed me. Being out there on the mountain bike, I was like ‘oh my God this is so fun!’ And that’s what got me hooked.”
The Music of the Everyday
Artist and composer Matthew Wilcock looks for patterns in the everyday and creates music from them. It’s easier to quickly watch an example than to explain:
Instantly thought of the video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. They also seem like the sort of videos you would have found on Mister Rodgers’ or Sesame Street back in the day.
In addition to traffic, Wilcock has made music with people on escalators:
Each escalator and path is assigned three notes and they alternate between those as the person’s head breaks the line. Lowest note closest to camera, highest furtherest away. I love the idea of involving all these people unknowingly in an artwork. Recorded in Liverpool St. station, London.
And a bird eating:
Bees:
You can find more of these video compositions on Wilcock’s YouTube channel and Instagram. He’s most active (and popular) on Insta; check out his Tour de France and swingset videos there. (thx, andy)
Zadie Smith: “In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick, and, when it comes to essay composition, the rectangle is mine.”
The Hummingbird Bike
Gooood lord, just look at this exquisite handmade bike, a collaboration between British design collective Tomato1 and Shinichi Konno of Cherubim.
- Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of the electronic group Underworld are Tomato co-founders. I found my way to this bike after watching Underworld’s recent Boiler Room set.’↩
New issue of Laura Olin’s newsletter, full of good stuff. “I had forgotten that the Statue of Liberty was, upon installation, brown.”
Fantastic essay by Roxane Gay: Civility Is a Fantasy. “Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly. It is a demand for control.”
Steamed Hams but It’s a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film. The classic Simpsons bit but it’s live-action and a My Dinner with Andre parody. So many more where that came from.
Generative Design
I had a lot of fun playing around with this collection of generative design tools, especially the textual ones. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. (via sidebar)
Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades? Why not two? Or five? Or eight? Turns out that three is sort of a Goldilocks sweet spot for blade count due to physics, engineering, and aesthetic reasons.
Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time. “An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients.”
Hybrid ASCII Art
Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That:
Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my computer and browse through hundreds of images in the public domain to find things that catch my attention and feel are worth shining a new light on them,” says Enigmatriz. “When working with ASCII, what I like and find particularly interesting is the blend between hundred old paintings, photographs etc. and modern technologies.” Enigmatriz creates unique contrasts between images — historical paintings are overlaid with spatterings of text, ASCII renders are layered on top of playing cards or archival imagery.
You can find more of their work on Instagram.
Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s launching his new career as an indie writer with a newsletter about “the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America”. Recommended!
Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb.” The technique was used to test the legitimacy of some wines said to belong to Thomas Jefferson.
Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the last 10 days or so, several Times articles have been considerably more straightforward – and honest – about the way Trump lies and spreads division.”
Everyone Was Wrong About Maximum Siphon Height
Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)
In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return from suspension. “I was not happy when they pulled me off the air.”
McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, & Tylenol…they just printed them verbatim and it reads like the most unhinged parody. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace.”
An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another You. “But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.”
Wild Cats, Bored Cats, Sleepy Cats
The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal)
Carbon Dating: Cold War Nukes & Art Forgeries
In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union (with contributions from the UK and France) conducted a series of above-ground nuclear tests that led to an increase in the radioactive carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere. This global surge, known as the “bomb pulse” or the “bomb spike”, is one of the most distinctive chemical signatures of the Cold War. The radiocarbon spread worldwide, embedding into plants, animals, and humans.
Scientists later discovered that this bomb-pulse radiocarbon spike could be used as a precise dating tool. Bomb-pulse dating allows researchers to determine whether biological material formed before or after nuclear testing. This method has been applied to forensic science, medical research, and environmental monitoring. It has been used to identify forgeries in artwork, measure human cell turnover, and estimate the lifespan of Greenland sharks.
One of the most important applications has been in tracking the illegal ivory trade. Elephant tusks absorb atmospheric carbon while the animal is alive. By analyzing the carbon-14 content of ivory artifacts or raw ivory, investigators can determine whether the material comes from a legally antique source or from a recently killed elephant.
This intersection of nuclear history, atmospheric science, and conservation biology demonstrates how Cold War nuclear fallout became a forensic tool for fighting elephant poaching and wildlife trafficking. More broadly, it demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of scientific researchers, who find ingenious uses for datasets of unlikely origin.
Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.”
Didn’t think I was interested in a profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but Sam Anderson can write. “It is a smile that makes you feel as if the sun is setting over an undiscovered tropical beach on which 10,000 baby sea turtles are about to hatch.”
I’m Heading to Japan. What Should I Do?
Hey folks. I’m very excited to be heading to Japan for the first time next month. I’ll be there from mid-October for 3-4 weeks. The current plan is Tokyo, Kamakura, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Koyasan, and perhaps Hiroshima — change my mind? If you’ve been there, please leave your recs in the comments below or drop me an email. If you live there or will be visiting at the same time, let’s meet up!
The photograph above is from Koya Bound by Craig Mod & Dan Rubin. The companion website to the book is great.
The 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years, including Extra Yarn, School’s First Day of School, Julián Is a Mermaid, and Don’t Trust Fish.
Little, Big, and Far
Even after reading a couple of reviews and watching the trailer, it’s difficult to understand what the Austrian film Little, Big, and Far is actually about. So here’s the official synopsis:
Austrian astronomer Karl is at a crossroads in his life and work. He finds his physicist wife growing distant and his job being reshaped by environmental crises as thoughts about science, fascism, and his grandson’s future spin above his head. After attending a conference in Greece, Karl decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a dark enough sky to reconnect with the stars. Abandoned at a remote mountain trail, he ascends and waits for darkness to fall.
This morning’s music selection while working: this 1h23m mix by German DJ/producer Parra for Cuva.
Some advice: “finishing creative projects is a skill in and of itself. if you want to be able to finish large, complex projects, you have to _practice finishing things_. which usually means doing smaller projects.”
The Trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu
Disney dropped the trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu today, a feature-length film that will debut in theaters in May 2026. As this Star Wars Explained breakdown, er, explains, that the trailer was going to come out earlier but:
Word on the street is that it was supposed to come out this past Friday, but Disney was and is in the middle of some hot water. Acting like cowards in the face of authoritarianism will do that, especially when one of the franchises you own {shows footage of Andor} is about the exact opposite.
Last week, Disney made the decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live from the schedule because of threats from the Trump regime, prompting protests. Kimmel returns to the air tomorrow night:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Super Mario Bros. Remastered
Super Mario Bros. Remastered is an open source, fan-created, remastered version of the original Super Mario Bros. The trailer is above.
The game includes new levels, custom modes and characters, a custom level editor, and more. You need the SMB1 NES ROM to play it — “none of the original assets are contained in the source code, unless it was originally made by us!”
You can download versions for Windows, Linux, and MacOS…check out all the options and details on Github.
Lāhainā Noon (aka zero shadow day) occurs twice a year in the tropics when the sun is directly overhead and vertical objects (like flagpoles) cast no shadows.
Call Me Maybe Mashed Up With NIN’s Head Like a Hole
Weird day (fuck, weird week) but this totally totally made it. Some genius took Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe and mashed it up with Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole:
Totesally amazingballs. Way way better than I expected. (via the verge)
It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. “It’s fall, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.”
I’m usually pretty go-with-the-flow as far as OS updates go, but iOS 26 / Liquid Glass is terrible: incoherent, ugly, and difficult to use. Obviously a massive design effort, but they missed the mark IMO.
Physics of Fluids journal article: ‘Phase behavior of Cacio e Pepe sauce’. The authors found the dish entered the “Mozzarella Phase” when starch concentrations (relative to cheese) dropped below 1%, “corresponding to an unpleasant and separated sauce”.
Matt Webb: “Gin & tonic was invented by the East India Company to keep its colonising army safe [from malaria] in India. Bet the covid vaccine would have been more popular if it got you drunk.”
A Brief History of The Flatiron Building
A photo of NYC’s Flatiron Building, taken in 1904 by Edward Steichen.
Fun fact: the Flatiron Building was not so named because of its resemblance to a clothes iron. It was actually named after the building’s owner, Archibald W. Flatiron.
Ok, not really. But *puts on mansplaining suspenders* the part about the building not being named after its resemblance to an iron is true. It was the piece of land that was so-named, long before the building was even built. A man named Amos Eno owned the property and it became known as “Eno’s flatiron”. The canny Eno, knowing his property was conveniently located right next to Madison Square, erected a screen on top of the small building at the very tip of the triangle and made it available for motion picture advertising in the 1870s. From Alice Alexiou’s The Flatiron:
He set up a canvas screen on top of the Erie ticket office roof, and charged the enterprising owners of stereopticons or “magic lanterns” — these were the first slide projectors, invented about twenty years earlier and now extremely popular — to project advertisements upon the screen. Madison Square, just opposite, provided the perfect place for the spectators. To keep them interested, the operator alternated pictures with the ads, all in rapid succession. “Niagara Falls dissolves into a box of celebrated boot blacking, and the celebrated blacking is superseded by a jungle scene, which fades into an extraordinarily cheap suite of furniture,” wrote a reporter in Scribner’s Magazine in August 1880. Sometimes in the Young Men’s Christian Association paid to add their messages — “The blood of Christ cleanses all from sin,” “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shall be saved” — to the mix. On balmy evenings, the slide displays lasted until as late as ten o’clock. Even in cold and nasty weather, the free shows drew crowds. The New York Times began using Eno’s screen for their news bulletins. The experiment drew huge crowds. “All the important events of the day were rapidly displayed in large letters… so that the public was at once informed of the news. From 7 o’clock until midnight the bulletins appeared in quick succession… The latest move in Erie, the Tweed trial, the hotel inspections, the doings of Congress… the messages being transmitted by telegraph from the Times office, as soon as received,” the Times reported on January 14, 1873. The New York Tribune now also began buying time on Eno’s screen. On election nights, Eno’s flatiron was now the nerve center of New York, as Democratic and Republican Party bigwigs held court across the street in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers filled Madison Square, where, staring at the screen, the waited eagerly for election returns.
Not to get all Victorian Internet on you, but that sounds a little like Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat.
Eno was not the first to use such a system to disseminate information. Before baseball games were broadcast on the radio, enterprising business and newspaper owners used information from frequent telegraph messages to display scores from the games in increasingly engaging ways. In Georgia, they even cosplayed games from telegraph intel:
“A novel feature of the report was the actual running of the bases by uniformed boys, who obeyed the telegraph instrument in their moves around the diamond. Great interest prevailed and all enjoyed the report,” read the Atlanta Constitution on April 17, 1886. (And as if that wasn’t enough to entice you, the paper also noted that “A great many ladies were present.”)
Which brings us back to that photo of the Flatiron. Just as the telegraph-assisted baseball game wasn’t “the real thing” or in some sense “authentic”, neither is Steichen’s print. For starters, it’s not the only one. Steichen made three prints from that same shot, one in 1904, another in 1905, and the last in 1909, the one shown above. You’ll notice that each of the prints is a slightly different color…he applied a different pigment suspended in gum bichromate over a platinum print for each one. The 1909 print was time-delayed, a duplicate, and painted on…was it even a proper photograph? Perhaps some in that era didn’t think so, but I believe time has proved that “great interest prevailed and all enjoyed” Steichen’s photographs. *snaps suspenders*
Inside the Top Secret Virgil Abloh Archive. For the first time, a look into the fashion collection of the late Off-White and Louis Vuitton creative director.
“AI developers haven’t figured out a way to train their models not to scheme. That’s because such training could actually teach the model how to scheme even better to avoid being detected.” (The same is true for children.)
Damn Interesting celebrates its 20th birthday. “In 2005, YouTube, reddit, and Facebook were all still wet and screaming infants.”
Gear Brands With a Lifetime Warranty like Darn Tough Vermont, Osprey, Orvis, Patagonia, and Timbuk2.
Crying Glacier
A short documentary with the recorded sounds of a melting glacier.
When you look at this gigantic mass of ice, it’s hard to get a personal relationship to it. So we wanted to document this landscape to give us an idea of what it sounds like inside a glacier. There is also the sadness because you know that all these sounds are disappearing right now. Of course, melting is something natural for glaciers, but the problem is that nothing new is coming back.
A 1965 television interview with a 107-year-old Irish farmer (born in 1858) on all the changes he’s seen during his life. Q: “What would you say was the biggest change?” A: “Well, machinery.”
The 2025 Audubon Photography Awards Emphasize Epic and Endangered Migrations. I love the shot of the acorn woodpecker.
How the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Survived the Death Camps. “I have been gripped by a need to understand more not only about the women in the Auschwitz orchestra…but also what hearing music in this inferno meant to the other prisoners.”
Of Oz the Wizard, an Alphabetized Version of The Wizard of Oz
Of Oz the Wizard is the entire Wizard of Oz movie presented in alphabetical order by dialogue. So it starts with all the scenes where Dorothy and the gang say “a”, “aaiee”, “along”, and proceeds through “you’re” and “zipper”. Even the words on each of the title cards are sorted alphabetically.
(I feel like I’ve posted this before — or something like it — but I can’t find it in the archives. Anyone?)
Update: Ah yes, I was thinking of this alphabetized version of Star Wars (which I’ve seen before but somehow never posted):
Another example is Thomson & Craighead’s The Time Machine. Matt Bucy, the creator of Of Oz the Wizard, seems to have pioneered this technique (the Vimeo page indicates it was completed in April 2004) but didn’t post the video online until a few days ago. (via @Mister_Milligan, @sannahahn)
Gina Trapani writes about taking a sabbatical. “Take afternoon naps. Bigger things like foster a box of 6 kittens, do a 10-day silent retreat, quit coffee, start lifting, train for a triathlon, take vacations to explore…”
This sounds like a cool project: Pocket Fiche is a pocket-sized microscope that comes with a ultra-high resolution, nano-fabricated image. “Think of Pocket Fiche as the Earth bound version of the Voyager golden record.”
Some unusual rocks observed by NASA’s Perseverance rover “could be the clearest signs of life ever found” on Mars.
Some KDO Updates: We’ve Got Ourselves a Stew
Hey folks, I know there’s a lot going on these days, but I wanted to update you on a few things I’ve been doing for the site lately. Alright, looking through my Git commits from the last couple of months:
- I already told you about the Rolodex. Hoping to provide access to the full list at some point.
- Replying to comments is now possible after sorting threads by date or popularity.
- Members can now see the last ~40 posts they have faved on their profile page (when logged in, click on your name in the upper right-hand menu and then “Profile”).
There are a few new gift‑link indicators that I added to the site — for links to sites like Defector, Aftermath, Hellgate, Slate, Medium, Talking Points Memo, in addition to the older ones like the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. When I link to paywalled stuff, I try to post a gift link — here’s how the indicator looks if you’re reading on the site. (RSS readers, live a little and come in from the cold!)
- The video embeds for YouTube and Vimeo now use Lite YouTube Embed and Lite Vimeo Embed, which should decrease load times for those videos and eliminate much of the tracking those companies jam into their embeds.
- I revamped the footnotes so they no longer appear in a pop‑up; they now appear inline in the text and can be toggled on and off. You can try it right here ->1 I really like how it looks/works.
- There are avatars for each commenter in the comment threads. Right now, it’s just a simple, colorful circle with the first initial of the person’s display name. But hopefully in the future you’ll be able to customize it with a photo or whatever. A small first step.
- Most recently, I upgraded the share menu on posts. Previously, clicking the share button just copied the URL to your clipboard. Now you can copy the link, open it in a new window, translate the post (which sends you to Google Translate), and easily share the post on social media (Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads), email, text/SMS/Messages, and WhatsApp.
I’ve been a little busy, I guess. The day-to-day posting has not been consistently sparking joy recently but digging into the guts of the site & making improvements has provided me with the heads-down, flowy focus that I need to stay emotionally and intellectually afloat these days. Thank you to KDO members for supporting this work and keeping the site free to read for all.2
I’d love to know what you think. Criticism and nice words are equally welcome. I’ve heard that some of you dislike the auto-expanding video player — does anyone actually love it as much as I do? I’ve gotten some early feedback that the comment avatars are too big (and I might agree with that).
“Let’s be clear about what just happened: Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent late-night comedian, was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn’t like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up.”
Man pulls off daring scuba heist of Disney paddleboat restaurant, netting $10K-$20K before successfully escaping into the water from whence he came.
The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas. “The fundamental issue with “debate me bro” culture [is] that it creates a false equivalence between good-faith expertise and bad-faith trolling.”
How Agates Form, Why Minnesota Lakes Have So Many, & Where To Look For Them. I was always excited as a kid to go find agates at the lake (typically Lake Superior), but I didn’t know a) how they formed, or b) that you couldn’t find them just anywhere.
Inspired by a question over at Cup of Jo, what are the five things that are essential in your kitchen? Mine lean black & tan: balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, parmesan, olive oil, mayonnaise. (Honorable mention: chili oil.)
Blending In
These are some of my favorite portrait illustrations from Sofia Bonati.
In her art you’ll find female portraits that invite you into a dreamlike world where the woman and her surroundings intertwine, connect. They are women with deep, mysterious looks, who want to tell us something.
I especially like the more geometric ones that radiate. Prints and original works are available in her shop. (via colossal)
The Climate Change Paradox. “Earth’s climate is chaotic and volatile. Climate change is simple and predictable. How can both be true?” Complexity & chaos theory are so interesting.
On the latest wave of AI/LLM tools. “It is a transition from working with a co-intelligence to working with a wizard. Magic gets done, but we don’t always know what to do with the results.”
Smart Tracker Cards
Here’s a thing I didn’t know existed until the other day: credit-card sized trackers that you put into your wallet (or bag) that can be located with Apple Find My. Some come with long-life batteries and others are rechargeable. Some can play a sound when lost. This seems pretty handy for when an AirTag is too bulky.
The first one I stumbled across was this one from Paperwallet but there are also many other options.
“Trump told voters that they could indulge their resentments and still walk away richer and more prosperous. But they can’t. To embrace nativism in a global, connected economic world is to sacrifice prosperity for the sake of exclusion…”
Classic Airlines Apparel
Remember the collection of classic airline logos I linked to a few years ago? The folks at 08 Left have taken some of those old logos and put them on hats, t-shirts, and hoodies.
New from Neal Agarwal: a series of increasingly ridiculous and difficult captchas. I burst out laughing at the vegetables one.
Scandal rocks international stone skipping contest. “The would-be cheaters admitted to the scheme by a show of hands and apologized for their misdeeds after the judges raised their suspicions.” Aww, so wholesome?
“Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century.” Derek Guy: “The 1970s is often written off as the ‘decade that taste forgot.’ But Redford shows how to do it well…”
A Clock: An Online Remake of Christian Marclay’s The Clock
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
A McSweeney’s list that’s not that funny: How to Tell the Difference Between a Lone Wolf and a Coordinated Effort by the Radical Left.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause’. “By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.”
How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived. “‘The goal of climate modeling is really to build a fake version of the Earth,’ a coarse-grained copy of the planet that’s stripped down to ‘the processes we think are relevant.’”
Incredibly Realistic 3D Models of the Moon’s Surface (From 1874!)
A gem of a find by The Public Domain Review of a collection from the Rijksmuseum: photographs of plaster models of the Moon’s surface that were made from observations of the Moon through a telescope.
Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
These are incredible; I love them so much. While Nasmyth’s models were spikier than the Moon’s actual surface, they still look amazingly realistic for something produced in the 1870s. (The 1870s!)
The book from which these were taken also contains this page, where Nasmyth seems to hypothesize that certain mountain ranges on the Moon (and Earth?) are formed by “shrinkage of the globe”:
You win some, you lose some. 🤷♂️
See also Henry Draper’s photographs of the Moon from the 1860s and 1870s.
Photographer Upends His Whole Life to Chase Auroras Around the Arctic. “Prior to moving to Lapland, I had never owned a camera and I almost never took photographs. However, just watching the aurora captured my attention…”
A 16-Hour Video Series on Everything that Happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s
From the Weird History YouTube channel, an epic undertaking: telling the (US-centric) cultural history of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s in just (just!) 16 hours.
This is like a mega ultra monster extended mix of We Didn’t Start the Fire. The videos are organized chronologically, with each year taking 15-30 minutes to summarize, so you can watch small bits here and there instead of having to ingest a whole decade in one go.
Fun logic puzzle game called Clues by Sam. “Your goal is to figure out who is criminal and who is innocent.”
Ok, I think I have to move back to NYC (at least for Sept.) because this Big & Loud series sounds amaaaazing: films like Lawrence of Arabia, Close Encounters, 2001, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Matrix, Fury Road, etc. in 70mm + Dolby Atmos. Wow!
The Evolution of How Rappers Construct Their Rhymes
In this video, Vox’s Estelle Caswell and Martin Conner break down how rappers construct their rhymes and how it’s changed and evolved since rap’s early days. As someone who doesn’t know a whole lot about music and even less about rapping but appreciates both, this was super entertaining and informative.
Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date. “Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted, because of Earth’s wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign.” (I actually wrote about this 26 years ago.)
Reviews of the best mp3 players you can buy in 2025. “MP3 players — or digital audio players, as they should more accurately be called — are seeing a small resurgence…”
Why AI Narrators Will Never Be Able to Tell a Real Human Story. “Narrating audiobooks today is the closest thing to that primal art form. One person, one voice, spinning a tale for another.”
Objects From Films
Artist and poet Marcus Merritt draws objects from films — the TV above is from E.T. and the payphone is from Terminator 2.
I very much dig the spare illustration style here. (via waxy)
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape. “Recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced”; some have USB-C and rechargeable batteries.
Dataguessr. “This game is inspired by the work of Gapminder and Our World in Data. It uses data to give you a better understanding of the state of the world.”
TypePad is closing down at the end of the month and Phil Gyford has shared the process for downloading a TypePad blog (so that you can turn it into “a pretty self-contained ‘static HTML’ site”).
Coulou’s Vinyl Cafe (No. 1)
This is not some AI-generated to-study-to jazz video; it’s a guy who really likes jazz playing a bunch of records from his extensive collection.
over the years i’ve built a small but reallllly incredible and meaningful record collection, spanning from jazz, classical, a great folk collection from my dad, hip hop, house music, and random other things. record stores have been a sort of library for me, a place where i can find artifacts. there in sooo much real living history in a record.
most of vinyls i’ve collected are originals too and it’s just such a cool experience. for so many of the records i have they were originally recorded in a studio or live, mixed on a mixing console and put onto tape. then from the tape recording the vibrations were etched into the wax of the vinyl. how cool is that?
there’s a certain sense of bringing back to life i feel when i put a record on, these preserved etches of a song reawakening. it’s really beautiful.
i had an absolutely balll making this and i cant wait to make many more. i truly hope you find some songs that you love in here, so many of these are real favorites of mine.
If you enjoyed that, you might like this other YouTube channel that I posted about recently. (via undermanager)
Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps. “‘Before I die in that old people’s home, I would rather go to a meadow and enter eternity that way,’ said Sister Bernadette.” (Someone get a screenplay going on this…)
Karen Attiah: “The Washington Post Fired Me”
Former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah this morning on Bluesky: “I’ve been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.” Until the Post’s relatively recent shift towards the right, Attiah had been a pivotal figure at the paper:
I am perhaps most proud of starting Washington Post’s Global Opinions section.
As its founding editor, I helped build a journalistic home for diverse writers from around the world, many of them censored for their views in their countries.
I hired Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2017, and worked with him closely until he was murdered by the Saudi regime in Istanbul — simply for expressing himself.
I put my safety on the line for years to push publicly for justice and accountability in his murder.
But now, she’s one of the dozens of people who have been fired or forced to resign over their comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder:
Now I am being silenced by the Washington Post for — *checks notes*
Lamenting America’s acceptance of apathy towards political violence and gun deaths — especially when the violence is encouraged and carried out by white men.
You can read what was so objectionable to the Post in Attiah’s newsletter, e.g.:
I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe “political violence has no place in this country”.
But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence.
Not just accepts, but worships violence.
She made only one direct reference to Kirk, quoting his own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”.
-Charlie Kirk
For this, the Post fired her:
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation.
I’m very glad we’ve put this cancel culture business behind us and that we once again have free speech. 🇺🇸
Radical Neighbouring. “The food from this place has been offered as a gift to the neighbours and strangers who find their way here. Welcome to the farm where nothing is for sale.”
How to Navigate a City Without Street Addresses
Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead, people use landmarks as reference points when giving directions. Here’s a postal worker talking about how some senders use outdated location markers to send letters:
Pretty bad, addresses here are pretty bad. For example, there is a letter I get, like, once a month. It says, “From the old Cristal Hotel…” and then some other reference points. So, yeah, it’s hard because people don’t update the addresses, they just write “from the old…” and it stays “from the old…” The Cristal Hotel had already closed when I was born.
However, for many residents there’s a kind of poetry in this old style of wayfinding. A lovely and thoughtful short film.
How Albert Einstein Used His Fame to Denounce American Racism. “As a target of anti-Semitism…the Jewish scientist was well aware of the harm that discrimination inflicts, and sought to use his platform to speak out against the mistreatment of others.”
David Friedman on how he created a fun little game called Doomscroll. “I’m not a coder, but I enjoy how vibe coding lets me turn an idea into something real. So naturally, I turned to vibe coding for this. It didn’t work.”
The Hive Architect: Saving Britain’s Wild Bees
The Hive Architect is a short documentary about honey bee conservationist Matt Somerville and the log hives he builds to house wild bees.
There is a widely held theory that our British honey bee couldn’t exist without being domesticated by beekeepers. However, for bee conservationists like Matt Somerville, this theory is ludicrous.
He has spent decades admiring free-living honey bees nesting in tree cavities and they are under increasing threats from commercial beekeeping, loss of habitat and other violences of the modern world.
So Matt decided to do something about it. For the last 14 years he has spent the winters creating his log hives before driving around all of England in the summer, erecting them as minimal intervention homes for wild honey bees.
This YouTube channel has a bunch of 40-60 minute DJ mixes of jazz vinyl. The videos have names like “Jazz Kissa”, “Velvet Night”, “Elegant Morning”, and “Breezy Noon”.
Enjoyed these thoughts from food critics about what they’d like to see more of (“simple foods broken down and made perfect”) and less of (“caviar, truffles, Wagyu and uni in the wrong places”) in restaurants.
Rogue Rattlesnake Removed from Grand Isle. This is such a Vermont story — the woman who found the snake “sat for 30 minutes, until these rangers arrived, doing my loving-kindness meditation, trying to just send peace to this snake”.
I Planted a Forest Four Years Ago
Four years ago, Beau Miles planted 1440 trees in 24 hours. Recently, he went back to see how they were doing; those trees are a bonafide forest now.
In 2021 I planted a tree a minute, for 24 hours, on my mates farm. It was freakin hard work, but also one of the coolest, most rewarding days I’ve ever had. I made a film about the project and promised folks I’d return every two years to show off the plot and see how the trees and bushes are going. This was a special day because I really felt like the project had landed. I had a cup of tea in the new forest, from water boiled on a fire made from the forest itself. It’s perhaps the most profound cup of tea I’ve ever had.
Confession: I spent half of this video concerned that Miles had actually cut down one of the trees to build his tea-making fire, but I needn’t have worried: he used the old planting stakes and trees that didn’t grow.
Miles recently made another video about planting trees and the number of views that video got in a month would dictate how many trees he would plant for the next bit of forest.
Watching the highlights of the recent GeoGuessr world championships is wild; competitors nailing the exact coordinates of Street View locations in a matter of 30-60 seconds is just bonkers.
Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2025
I needed some new bouncy/chill music today and Tycho’s sunrise DJ set from this year’s Burning Man is doing the trick. I also ran across this playlist with 190 DJ sets from Burning Man this year containing 305 hours of music.
(via @mikeakers.bsky.social)
A new book from photographer Sally Mann: Art Work: On the Creative Life. I really enjoyed Mann’s previous book, Hold Still.
The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee
Dan Sinker recently visited an arcade full of old school vintage arcade games and documented some of the wonderful typography and design of the game cabinet marquees.
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
I’ve been to Funspot in New Hampshire a few times and it’s so fun to walk around and marvel at all of the 70s, 80s, and 90s graphic design — to see what the past thought the future was going to look like.
Defector is celebrating its fifth anniversary. “This is a website run by people who want to speak — plainly, honestly, passionately — to an audience that we acknowledge as people rather than metrics.” 🎉
Aubrey Hirsch is an eternal optimist. In her latest comic, she writes/draws about “freaking the hell out” about the current political situation and the limits of optimism.
You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why.
Here’s a short video by Arthur Brooks (that you are probably watching on your phone) about why you should log off, put your phone down, and let yourself be bored.
You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.
See also In Praise of Boredom, In Defense of Boredom, and “Boredom: the great engine of creativity”.
“A growing number of scientists believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may instead be subtly altering our immune systems.” Is Covid-19 to blame for “the global surge in non-covid infections”?
Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
I haven’t watched it yet, but I have seen so many recommendations for this gonzo birdwatching documentary called Listers over the past few days that I wanted to share it with you.
Two brothers travel across the United States in a used minivan on a mission to find as many bird species as they can in a single year.
Yeah, not your typical birdwatching fare…the vibe of the brothers’ quest is more like a surf or skate video. Here’s the trailer:
And the whole 2-hour movie is available on YouTube as well:
I’ve hoping to make some time to watch it this weekend; it looks great. The two brothers have also released a companion book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States.
An interview with Rebecca Solnit. “It feels like part of this horrible new culture where you can have any truth you want — as if history began and ended yesterday. Everything’s infinitely revisable, and there’s no accountability.”
Colorful Surf
Todd Weaver uses analog & in-camera experimental techniques to achieve subtly geometric and colorful surfing photographs. Of one of his photos, Weaver says:
This one was taken on my half-frame camera at my favourite place to surf, First Point in Malibu. The colour is a one of a kind. I don’t think I could repeat it in a thousand tries. The stripe is an artefact of my pre-exposing process.
You can find more of Weaver’s work on his website and Instagram. If you like these surf photos, you might be interested in getting a copy of Dream Weaver Journal Volume 2.
Without looking it up, what’s the longest single-syllable English word you can think of? (Here are the answers.)
This is what could happen to a child who doesn’t get vaccinated. “Pneumonia struck first. Then tonsillitis spiraled into sepsis. Malaria battered him next, and after treatment, the other illnesses flared back up again.”
Drunk Jeff Goldblum
One of my favorite “memes” of all time is Drunk Jeff Goldblum. The first video, a slowed-down ad for Apple from 1999, is still the best. “In ter net?! I’d say In ter net.”
But this new one about PayPal is pretty great too.
“Buying a chair… while sitting in a chair…” (via interesting)
A clicker game where the click reloads the page in your browser. (Let’s see if we can crash the server?)
An Electro-Acoustic Instrument Made Out of an Old Singer Sewing Machine
Gabriel Bonnin, aka Singer Sound System, plays an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy that’s driven by an old Singer sewing machine pedal.
My instrument is an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. I just removed the crank and use a Singer machine to drive it :-) It is equipped with four integrated microphones that allow me to process the sound live, especially in Ableton Live.
Some of his most popular recent covers include the Doctor Who theme1:
And Enter Sandman by Metallica:
Oh and Daft Punk!
‘It’s Just a Mess:’ 23 People Explain How Tariffs Have Suddenly Ruined Their Hobby. “Many small businesses overseas have stopped shipping items to the United States, and some customers say that their packages are in customs processing hell…”
The great Ray Hudson is retiring from broadcasting. “His commentary was a gift from the gods, a shooting star from the furthest reaches of the brightest galaxy, that was only meant to rest on planet earth for a short period of time…”
Wake Up Dead Man Trailer
The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie; looks like another great prestige caper.
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
It’s coming out in “select theaters” on Nov 26 before its debut on Netflix Dec 12.
Congress Plays Keep-Away With Child’s School Lunch. “‘If you want to eat, you’re going to have to jump for it!’ said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), laughing as he dangled the bag above the head of the 4-foot-tall child, who leapt in vain…”
I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education. “The dominant worldview seems to be: Why worry about actually learning anything when you can get an A for outsourcing your thinking to a machine?”
“A new volunteer-led organization called Grandparents for Vaccines launched Sunday on National Grandparents Day with a mission to share firsthand experiences of life before vaccines were widely available.”
Zohran Mamdani’s social media team is operating on all cylinders: A Dramatic Reading of The New York Times: How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor? Read by “Railroad Daddy” Morgan Spector.
How a Deaf Quarterback Changed Sports Forever By Inventing the Huddle. “Concerned that his hand signs were tipping off his plans to the opposing defense, Hubbard summoned his offense and directed them to form a circle around him…”
The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word. “They’re a precursor and a stake in the ground; the cart before the horse and the name before the face.”
How to Make Rope the Old-Fashioned Way
Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together — my mouth actually fell open at this point. It’s amazing what you can do with just a simple machine that cleverly leverages the laws of physics and the material’s own properties.
You can order one of these rope making machines from Etsy.
See also How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way, i.e. how rope was made in Edwardian England. (via book of joe)
49 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall. That seems like a lot! Includes Frankenstein, The Twits (Roald Dahl), various Seuss stories, The Running Man, Train Dreams, Hamnet, etc.
Code Rush, a 2000 Documentary About Netscape/Mozilla
Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad.
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers’ lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Interviews in the movie include Ellen Ullman, Kara Swisher, Jamie Zawinski, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, and Brendan Eich. (via robin sloan)
USGS Unveils New National Geologic Map. “In a significant advancement for geoscience, the U.S. Geological Survey has released the most detailed national-scale geologic map of the country to date.”
John Candy: I Like Me
This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.
I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)
Yesterday, Jackson Goldstone won the 2025 Downhill Mountain Bike World Championship. Here’s the POV of his winning run down the *very* steep course in Champéry, Switzerland. (This is *bananas*!)
Forthcoming book by Bernie Sanders: Fight Oligarchy. “Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous economic and political power.”
Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow.”
How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer. “If you are not in one of the 16-ish states requiring a prescription for a COVID vaccine, you should be able to self-report a condition and receive your vaccine.”
The Persisters
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch. The portraits are quite large, as you can see in this photo of AOC’s painting.
I also quite like Hay’s other portraits, including this poignant one of Anne Frank.
“I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans.”
Meet the Man Doing a 10-Day, Self-Supported Swim Across a 140-Mile Lake
Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board while he swims. He’s documenting the whole thing on Instagram; here’s a video where he explains all the gear he’s taking with him.
I’m attempting to be the first person ever to swim across Lake Powell. Here’s how I’m preparing for this massive journey-
I will be swimming from Hite Crossing Bridge in Utah to Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. This means that I will need to swim 140 miles in just 10 days. Ambitious, I know.
This journey will be completely unassisted. My safety crew will not be offering me food, navigation, or pacing.
To carry my gear, I’ve designed a floating rig from an inflatable paddle board with solar power, water filtration, and dry boxes for food storage, gear, and human waste (yes, I will be leaving NO trace).
Schieffer, 49, is going to be consuming 8000 calories each day on his journey and told a local TV station that “I’ve anticipated about 200,000 rotations of the shoulders out there in the water”.
He started on Sept 2, so this is day 3 of the trip. Again, you can keep up with the whole thing on Instagram.
The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city.”
The Official Map of the Star Wars Galaxy
Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge.
The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems.
A thoughtful essay about e-bikes as a metaphor for AI, augmentation vs amputation, and the bargain of innovation. “We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable.”
From Lewis Hine, a photograph of Clyde Bradford. Hine’s photos of child laborers resulted in some of the first laws in the US against child labor.
U2 and a Harlem Choir Sing ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’
In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Madison Square Garden in NYC. Before the show, the band and the choir rehearsed together at Greater Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem:
Here is some behind-the-scenes footage of the rehearsal (more); Bono’s arm is in a sling for some reason?
The live recording of the song from that MSG show appeared on their next album, Rattle and Hum; here’s the (music-only) video from U2’s YouTube channel:
And here’s an actual video of the MSG performance (taken from the Rattle and Hum DVD):
You can also find the MSG version of the song (and the rest of Rattle and Hum) on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Bell and the New Voices of Freedom recorded their own version of the song, which you can listen to on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
P.S. That same day, the band walked around Harlem and stumbled across street musicians Satan & Adam; a clip of their song made it onto the album and DVD.
(via laura olin)
A list of 29 heroes and interesting people that few people have heard of. I’ve only heard of one or two of these folks.
The Baltimore Museum of Art is exhibiting Amy Sherald’s American Sublime show after Sherald pulled it from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery due to attempted censorship. I saw this in NYC; it’s fantastic.
The Thousands of Atomic Bombs Exploded on Earth
From Orbital Mechanics, a visualization of the 2153 nuclear weapons exploded on Earth since 1945.
2153! I had no idea there had been that much testing. According to Wikipedia, the number is 2119 tests, with most of those coming from the US (1032) and the USSR (727). The largest device ever detonated was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb set off in the atmosphere above an island in the Barents Sea in 1961. Tsar Bomba had more than three times the yield of the largest bomb tested by the US. The result was spectacular.
The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away from where it ascended. The subsequent mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (over seven times the height of Mount Everest), which meant that the cloud was above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere when it peaked. The cap of the mushroom cloud had a peak width of 95 kilometres (59 mi) and its base was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide.
All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 kilometres (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 kilometres (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 kilometres (560 mi). Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. The seismic shock created by the detonation was measurable even on its third passage around the Earth.
The Soviets did not give a fuck, man…what are a few thousand destroyed homes compared to scaring the shit out of the capitalist Amerikanskis with a comically large explosion? Speaking of bonkers Communist dictatorships, the last nuclear test conducted on Earth was in 2013, by North Korea.
Update: Since this post was published, North Korea has tested a few more nuclear devices, the last one in 2017.
3books, a site that features the books recommended by guests at the end of each Ezra Klein Show podcast. Built by my pal Michael Sippey.
Great interactive feature on how former world record holder Max Park solves the Rubik’s Cube. You scroll through his slow-motion solve — he makes 12 moves in the first second. “It’s like playing chess at the speed of ping pong.”
I loved this: The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department. “The writer had already engaged in the charm and betrayal inherent in reporting. We were in the harm-reduction business.”
The Baseball Photographer Trading Cards, 1975
In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams.
I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade. I travelled around the United States visiting about 150 photographic “personalities” and had them pose for me. I carried baseball paraphernalia: caps, gloves, balls, a mask and chest protector, a bat, as well as photographic equipment, and made a 14,000 mile odyssey. Out of this experience came 134 Baseball-Photographer images. I designed a reverse side for the card which would allow for each photographer to fill in their own personal data that in a way referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards: Favorite camera, favorite developer, favorite film, height, weight, etc. I used whatever information each photographer provided me.
You can hear Mandel talking about the project in this SFMOMA video — the gum he included in the packages of cards was donated by Topps:
You can find some of the cards on eBay for around $10-50 apiece and a complete set, signed by Mandel & Imogen Cunningham, can be had for $3,650. (thx, duncan)
How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes. “The country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.”
Abstract Popular Science
I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin:
How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger:
My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them:
These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made).
Thetrusize.com, by James Talmage and Damon Maneice, is a website that lets you move a country or state around a Mercator projection map of the world so you can see how big or small a country really is.
One Teen’s Incredible “Mental Time Travel” Memory System
A paper recently published in a behavioral sciences journal describes a high school student’s hyperthymesia, an extraordinary ability to retrieve autobiographical memories. Teenager With Hyperthymesia Exhibits Extraordinary Mental Time Travel Abilities:
The subject of the study, referred to as TL, was a 17-year-old high school student in France when she came to the researchers’ attention. She had long known her memory was different. As a child, she would casually mention her ability to mentally revisit past events to check for details, only to be accused of lying by her peers. Eventually, she disclosed this ability to her family at age 16.
TL’s recollections were not merely accurate — they were structured. She described a highly organized internal world where memories were stored in a large, rectangular “white room” with a low ceiling. Within this mental space, personal memories were arranged thematically. Sections were dedicated to family life, vacations, friends, and even her collection of soft toys. Each toy had its own memory tag, including information about when and from whom it was received.
Importantly, these recollections were not purely factual. They carried emotional weight and vivid perceptual details. TL could mentally relive events from both her original perspective and from an outside observer’s view. She described, for instance, her first day of school in striking detail: what she wore, the weather, and the precise visual memory of her mother watching her through the fence. These experiences were accompanied by a strong sense of re-experiencing.
Whoa. The paper’s authors refer to her abilities as “mental time travel”. And this is straight out of Pixar’s Inside Out:
Beyond memory storage, TL described three additional rooms in her internal world, each associated with specific emotional functions. A cold “pack ice” room helped her cool down when angry. A “problems room” was empty but served as a space for pacing and thinking. A more uncomfortable “military room,” associated with her father’s absence due to military service, was linked to guilt. These features suggest a broader internal architecture shaped by emotional needs and reflective processes, not just memory content.
My memory does not work like this and it’s always fascinating to discover how other people think and perceive the world; see Does Your Brain Picture Things? (via damn interesting)
Oh wow, after 26 years and 1000+ episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from hosting the In Our Time radio series.
Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! “We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now.”
This video features a number of scientists who were working on stuff like HIV treatments and life-saving cancer research but whose work has been shut down or curtailed by the Trump regime cutting their funding.
We’re All in the Network of Time
The Network of Time is a project that links people together, in the style of six degrees of separation, by appearance together in photographs.
Every photo you take with someone else links you into the vast network of people caught together in images.
It’s a collage millions of pictures deep – every actor you’ve seen on screen, every politician you’ve seen in the news, almost everyone you’ve seen in a history textbook.
Network Of Time is the world’s first interactive snapshot of this network.
For instance, LeBron James can be linked to Joseph Stalin in just five photographs.
James appears in a photo with Canadian broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos, who was photographed with former Canadian PM Jean Chrétien. Chrétien was in a photo with Queen Elizabeth II, who appeared in a photo with Winston Churchill, and Churchill was photographed with Stalin.
The Network of Time is conceptually adjacent to the Great Span.
In tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, a choir of 7000+ people sang Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Lovely.
Hamnet
For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. Here’s the trailer.
The film recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the reviews are very good.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.
The film premieres in the US on Nov 27 with a nationwide release on Dec 12.
Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. “The sister to all other animals, the first to branch off, and the most genetically isolated animal is … drumroll please … the comb jelly!”
Alexander Chee: How Can I Write At A Time Like This? “We are being hit with what I would call advanced resilience targeting, an attack on our ability to be in community, to be healthy, to make a living, to know our rights, to have a government.”
We Already Know a Way to Save a Bunch of Lives. (Giving wounded people blood earlier, in ambulances, increases their chance of survival. But insurance won’t pay for it so we don’t do it in the US. 🤬)
Eels Shouldn’t be Able to Exist
I didn’t know this about eels:
No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present.
For centuries, the world’s greatest thinkers tried to solve the mystery of the eel. Aristotle thought they emerged from mud. Others believe they simply appeared, formed by sunlight and dew. Even today, there’s only one place on Earth where we think all eels are born: somewhere deep in the Atlantic where mysteriously no adult eel has ever been found.
So why are eels like this? What evolutionary advantage lies in such an impossibly complex journey? And why does their life cycle still defy so much of what we know about biology? This isn’t just a story about a fish. It’s a story about a creature that breaks the rules of science.
I found this via Frank Chimero’s short essay on eels.
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