Entries for September 2025
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…”
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!
vintage post from May 2016
· gift link
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.”
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”).
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…)
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.”
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 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.”
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.)
It’s getting to be that time again: The 2025 Fall Foliage Prediction Map.
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.”
vintage post from Oct 2012
· gift link
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?)
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:
Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train:
The X-Files theme:
And Enter Sandman by Metallica:
Oh and Daft Punk!
You can find his stuff on YouTube and Instagram.
‘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…”
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.
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