Upcoming exhibition from the MFA in Boston: “‘Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography’ explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has played out in populous urban spaces…”
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Entries for October 2025
The Mainstream Media Is Catastrophically Failing To Meet The Moment. “Mainstream media has become so terrified of appearing biased that they’ve abandoned their basic responsibility to clearly communicate truth to the public.”
The Taco Bell 50k Ultramarathon was run in Denver over the weekend. Competitors must eat at 9 out of 10 Taco Bells along the route. “By the 4th stop, all entrants must have consumed at least one (1) Chalupa Supreme or one Crunchwrap Supreme…”
I missed this from a couple of months ago: Inside the World of “The Great British Bake Off”. “No show does so much to hide its true nature: namely, that it is a competition people desperately want to win.”
What Makes for a Healthy Society?
In a 2014 preface for his 1978 book The Ohlone Way, a description of how the indigenous peoples of California’s Bay Area lived before Europeans arrived, Malcolm Margolin shared a list of what he thought constituted a healthy society:
- Sustainable relationship with the environment. In a healthy society, the present generation doesn’t strip-mine the soil, water, forest, minerals, etc., leaving the future impoverished and the beauty of the world degraded.
- Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts — prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
- Relative egalitarianism. The gap between those with the most wealth and power and those with the least should be moderate, and those with the least should feel protected, cared for, or rewarded in some other way.
- Widespread participation in the arts.
- Moderation or control of individual power.
- Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than through the individual hoarding of goods.
- Love of place. The feeling that one lives with emotional attachment to an area that is uniquely beautiful, abundant in natural recourses, and rich in personal meaning.
- Knowing one’s place in the world. A sense, perhaps embodied in spiritual practice, that the individual is an insignificant part of a larger, more abiding universe.
- Work is done willingly, or at least with a minimum of resentment.
- Lots of laughter.
(thx, swati)
“Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments.”
Empty Nest? Or Open Door?
Last year, Gretchen Rubin wrote a widely circulated piece about trading the “empty nest” metaphor for something that “emphasizes possibility”: the open door. I somehow hadn’t read it when it came out, but being in the midst of emptying the nest/opening the door, it was unsurprisingly resonant for me to read now. Rubin writes:
I balked at empty nest’s connotations of futility or meaninglessness. No wonder so many adults, when and if they anticipate this stage of life, consider it with dread. I found myself searching for a different metaphor — one that could help me and parents like me not to languish but to see this new phase as a time of self-discovery, possibility, and growth.
For me, I’m not so sure the terms or framing matters too much. I’ve been genuinely looking forward to my kids being out in the world and the possibility more freedom & bandwidth, but I am still feeling allllll of this bewilderment and questioning:
That lack of foresight isn’t surprising. The tumult of everyday family routine can make it hard for people to step back and think about their lives. As I often remind myself, something that can be done at any time tends to be done at no time, and the demands of parenthood make it easy to delay facing what can be difficult questions. Am I living the life I want to live? Is it too late to start something new? Do I really want to be married anymore? Or simply: Now is it okay to eat meals in front of the TV?
Some people I’ve encountered whose children have left home have told me — in tones of shame, sadness, or bewilderment — that they’re reassessing long-standing habits and relationships. “I thought I had a group of friends, but I didn’t,” a woman seated next to me on an airplane last year said. Her social circle was tied to her daughter’s activities, such as soccer and violin; once her daughter graduated, those bonds dissolved. Some have reported a crisis of identity. “I keep asking myself, What am I for?” a friend said. Another warned me to resist the lure of all those hours freed up on my schedule: “I know you love to work, but be careful not to work all the time, because now you can.”
What am I for? Am I living the life I want to live?
How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World. “Cuneiform consists of three components — upright, horizontal and diagonal — made by pressing the edge of a reed stylus, or popsicle stick if you prefer, into a clay tablet.”
In Praise of Comfort Films
In his latest video essay, Thomas Flight praises the comfort film and shares some examples (The Big Lebowski, Perfect Days, Mon Oncle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Moonrise Kingdom) from a few different types.
We want high stakes to make things interesting. But if you’re constantly being bombarded by conflict in your real life or the other media you’re consuming, it might be nice to spend some time with a story that takes a step back from high-stakes conflict as the primary narrative driving force.
I don’t know about you, but I am watching, reading, and listening to a looot of comfort media lately. (And by “lately”, I mean the past 8-10 years. 🫠) I felt this bit deeply:
There’s a point at which we can become trapped in chronic nervous system distress because of the media we’re consuming. Our brains are hardwired to scan our environment for potential dangers or problems. The media you consume can then end up releasing cortisol, raising your blood pressure, elevating your heart rate, inducing stress. And when we have access to this media in our pockets all the time, it means that places in our lives that may have typically been felt as a safe haven in the past, like maybe our living room or our bedroom, are now often the places where we’re really intensely and intimately consuming some of the most distressing media that we ever consume.
What are your favorite comfort movies? Any non-obvious ones? (E.g. I watch disaster movies as comfort films. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, The Core, Deep Impact.)
Tim Berners-Lee: “I gave the world wide web away for free because I thought that it would only work if it worked for everyone. Today, I believe that to be truer than ever.”
Oh I don’t know, the appearance of two perfectly overlapping fiery rings in the sky doesn’t seem like a good omen to me, even at low frequencies.
We Are Not Fascists, and If You Call Us Fascists, We Will Arrest You. “There is nothing funny about calling me or Donald Trump a fascist, and if you do, we will ship you to Guantanamo.”
Keeping Up Appearances star Patricia Routledge dies at 96. I loved that show — almost every time I’m driving and see a herd of cows in a nearby field, I shrill, “Mind the cows, Richard!”
80 of the Most Iconic Guitar Intros
Watch as Paul Davids plays 80 of rock’s most iconic guitar intros, including ones from Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, The Kinks, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Joan Jett, AC/DC, Blur, and The White Stripes.
Name A 28-Year-Old. “The data tells us that 3,880,894 children were born in the year 1997, and yet we can find no trace of them in popular culture.”
I think I’m gonna read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence next, inspired by Evan Puschak’s recent video. Just downloaded the free ebook from Standard Ebooks.
Harvard Library’s collection of Soviet and post-Soviet lapel pins. Sputnik, Aeroflot, the 1980 Olympics, Tolstoy…collect your favorites!
Swift Justice: A Look Inside a Taliban Courtroom
Swift Justice is a short documentary that, perhaps for the first time, takes viewers inside a rural Afghan courtroom operated by the Taliban, whose arbiters decide cases using Sharia law. [Content warning: a man is visibly beaten in the courtroom to make him “speak the truth”.]
To Westerners, the term “Sharia law” may call to mind sword-wielding fanatics with Old Testament sensibilities. Traditionally, though, less than ten per cent of the Sharia—Arabic for “religious law”—relates to criminal injury like murder, rape, or theft. The rest concerns family and marital relations and prosaic matters of commercial transactions and ritual. Sharia courts have existed in Afghanistan for centuries, and during the U.S. occupation they formed one of three distinct legal systems. There were also the official courts of the U.S.-backed Afghan government that were notoriously corrupt and inefficient. Bribery was this system’s lubricant; murderers often walked free, while the innocent languished in prisons rife with torture and other abuses. And there was the tribal system, an informal and sometimes ad-hoc approach to dispute resolution based on rural Pashtun practices. Few rural Pashtuns miss the old Afghan government courts; instead, today the central tension is between tribal and religious law.
Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem, an interview with Ted Chiang from earlier this year. “I don’t believe it’s meaningful to say that something is better art absent any context of how it was created. Art is all about context.”
The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time, including, of course, Ali on the cover of Esquire as Saint Sebastian. See also all the nominated covers.
Instead of hiding rips and tears, the visible mending movement turns them into art. “Born from the Japanese art of sashiko, visible mending enables crafters to eschew fast fashion and make mistakes beautiful.”
Old Masters, New Media
In a five part series called “emoji-nation”, Ukrainian Nastya Ptichek mixes the work of well-known painters with graphical elements of new media. In the second part of the series, the works of Edward Hopper are augmented with social media interface icons:
The first part finds emoji doppelgangers for works of fine art while the third part uses paintings as movie poster imagery for the likes of Kill Bill and Home Alone (paired with Munch’s The Scream). For part four, Ptichek places modal dialogs over art works:
And part five plays around with several Google interface elements:
Love this kind of thing. Feels like I’ve seen something like it before though. Anyone recall?
When Kittens Came to My Prison, I Had Not Petted One in 15 Years. “All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees…”
A Chronology of All 113 Prints of Hokusai’s The Great Wave
A few years ago, a researcher looked at every surviving print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa that she could find (113 in all) and, using differences caused by “woodblock wear”, developed a system for determining if a particular print was made early in the life of the woodblocks used, late, or somewhere in-between.
Did you know there are 113 identified copies of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I know the title says 111, but scientist Capucine Korenberg found another 2 after completing her research. What research was that? Finding every print of The Great Wave around the world and then sequencing them, to find out when they were created during the life cycle of the woodblocks they were printed from.
This involved painstakingly documenting visible signs of wear to the keyblock that made the Great Wave, and tracking these visible changes as the keyblock continued to be used (fun fact; scholars estimate there were likely as many as 8000 prints of The Great Wave originally in circulation).
See also The Evolution of Hokusai’s Great Wave.
Are you ok? In a recent video, Hank Green tells his brother John: I’ve Not Been Doing Well. Lots of what Green says here resonates with me.
Quentin Blake: How I Draw
Illustrator Quentin Blake, who is most widely known for his energetic drawings for Roald Dahl’s books, generously shares his drawing process on his website and also in a series of videos.
I do a freewheeling sort of drawing that looks as though it is done on the spur of the moment. However even a single drawing needs a certain amount of preparation and planning. Most of the time I need to do a rough in which I find out how people stand, what sort of expressions they have and how they fit on the page.
Here are some of the videos he’s done. Quentin Blake draws a Hornswoggler:
Ten Minutes of Illustration (in three parts for some reason):
The illustration above is from The Wild Washerwomen.
The official number of exoplanets tracked by NASA has reached 6000. Astronomers have found “planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemstones”.
Musician Plays the Last Stradivarius Guitar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679. I had no idea Stradivari made guitars.
A company called Blackdot has built a tattooing robot. The company says the machine is less painful and the tattoos look like they are laser-printed.
Have I Earned It?
Craig Mod is off on another of his long walks of Japan and is writing a pop-up newsletter (subscribe!) along the way. I am feeling this bit from his first missive recently:
To have a day like today feels a bit selfish, even more so after having met Vlad. He wonders, always wonders, if he has earned it. The time alone, the steps, the little interactions, the looking closely at the world. He takes it, he’ll take whatever he can get whenever, and try to be as grateful as possible. What else is there? Tiny men with big sticks upend sanity the world ‘round and all you can do is try to find your footing and push back.
A new kind of bone glue that “mimics how oysters stick to underwater surfaces” can bond bone fragments together in 2-3 minutes, “even in blood-rich areas where most adhesives fail”.
25 years ago today, Radiohead released Kid A. This morning, I’m celebrating by, um, listening to Kid A.
“Scientists reflect on the life and work of [Jane Goodall], whose discoveries made them rethink what it means to be human.”
Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters. “A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet.”
Every Click
Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing.
From Haymarket Books, an Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police Reading List. “In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and police repression, we offer an extensive reading list…”
A Loophole to Survive the End of the Universe?
The latest video from Kurzgesagt imagines a scenario in which an advanced civilization called the Noxans can potentially survive the heat death of the universe.
With five hours of the full energy emitted by the Sun, we could power present day humanity for about 10 billion years.
So the Noxans harvest the last stars and build a gigantic complex of batteries around their home star. In principle, this energy could keep them alive for a few hundred trillion years, a long time but not even close to forever.
So now the hard part of the plan begins. The Noxans need to change the nature of life itself.
Anil Dash on Mariah Carey’s unreleased “Hole-inspired grunge album” called Someone’s Ugly Daughter, recorded in the mid-90s with “an album cover featuring a dead cockroach on the front”.
Which one of these paintings of a guitar player is by Johannes Vermeer? Both? Neither? They’re hanging side-by-side in London for the next few months so you can decide for yourself.
The Age Of Innocence: Adaptation Done Right
In his latest video, Evan Puschak looks at the differences between Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation.
In every adaptation across artistic mediums, there is a loss. You lose something of the original, something vital. But hopefully you gain something too, ideally something that the new medium is uniquely good at expressing.
I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of adaptation as I make my way through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on audiobook. I’ve been watching each of the movies after finishing the corresponding book, so I’m getting a really good sense how the books differ from the film adaptations. Some hardcore Tolkien fans were critical of some of Peter Jackson’s choices (leaving out Tom Bombadil for instance) but as the 20-hour+ audiobooks attest, you can’t leave everything in — and there are long sections where the books’ narrative drags like a rusty muffler.
Trump Has No Mandate to Destroy America. The manifestation of a Trump mandate is understandable for the party trying to overthrow democracy, but for Democrats to go along with it is inexcusable & self-destructive.
Five More Things I Want to Tell My White Friends. “Please understand the degree to which Black and brown people (and LGBTQ+ folks) in this country are particularly scared and feel abandoned at the moment…”
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