We Are the Bad Guys. “What do we call it when a stronger person decides to rob a weaker person because he can? It is just gangsterism. We are the most dangerous gangsters in the world today.”
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Entries for January 2026
Isaac Chotiner interviews Oona Hathaway, an expert in international law, about the “brazen illegality” of the Trump regime’s invasion of Venezuela to kidnap president Nicolás Maduro.
Variety has a list of 50 great movies from 2025 that are now streaming, incl. One Battle After Another (HBO), Bugonia (Peacock), Black Bag (Prime), Frankenstein (Netflix), Sinners (HBO & Prime), Weapons (HBO), and Train Dreams (Netflix).
Investigating a possible Daft Punk Easter egg: is the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger an exact 123.45 BPM and if so, was that intentional on the part of “our helmet-clad robot friends”?
360-degree panoramas of the interiors of several Star Trek ships (Enterprise, TNG’s Enterprise D, Voyager, Defiant, etc.)
Core Memories With the Swiftie Dads
In 2023, Paul Scheer spent a few days talking to fathers who accompanied their daughters to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in LA, either as concert-goers or just chauffeurs. I love this video. One of the dads summed up the vibe of being there for your loved ones, even if it’s maybe not entirely your thing:
Life is moments. Life has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with things. Life is dancing, that is life! It’s when you feel happy. Their happiness is my happiness.
Elizabeth Spiers wrote about the Swiftie Dads on Bluesky:
This is a model for what actual masculinity should be. Men don’t need to spend more time in caves beating their chests with other men; they need to take their daughters to a meaningful thing and talk to them about it.
These guys taking their daughters to Taylor Swift concerts — and unabashedly enjoying it! — are the model. They are being themselves and not treating their daughters’ interests as stupid or aberrant or a thing they should be patted on the back for participating in.
See also The Joy of Fortnite. (thx, caroline)
Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things! “Thermochauvinism is the (often unconscious) assumption that it’s reasonable to live in cold places but unreasonable to live in hot ones.”
It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point
“What if you held a tree long enough for it to grow around your hand?” For a piece called It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point, Giuseppe Penone fitted a cast of his hand to a growing tree and the tree grew around it for more than a decade.
Penone has been featured on KDO once before — for his sculptures of trees where he carves away tens or even hundreds of years from massive trees to reveal their inner saplings.
Stewart Cheifet died last weekend at age 87. Those of a certain age and nerdiness will remember Cheifet as the host of Computer Chronicles, a public television show about personal computing that aired in the 80s and 90s.
“America is no longer a democracy. That doesn’t mean authoritarianism has won. But merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t work. The country needs a democratic transformation.”
NeatoCal is a tiny JavaScript app that outputs a printable calendar with a full year on a single page. I love the view where all the weekends line up.
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