Entries for February 2026
In this lovely short film, the traditional Tibetan drink butter tea (bho jha) becomes a bridge between generations, outreach across cultures, and a reminder of the value of mindfulness.
From Clarissa Wei at Eater, more about butter tea and its place in Tibetan culture:
I stayed with Goulongzhu and her family in Tibet for four days in June, and every morning, without pause, she’d serve me a creamy bowl of yak butter tea for breakfast. In the early hours, she’d make a batch of crude black pu’erh tea — a fermented dark tea from China — brewed along with a great deal of salt. Then, a fat serving of yak butter would go into a bowl along with toasted barley powder and milk curds, and she’d pour the tea in until the liquid nearly reached the rim. I’d mix it all together with my chopsticks and sip. It was creamy and substantial — overflowing with healthy fats. The highland barley gave it a nutty finish, and in those four days, yak butter tea was something I looked forward to immensely in the mornings.
A ripple of excitement pulsed through the crowd. Paul Ford is blogging regularly again.
The folks behind Dark Sky spun themselves out of Apple and have built a new weather app: Acme Weather. “We missed those days as a small scrappy shop. So let’s try this again…”
Do you know your Gaia from your Cronus from your Zeus? In fewer than 15 minutes, this video provides a comprehensive overview of all the important Greek & Roman gods, goddesses, nymphs, heroes, monsters, demigods, and other assorted spiritual beings, who begat who, and what all of their domains were. (via open culture)
The Color Game. “Humans can’t reliably recall colors. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it. We’ll show you five colors, then you’ll try and recreate them.” I scored 39/50 but got a perfect score on one color.
Some of the best drone shots from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows. “These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social. To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.”
Loop is an award-winning animated short featuring a society where people live a perfectly looping existence, all in rhythm. Then one day…
An app called NonUSA is surging in popularity in Denmark; it “helps you identify and avoid American products in everyday life”. (Ironically, iOS-only for now…)
“I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself.”
The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family. “‘Look at the Pelicot family.’ They had been ‘confronted with the impossible dilemma,’ he said. ‘How to make suffering coexist.’”
In a video for the V&A Museum, stone carver Miriam Johnson hand-carves a pair of hieroglyphs “using both sunken relief and raised relief techniques”.
The video has minimal narration; mostly it’s just a master craftsperson quietly tapping away at the stone — and getting bits of rock all over the sleeve of her jumper. The effect is pretty relaxing, especially with the more rhythmic tapping for the second carving. (via the kid should see this)
An appreciation of Flickr’s URL structure. “It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs.”
In-browser puzzle game: “Enclose the horse in the biggest possible pen!”
A data analysis of how women’s clothing doesn’t actually fit women. “That leaves millions of people — over half of all adult women — who are excluded from standard size ranges” in their 20s and beyond.
In the 1930s, a radical conservative political group almost succeeded in overthrowing Finland’s democracy:
Called the Lapua movement, it was a far-right group of Finns who sought to overthrow the republic, marginalize communists, and install an authoritarian government. They managed to disrupt Finland’s political order through threats of violence and symbolic kidnappings, in which they would capture political rivals and drive them to the Soviet border.
They earned the support of center-right and moderate politicians who believed they could harness the passion and support of this radical nationalist group. The movement also included prominent businessmen, newspaper owners, and key members of the military.
But after a few years, the country was able to right the ship:
Almost overnight, the Lapua movement collapsed. Within three years of its founding, this far-right faction was banned from Finnish politics, and democracy in Finland has been stable ever since.
You can read more about the Lapua movement and how it was defeated in this article about democracy’s “near misses”.
In November 1929, red-shirted communist youth paraded in the small Finnish village of Lapua, located in the country’s religious and conservative southern Ostrobothnian region. An angry mob of local farmers attacked the parade, stripped the participants of their shirts, and began beating the unlucky leftists. That seemingly isolated and chance incident sparked a “a series of events which proved almost fatal to parliamentary government in Finland.
A list of all the media (movies, books, TV shows, plays, etc.) consumed by Steven Soderbergh in 2025.
SEEN, READ 2025 · extension765.com
All caps, bold: MOVIE All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* All caps: TV SERIES Italics: Book Quotation marks: “Play” Italics, quotation marks: “Short Story” 01/01 The Possession, Annie Ernaux, AVIICI I’M TIM 01/02 The Making of Star Wars, A.J. Rinzler, THE MAKING OF THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, RAIDERS OF
The Brattle theater is playing what they call the Ultimate Double Feature: “we play the first movie up until the point when the characters enter a cinema to watch a different film”, then play the entirety of that 2nd film, then finish up the 1st film.
You know who else had a Greenland obsession? “Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s.”
I love these collage illustrations of various celebrities and famous characters by artist/designer Fries Vansevenant: Han Solo & Luke Skywalker, Notorious BIG, Heath Ledger’s Joker, Beatrix Kiddo, David Beckham. There are more on his Insta.
New from Neal Agarwal: Sandboxels. “It’s a falling-sand game with hundreds of elements, heat simulation, electricity & a lot more. I like making little cities and then adding tons of rats.”
Some modern collective nouns: a cringe of Cybertrucks, an anxiety of authors, a migraine of toddlers, and “a group of two or men is called a podcast”.
Business/product advice: launch it three times. “The vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist, and nobody gives a damn about what you do.”
With music by Max Cooper and visuals by Conner Griffith, A Sense of Getting Closer is a music video that was inspired by a quote submitted to Cooper’s On Being project:
I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen.
Mesmerizing. Like literally, given that it’s based on “a hypnotic light show we can’t look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.” (via @aaroncoleman.bsky.social)
Searching for Birds, an engaging visualization of eBird and Google Trends data that reveals human curiosity about birds.
How to raise children. “It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is.”
Team Pursuit speed skaters used to trade off leads like cyclists but the sport has been revolutionized by the US team’s invention of the “bump drafting” technique.
The excellent Poster House museum in NYC currently has an exhibition up of posters by Peter Strausfeld.
Between 1947 and 1980, Peter Strausfeld, a German refugee interned on the Isle of Man during World War II, created unique, compelling posters for London’s Academy Cinema—the city’s premier art house movie theater. Founded by Elsie Cohen in 1931, the Academy specialized in international films that eschewed classic Hollywood narratives, highlighting works by now-famous directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, and Satyajit Ray. While these films now hold cult status for cinema aficionados, in the early to mid-20th century, art house remained a novel and daring form of cinema that few theaters showcased.
Throughout his longstanding relationship with the Academy, Strausfeld created over 300 bold, predominantly single-color linocut compositions with a deceptively simple hand-printed feel.
An accompanying book is available from RIT Press. More of Strausfeld’s work can be found at It’s Nice That, Orson & Welles, and Mubi. (via the new yorker)
Paul Ford on AI and the Infinite Software Era. “All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.”
Current is an interesting new RSS reader that doesn’t function like an email inbox. “There is no count because counting was the problem.”
A New Winter is a project from Colombian-American photographer Sofia Jaramillo that seeks to
This project revisits the early depictions of skiing, which often portrayed Eurocentric ideals and a narrow vision of who belongs on the slopes. By reimagining the first images of skiing in the United States, A New Winter challenges the stereotypes and exclusive culture perpetuated by these initial depictions, inviting us to expand our understanding of winter sports and celebrate its evolving culture. It seeks to disrupt traditional narratives, challenge stereotypes and promote representation in winter sports by placing people of color at the center of these images.
Several of the images were featured in Outside magazine, where Jaramillo says, “I’m doing this for all the young Black and brown girls and boys out there who don’t see themselves when they walk into a ski resort.”
The goal of the Trump Action Tracker is to “document how the trajectory of Trump’s presidency is aligned with the authoritarian playbook”.
I think I’d heard the term “k-shaped economy” somewhere before but didn’t really know what it meant until I watched this video:
American Airlines is changing the layout of some of their aircraft to add 31 first class and premium seats while cutting out 73 economy seats. This is the hot new trend in air travel: pulling out all the stops to cater to the wealthy.
Airlines are adding suites with more bed space, privacy doors, an extra ottoman for guests. They’re offering caviar, free PJs, luxury skin care products, and multi-course meals with wine pairings made by gourmet chefs. They’re also building more airport lounges. Meanwhile, economy is getting more cramped and low-cost carriers are going bankrupt. It’s because wealthy passengers are where the money’s at.
For years, airlines have made more money from their credit cards than from actually flying passengers around. And these days, premium seating is bringing in more revenue than the economy cabin. It’s a perfect example of the K-shaped economy.
Here’s an AP article about the K-shaped economy from late last year.
Corporate executives are paying attention and in some cases explicitly adjusting their businesses to account for it. They are seeking ways to sell more high-priced items to the wealthy while also reducing package sizes and taking other steps to target struggling consumers.
Why AI Writing Is So Generic, Boring, and Dangerous: Semantic Ablation. “The AI identifies high-entropy clusters — the precise points where unique insights…reside — and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences.”
The 19 richest Americans hold more than 2% of the total US holdhold wealth. That figure has roughly doubled in the past 5-6 years. “The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering.”
In 1964, legendary jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie ran for President as a write-in candidate. Some of the more interesting details about his campaign:
- If elected, he’d rename the White House to the Blues House.
- Running mate was slated to be Phyllis Diller. “She seems to have that sua-a-a-a-ve manner; she looks far into the future. She’s looking into the future. So I’m a future man, I said to her.”
- His nominees for a stacked cabinet: Duke Ellington (minister of foreign affairs), Charlie Mingus (minister of peace), Peggy Lee (minister of labor), Malcolm X (minister of justice), Louis Armstrong (minister of agriculture), Ray Charles (Librarian of Congress), and Miles Davis (head of the CIA). Of Davis, Gillespie said: “O-o-oh, honey, you know his schtick. He’s ready for that position. He’d know just what to do in that position.”
Gillespie dropped out before the election, paving the way for Lyndon Johnson’s victory over Barry Goldwater, who Gillespie said “wants to take us back to the horse-and-buggy days when we are in the space age”.
Ski Jumping Pairs is my favorite Winter Olympics event. (Video by Riichiro Mashima.)
From designer Beth Mathews, a free “Private Property! No ICE” sign you can print out for your shop or restaurant.
What movies can you brag about seeing during their original run in the theater? Not big movies, more culty ones. I’ve got Iron Giant, American Movie, Run Lola Run, Hands on a Hardbody, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. 😂
From a draft of the opening narration of Star Trek: “Assigned a five year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds…” I’m glad they punched it up.
If what you want is to see tiny people all over your plate, you 100% absolutely have to try Lanmaoa asiatica. The mushroom is a popular food during mushroom season, but if undercooked has the same effect worldwide: lilliputian hallucinations.
I know I probably say this every time I post videos like this, but I wish I’d gotten into art & art history earlier than I did. Channels like Behind the Masterpiece are so good at making this stuff come alive and their Brief History of Japanese Art scratches my recent interest in Japan itch quite nicely. I was lucky to see some of the pieces from the video on my Japan trip last fall, including the Big Buddha in Kamakura, hand scrolls, sumi-e, and so many woodblock prints. (via open culture)
On historical accuracy in movies (Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey) and the “anxious, professional monitoring in which the images onscreen must be checked and rechecked for their accordance with the original text and preexisting notions about it”.
The AI hater’s guide to code with LLMs. This is an interesting and thoughtful read.
Recently released: Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play. “What magical mushroom could have turned an unassuming playing card company into one of the dominant cultural forces of the twenty-first century?”
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