Entries for November 2026
In a recent video, Kurzgesagt explores what we know about the first human civilizations that formed some 12,000 years ago and how they led to the first cities and the invention of writing.
What we know about human history is only a fraction of the full story. Much of the rest is like dark matter, invisible to us. We can’t see it, and we can only see the effects of its presence. But thanks to new techniques for DNA sequencing, dating ancient detritus, mathematical models, and aerial and lidar archaeology, we are now able to get a faint idea of what this world might have looked and felt like.
One thing I really appreciate about Kurzgesagt is how each of their videos is accompanied by an extensive list of sources. For instance, I’m not sure I’d heard about the massive Lake Agassiz draining into the world’s oceans and disrupting the entire planet’s climate some 8200 years ago — and there are several primary sources listed for further reading. Here’s how Kurzgesagt tells it:
Around the year 3800 of the human era a sudden catastrophe happened in North America. The receding glaciers of the last ice age had created one of the largest lakes in Earth’s history, larger than the Caspian Sea today. It was held back by super massive ice sheets, which formed a gigantic dam.
Surprising no one, the dam melted and suddenly failed – the whole lake suddenly drained into the ocean. Global sea levels rose by 1-2 meters and the great conveyor belt that carried warm water northwards slowed down. Across the North Atlantic and Europe, and into the Near East, the climate turned colder and drier – in some regions by several degrees. Rain patterns shifted, summers grew longer and harsher, and a drought lasting well over a century parched the land.
And:
We know that during this time all over the world migration towards rivers and lakes sped up — bringing agriculture and technology with them. Some of the most consequential journeys led into the Nile Valley, where farming villages took root and slowly laid the ground for the rich civilization that would one day rise there.
From Wikipedia:
Lake Agassiz’s major drainage reorganization events were of such magnitudes that they significantly impacted climate, sea level, and possibly early human civilization. The lake’s enormous freshwater release into the Arctic Ocean has been postulated to have disrupted oceanic circulation and caused temporary cooling. The draining of 13,000 years ago may be the cause of the Younger Dryas stadial. Although disputed, the draining at 9,900–10,000 years ago may be the cause of the 8,200 yr climate event. A study by Turney and Brown links the 8,500-years-ago drainage to the expansion of agriculture from east to west across Europe; they suggest that this drainage may also account for various flood myths of ancient cultures, including the Biblical flood narrative.
Fascinating.
Do you think you could write down the names of 3000 people? “As part of a competition with a few friends, I attempted the very dumb challenge of trying to write the names of 3,000 real people in one sitting. It took 7 hours, but I did it.”
“Our attention is all we have. And we already gave away a huge percentage of it to machine learning algorithms 10 years ago, and we are living in an intensely different and I think worse world because of it.” Was 2016 a sneaky inflection point?
The soundtrack for Wipeout XL (aka Wipeout 2097) was crazy for a video game; it featured tracks from groups like Underworld, Orbital, The Prodigy, Daft Punk, and Chemical Brothers. I had this on CD! Ripped it and played ‘em on Winamp!
An important KDO milestone whooshed by the other day and I was so heads-down on tuning up the new search engine (more on that below) that I missed it. So: it’s been 10 years since I started the KDO membership program! (Quick recap of the value proposition from the membership page FAQ: “kottke.org is my full-time job and member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled.”)
10 years! It is impossible for me to overstate the impact membership has had on my work. Beyond the simple fact that KDO wouldn’t exist without it, membership support allows me the freedom to choose when, where, how, and why to work, resulting, IMO, a better place for all of us to spend time.
The last couple of years have felt especially membership-inflected and influenced. We’ve been working together on building the KDO comments into a quieter haven for sharing stories and information, outside the social media networks driven by algorithms and outrage. It’s taken time, but KDO is starting to feel like a neighborhood joint where folks can stop by and find a welcoming place for interesting conversation.1 And more to come!
I’ve also been working hard on different ways of helping people find stuff to read/watch/listen to online and just generally making things easier to use around here. There’s:
- The Rolodex (which includes a mini feed reader for members), which is a list of the sites and people I read that you might like too.
- Improvements to the comments to help make following & having conversations easier. This has been a steady effort — tweaks and new features every few months since launching member comments three years ago. (How has it been that long?!)
- Prometheus, a search & discovery tool for gift links, open only to members for now.
- KDO site search. Still only open to just members. I spent a lot of time over the past weekend tuning it to return better results, and I think we’re getting somewhere. Improved the speed as well, at the expense of, well, increased expense.2 It’s still not magic, but I’m hoping to open this up to everyone soon.
- Underscore, a web-based music player I built for listening to music across multiple streaming platforms while I work. Anyone can listen to my collection and members can compile their own collection to listen to.
And this is in addition to the site’s usual service of curated links and posts. A lot of this has happened in just the last month — Jesus, Kottke, slow down! — but I’ve been working on some of these things, on and off, for years. I couldn’t focus on this stuff for months and months earlier this year — launching requires a level of attention that’s difficult for me to muster when other things are going on. Getting the move behind me and establishing myself in surroundings more suitable to my temperament has been a real boon.
I hope all of this adds up to a place and project that people want to make use of and support. Twenty-something years into doing KDO as my full-time job, I can honestly say I am enjoying it more than ever. Thanks so much for reading and for your support. If you’re not yet a member and want to join us on this ride, you can check out your membership options here — it only takes a minute to sign up (less if you use Apple Pay or Stripe’s Link autofill).
Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires by Paris Marx. “He exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities in their pursuit of digital power…”
Simon Willison: The October Inflection Point for Vibe Game Development. “The thing I find both exciting and shameful about this is that I have got interesting results from so little creative input.”
Arkivism is a search and visual discovery engine for millions of public domain works from the collections of the Smithsonian, The Met, NASA, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, and more.
Ted Chiang: “There’s no way to write fiction and guarantee your readers will understand it correctly. There is no way you will ever be able to write something so straightforward that Elon Musk will understand it the way that you intend it.”
Let’s get this out of the way: Olivia Colman will be great as Mrs. Bennet in the new Pride and Prejudice series; here’s the trailer. But the rest of it has some awfully large shoes to fill — both the 1995 and 2005 adaptations are rightly beloved.
Are contemporary technologies like GPS, phones, and AI deskilling the human body? “In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending.”
Love the idea of a volta, a pivotal point. “The moment when an acquaintance becomes a friend, when a song goes from background noise to what I will demand people play at my funeral.” Or when a novel goes from boring to incredible.
The Drawn Maps are the borders of the countries, state, provinces, and other official territories collectively drawn by more than 300,000 people playing an online daily game called Borderline. There’s a world map as well as maps of the USA, Canada, Italy, and more. There are also timelapse versions of some of the maps.
Babe, wake up! New potato just dropped. It tastes like roast chicken.
Trailer for season four of The Gilded Age, which started yesterday. I love this show for reasons that are unclear to me. But I don’t care! The heart wants what it wants!
Readwise announces Readwise Books. “We’ve built Readwise Books: our very own ebook store and app. In simple terms, you can think of it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps, where you can buy, read, and track books.”
In the wake of Patrick Stewart’s death the other day, I watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation — the two-part series finale All Good Things… in fact.1 Wanting to add more Picard-centric episodes to my watchlist, I did some research.
There are several lists out there of the episodes of ST:TNG and Star Trek: Picard where Captain Jean-Luc Picard particularly shines. Some episodes appear on nearly every list; these are the consensus favorites:
- The Inner Light. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard is struck unconscious by an energy beam from an alien probe. While just 25 minutes pass for the rest of the crew between Picard being struck unconscious and eventually regaining consciousness on the Enterprise bridge floor, the probe makes Picard experience 40 years of lifetime as Kamin, a humanoid scientist whose planet is threatened by the nova of its sun.”
- Family. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard visits his brother’s family in France, where he begins to come to terms with his treatment by the Borg.”
- The Best of Both Worlds. “In this two part episode, the Enterprise must battle the Borg who are intent on conquering Earth, with a captured and assimilated Captain Picard as their emissary.”
- Darmok. “The crew of the Enterprise is unable to establish meaningful communication with the crew of an alien vessel, which is resolved by the struggle of the ships’ captains to defend each other from a vicious beast.”
- All Good Things… “The plot involves Captain Jean-Luc Picard jumping through time and the formation of an anomaly that defies causality, the whole situation being a test that allows Picard to demonstrate human potential to the Q Continuum by making an intuitive leap of faith to understand the cause of, and how to eliminate, the anomaly before it destroys humanity.”
- The Measure of a Man. “In this episode, the rights of the android officer Lt. Commander Data are threatened by a scientist who wishes to dismantle him to produce replicas of him. Captain Jean-Luc Picard fights in a Starfleet court for Data’s right of self-determination, not to be declared mere property of Starfleet, while Commander William Riker is obliged to argue on behalf of the scientist.”
- Starship Mine. “While the Enterprise is evacuated for hazardous maintenance, Captain Picard must, alone, contend with thieves posing as a work crew aboard the ship. The plot has been noted for its similarity to the 1988 action film Die Hard.”
- Chain of Command. “Jean-Luc Picard is relieved of command of the Enterprise and reassigned to lead a covert mission, while his replacement is assigned to deal with the Cardassians openly. The second part of the episode is noted for the intense performance of Patrick Stewart and its depiction of brutal torture and interrogation scenes.”
- Tapestry. “Q allows a supposedly deceased Captain Jean-Luc Picard to re-visit a pivotal event in his youth that he since regrets. Picard changes the past, but upon returning to the present he finds that the event made him the man he became.”
- The Drumhead. “An explosion aboard the Enterprise leads to a high-level investigation headed by Admiral Norah Satie, a retired officer renowned for her skill at exposing conspiracies.”
You can check out the lists at Screen Rant, Collider, Comicbook.com, That Love Podcast, and Popular Mechanics for more good Picard episodes.
The movies seemed to be out of scope for these lists, but I’ve always loved First Contact and Picard’s unhinged pursuit of the Borg — “The line must be drawn here!”
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