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.
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A Brief History of Japanese Art
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”.
kdo rolodex · a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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The Browserhttps://thebrowser.com -
Ross Andersenhttps://bsky.app/profile/rossandersen.bsky.social -
Chenjerai Kumanyikahttps://bsky.app/profile/chenjerai.bsky.social -
TYWKIWDBIhttps://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com -
MessyNessyChichttps://www.messynessychic.com
refresh for more
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?”
A molly guard is a safety cover that you need to move out of the way before pressing an important button. “Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button…”
Polar explorer and scientist Felicity Aston shares her beauty uniform. “When I come back from an expedition, my hair is in the GREATEST shape. That whole thing about washing your hair less frequently? It’s true.”
Food Is Love is a collection of essays about “how memory, food, and love are all intertwined”. “We are reminded that food is an expression of love, and sometimes the only way people who loved us were capable of showing it.”
14-year old Miles Wu recently won the top prize at a junior innovators competition for an origami shape that can hold 10,000 times its own weight “that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters”.
The 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century. I’ve only seen a few of these; I’ve added a bunch to my to-see list. Any particular faves? Or additions to the list?
Comments Are Back On
As I mentioned previously, comments have been unavailable on the site for the past few weeks:
There was a rise in casual negativity that felt too close to how social media feels, i.e. a place where even well-meaning folks are not incentivized to think “this isn’t for me” and move on without comment. I understand that the pull of treating this social space just like other social spaces is strong, but we’re trying to do something different here…
In the meantime, I’ve updated and refreshed the community guidelines; if you are going to participate in comments threads here, I would appreciate you reading it. (Quick reminder: you need to be a KDO member to comment.)
Instead of going over the guidelines here, I thought it might be helpful to share some examples of what I would consider good comments & threads:
👏 Margaret M’s comment on The Lies and Falsifications of Oliver Sacks (it’s a good thread in general); an excerpt:
I’m a doctor. It’s my second career; I was a book editor before. Naturally, when I decided to go back to school to pursue medicine, I read all sorts of books by doctors about taking care of their patients. Obviously, I read everything he wrote (for a general audience, anyway).
This is such a betrayal.
🙌 Stuart Kern’s comment on Core Memories With the Swiftie Dads; an excerpt:
Got time for a lengthy Worst Dad Ever Goes to See Taylor Swift story?
2018 Taylor Swift tour. I take joy in what brings either of my two daughters joy. Happy to take my 17 year old daughter to see Taylor Swift. It involved snakes for some reason.
Months in advance she camps out online and scores two tickets. Days out she decorates a t-shirt. Concert day she gets home from school, paints her face. We sit in traffic for two hours to get to the stadium. She floats across the acres of parking lot, grooving on the scene. We get to the gate.
“These tickets were for last night.”
👍 Both discussions about Pluribus — perfect posts for folks to express opinions. And so many people thoughtfully disagreeing with me and each other with kindness & respect.
😊 The thread about the “devilish” 2025 game. Quick comments work here — everyone understood the vibe of the thread.
🎯 Dalton’s comment on Playing Boards of Canada on a DEC PDP-1 from 1959:
Somewhere there is a Venn diagram of all the things I like, and this is right in the middle of all of it!
It’s always OK to express your enthusiasm and appreciation for a link or comment.
I also pulled some examples of feedback from social media that I don’t find helpful in contributing to a good discussion. None of these have a “yes, and…” vibe:
👎 These replies to the CIA deleting the World Factbook:
But then, did we ever trust “facts” published by the CIA?
I’m pretty sure half of them are functionally illiterate anyway so they probably don’t see the point.
Perfectly fine posts for social media but they wouldn’t work on KDO; they’re casually negative and don’t improve the conversation for others. Discussing the trustworthiness of the CIA, the propaganda aspect of the World Factbook, and the incompetence of the current regime are all worthy topics of discussion, but you’ve gotta work harder than these drive-by dunks.1
🤦♂️ This reply to The Strangers’ Case:
Many would say that Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More were unoriginal. This same guidance is found from 1,600 years earlier in Luke 10. Many know is the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Again, very normal social media post. Further context/reading is good, but you can tell us about the Parable of the Good Samaritan without dinging Shakespeare for unoriginality.
😱 This reply to the news about canned juice being discontinued:
OJ is liquid candy anyway, which is why juice sales are stalling. I just wish it weren’t towards the horrid paint thinner that is kombucha…
Self-explanatory, I hope.
Anyway, I hope you get the gist and that I haven’t completely scared you off from commenting here. Really, the vast majority of comments here are great and I’m glad this facet of the site is back.
- That said, the tone of my post about the Factbook was not at all positive or constructive: “The CIA has deleted the CIA World Factbook (a popular almanac about the countries of the world) from the web. Fuck this. All these assholes do is pillage & destroy.” (And because of that tone, I probably would not have turned on comments for that post — not a good conversation starter on my part.)↩
Fun fact of the day: at the height of his quadruple axel, Olympic figure skater Ilia Malinin is spinning at 350 rpm, “about the same as a kitchen stand mixer”.
If you haven’t seen this or heard about it (or even if you have), the full story of this McDonald’s mural is well worth your time. “Giving that talk…was one of the greatest moments of my life. Bar none.” (Don’t skip the video!)
Building a Lego-Powered Submarine
As you know, I love me some Lego engineering builds. This one is pretty fun: using a large syringe, a Raspberry Pi, neodymium magnets, a controller scavenged from a toy submarine, and a bunch of Lego pieces, Brick Experiment Channel built a remote-controlled submarine. And it works so well! They even tested it by navigating 200 meters in a real stream.
Spider-Noir is an upcoming live-action series starring Nicolas Cage as his noir Spider-Man character from Spider-Verse. The trailer is available in color and black & white.
The Track
The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge.
The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the boys are guided by their devoted coach Senad, whose fight to rebuild the neglected track mirrors his determination to create a future for his athletes in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Filmed over five transformative years, The Track captures an intimate and deeply human coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the scars of war, political corruption, and rising nationalism. As the boys balance Olympic ambition with the pull of street life, heartbreak, and survival, their paths begin to diverge, revealing the stark realities young people face in modern Bosnia.
You can check the website for online and IRL showings; it’s on Amazon Prime in the US.
“‘CEO said a thing!’ journalism generally involves a press outlet parroting the claims of a CEO or billionaire utterly mindlessly without any sort of useful historical context as to whether anything being said is factually correct.”
“Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its centre but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence.”
The Origins of One of the Most Beloved Video Games of All Time. “Something I’ve heard from every Mario developer I’ve ever spoken to over the years is this: Whenever you press a button, something fun should happen.”
Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart) on the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest. “If you allow yourself to trust-fall into the barbed intricacies of the writing, you will discover soft, exquisite humanity as its perennial landing.”
“It’s Fine If I Suck Sometimes”
Sara Hussain for Vogue India: In 2026, I’m No Longer Interested in ‘Working on Myself’, aka the exhausting “hyper-policing [of] our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise”.
Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don’t reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.
To be fair, some of this shift was necessary. Therapy helps. Naming patterns helps. Talking about things publicly has helped people survive things they otherwise might not have. Awareness is progress. My awareness, however, has tipped into surveillance.
Being in therapy these last few years has been great, essential even. But I feel what Hussain is talking about here. One of the helpful things I’ve learned is that while you do need to change and grow, you still need to be yourself. I forget who, but someone once said that the job of an editor is to make a writer sound more like themselves. That’s probably true of the therapeutic process as well, including the part we’re responsible for.
“Any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims.”
When Gmail was released as a public beta in 2004, it “ran on three hundred old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted”.
Actor-style headshots from the 80s of artists like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Longo.
Recently Discovered: an NYC Underground Railroad Stop
The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the house, abolitionist Joseph Brewster, as a hiding place for enslaved people escaping from the South.
But when visitors head upstairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, there’s something strategically hidden within the walls of Manhattan’s first landmarked building: a link to the Underground Railroad.
“We knew it was here, but didn’t really know what we were looking at,” Camille Czerkowicz, the curator for the Merchant’s House Museum, said.
Now they know that the Merchant’s House was also a “safe house” for enslaved Africans who escaped bondage in the South.
Architects and preservationists recently investigated the building’s hidden vertical passageway along the west wall and examined it for themselves.
“I’ve been practicing historical preservation law for 30 years, and this is a generational find. This is the most significant find in historic preservation in my career, and it’s very important that we preserve this,” Michael Hiller, a preservation attorney and professor at Pratt Institute, said.
Underneath those built-in drawers is the path to freedom.
AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions. “From this point on, for as long as we exist, we might be asking AIs what comes next. We won’t always understand how they arrived at their predictions.”
Zoning Out Is Good For You
Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.
In case you didn’t realize, ICE is still terrorizing communities, kidnapping people off the streets, and destroying property in Minnesota. “The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance.”
Fontemon is the world’s first video game in a font. “The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font.”
The GOP goal of destroying the post office is coming along: the USPS is now so unreliable that newspaper delivery is delayed across the country. (My mail delivery is currently one bundle every week or two.)
Some Site Goings-On
Hey gang. I took a couple of days off at the beginning of the week to visit some colleges with my daughter. She found a potential contender, one that was just fine, and a school that isn’t going to work for her — we both independently zoned out listening to the presentation about 10 minutes in. 😂 It was a last-minute trip and I’m so glad we got to go do this together. Standout food of the trip was from All’Antico Vinaio — best sandwich I’ve had in months. Anyway, I’m back now and focused on the site because what else is there to do when it’s -5° outside?
Some of you have noticed that the comments have been turned off for the last few weeks. There was a rise in casual negativity that felt too close to how social media feels, i.e. a place where even well-meaning folks are not incentivized to think “this isn’t for me” and move on without comment. I understand that the pull of treating this social space just like other social spaces is strong, but we’re trying to do something different here, as outlined in the community guidelines. So, I took comments offline to regroup. They will be back soon; I miss them. Thanks for your patience.
I have been busy the last couple of months and have lots of things in the pipeline, including a new t-shirt (and store), new site features, and a bunch of behind-the-scenes things that (hopefully) you won’t even notice. I’ve been kinda stuck on finishing them up and rolling them out because of *waves hands around wildly at all the things happening in the world* — it feels like a tough time to be anything but laser-focused on fascism, even though that’s what they want.
The bastards, they’ve ground me down some, I can’t lie. Striking any sort of balance between normalcy and alarm, personally, has been challenging. Hardly a unique situation — everyone I talk to these days is in the same boat to some degree (and some are in more challenging & dangerous boats) — and sometimes that solidarity is a comfort but sometimes it ain’t and I just feel stuck and aimless and wrong for not caring or for caring too much. But I’ll figure it out — we all will. I hope. ✌️
“We will not achieve any of our ultimate goals without exercising state power, and the most effective way to take state power is through nonviolent but confrontational resistance.”
A recommendation for a recent episode of the Heavyweight podcast on the Trump regime’s occupation of Minneapolis.
The Guardian: here’s how Substack makes money hosting Nazi newsletters. These newsletters weren’t even hard to find or subtle: swastikas and in-app recommendations from one antisemitic newsletter to a bunch of others.
How Edo (Tokyo) transformed from a city on the brink of ecological collapse 400 years ago to “one of the most sustainable and efficient cities in history”.
“Printing Films is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography.”
Why don’t filmmakers just film on location instead of using visual effects? Lots of reasons, including not disrupting communities, control of weather & sun position, or can’t get permission.
Dan Sinker writes about the transformative experience of seeing a work by Jenny Holzer when he was 14. “Truisms was a revelation. Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST NO BILLS wall as it could in a gallery.”
“How did medieval French handwriting become ‘the Nazi font?’ And why did Hitler make it illegal?” TIL that Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag about how much he disliked blackletter fonts.
Do you remember Oddpost? It was an early email web app that used dynamic HTML to mimic the design and functionality of a desktop mail app, 2 years before Gmail launched.
Tinder Hasn’t Worked, So I’m Putting Myself on Zillow. “I realize that my late-’80s construction might not land me in the “trending” section right away…”
I’ve always said more popstars should duet with puppets, so Sabrina Carpenter and Kermit the Frog singing Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s ‘Island in a Stream’ as part of The Muppet Show’s latest special is perfect (to me).
The Triumph of Europe’s Social Democracy
Economist Thomas Piketty, writing for Le Monde (archive) on the success of Europe’s social democratic model and countering “the narrative of a ‘declining’ continent”:
If someone had told the European elites and liberal economists of 1914 that wealth redistribution would one day account for half of national income, they would have unanimously condemned the idea as collectivist madness and predicted the continent’s ruin. In reality, European countries have achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social well-being, largely due to collective investments in health, education and public infrastructure.
To win the cultural and intellectual battle, Europe must now assert its values and defend its model of development, fundamentally opposed to the nationalist-extractivist model championed by Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States and by Vladimir Putin’s allies in Russia. A crucial issue in this fight is the choice of indicators used to measure human progress.
For these indicators, Piketty mentions some of the same factors that economist Gabriel Zucman detailed in his Le Monde piece I posted in December:
More leisure time, better health outcomes, greater equality and lower carbon emissions, all with broadly comparable productivity: Europeans can be proud of their model, argues Gabriel Zucman, director of the EU Tax Observatory.
Professor Walt Hunter on the merits of challenging students: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are. “Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?”
The Mountain That Weighed the Earth. How scientists in 1774 used a Scottish mountain to estimate the mass of the Earth to within 20% of the modern number by measuring the mountain’s gravitational effect on a precision plumb line.
Keep the Meter Running With Mouhamadou Aliy & Zohran Mamdani
In addition to his great series Subway Takes, Kareem Rahma does another series called Keep the Meter Running where he hops into NYC cabs, interviews the drivers, and asks them to take him to their favorite places.
In the run-up to the NYC mayoral election last year, Rahma jumped into a cab driven by Mouhamadou Aliy, who wanted to pick up his friend along the way to his favorite spot. That friend was now-mayor Zohran Mamdani, who tells the story of how the two of them protested & went on a hunger strike together. It’s a great conversation and video…I watched a snippet of it on Instagram (I missed it last year) and had to track down the whole thing:
I’m sorry, how can you not vote for this guy? The real deal, indeed — and voters could tell. There are so many politicians, particularly on the left, who talk a good game, push all the right buttons, and then they sputter or freeze or about-face when the rubber meets the road. It feels hollow; no wonder voters and activists find it hard to get behind the calculation of politicians who they know, deep down, are just saying certain things to get a vote. At least with Republicans, they tell you they’re going to run the country into the ground and then they go out and try to do it.
Times New Resistance
This is awesome and clever. Minneapolis designer Abby Haddican has made a typeface called Times New Resistance. The letters are identical to Times New Roman (and it even appears as such in font menus, except there’s “an extra space between the words Times and New”) but when you type with it, it autocorrects a list of words: “For example, the word ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon.” Here’s a partial list:
The idea is that you install it on your MAGA relative’s computer and then sit back and watch the fun. It even works when you copy/paste text or on pre-existing text. Free to download on Haddican’s website. (via @kylevanhorn)
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