Artist Lewis Prosser describes himself on Instagram as an “absurdist basket-maker”. His costumes for a project called Making Merrie reflect that self-description. Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked traditions … | Continue reading
Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John Waters about how he used to work at Mary Oliver’s bookstore in Provincetown. “They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun.” | Continue reading
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the 14th amendment, “spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get”. | Continue reading
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.” | Continue reading
57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W telev … | Continue reading
I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city builder game called GlagStone. | Continue reading
I suspect like many of you, I saw The Odyssey this weekend. I really liked it and the more I read & think about the film, the more it grows in my esteem. This thread by Mmina Maclang-Tamayo (spoilers!) is pretty much how I interpreted what Nolan was trying to convey. As it turns … | Continue reading
From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution, a five-part series premiering on PBS in October. “Ponder this: All the incredible diversity of animal life on Earth sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other.” | Continue reading
What Training My Chaotic Dog Taught Me About Power, Control — and Human Beings. “As any parent of a toddler knows, being morally liable for something that is incapable of moral liability is a fraught and stressful business.” | Continue reading
Building a World Map With Only 500 Bytes. | Continue reading
This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories. Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revi … | Continue reading
From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the 250 most influential books in United States history”. Incl. Neuromancer, The Fire Next Time, Nickel and Dimed, The Power Broker, and The Snowy Day. | Continue reading
New-to-me podcast that looks really interesting: Time Sensitive, “a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with leading minds about their life and work through the lens of time”. | Continue reading
To draw attention to the millions of girls who cannot afford period products, the MENstruation Foundation ran a unique advertisement in three major South African newspapers. Readers of The Star, The Mercury and Cape Times opened their newspapers this week to find something deepl … | Continue reading
Uncovered, a site for judging books by their first pages. “No cover. No bestseller sticker, no celebrity book club, no BookTok trend. You read the opening of a real book, blind, and answer the only question that matters: would you keep reading?” | Continue reading
The Resonant Computing Manifesto. “We can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations. We can build resonant environments that bring out the best in every human who inhabits them.” | Continue reading
What would a rainbow look like if we had two suns (like on Tatooine)? | Continue reading
A few highlights from a collection of lovely woodblock-printed sugoroku game boards from Japan. “The gameboards use stories and maps to teach children history and geography.” | Continue reading
Nicholas Rougeux, whose work I have featured here before, has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 illustr … | Continue reading
Legibility of effort in the LLM age. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.” | Continue reading
These have to be some of the most remarkable sports photos of all time: a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal. Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up through th … | Continue reading
Ted Gioia: “Works like the Odyssey are ritualistic and trance-inducing. They are propelled by music and driven by rhythm. They cross a border beyond literature, and enter something more transcendent and metaphysical.” | Continue reading
Good interview with Craig Mod about how he uses LLMs: “using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the ‘mainlining’ AI era”. | Continue reading
The Moist Towelette Online Museum. Live moist and prosper. 🖖💦 | Continue reading
Molly Burford, author of Moments to Hold Close, writes list poetry (is that a thing?) about the kinds of people that you want in your life. From Types Of People You Need To Hang On To: The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing for t … | Continue reading
100000% this: I Hate The Way We Talk Online. “Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. Hot takes? No. Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.” | Continue reading
Robert Eggers continues his run of One Word Title Films Featuring Very Strange Men with Werwulf. I’m not a horror guy but I was pleasantly surprised by Nosferatu, which I quite liked. | Continue reading
Trump Dismantled a Federal Climate Website. These Women Rebuilt It. “It’s not a pretty picture for climate communication and climate journalism right now.” You can check out the new site at climate.us. | Continue reading
A short, hypnotic video by Matthew Wilcock of the music generated by a tennis rally at Wimbledon. “Duplicating the players and then using the rhythm of the multiple tennis balls as they cross the pink line to drive the rhythm of the piece.” | Continue reading
Swiss project proves the viability of solar panels placed in the otherwise unused space between railroad tracks. | Continue reading
Philip Summers hand-draws game guides for old school video games. He’s done guides for games like Mega Man, Castlevania, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES), and Metroid. But my favorite one is The Legend of Zelda game guide because Zelda was (and still is, tbh) my absolute favor … | Continue reading
The LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project, tracing & visualizing 10,350 LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the US since 2003. Anti-trans bills have dominated since ~2014. | Continue reading
On the Britishisms & grammar imported into American English during the World Cup. “That’s not a foul, just a coming together.” | Continue reading
Clipart Studio lets you cut up magazines sourced from the Internet Archive, images from Wikimedia Commons, & files you’ve uploaded, and create art collages from them. This is great — be sure to check out the gallery. | Continue reading
If Other Jobs Were Like a U.S. Senator’s. “You are at the dentist’s office. No one has seen or heard from the dentist in months, but he’s been making stock trades.” | Continue reading
“A star located about 1,300 light-years from Earth shows signs of having devoured one of its planets — and is now gearing up for a second helping…” Scientists found signs of the meal by looking for “cosmic cookie crumbs”. | Continue reading
I’d seen that there was a new Tom Cruise movie coming out this fall called Digger, but I was not prepared for the trailer, in which we see Cruise playing a dipshit oligarch in what appears to be a Dr. Strangelove-style satire/thriller. The most powerful man in the world embarks … | Continue reading
TIL about Fredkin’s paradox. “With this kind of decision, what Fredkin’s paradox tells us is if it’s very difficult to decide, it’s probably because the alternatives are equivalent, and therefore it doesn’t matter which one you choose.” | Continue reading
The Universe of Short Film is an amazing site for watching, sharing, and connecting around short films. This is really cool…not sure why the site isn’t better known. | Continue reading
From XKCD, a tour of some of the Earth’s deepest and most notable holes, including mines, caves, boreholes, subway stations, lakes, tunnels, neutrino detectors, and, of course, the Mariana Trench. I was surprised to learn that a pair of boreholes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole and … | Continue reading
Ocean Vuong has a photograpy show opening at The Wadsworth Museum in Hartford, CT in August. Vuong used “portraiture, landscape, and snapshots to document queer and immigrant life in the Connecticut River Valley over two decades”. | Continue reading
When A.I. Is a Member of the Family. How a family of three in a Cleveland suburb uses AI chatbots. This is wild. | Continue reading
The best aerial photography reminds us that we don’t have to go all the way to space to experience a small helping of the overview effect. The 2026 Aerial Photographer of the Year contest celebrates the best photos taken from the air; here are a few of my favorites: … | Continue reading
A list of the new foods on offer at the Minnesota State Fair this year. They’re all some variation of “jerked pork rolled in butter & sugar, deep fried in dill pickle batter, and served with a side of cheese curd mayo”; I’d happily try any of them. | Continue reading
Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “We’ve been clear about what we want. We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.” | Continue reading
This might be my new favorite skate video? It follows a pair of young skaters around the city as they chat about their friendship, share tips about living life, and try skating everything that is even remotely skateable. Best friends, Ari and Luca are two of the most promising N … | Continue reading
Can we agree to pause the AI race? “If we can’t, then we are not as sovereign as we imagine; if we can’t, a machine god has already taken over this planet, and it’s called the market.” | Continue reading
This ancient Egyptian painter’s palette from 3000 years ago still contains traces on the original colors. (Wtf, I have old watercolor paints that look older than this…) | Continue reading