Some advice from Old Man Kottke: if you need readers, get some with good lenses. I had some cheapo ones that gave me eye strain, so I ordered these from Caddis and they’re like 100 times better. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
“When does a kid become an adult?” Boy oh boy, this question has manifested in so many ways in our family over the past year (my son turns 18 soon, is off to college in the fall, and is both super smart/capable *and* wildly clueless). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don’t Exist. Just straight-up hallucinated books by the likes of Percival Everett & Andy Weir. The writer: “I’m completely embarrassed.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Magnus Carlsen played a game of freestyle chess against 143,000 people (who voted on what moves to make) and was forced into a draw. I’m surprised at the outcome…I didn’t think the wisdom of the crowds would work in a situation like this. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.o … | Continue reading
Derek Bolz made a video about what biking does for his mental health. A partial transcript (boldface mine): Life has been rough lately. I don’t want to air my dirty laundry on the internet, so I won’t go into detail. But for a number of reasons, I am quite stressed out, maybe mor … | Continue reading
White House officials wanted to put federal workers ‘in trauma.’ It’s working. “Federal workers describe struggling with panic attacks, depression, suicidal thoughts.” Once again, the cruelty is the point. | Continue reading
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno: Or direct t … | Continue reading
What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get. “Nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck.” | Continue reading
Fairy Pools is an excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s upcoming novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. “Arugula, she thought. I’m going to die alone in a Scottish castle because people have gotten too good for iceberg lettuce.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Whoa, look at the interior of this new Japanese restaurant in NYC called Shirokuro — all of the surfaces (floors, chairs, walls, counters, etc.) are painted to look like a 2-dimensional drawing. From Colossal: “Shirokuro” translates to “white-black.” The New York Times shares tha … | Continue reading
The Unbreaking team is starting to publish “clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters”. Their first three are on Medicaid, Transgender Healthcare, and Equality at Work. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95. “He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
NASA engineers fixed some thrusters on Voyager 1 from 15 billion miles (almost 1 light-day) away. They’d been broken for 20+ years and the fix was tricky. “If the heaters were still off when they fired, it could trigger a small explosion…” Amazing. 💬 Join the discussion o … | Continue reading
Justice Sotomayor’s Message to Lawyers: Stand Up, Fight and Win. “Those on the high court often exercise caution in their choice of words. That’s why it was striking when she [delivered] a stern message to the legal profession: stand up for democracy…” | Continue reading
A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about … | Continue reading
“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.) 💬 Join the discussio … | Continue reading
Yes, the Media’s Biden Coverage Was Flawed. But Its Reporting on Trump Was Far Worse. “Despite wishful thinking, there’s no such thing as ‘just the facts’ or complete neutrality, because editorial decisions and reporting choices always matter.” | Continue reading
Colin Jost & Michael Che give each other jokes to tell on SNL’s Weekend Update. Humans don’t have gaskets but I nearly popped something gasket-like while watching this I was laughing so hard. (Seriously, there was actual chest pain.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Netflix has picked up Sesame Street after HBO/Max/HBO Max/LOL Max cancelled their financial support of the show. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Congratulations to Amazon on Its Partnership With the Saudi Prince Who Murdered Jeff Bezos’ Employee and Hacked His Phone. A profile in rapacity & cowardice. | Continue reading
Hey folks. I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes on some new features and while some of them aren’t ready to go yet, others are. I don’t know if Sunday evening is the best time to do this, but here’s what’s new on the site: 1. Faving posts. For the past several months, KDO me … | Continue reading
The Internet Phone Book is “an annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
I was reminded the other day of what a curated treasure trove of art 20x200 is. So I took a spin through their archive and pulled out some favorites. First up are these Always Choose Happy prints from Amos Kennedy (I also like his Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone prints): I don’ … | Continue reading
A series of videos by Toby Hendy where she explains the PhD theses of Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and others. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
The Public Domain Review has published some lovely illustrations of goldfish from a 1780 monograph called Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine. Histoire naturelle des dorades de la Chine (1780) — the dorades in the title refers not to sea bream but the fish’s gilded appeara … | Continue reading
George Orwell’s 11 rules for a nice cup of tea. “I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator. Brooks says of the photo: Despite being a scientific instr … | Continue reading
International students studying in the US were asked about the chilling effects of the Trump regime’s actions on their freedom of speech and movement. “Others said they now avoid speaking in public about divisive issues or participating in protests…” | Continue reading
Trans athlete Soren Stark-Chessa finished first in the 1600-meter race at a recent track meet in Maine. Republican state representative Laurel Libby complained about Stark-Chessa’s win on a Fox News appearance, saying that trans athletes are “pushing many, many of our young women … | Continue reading
Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing. “Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
We all recall the revelation last year that the ocean’s rebellious teenagers, orcas, have started wearing salmon on their heads. Again. (The official state animal of Connecticut is the sperm whale, which is wholly unrelated to this post, except insofar as whales were just mention … | Continue reading
What It’s Like to Be a Professional Card Counter. “Suddenly, I get a tap on the shoulder from security telling me that they don’t want my business anymore.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Typically interesting thoughts about AI from Neal Stephenson. “I see parallels between these and the hydrogen bomb tests that were conducted in your back yard during the 1950s.” | Continue reading
Future Ruins is a one-day music festival featuring film and TV composers like Ben Salisbury, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Isobel Waller-Bridge, and Mark Mothersbaugh. Nov 8 in LA. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
Albert Kahn sent photographers all over the world in the early 1900s and amassed over 72,000 color photos in the process. Here are a few shots of his from Paris on the eve of World War I. That photo is of the entrance to the Passage du Caire at the corner of Rue d’Alexandrie and … | Continue reading
U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat. “Suppose your special forces team is parachuting into hostile territory. Can you really order someone named Ashley to jump out of a plane? It defies common sense.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke … | Continue reading
Power Houses, a photographic look “inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers”. Incl. Spike Lee, Colson Whitehead, Ella Emhoff, Huma Abedin, Martin Scorsese, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Maya Lin. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
A Longevity Expert’s 5 Tips for Aging Well, e.g. strength training, better sleep, pay attention to mental health. (Having money helps w/ all this.) And 100%: “If they’re hawking a supplement. I would kick them off the list of being credible.” 💬 Join the discussion on kott … | Continue reading
“British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.” Harvard bought it for $27.50 — it’s likely worth $10s of millions. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS. Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video … | Continue reading
10,000 Drum Machines is a growing collection of web-based drum machines. I like the Extremely Long-Term Drum Machine (“20 bass drums a millennium”). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in his work. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. It … | Continue reading
The End of Rule of Law in America. “After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years.” | Continue reading
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jas … | Continue reading
When the world is going to shit, people need music; they need to dance. Especially those whose communities are under attack and who feel unsafe. See also Sinners. (That scene! You know the one…) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading
How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. “The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda.” | Continue reading
Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. It’s a real golden age of rich people revealing how not that smart they are. And now some more laughing: hahahaha. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → | Continue reading