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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on page 17 of her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules.⁶ We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

The footnote refers to the OED’s entry for “Calvinball”.

Link: supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a103_kh7p.pdf

Do you miss being excited about cool new apps?

We’ve made some before like Clear and Heads Up!, and today, we have a new one for you.

Walk the World turns your steps into a new kind of virtual globe-trotting adventure.

Wouldn’t it be cool to know you’ve walked the length of the Boston Marathon this past week?

You can conquer iconic hikes and trails from around the world presented as gorgeous map milestones to complete with your hard earned steps.

If you enjoy or aspire to go on walks more regularly, and beautiful indie apps with a fun new twist, this is your new healthy addiction.

Try it free today for your iPhone.

Link: apps.apple.com/us/app/walk-the-world-virtual-trails…

This Scribbles piece was newly colored as part of a collaboration with The Marine Mammal Center! We have made signed prints available and a portion of all proceeds go to them.

Birthday breakfast, first Forkalyst gig, "Please Touch", and Easter. (33 photos)

I don’t know exactly what my expectations were of how lettering is painted on city streets, but this was not it. The level of precision and artistry is surprising.

Reminds me of this video of a hand-lettering master at work.

Update: Sure, he’s using a vehicle, but this guy is pretty good at line painting as well.

[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2014.]

Tags: art · timeless posts · typography · video

The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz profiles Patricia Lockwood. Regarding her forthcoming novel: “‘I wrote it insane and edited it sane’; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country.

From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents.

That to me is the big story of American politics right now: a mad king openly exerting tyrannical power over Americans and threatening further tyrannical power against other Americans, all under a pretext of crime reduction.

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · USA

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.”

Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

Great piece from Andy Baio demonstrating quite how convoluted the usage ethics and backlash against generative AI has become.

Will Smith has been accused of using AI to misleadingly inflate the audience sizes of his recent tour. It looks like the audiences were real, but the combined usage of static-image-to-video models by his team with YouTube's ugly new compression experiments gave the resulting footage an uncanny valley effect that lead to widespread doubts over the veracity of the content.

Tags: andy-baio, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Mallory head to Amish country to revisit the 1985 crime thriller ‘Witness,’ starring Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas, and Viggo Mortensen. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Ronak Nair, and Chris Wohlers Free eBooks library. It’s on Prime. This episode is sponsored by State Farm®️. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.®️ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is. “So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make, I think Inglourious Basterds is my masterpiece but Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is my favourite.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Raised lines and textures represent roads, pedestrian paths, and railways.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

MacOS has shipped with a collection of “utility” apps since the prehistoric era of classic Mac OS. A good rule of thumb for what makes an app a “utility” is that it’s a tool for doing something to or about your computer. Ever since Mac OS X 10.0, most of these apps have been...

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? “Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Video: “Environmental police in Rochedo, Brazil stumbled on an unexpected sight: thousands of orange-and-black bumblebee catfish scaling the slippery rocks behind waterfalls on the Aquidauana River.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

This new piece was created in collaboration with The Marine Mammal Center! We have made signed prints available and a portion of all proceeds will go to them :)

Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors. In Doors (2022), Marclay stitch...

American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate. “In 2023 there were about 700,000 “missing Americans” — those who died in 2023 but would be alive if they had lived somewhere else.” And it’s not a pandemic thing.

21 Ways People Are Using AI at Work. A high school music teacher used the prompt “make it more Gen X” for helping her write rejection letters that were direct and “thoughtful, but didn’t sound like Mr. Rogers on molly”. 😂