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Historian Thomas Zimmer has left academia, Substack, and the US; now he’s launching his new career as an indie writer with a newsletter about “the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America”. Recommended!

My guest today is Chef David Chang. He founded Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. That was just the start of his incredible career – he’s opened several restaurants, winning awards and Michelin stars along the way, and becoming a fixture in the upper echelon of food. He’s the host of the Netflix shows Ugly Delicious and Dinner Time Live, as well as his own podcast, The Dave Chang Show. For this episode, I talked to Dave about the song “I See a Darkness.” It's the title track on the album by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, which came out in 1999. Later, Johnny Cash would cover “I See a Darkness” in 2000, as a duet with Will Oldham, as part of Johnny Cash’s acclaimed American series.

You can get Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s "I See a Darkness" on vinyl or digital here.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/david-chang.

Using Cesium-137 testing to find counterfeit wine. “Cesium-137 did not exist on this planet until we exploded the first atomic bomb.” The technique was used to test the legitimacy of some wines said to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

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Is the New York Times finally getting real about Trump? “In the last 10 days or so, several Times articles have been considerably more straightforward – and honest – about the way Trump lies and spreads division.”

Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: physics · science · Steve Mould · video

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In Jimmy Kimmel’s words: What the late-night host said upon his return from suspension. “I was not happy when they pulled me off the air.”

McSweeney’s didn’t even need to lampoon Trump’s comments about vaccines, autism, & Tylenol…they just printed them verbatim and it reads like the most unhinged parody. “They pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies. It’s a disgrace.”

Qwen3-VL: Sharper Vision, Deeper Thought, Broader Action I've been looking forward to this. Qwen 2.5 VL is one of the best available open weight vision LLMs, so I had high hopes for Qwen 3's vision models. Firstly, we are open-sourcing the flagship model of this series: Qwe...

GPT-5-Codex OpenAI half-relased this model earlier this month, adding it to their Codex CLI tool but not their API. Today they've fixed that - the new model can now be accessed as gpt-5-codex. It's priced the same as regular GPT-5: $1.25/million input tokens, $10/million out...

An excerpt from Patricia Lockwood’s new book Will There Ever Be Another You. “But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.”

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The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal) Tags: art · cats · ShouXin 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

A tantalizing peek into the massive 90,000-item archive left behind by David Bowie.

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In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars. ...

Conservative White Christians Will Worship Anyone But Jesus. “Seeing White Evangelicals build idols out of people whose lives and public work are the antithesis of Jesus is something we’ve grown accustomed to.”

Didn’t think I was interested in a profile of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but Sam Anderson can write. “It is a smile that makes you feel as if the sun is setting over an undiscovered tropical beach on which 10,000 baby sea turtles are about to hatch.”

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Hey folks. I’m very excited to be heading to Japan for the first time next month. I’ll be there from mid-October for 3-4 weeks. The current plan is Tokyo, Kamakura, Kanazawa, Kyoto, Osaka, Koyasan, and perhaps Hiroshima — change my mind? If you’ve been there, please leave your recs in the comments below or drop me an email. If you live there or will be visiting at the same time, let’s meet up!

The photograph above is from Koya Bound by Craig Mod & Dan Rubin. The companion website to the book is great.

Tags: Craig Mod · Dan Rubin · Japan · Jason Kottke · travel

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Taegan Goddard, a few days ago at Political Wire: The sudden suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show after threats from FCC chair Brendan Carr was a jolt. It looked like the next step in Donald Trump’s campaign to silence dissent. But there’s another way to see it: an opportu...

The 25 Greatest Picture Books of the Past 25 Years, including Extra Yarn, School’s First Day of School, Julián Is a Mermaid, and Don’t Trust Fish.

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Even after reading a couple of reviews and watching the trailer, it’s difficult to understand what the Austrian film Little, Big, and Far is actually about. So here’s the official synopsis:

Austrian astronomer Karl is at a crossroads in his life and work. He finds his physicist wife growing distant and his job being reshaped by environmental crises as thoughts about science, fascism, and his grandson’s future spin above his head. After attending a conference in Greece, Karl decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a dark enough sky to reconnect with the stars. Abandoned at a remote mountain trail, he ascends and waits for darkness to fall.

Tags: astronomy · Little Big and Far · movies · trailers · video

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ABC is putting Kimmel’s show back on tonight, which is great. But I think it’s essential to watch the joke that triggered his suspension. I’m linking here to a CNN post with the full clip. CNN headlined their post “What Kimmel Said About Charlie Kirk That Yanked His Show Off Air”, and that’s basically how most news outlets have phrased it.

But the joke wasn’t about Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. It was about Donald Trump being a sociopathic ghoul. Trump was asked how he’s holding up after the death of “his friend Charlie Kirk”. You really have to watch it — a transcript of Trump’s answer does no justice to how sociopathic it was. And Kimmel called him out on it with mockery.

Link: cnn.com/2025/09/17/business/video/abc-jimmy-kimmel-fcc…