In this episode, I go through the top 10 songs on the US Spotify pop charts... somehow they got even worse. My Beato Club supporters: Justin Scott Terence Mark Jason Murray Lucienne Kilpatrick Alexander Young Jason Wagner Todd Ladner Rob Kline Nicholas Long Tim Benson Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues Eddie Perez David Solomon MICHAEL JOYCE Stephen Stubbs colin stead Jonathan Wentworth-Linton Patrick Payne MATTHEW KARIS Matthew Barouch Shaun Samuels Danny Kurywchak Gregory Reedy Sean Coleman Alexander Verbitskiy CL Turner Jason Pappafotis John Fulford Margaret Carno Robert C David M Combs Eric Flatt Reto Spoerli Herr Moritz Adam Monte St. Johns Jon Beezley Peter DeVault Eric Nabstedt Eric Beggs Rich Germano Brian Bloom Peter Pillitteri Piush Dahal Toby Guidry
What Was the Very First Plant in the World? “Scientists believe the first true plants evolved from green algae around 470 million years ago.”
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
"Historians and nonfiction authors often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates. But I had just gone through something primal—something beyond my control and beyond the boundaries of modern life."
This is so cool: in the early 1900s, a mechanical engineer named Louis Brennan invented a self-balancing train that ran on a single track. This video demonstrates how the train worked using a clever system of gyroscopes.
This is the Brennan Monorail, a train from the early 1900s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input.
It’s kind of incredible how well Brennan’s system worked. It’s ingenious. (via messy nessy)
Tags: engineering · inventions · Louis Brennan · physics · science · trains · video
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/14/name-of-foldable-iphone
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
"Limited information and a lack of informed health care providers make this life transition even more difficult for incarcerated people."
I mentioned this book in a previous post but it deserves its own thing: Timothy Ryback’s 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy will hit shelves in September. A must-read for me.
As part of his Real Time series, artist Maarten Baas has created The People’s Clock, a timepiece that lives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. To create the clock’s “workings”, Baas recorded more than 1000 volunteers moving as the clock’s hands over a 12-hour period. If you look carefully, you can see a single individual dressed in orange at the edge of the circle acting as the second hand:
Each of the installed clock’s faces is a looped video of that recording, synced to the current time. Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes video of how the clock was made:
See also Baas’s Sweeper’s Clock and Schiphol Clock.
Tags: amsterdam · art · clocks · Maarten Baas · time · video
Longreads
• Carolyn Wells
"The ultra-rich are fortifying themselves inside one of America’s last intact ecosystems—with money plundered from ecological sacrifice zones around the world."
The Great American GLP-1 Experiment. In the last few years, people have come up with all sorts of off-label uses for GLP-1s, including treating concussions, menopause, long Covid, IBS, drug addiction, anxiety, hair loss, and arthritis.
I made a public list of feeds for IndieWebCamp 2026 in Düsseldorf, taking place very soon on the weekend of April 25 and 26.
So far, I have put people on the list that are listed as participants on the Wiki page for the event:
So, if you like, you can use this list to see what everyone’s up to before, during, or after the event. You can just browse the list’s web page, or chuck its feed into any feed reader and follow along that way.
I’ll update the list whenever new people RSVP or show up at the event.
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
"The gold that once drew opportunists to this slice of California now attracts a new generation."
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
