19.05.2026
You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
A neglected portrait is given what seems like an almost miraculous second chance.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Baumgartner Restoration Painstakingly Brings a Neglected Portrait Back to Life appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
"Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses."
Mariame Kaba’s letter to young activists: “I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently.”
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Hot Chip is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork. And later, NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called “Boy From School.” You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix—the band’s also in the show—or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song in my car all the time in 2006. So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how “Boy from School” was made.
For more info, visit songexploder.net/hot-chip.
A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”
Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Among the buildings are a school in Mass., a hospital in Rwanda, a prison in Norway, and a lighthouse in Maine. Intriguing!
India’s Hottest District Shuts at 10 AM as Mercury Breaches 48 Degrees Celsius Mark. “After 10am, Banda becomes deserted. At first, you see one or two people outside. Then, as the day rises, there is only silence.” (48C = 118F)
Longreads
• Carolyn Wells
"A family trips and stumbles across 3,000 miles of Texas."
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Arch Enemy Arts joins forces with PangeaSeed for a group show and fundraiser to help conserve our oceans.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Four Dozen Artists Celebrate Marine Wildlife and Lore in ‘Common Waters’ appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
“Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship.”
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
"Is it suffering? Is it just a sign of the times?"
New-to-me vocabulary: oneshotted, “a term that means, roughly, to be destroyed and subsequently remade by a single experience”.