The Financial Times has a nice illustrated guide to the leadership team at Twitter/X, where things are going about as you’d expect.
A Collection of Unreleased Boards of Canada Tracks
A couple of weeks ago, someone uploaded to YouTube and Google Drive eleven unreleased tracks from Boards of Canada (made from 1985-1996). This seems to be a legit, high-quality leak, judging from the excitement in the YT comments and on Reddit. I’ve heard a couple of these before, courtesy of some long-ago Kazaa/Limewire crate-digging, but most of these are new to me. (via the morning news)
Tags: Boards of Canada · music · video
This sucks: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is no more. “Its board...
This sucks: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is no more. “Its board of directors chose Monday to shutter CPB completely instead of keeping it in existence as a shell.” GOP ghouls finally killed it.
The Detectorists — A Short Film About Otters and Detection Dogs.
An ecologist in Wales uses tracking dogs to help track & protect the endangered wild otter population; meet The Detectorists.
Set against the serene backdrop of rural Wales, this short documentary follows wildlife ecologist Lee Jenkins and his two German Pointers — Neo and pup-in-training Cariad — as they search for elusive otters. Using scent detection to guide camera trap placement, the team gathers crucial evidence to protect these endangered animals. Shot from a dog’s-eye view with immersive cinematography, the film offers a poetic glimpse into conservation through the nose and eyes of a canine detective.
Don Mattingly Joins Phillies as Bench Coach
nytimes.com/athletic/6942357/2026/01/05/don-mattingly-hired-bench-coach-phillies/
Welcome to Philadelphia, Donnie Baseball.
Link: nytimes.com/athletic/6942357/2026/01/05/don-mattingly-hired…
Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your...
Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.”
Anna’s Archive (“the largest truly open library in human history”) is backing...
Anna’s Archive (“the largest truly open library in human history”) is backing up the entirety of Spotify. “We have archived around 86 million songs from Spotify. While this only represents 37% of songs, it represents around 99.6% of listens.”
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
In Search of the Ghosts of the Forests
In California, a rare specimen of sequoia produces ghostly white leaves. Reporter Alexa Lim ventures into the forest to get a look at albino redwoods.
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A 2026 Rewatchables Mailbag
Bill is joined by Chris Ryan and Craig Horlbeck to read listener submissions for new categories as we gear up for 2026 on The Rewatchables.
Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, and Eduardo Ocampo
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★ Pickle Smells Like a Cult
Pickle CEO Daniel Park posted on Twitter/X, attempting to rebut the analysis from Matthew Dowd I linked to over the weekend pointing out the ways that Pickle’s AR glasses, for which they’re accepting $800 pre-orders, look like a scam. Park’s rebuttal, in my opinion, boils do...
‘It’s Hard to Justify Tahoe Icons’
This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations ever...
Tensegrity
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
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When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them...
When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog. A comparison of the two 2022 documentaries about volcanologists Maurice & Katia Krafft, Herzog’s The Fire Within, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love.
From Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast: How to Read More (and...
From Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read podcast: How to Read More (and Better) in 2026. “They dig into when to push through, when to quit a book, how to choose books outside the algorithm, and how small shifts in attention can enrich your reading life.”
The Mystery Of The Samurai In Venice
Until the late 19th century, Japan’s relations with Europe were relatively limited. So when a pair of letters written by a Japanese man in the early 1600s were discovered in Venice, a mystery was born. Who was this man, why was he in Italy, and why was there little previous evidence that he’d been there? In part one of a new series, Evan Puschak sets the geopolitical stage and introduces us to the samurai who travelled to Rome to treat with the Pope.
Tags: Evan Puschak · Japan · religion · video
A Year of Clean Energy Milestones. “Wind, solar, and electric vehicles made...
A Year of Clean Energy Milestones. “Wind, solar, and electric vehicles made huge strides globally in 2025. For the first time, wind & solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than 1/4 of new car sales.”
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Devastating critique of the new menu icons in macOS Tahoe by Nikita Prokopov, who starts by quoting the 1992 Apple HIG rule to not "overload the user with complex icons" and then provides comprehensive evidence of Tahoe doing exactly that.In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.
But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.
And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.
Via Hacker News
A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are...
A number of studies show that various vaccines (shingles, RSV, flu) are associated with “off-target” benefits like reduced cardiovascular risk, lower rates of dementia, and lower Alzheimer’s risk for older people.
Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross...
Why I Left Substack. A combination of “a good deal of gross misogyny, transphobia, and hard-right stuff” plus Substack “trying to deny this responsibility [as a publisher], to pretend that their decisions weren’t decisions at all”.