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The Kerrs were devoted to one another and to their faith. But when one of their own rejected modern medicine, they faced a dire question: What if her children ever needed a doctor to save their lives?

On the eve of the Second World War, there was one place that was the source for all good stories — the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. It exuded luxury and power, and also was the converging spot for foreign correspondents in the 1920’s and ‘30s who were warning the world about the rise of dictatorship. Historian and author Deborah Cohen takes us back in time and into the lives of these influential journalists.

MORE Check out Deborah’s book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/576473/last-call-at-the-hotel-imperial-by-deborah-cohen/

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Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust.

I figured it would be fun to try that out in a browser via WebAssembly. Here's the prompt I ran in Claude Code for web (Fable 5), and this is what the resulting tool looks like:

Tags: tools, rust, webassembly, mermaid, grok, xai

xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home dire...

A few highlights from a collection of lovely woodblock-printed sugoroku game boards from Japan. “The gameboards use stories and maps to teach children history and geography.”

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI believes the product’s defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive...

Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo:

The new language could simply accommodate the availability of Apple-owned services on the web and through third-party devices and operating systems; the Apple TV app, for instance, is available on smart TVs, streaming devices, and game consoles. But the addition of “other properties” is conspicuously broad and appears to give Apple the contractual latitude to distribute ads beyond its own services entirely. This would allow for a material expansion of the company’s advertising surface area.

Further, if Apple does indeed plan to expand Apple Ads to third-party surfaces, it would explain why the company did not reveal an update to its AdAttributionKit (AAK, formerly SKAdNetwork, or SKAN) attribution framework at this year’s WWDC.

That would be one way to go.

Link: mobiledevmemo.com/did-apple-just-signal-a-third-party…

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch: In a newly published Apple Advertising Services policy, effective as of July 14, 2026, the iPhone maker shares its rules for advertising on Apple Maps. Notably, it prohibits the broad category of home services businesses, like plumbing, electrica...

Ben Jiang, reporting from Beijing for the South China Morning Post: Chinese regulators have granted Apple a long-awaited licence to roll out its artificial intelligence service on iPhones in the country, with Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu serving as technical partners....

Nicholas Rougeux, whose work I have featured here before, has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 il...

Dan Werb on the understated intelligence of the animals that share our cities.

Legibility of effort in the LLM age. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.”

Between 2010 and 2011, Marlow documented all 42 Anglican cathedrals across the breadth and length of England.

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 See Peter Marlow’s ‘The English Cathedral’ at London’s Oldest Gothic Church appeared first on Colossal.

These have to be some of the most remarkable sports photos of all time: a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal. Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up throu...

Ted Gioia: “Works like the Odyssey are ritualistic and trance-inducing. They are propelled by music and driven by rhythm. They cross a border beyond literature, and enter something more transcendent and metaphysical.”

Good interview with Craig Mod about how he uses LLMs: “using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the ‘mainlining’ AI era”.

The Moist Towelette Online Museum. Live moist and prosper. 🖖💦