It’s David Attenborough’s 100th birthday today! One of my few genuine heroes.

“In nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be.”

David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor: The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and thi...

A brief history: lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction. “Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?”

The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC.

The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

It is meant to serve as a tool for abolitionist resistance grounded in a long view of the struggle, tactics, and goals.

The map is available as a PDF and as an interactive version. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Tags: maps · NYC · prison

Chess Peace is an iOS puzzle game where you have to place chess pieces on a board so that none of them attack each other. Simple + clever!

One of the coolest things about honey is its theoretically infinite shelf-life. 3000-year-old jars of still-edible honey have been found in Egyptian tombs — they used it medicinally for all sorts of things.

Ok, this is incredible: this person on Reddit discovered that if you take a bunch of the sequential photos of the Earth captured by the Artemis II crew and animate them, you can see that some of what appear to be stars are actually satellites, buzzing around the Earth like flies. You can see them really clearly in Seán Doran’s remastered animation. Totally totally gobsmacking. Literally awesome.

Tags: artemis · astronomy · Earth · photography · science · Sean Doran · space

“Podcast sloplords” are flooding the zone with AI-generated podcasts. By one count, almost 40% of new podcasts are written by AI chatbots and presented by “AI voice synthesizers [that] can sound eerily humanlike”.

Lines, Ranked. “2. Assembly. It’s not glamorous, but hot damn is it effective.”

A supercut of context-free intertitles from Adam Curtis documentaries. Even if you don’t know who Adam Curtis is, this is entertaining.

New episode of Great Art Explained on Francis Bacon. “A new generation was starting to ask - who gets to decide what is right? And who has the authority to tell us how to live?”

20 years ago: a guy interviewing for an IT job gets pulled onto live TV. “Mr. Goma is being celebrated as a folk hero of sorts for anyone who has ever found themselves ill-equipped for a challenge in the workplace.”

Jon Krakauer writes about what has changed about climbing Mt. Everest since he wrote Into Thin Air. “The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine.”

Infants are dying because parents are opting-out of vitamin K shots. “In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention.”

My pal Matt Haughey recut the first season of Apple TV’s Murderbot into a 3.5-hour-long movie. “I did it fast so there are a few jarring cuts, but I now have an entertaining as hell movie with zero interruptions.”

This is nuts: Fred Again has uploaded a video of every single show he did during his USB002 tour (except Mexico City) — it’s four and a half days long. “im told this is the longest video on YouTube ever?”

Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile) Tags: design · Eric Rohman · movie posters · movies

The official trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was just released. Really looking forward to this.

What now-familiar domain names looked like before they were bought by big-time companies, e.g. openai.com was “the personal homepage of a guy named glenn”, doordash.com was a porn site, threads.com sold spools of thread.

Pocket forests. “The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.” The key is densely planting diverse & native species…this isn’t just planting some trees.

Could This Fish Be a Notebook? “David Byrne learns how fisheries from Iceland to the Great Lakes are using 100% of their catch — and shares his tips for making fish head soup.”

Huh. A24 is coming out with an Anthony Bourdain biopic that focuses on the time period around the chef/writer’s college years, when he first started working in kitchens. Directed by Matt Johnson, who co-created Nirvana the Band the Show and directed BlackBerry. Could be good. (via rex)

Tags: Anthony Bourdain · movies · Tony · trailers · video

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in black & white with the Japanese audio track “becomes the best ‘Space Kurosawa’ movie ever made”.

Microshifting. “From a creativity standpoint, it’s good to take breaks. When you stop thinking about a task is when your best ideas come to you.” This is how I’ve worked for the past decade+…bursts of work throughout the day & week.

The Booksellers is a 2019 feature-length documentary film about antiquarian and rare book dealers; you can watch the whole movie for free on YouTube.

The artist Banksy has installed (without a permit, one assumes) a new statue in London that depicts a man in a suit marching off off a ledge, blinded by a flag.

The artwork has been dubbed Blind Patriotism, although Banksy, enigmatic as always, doesn’t explain the meaning of his latest work. However, many have interpreted it as satirising the rise of nationalistic fervour in the UK, typified by the populist politician Nigel Farage and other forces on the far right.

Another bullseye for Banksy. 🎯

Tags: art · Banksy · politics

Designer Jenny Volvovski’s collection of unsolicited book cover designs. “I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.”

I’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.

According to this peer-reviewed paper, the “screeching sound of peeling tape” is caused by tiny sonic booms. The speeds at work here are in the range of Mach 0.7–1.8. Supersonic crafts!