From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami. ‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on ...

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys. Today’s tech titans took all the wrong lessons from the science fiction of their youths and now they’re each building their version of the Torment Nexus.

The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11. “The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking.”

Neat little prototype demo of a Bluesky reader that uses the UI of the long-retired Paper app. I loved the design of Paper.

A late 90s guide to Super Metroid was written in monospaced type, fully justified with no double spaces or hyphens. “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.”

Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment. I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in m...

“In almost every [US] county, extreme heat is at least as bad as it was 30 years ago. In most counties, it’s much worse.” It’s Not Just You. America Has Gotten Much Hotter. (Not a fan of articles like this being in the “opinion” section…)

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital. “We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society.”

At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons: It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did this with Homer a...

“Gimme is a dazzling ever-growing type family of multi-chromatic and variable display typefaces…” This is bonkers…letters made from Battleship pieces, Connect Four boards, playing cards, wooden railroad tracks, etc.

Bring Blockbuster Video back to your town/city by setting up a little free library of VHS tapes & DVDs. “Take a movie, leave a movie.” Love this.

Gloria Steinem’s final essay, posthumously published by the New Yorker. “When you’re lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role as an older person is to remind us how far we have come.”

TIL that my iPhone has a tiny bit of water in it (for cooling).

Teaser trailer for Musk, a 3h45m-long documentary film on fascist businessman Elon Musk, directed by Alex Gibney. “He’s chaotic, random, capricious. He is manifestly cruel and selfish. In a science fiction novel, he would not be a hero.”

“We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web research task. These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.”

The Chicago Public Library informs patrons of how much money they’ve saved borrowing from the library instead of buying. “You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!”

Over the past 12 years, Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Tomlin has built a Minecraft city. He started playing the game for the same reason I started playing Fortnite: his kids. “How do I meet them where they are and spend time with them?”

From the Internet Archive: Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. “When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal…our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.”

Over on Flickr, Jane McDevitt maintains a huge collection of 20th century matchbox label art from Eastern Europe, over 4000 photos in all. Some of the labels are available as prints. They did a book too, but it’s sold out. It was really difficult to narrow these down to some of my favorites, but I managed. P.S. I wrote this whole post and then discovered that I’d written about this collection before. But I picked different labels so it’s all good. Tags: art · illustration · Jane McDevitt

A catalogue of 645 acts of hate from the week after 9/11. “Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Sikh Americans were targeted for how they looked, dressed, or prayed.”

Bayeux Go! A playable video game of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Thou art Harold. Win Thine Battle. Tap to starte.”

Spaceships: A version of Asteroids where “you are not the ship” — you control the rocks instead.

The 101 Plays Itself. The five lanes of highway 101 in LA turned into a musical instrument: each car on the live Caltrans camera is a note.

Teaser trailer for You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim. “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move.” WHAT WAS THAT?

My move is coming down to the wire (omg so many things to juggle!), kids are heading back to school, I’m going to be traveling, and it’s a holiday weekend here in the States, so there’s probably not going to be too much going on here until next week. Thanks for your patience…I can’t wait to get back to work here.

In the meantime, I thought I’d open up this thread for folks to share what they feel like sharing. I’ll go first below…

Tags: kottke.org · open threads

Writer, journalist, and feminist activist Gloria Steinem has died. She was 92.

Jamelle Bouie:

The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation.

It is important to say, as well, that this is all out in the open, as plain as day.

*repeated hair tearing-out noise*

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · usa

Gina Trapani: The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer. I’ve always been a little 3D printer-curious and this looks like a good resource to start with.

2 Odysseus 2 Ithaca: Emily Wilson is completely retranslating The Odyssey. “It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version.” This is the exact opposite of resting on one’s laurels.

Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail. “The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”