Instead of Losing Democratic Elections, What If We Just Stopped Having Them Altogether? “My goodness, imagine the efficiency. No long lines. No campaign ads. No need to pretend Wisconsin matters every four years.”

How The Heck Does Shazam Work? “By throwing away almost everything and keeping only a handful of landmark peaks, a noisy 5-second clip from a coffee shop becomes a set of coordinates precise enough to pinpoint one song out of millions.” Fascinating!

What’s on your mind lately? What’s going on in your life? Witnessed anything amazing? Anything you’d like to share with the rest of the class?

Here in Vermont, it’s barely spring (which means it’ll probably snow at least one more time before I need to start mowing the lawn). No mountain biking yet. A local theater is playing Silence of the Lambs this weekend (35th anniversary!), so I might go do that. I’ve been working on a new post editor for KDO and it’s coming along — building software and designing interfaces is fun and maddening. Autumn is going to come with some big changes for me, and I’ve been making some progress in preparing for that.

Hows about yous?

Tags: kottke.org

1D Chess. “You might initially find it more difficult than expected, but assuming optimal play, is there a forced win for white?”

Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael biopic out in theaters right now: “How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?”

Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the Twin Peaks theme music. Perfect. A damn fine cup of coffee, even.

ProPublica explores what a future without vaccines would look like in the US. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of children paralyzed, and many other children stricken with serious but easily preventable health issues.

The earliest-known recordings of whale songs (from 1949) were recently discovered in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s archive. The scientists who recorded the audio didn’t even know what they were listening to.

I’ve never seen anything like these photos before. In October 2024, Rachel Moore had a close encounter with a humpback whale in French Polynesia and took these photos of the whale’s eye. Moore wrote of the experience: This moment of eye contact was beyond my wildest dre...

Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s. “A century ago, new technology and mobility reshaped what it meant to be young, linking rural life more closely to the city.”

I got the chance to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with friends recently and it was magical, otherworldly, lovely. I think we hit peak blossom down to the second. It was cold and gray and windy, which kept the crowds down, provided the perfect photographic contrast, and made for an enchanting petal-fall. Tags: photography

If you want to surf elsewhere in the galaxy, it doesn’t actually look that promising. “Surfing on Titan would likely be a surreal, slow-motion, and tenebrous experience.” Or there’s also a planet with a sulfuric acid ocean?

On a recent mini-episode of the Becoming the People podcast, Prentis Hemphill talked about traitors to the patriarchy. Here’s a short excerpt:

I only want to spend time with men who are traitors to that project, the project of patriarchy and patriarchal violence. I want to hang out with traitors and snitches and betrayers of that system. If you do not actively identify as a traitors to that system, if you don’t actively have receipts, I don’t think that a lot of people should necessarily believe that they can invest time in in you.

Here’s the full episode (which you can also listen to on Apple Podcasts):

(via @rebeccawooolf)

Tags: Prentis Hemphill · video

I love the chutzpah of this: all 35 of Shakespeare’s plays ranked. Romeo & Juliet didn’t crack the top 20 but Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night made the top 5. Worth it for the old photos of productions feat. Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench, Brian Cox…

“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper:

Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.

Ace is a fine name, but I might have gone with something like WALL-E Supreme instead. (Robbie Supreme?)

Tags: artificial intelligence · robots · sports · table tennis · video

I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.

A group of “unauthorized users” have accessed Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which the company recently said they couldn’t widely release because it was too dangerous. Whoopsie doodle! Maybe don’t use guessable paths for your powerful cyberattack model?

Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them. The Jeff Bezos ...

Wow, this interview! “I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron.”

“In a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” [Israeli professor of Holocaust & genocide studies] Omer Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7th.”

Lessons from a 1969 documentary on Nazi-occupied France on how fascism takes root. “A former undercover British agent recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it.”

A new short story from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc.) called Constellations about a mission that has crash-landed on a distant planet.

We thought this day would never come. But we kept the faith and now we can begin to reap the rewards: there is actually a trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie and the movie itself is actually coming out on Aug 28. Quick recap of the situation so far: Ian Frazier wrote a ...

Well, here it is at last: the new Boards of Canada album is called Inferno and it will be released on May 28. Pre-order or pre-save the album.

Jamelle Bouie on the truly unprecedented open corruption of the Trump regime. I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.

Is the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years: a) The Silence of the Lambs, b) The Princess Bride, c) The Return of the King (LoTR), d) Apocalypse Now, or e) Jurassic Park?

A French corporation was recently found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. “The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime.”

This is an animal called the leaf sheep: It’s a species of slug that is partially solar-powered, like a plant. Leaf sheep are kleptoplastic organisms that steal chloroplasts from algae, store them in their bodies, and then can rely on photosynthesis for their energy needs...

Everyone Is Blaming AI for the Water Crisis. We’re Looking at the Wrong Culprit. “One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks.”