This Is What It’s Like to Spend Your Life in Prison. “None of us want to be defined solely by the person we were in our youth, or by the worst thing we ever did. The men serving life without parole feel the same way.”

The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu, Shimon Perlstein, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel Viñé Garcia. P.S. In case you were wondering about the aspect ratio of panoramic images: according to the submission rules, the image’s longest side needs to be at least twice the length as the shortest side. Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

“Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet.”

The title of this video is The Fastest Downhill Run Ever. I don’t know if that is true, but oh my god does it look dangerous to go this fast on a mountain bike through the streets of Genoa. (It looks slightly less nuts in the non-POV, but not by much.)

Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift link...

“A SpudCell can grow, copy its DNA, divide in two, and start its cell cycle all over again. But this cell is made by people, created from lifeless ingredients.” Um, what?

Bastardica is “a foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and/or squish them.” E.g. Nervous Sans: “Arial is stacked five times, pseudo-randomly twitching out of line.” I quite like Impacter.

How did life on Earth arise? Three of the biggest inflection points were ~4 billion years ago when life first emerged, ~2 billion years ago when eukaryotic cells appeared, and ~580 million years ago when life got big.

For CBS News in 1985, Charles Kuralt profiled bike messenger David Leopold.

I don’t go slow. I don’t stop for red lights. I go against traffic. I disobey every traffic law there is.

Great street footage of NYC from 40 years ago. You might think that Leopold ended up as a stain on the pavement. In 2010, CBS News did a follow-up on him:

See also Leopold on David Letterman from 1985.

Tags: Charles Kuralt · cycling · NYC · video

The Library Is Closed. Feel Free to Come In. “In communities where workspaces are scarce, libraries are welcoming visitors outside of staffed hours. All they need is a library card.”

Tiny People in a Big World is like a birdwatching guide, but for people-watching. “I made this campaign to produce a book that will help you notice and appreciate the tiny people who pass through your big world.”

Link Loop is basically a 2D version of Portal. Looks fun!

Ambient Earth is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. Seán Doran took almost 49,000 images from 27 time-lapse sequences captured from the ISS by astronaut Butch Wilmore, repaired, remastered, and interpolated...

“Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth.”

Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. “The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy…”

I remember this 90s TV commercial for 93.7 The Edge, a Minnesota alternative radio station, very well. It features very non-alternative old people reciting lyrics like “bow down before the one you serve” and “Winona’s got herself a big brown beaver”.

Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history — I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,¹ and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.

1. The Timeless Way of Building is shorter, less dense, and perhaps a better introduction to Alexander’s ideas about patterns. ↩

Tags: Gregory Wieber · simcity · The Sims · video games · Will Wright

New book from James Gleick about the history of the telephone. “It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night DJ, and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.”

“Astronomers for the first time have identified a green star, documenting a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf that became a ghostly shade of chartreuse after ingesting rocky ​debris from planets that once had orbited it.”

Perfect Play ran over 300 million games of Monopoly to determine the best strategy and the most common mistakes players make. I turned eight classic Monopoly strategies into computer players and made them play 312,898,560 games against each other. At a table of four, the...

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First. “It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.”

Using an LLM’s “superhuman ability to parse through galactic quantities of data”, a very amateur astronomer has found a possible exoplanet candidate. MIT is going to point their satellite at the candidate planet to collect more data soon.

This workshop founded in 1882 still makes dried bonito like they did back in the Edo period. How katsuobushi — Japanese dried bonito, said to be the world’s hardest food — is made in Nishi-Izu, Japan. Inside Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, a workshop founded in 1882, 5th-gener...

Brewster Kahle argues against news sites blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their sites. “Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data.”

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate-buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.

Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.

This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen. If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game...

A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.

Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”

I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent int...