The Death of the Basic American Car. “Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income.”

An AI bot created by Andon Labs is running its own retail store in San Francisco. The bot has hired a pair of human employees and “has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras”.

“Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places — Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies — where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected.”

An interactive explainer on the physics of GPS. “The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.”

Media companies are increasingly blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their material (but at the same time using the site to gather data for their stories).

I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.

Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?

Tags: Ian McKellen · Michaela Coel · movies · The Christophers · trailers · video

We love a slime mold around here. “From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes.”

This is incredible: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It. I knew some of these but not all, e.g. verbatim mode “returns results for exactly what you typed, stripped of personalization and synonym-swapping.”

David Altmejd’s 2017 sculpture entitled “God” is one of the most disturbing artworks I’ve seen recently, so naturally I had to show all of you. If you need further wigging out, here you go. Lots more on his website and Instagram.

Tags: art · David Altmejd

Great new Patrick Radden Keefe piece on a New Orleans insurance fraud scheme involving big rigs. “After all, who would agree to be cut open on an operating table if it weren’t necessary? Quite a lot of people, it turns out.”

Almost three years ago exactly, Fred Again rolled into the NPR studios and did a Tiny Desk Concert. When Fred again.. first proposed a Tiny Desk concert, it wasn’t immediately clear how he was going to make it work — not because he lacked creativity, but because translati...

Why Japan Has Such Good Railways. “Their system excels because of good public policy: business structure, land use rules, driving rules, superior models for privatization, and sound regulation.” Other countries can follow their lead.

Rebecca Solnit: “The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.”

Hungarian Opposition Ousts Viktor Orbán After 16 Years in Power. “Magyar…pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services.”

Interviews with five novelists (Jesmyn Ward, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood) on writing something true with fiction. Oates: “If you could read Toni Morrison, why would you read AI?”

From Daphni (aka Caribou), a 7hr DJ set. 7 hours!

The trailer for Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. The film is showing in select locations around the country and will air on PBS this summer.

Ultimate Online Phreak Box. “This is a free online blue box, red box, and silver box.” (With this and a time machine, you could make free phone calls in the 1970s.)

A tour of the mannequin storage room at FIT. Each era’s mannequins are designed to mimic the “fashionable body” of that time period.

An interview with Ronald Wayne, Apple’s forgotten third founder. (He was with the company all of 2 weeks.)

From a livestream recorded many years ago, this is Radiohead covering Joy Division’s Ceremony. The song was originally written by Joy Division but the version most people know is New Order’s — it was their first single. From Wikipedia:

“Ceremony” was one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis. According to guitarist Bernard Sumner, the group wrote the song a few weeks before Ian Curtis died “to try and heal him through music” and keep him “involved in the band and involved in music and remind him of what … a great future he had”. Sumner concluded, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work”.

Just three versions of Joy Division performing the song exist, including one on the group’s compilation album Still.

Tags: Joy Division · music · New Order · Radiohead · remix · video

Oh wow, this is a trippy game inspired by MC Escher. My brain may be permanently broken by this.

A short analysis of what makes Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen…” speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar so good and effective.

Using wiki software, old photos, family stories, bank transactions, social media posts, and an LLM to sift through everything to build a personal encyclopedia.

“Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow.”

Charcuterie is a visual Unicode symbol explorer. Click around, search, or use the pencil in the upper left to draw the shape you’re looking for. This is very cool.

This is wonderful: a Redditor uploaded some of their grandmother’s comics that she made in the 1940s, documenting her marriage to the deployment of her husband for World War II. I never got to meet my grandma, she passed away young in 1977 but finding her 1940s sketches felt like she was finally introducing herself to me. She was so talented, and as you can see, she had absolutely zero filter (I finally understand where my mother and I get it from). My favorite part is seeing her personality jump off the page. She goes from joking about Pre-Marital Chaos and Pancake Gravy to the gut-punch of my grandpa getting his deployment orders in ‘44. She wrote “Damn the Army and Hitler!” (thx, andy) Tags: comics

Well, this blows: FSG has shuttered their MCD imprint & Sean McDonald is leaving the company. MCD published so many good titles/authors: Questlove, Enshittification, Robin Sloan, Jeff VanderMeer, Sloane Crosley, Dilla Time, Tamara Shopsin…

This tiny e-ink reader is small enough to attach to the back of your phone.

I’m charmed by this fragment of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Mary Magdalene that’s up for auction later this month. For many years it was in a private collection in Germany where it lay rolled up in a cellar. The head of the saint had been cut out of the canvas, un...