The Astor Place Riots of 1849 resulted in “the greatest loss of life in a civic insurrection in American history up to that time”. And they were incited over the “wrong” actor playing Macbeth.

I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about Ben Lerner’s new novel Transcription (Amazon) which comes out tomorrow. From the book’s description: What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narra...

A visual history of exploring the far side of the Moon. “The Moon is tidally locked, meaning that only one side of the Moon ever faces the Earth. [For millenia,] there was an entire half of our natural satellite that no human had ever seen before.”

Livestream: Artemis II is about to fly around the Moon. At around 1:56pm ET, they’ll surpass the Apollo 13 distance record. And: “At their closest point, they’ll pass roughly 4,000 miles above the lunar surface.”

New vocabulary word: “RAM harvester”. RAM chips are so expensive right now that RAM harvesters are stealing them out of demo computers at electronics stores.

Missed this last week: Lane 8 dropped their Spring 2026 Mixtape. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.

Max Cooper’s music videos are always worth a look. This one, directed by Katia Schutz, is for a song called Pattern Index from his forthcoming album (Feeling Is Structure, May 8).

Cooper describes Feeling Is Structure as an “audiovisual album”, which I take to mean that each song will have an associated video released with it. A second video, Ebb and Flow, is already out too:

Tags: Katia Schutz · Max Cooper · music · video

Lessons from fighting cancer that apply to resisting authoritarianism. 1. We need each other. 2. We must move, even when on uncertain ground. 3. Past trauma will bring us down if we do not release its effects on us. And more…

“The promise of the open web was colonized by internet giants. But the power of LLMs and agentic coding means we can start to take it back. We can build customized, personal software for ourselves that does what we want.”

Louisiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland: only five US states have ever had a Black governor.

We’re expected to believe that the NY Times is a serious newspaper when they are sending a reporter to talk to dozens of ppl to debunk a claim from a known conspiracy theorist, fascist, and grifter that he’d teleported into a Waffle House?!?

As Slow As Possible. Very very very slow versions of three classic video games: Pong, Breakout, and Missile Command. On the slowest setting, you’re almost begging for a notification functionality to alert you when you need to next engage.

I have to say that I was a little bit charmed by the trailer for Supergirl. Looks promising.

I thought the official video of Berghain by Rosalía (feat. Björk & Yves Tumor) was great — “I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral?” — and this recent live performance from the Brit Awards takes the song to the next level. I loved it. (via kenzie)

Tags: Bjork · music · rosalía · video

A women had sex with identical twins (within a 4-day period), got pregnant, and now it’s impossible to tell which is the father, even with DNA testing.

Tracker dashboard for the Artemis II mission using real-time data from JPL.

The commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission to the Moon, Reid Wiseman, took this photo of the Earth as the spacecraft speeds away our planet.

There are two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.

That is so cool. Worth clicking through to see the high-resolution image.

Tags: artemis · Earth · NASA · photography · science · space

Does what it says on the tin: acid techno mix in Japanese sake brewery.

“If Artemis II is successful, the astronauts will be the first humans to reach the moon’s orbit in more than 50 years, and their path around its far side will take them farther into the universe than any human being has previously traveled.”

Well, I’m back from my west coast trip, but I came home totally sick, the SSL cert for KDO wasn’t automatically renewed¹ so the site was down for several hours this morning, and my car has decided it’s suddenly out of brake fluid? Oh and I haven’t even seen Project Hail Mary yet. (I know, right?!??!??!!!)

*sigh*

I know when I’m beaten. It’s gonna be KDO Lite for a few more days while I get my life in order. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves…

1. A missed checklist item from when the site moved servers a few months ago.↩

“ICE Tours VT provides guided bus tours to many of these facilities, where you will learn about the scope, scale, and history of DHS in Vermont. Think Hollywood star tours, but instead of celebrity mansions you get federal surveillance infrastructure.”

“LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure, because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.”

This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.

See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.

Tags: Kendrick Lamar · music · Radiohead · remix · video

From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is “a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021…”

Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds, including psilocybin, DMT, and psychedelic compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.

I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wi...

Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note today’s date), but this is supposedly a fully functional compass that only points to the Olive Garden in Times Square.

The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645. “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”

After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series: “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”

Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner: that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a cons...