We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask. “Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information.”

Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun? “This is what it means to be entertained in the United States of America in 2026. Want to have fun? Like, the most fun? Get rich, or die trying.”

Stacks: “Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!”

XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If someone hasn’t done one already, I’d guess at least one person is working on a playable Football Chess game rn.)

This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”

David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them t...

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”

British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a ‌trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…

City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.

From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s. Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the w...

If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”

Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.

Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Tags: design · fashion · iPhone · soccer · sports · World Cup 2026

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…

Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.

Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.

Martin Timko (aka matogolf) cut this video of the best musical moments from Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. He plays a number of pieces from various soundtracks, including Dunkirk, Gladiator, Interstellar, Dune, and The Dark Knight. Great to hear live performances of these iconic pieces.

Tags: Hans Zimmer · Martin Timko · movies · music · remix · video

Sloan on Fable: “This is literally the core muscle of any/every language model: ‘I need to quickly and accurately understand what kind of document I am inside.’ Yet the sensitivity of that orienteering, the subtlety of it, has gotten so much better.”

New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”

Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.

If you are anything like me, your soul let out a big “oooooof” while reading this: The Year Is 2063 and You Were Never Interesting. But wait. You are 70 years old. You’re sitting in your home. Your grandchildren ask you what your 20s were like, and you honestly can’t tell ...

👀 Craig Mod interviewed by Debbie Millman on Design Matters. (I guess those eyes should be ears but an ears-bugging-out emoji doesn’t exist.)

The Fun Shortage Is Real, and It’s Making America Miserable (gift link). “With fewer places to relax and socialize, and steeper prices for entry, having fun is quantifiably harder than it used to be.”

I love this short little video montage of actresses during Charlie Rose interviews. No dialogue, just quiet reactions. Musical accompaniment by Laurie Anderson (O Superman).