This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.

Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.

What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?

Tags: brains · neuroscience · science · video

From the Brooklyn Public Library, a list of “the 250 most influential books in United States history”. Incl. Neuromancer, The Fire Next Time, Nickel and Dimed, The Power Broker, and The Snowy Day.

New-to-me podcast that looks really interesting: Time Sensitive, “a podcast featuring candid, revealing long-form conversations with leading minds about their life and work through the lens of time”.

To draw attention to the millions of girls who cannot afford period products, the MENstruation Foundation ran a unique advertisement in three major South African newspapers. Readers of The Star, The Mercury and Cape Times opened their newspapers this week to find someth...

Uncovered, a site for judging books by their first pages. “No cover. No bestseller sticker, no celebrity book club, no BookTok trend. You read the opening of a real book, blind, and answer the only question that matters: would you keep reading?”

The Resonant Computing Manifesto. “We can now build technology that adaptively shapes itself in service of our individual and collective aspirations. We can build resonant environments that bring out the best in every human who inhabits them.”

What would a rainbow look like if we had two suns (like on Tatooine)?

A few highlights from a collection of lovely woodblock-printed sugoroku game boards from Japan. “The gameboards use stories and maps to teach children history and geography.”

Nicholas Rougeux, whose work I have featured here before, has published a complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume book series on natural history published in the early-to-mid 19th-century. As part of the project, Rougeux restored each of the more than 1300 il...

Legibility of effort in the LLM age. “What software (and writing, to an extent) is missing now is legibility of effort - the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work.”

These have to be some of the most remarkable sports photos of all time: a 20-year-old Lionel Messi bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal. Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up throu...

Ted Gioia: “Works like the Odyssey are ritualistic and trance-inducing. They are propelled by music and driven by rhythm. They cross a border beyond literature, and enter something more transcendent and metaphysical.”

Good interview with Craig Mod about how he uses LLMs: “using AI as a research assistant, why he keeps a tech-free zone in the mornings for deep thinking, and why he’s resisting the pull of the ‘mainlining’ AI era”.

The Moist Towelette Online Museum. Live moist and prosper. 🖖💦

Molly Burford, author of Moments to Hold Close, writes list poetry (is that a thing?) about the kinds of people that you want in your life. From Types Of People You Need To Hang On To: The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing ...

100000% this: I Hate The Way We Talk Online. “Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. Hot takes? No. Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.”

Robert Eggers continues his run of One Word Title Films Featuring Very Strange Men with Werwulf. I’m not a horror guy but I was pleasantly surprised by Nosferatu, which I quite liked.

Trump Dismantled a Federal Climate Website. These Women Rebuilt It. “It’s not a pretty picture for climate communication and climate journalism right now.” You can check out the new site at climate.us.

A short, hypnotic video by Matthew Wilcock of the music generated by a tennis rally at Wimbledon. “Duplicating the players and then using the rhythm of the multiple tennis balls as they cross the pink line to drive the rhythm of the piece.”

Swiss project proves the viability of solar panels placed in the otherwise unused space between railroad tracks.

Philip Summers hand-draws game guides for old school video games. He’s done guides for games like Mega Man, Castlevania, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES), and Metroid. But my favorite one is The Legend of Zelda game guide because Zelda was (and still is, tbh) my absolute favorite NES game — and you can get it for free at the Internet Archive. Somewhere in my personal archive is the map I drew for the second quest of Zelda; I also still have my original game cartridge. Tags: art · Philip Summers · The Legend of Zelda · video games

The LGBTQ+ Legislation Tracking Project, tracing & visualizing 10,350 LGBTQ+ bills introduced in the US since 2003. Anti-trans bills have dominated since ~2014.

On the Britishisms & grammar imported into American English during the World Cup. “That’s not a foul, just a coming together.”

Clipart Studio lets you cut up magazines sourced from the Internet Archive, images from Wikimedia Commons, & files you’ve uploaded, and create art collages from them. This is great — be sure to check out the gallery.

If Other Jobs Were Like a U.S. Senator’s. “You are at the dentist’s office. No one has seen or heard from the dentist in months, but he’s been making stock trades.”

“A star located about 1,300 light-years from Earth shows signs of having devoured one of its planets — and is now gearing up for a second helping…” Scientists found signs of the meal by looking for “cosmic cookie crumbs”.

I’d seen that there was a new Tom Cruise movie coming out this fall called Digger, but I was not prepared for the trailer, in which we see Cruise playing a dipshit oligarch in what appears to be a Dr. Strangelove-style satire/thriller.

The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.

The film is directed by Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores perros, Birdman, The Revenant) and also stars John Goodman as a geriatric president, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons. Digger has just moved near the top of my most-anticipated movies of 2026 list.

Tags: Digger · movies · Tom Cruise · trailers · video

TIL about Fredkin’s paradox. “With this kind of decision, what Fredkin’s paradox tells us is if it’s very difficult to decide, it’s probably because the alternatives are equivalent, and therefore it doesn’t matter which one you choose.”

The Universe of Short Film is an amazing site for watching, sharing, and connecting around short films. This is really cool…not sure why the site isn’t better known.

From XKCD, a tour of some of the Earth’s deepest and most notable holes, including mines, caves, boreholes, subway stations, lakes, tunnels, neutrino detectors, and, of course, the Mariana Trench.

I was surprised to learn that a pair of boreholes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole and the Deepwater Horizon Borehole, are actually deeper than the Mariana Trench. Explain XKCD has more info on each of the various holes, including the truly bonkers Cave of Crystals in Mexico.

Tags: geology · infoviz · Randall Munroe · xkcd