Craig Mod is off on another of his long walks of Japan and is writing a pop-up newsletter (subscribe!) along the way. I am feeling this bit from his first missive recently:

To have a day like today feels a bit selfish, even more so after having met Vlad. He wonders, always wonders, if he has earned it. The time alone, the steps, the little interactions, the looking closely at the world. He takes it, he’ll take whatever he can get whenever, and try to be as grateful as possible. What else is there? Tiny men with big sticks upend sanity the world ‘round and all you can do is try to find your footing and push back.

Tags: Craig Mod

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A new kind of bone glue that “mimics how oysters stick to underwater surfaces” can bond bone fragments together in 2-3 minutes, “even in blood-rich areas where most adhesives fail”.

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25 years ago today, Radiohead released Kid A. This morning, I’m celebrating by, um, listening to Kid A.

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“Scientists reflect on the life and work of [Jane Goodall], whose discoveries made them rethink what it means to be human.”

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Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters. “A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet.”

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Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing.

[This is a vintage post originally from Jan 2014.]

Tags: mesmerizing · Shinseungback Kimyonghun · timeless posts · video

The driest desert on Earth (non-polar category) is blooming in a gorgeous phenomenon called El Desierto Florido.

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From Haymarket Books, an Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police Reading List. “In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and police repression, we offer an extensive reading list…”

The latest video from Kurzgesagt imagines a scenario in which an advanced civilization called the Noxans can potentially survive the heat death of the universe.

With five hours of the full energy emitted by the Sun, we could power present day humanity for about 10 billion years.

So the Noxans harvest the last stars and build a gigantic complex of batteries around their home star. In principle, this energy could keep them alive for a few hundred trillion years, a long time but not even close to forever.

So now the hard part of the plan begins. The Noxans need to change the nature of life itself.

Tags: Kurzgesagt · physics · science · video

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Anil Dash on Mariah Carey’s unreleased “Hole-inspired grunge album” called Someone’s Ugly Daughter, recorded in the mid-90s with “an album cover featuring a dead cockroach on the front”.

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Which one of these paintings of a guitar player is by Johannes Vermeer? Both? Neither? They’re hanging side-by-side in London for the next few months so you can decide for yourself.

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In his latest video, Evan Puschak looks at the differences between Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation. In every adaptation across artistic mediums, there is a loss. You lose something of the original, something vital. But...

Trump Has No Mandate to Destroy America. The manifestation of a Trump mandate is understandable for the party trying to overthrow democracy, but for Democrats to go along with it is inexcusable & self-destructive.

Five More Things I Want to Tell My White Friends. “Please understand the degree to which Black and brown people (and LGBTQ+ folks) in this country are particularly scared and feel abandoned at the moment…”

I really appreciated this thoughtful piece about Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ezra Klein. Andrea Pitzer says “lost” folks like Klein “don’t have a clear idea how this moment fits into history and what it is exactly that they’re doing”.

12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots. “There are kitchen tables, laptops open amongst the charming chaos of daily life, and desks appropriately equipped with the tools of the job, from laptop stands to ergonomic office chairs.”

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I love this self-portrait by Na Kim. It’s somehow bold and subtle? Wow.

Tags: art · Na Kim

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This question from Ta-Nehisi Coates in his recent conversation with Ezra Klein re: Charlie Kirk’s death jumped out at me: “But was silence not an option?” Too much attention-seeking and not enough meaning-making by our media & punditry.

Speaking of Benito Mussolini and fascism, the excellent Poster House museum in NYC has a new exhibition on for the next few months: The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy. It features “some of the best posters produced during the worst period in modern Ita...

How to actually live like a local. “The thing is, nobody ever actually wants to ‘live like a local’ when they are traveling. Instead, they want to live like a romanticized, idealized version of a local that they have in their head…”

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A long profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW. “Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least $1600.”

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On May 22, 1981, for the finale of the show’s 12th season, Mister Rogers visited Sesame Street. With apologies to the Avengers, this has to be the greatest crossover event in history. In the episode, Rogers agrees to judge a race between Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus, a ...

New book from Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain): London Falling, “a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.”

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Yes, this exactly: “The government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government.”

An oral history of Deltron 3030’s stupendous debut album.

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Huh, the original version of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale is a bit different: “An impudent old woman enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears…”

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A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc. The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, inclu...

They’re bringing back Reading Rainbow, hosted by Mychal the Librarian.

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Antonio Scurati’s 2018 “documentary novel” M: Son of the Century was a worldwide bestseller about the early political career of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in post-WWI Italy. Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Darkest Hour) has adapted the book into an 8-...

Natalia Newsome is a 5’11” sophomore volleyball player for SMU; she’s got a 40-inch vertical and can touch almost a foot above a regulation basketball hoop. It is bananas how high she rises when spiking the ball.

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