Nappy is a site offering free stock photos of Black and brown people. (The site says they’re going offline in a few months due to a falloff in demand bc of AI. Maybe Internet Archive can do their thing here?)

O Superman by artist Laurie Anderson from 1981. Some of the lyrics: ‘Cause when love is goneThere’s always justiceAnd when justice is goneThere’s always forceAnd when force is goneThere’s always MomHi, Mom So hold me, MomIn your long armsSo hold me, MomIn your long armsI...

Mapping Tariffs explores “the potential impacts of tariffs on jobs and businesses across Canadian cities and communities at the neighbourhood and city level”.

After working hard taking away the civil rights of people and granting more powers to our Mob Boss President, Chief Justice John Roberts retreats to a Maine island for the summer. But lately, neighbors are protesting his presence there. Good! No peace!

The Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the finalists for the 2026 competition and, well, these awards never miss. You can almost hear the background music for some of these… Tags: best of · best of 2026 · photography

Is American Culture Simply Bad Now? I’ve been hanging with my friend Matt while he’s here in Tokyo for a trip, which he refers to as his “America is Cooked Tour” as he keeps running across things that are much better here.

Back in 2005, a group of restorers established a hidden workshop in Paris’s Panthéon and snuck into the building for a whole year to repair an antique clock. “The group managed to connect the hideaway to the electricity grid and install a computer…” Wild!

OrySnack: The Bar Where Bartenders Work From Home. Small robot servers in this Japanese bar are controlled by people who can only work from home because of disability or illness.

Last week, the NY Times dropped a list of The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century, as picked by a panel of “more than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV”. The rankings have already been dissected online six ways from Sunday, but...

Don’t Cook That: a collection of real recipes that you shouldn’t make. Cholera remedy recipe calls for “equal parts laudanum, rhubarb, double-strength capsicum, camphor and spirits of nitre”.

From the Control Rooms group on Flickr. 🤩 So many little details in all of these photos to pore over. See also Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green, The User Experience Design of Lego Interface Panels, Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center (c. 1966), and Lots and Lots of Control Panels. Tags: photography

The Bayeux Tapestry of Fascism. “What’s this middle bit?” “Why, that’s the Battle of Legitimate Concerns!”

“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die…” 🎯

In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game. The basic story...

A “Kelvin wave” powered by El Niño will soon raise sea levels in California “by half a foot or more”. “It’s ‘highly probable’ that California will soon witness its highest sea levels ever recorded.”

The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go. “Why be financially independent, [editor in chief Sophia Dasser] wondered, if not to publish sharp-edged views of the biggest campus issues?”

The best multi day hikes in the world. “As an avid hiker, who spends most of her time hiking, I have done more than 100 multi day hikes all over the world. This list includes 25 of my favorite ones.”

Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game. “Lobster is lobster in English. Langosta is lobster in ___”

Ooh, Mestra is a new short story from Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles). “Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is granted a unique gift by Poseidon: The ability to transform herself into any being she can imagine.”

From mapped.earth, a map of every lighthouse on the planet, along with other charted lights like lighted buoys and such. The screenshots above are static but the lights on the real map move: each lighthouse sweeps out its actual arc and the reach of the beams is true to ...

Looks like Every Frame a Painting is ramping up again! “Over the last 10 years, Taylor and I have amassed a series of ideas — some of them originally designed to be on Youtube, some designed to be other things. All of this is currently in progress”

Amazon is releasing some new Kindle models, including a thinner Paperwhite (my fave) with an aluminum back, more storage, and faster interactions. If I didn’t just get a new last-gen Paperwhite to replace one I lost, I’d be tempted to pre-order.

A raw, revealing interview with an 80-year-old Sylvester Stallone on the occasion of his new memoir, The Steps. I listened to about half of this and had to stop…it’s incredibly candid but what he went through as a kid & young adult, oof.

A 15-minute tour of former NFL coach Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft city. As previously mentioned, he started playing the game to connect with his kids and never stopped. (This is only part 1 of ???)

You can destroy kottke.org if you want. Or any other site!

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

Tags: video

Eternal Family is a media service that shows “a hand-picked collection of unique & rare films across Vintage Animation, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Action, Documentaries, Found Tapes & Much More”. KDO readers might like the Early Technology section.

Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner on his past career as a profile writer. “If you’re doing the job well, you find yourself asking them profoundly intimate questions, and they find themselves answering them.” Really interesting.

“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

I love 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly & Matthew Macfadyen and directed by Joe Wright. So I really enjoyed Danny Boyd’s video essay about the great cinematography in the film.

Pride & Prejudice isn’t a movie I’ve exactly seen a 100 times in my life. And believe me, I like a good romcom. But when I finally sat myself down, put on the 4K disc, and paid attention, I could not believe the level of craft on display here. The cinematography of this movie is insane. Some of the closest to my own personal tastes as I’ve ever found. So today, I want to talk about how director Joe Wright created some of the best extended tracking shots, ones, long takes, that I’ve ever seen.

Tags: film school · Joe Wright · movies · Pride and Prejudice · video