For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.

Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc.

NASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.”

In a conversation with economist Paul Krugman, climate journalist David Roberts asserts that the United States and China are going in different directions in energy, one forwards and one back. One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when yo...

Help! My Favorite Athlete Is an Idiot (Alt headline: When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions). “Just root for the jersey and not necessarily the nitwit wearing it?”

Astronaut Michael Fincke was rendered unable to speak while on the ISS, prompting an evacuation to Earth. “We’re almost 100% sure that this is a space-related thing.” Uh, I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently; this is *exactly* how It starts.

A new study shows that since 1990, the United States has caused $10 trillion in global climate damages. China is responsible for $9T. “Our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world.”

Jesus Clarifies Return Will Be Strictly Limited To Carpentry Business. “My sole focus during this Second Coming will be various woodworking projects and not the establishment of a messianic kingdom.”

I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad).

For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Tags: Daft Punk · Fred Again · music · Thomas Bangalter · video

Test footage from a slime simulator game made by former Epic Games employee Asher Zhu. You try to stay hydrated in the hot Tokyo summer by showering and drinking beverages from vending machines.

A list of chain restaurants whose names contain unusual structures, presented in decreasing order of how appealing it would be to eat in such a structure. (White Castle, Waffle House, etc.)

There’s an upside-down “H” on the facade of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois. Here’s a deep dive into how it got there.

A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.

Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…”

“Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy…could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.”

We watched Zoolander last night and right before the Derelicte DJ throws on Relax, there’s a 2-second snippet of something that sounded super familiar. It took me a bit to track it down, but it’s trance banger Free by Mono Culture.

A new edition of On Liberty, a canonical work of political philosophy, “is the first to officially name Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author alongside John Stuart Mill”.

“COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show”. Not surprising when you look at excess mortality numbers for that period.

“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.”

Just renewed my membership for The Kid Should See This, a genuine internet treasure.

Hey folks. The site is going to be very light this week and early next week — I’m spending some time with my family and accompanying my daughter on some spring break college visits. I’ll be back to full force mid-next week.

In the meantime, I thought the open thread we did a couple of weeks ago was so lovely that it should be a regular thing. So, what’s going on in your world? What are you working on? Reading or watching or listening to anything good these days? How can we help you with something that’s been weighing you down?

Tags: kottke.org

An interview with Andy Weir about the accuracy of the science in Project Hail Mary. “I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find.”

“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.”

A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.”

This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.”

This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet.

“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…”

Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded. Stuart Laycock, t...

An online museum of Chinese cigarette packaging art.