Homer’s Catalogue of Ships from the Iliad. Where the Greek ships that set out for Troy were from and what they may have looked like. “No Homeric ship survives. What we have are pictures: a handful of painted sherds of the twelfth century BC…”

Practical Engineering: Are beavers actually good at building dams? (A: Yes, duh.)

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. Brad Pitt returns as Booth, the character he played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but 8 years later. Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, directed by David Fincher.

Trace is a daily puzzle game where you build a “recipe” of up to 4 steps to turn a starting set of numbers into another set of numbers.

The lessons four Islamic polymaths — al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi — hold for students today: “breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way”.

50 Songs That Explain America. “The songs were chosen on the basis that they told me something, sonically or lyrically or emotionally or vibrationally, about America and the idea of America.”

{Ira Glass voice} On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript: And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments...

How to rescue an orphaned baby elephant. “The baby elephant needs a mother to run to. And the fact is that the mother is a 30-year-old Nigerian man right now.”

I visited Jimbōchō today, a neighborhood that’s home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in English or sell magazines, posters, or visual books that are interesting to browse no matter what language you speak. I visi...

Robert Eggers is doing Romeo & Juliet. “When it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Elizabethan English (aka early modern English), with lines straight from the play.”

Play Solitaire Alone Together. “It’s Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet.” A little more social than solitaire, but not by much.

The Museum of Time-Based Art. “My idea for this site is to build an exhaustive, authoritative compendium of every art project that uses time as part of the work.”

I can’t remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.

For New York magazine, Emily Gould writes about her quest to cry again: I Miss My Tears (archive). I looked over at my husband, Keith, whose eyes were red, and felt … nothing. Not a clench in my chest, not a pang, not an incipient burning behind my eye sockets. It wasn’t t...

Chimpanzees use tools to collect food and deliberately teach other chimps (often their offspring) to use them for ant dipping, algae fishing, and termite fishing.

Some advice on giving good advice. “Not every situation warrants advice. Sometimes, the person just wants to gauge a reaction or to share.”

I love these black & white photos of Devils Tower by Zac Henderson. A butte of a rare kind of volcanic rock that formed a mile underground 50 million years ago, Devil’s Tower is visible now thanks to erosion of sedimentary rock. The tower features the world’s large...

TIL they can do wing replacements on injured butterflies…just take a look at this repair video.

Engaging read on how the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? was made. “To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion.”

The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever. “It didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.”

Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a few hours after posting this), you might need to sign up again. Sorry for the inconvenience — my email account got flagged and I needed to rectify this pronto. 🙏

For the rest of yous: you’re doing great, stay the course. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter and you like reading things in your inbox for some reason, you can subscribe as well. The newsletter goes out twice a week and includes links to everything I post here. Thanks.

Tags: kottke.org

A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes movies. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.”

I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects. Like Manet, she...

3D models for every single object in Katamari Damacy, all 1680 of them. You can download models and animated gifs of each one.

Ross Anderson on NASA’s recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which may “be able to deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light” as well as measure the effects of dark energy.

Canyon Groove. What if the grooves on a record were shaped like actual canyons? What would that sound like? “The floor sets the key. The shape of the walls sets the mood. The width sets how long one pass takes, and the depth sets the echo.”

So that companies can use them to make accessories like cases and bands, Apple maintains a collection of downloadable dimensional drawings and tech specifications for many of their products, including the iPhone, AirPods, Watch, and iPad. They are beautiful. I love their corner & edge measurements…you can see how fiddly Apple is with their curves. Curiously, the only Mac listed is the Macbook Neo. I guess that’s the only one that needs accessorizing? Also, I presume if you’ve got a 3D printer, you could use these to make your own very precise accessories? Tags: Apple · design

What’s your “origin” video game? “I’m talking about the game that flipped that little switch in your brain and made into a life-long gamer.” Mine is Lode Runner. Reflexes + puzzles + constraints + make-your-own levels = hooked for life. You?

TIL Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was written in part to help save the cathedral from demolition.

“The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big AI needs to follow all current laws—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t. When Big AI breaks those laws, they must face pros­e­cu­tion and penal­ties—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t.”