“So, at about 14, I became the team’s unofficial basketball musician,” writes Theocharis Papatrechas. “A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. And if someone missed badly — an airball — I’d drop in a ‘du-ba-dum’”.

Since Reporters Without Borders started tracking their World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago, the global rating has never been lower than the 2026 score. From a summary of their analysis: For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Pres...

Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.

Jamelle Bouie thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is positioning herself for a 2028 presidential run. “Yeah, she’s running.”

From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow: Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point wa...

Study: “A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right‑wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly.” People using the “For You” feed were more likely to favor GOP policies, less likely to want Trump prosecuted, and were more pro-Russia (vs Ukraine).

Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Conseq...

We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots. “For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints…”

Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again) and instead of an underwhelming Reddit clone, it’s now just scraping noted fascist cesspool “X” for AI news and telling us that Sam Altman is influential in AI? This is embarrassing. It’ll probably be a huge success.

How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer. “Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.” (A: An extreme level of redundancy.)

Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.

Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies. “It identified your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.”

Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video.

The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has claimed 17 lives so far.

Tags: hurricanes · mesmerizing · satellite imagery · Sean Doran · video · weather

Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’ve already been having to take of their own…”

Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death.

I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world.

Tags: Aardman Animations · animation · stop motion · video · Wallace and Gromit

People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions. “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.”

Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS.

At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” said a visitor. This film shows how a brief encounter has a strong impact and gives us insight into our own lives.

You can watch the complete documentary on the PBS site (like US-only). (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Tags: Grandma Stand · PBS · video

Where are the public benches on the internet? “Like cities that have prioritized cars, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes.”

Now open in NYC: a pop-up called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which consists of “all 3.5 million pages, 3,437 volumes, and 17,000 pounds of the released and partially redacted Epstein files”.

The Hidden Cassettes. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” (Be sure to read the “What?!” link.)

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress submitted a petition to the UN charging that the “brutality and discrimination” of Jim Crow constituted genocide by the US govt. The US prevented any debate on the petition and CRC leaders were persecuted thereafter.

Someone in a private forum I belong to mentioned fountain pens and thus I became acquainted with the role of a nibmeister, a person who can remake the nib of your pen more to your liking (different angle, better flow, etc).

PBS Kids and The Jim Henson Company have collaborated on a kids special called Wowsabout! that focuses on the experience of wonder. Wowsabout is rooted in a rich curriculum developed by Dr. Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and author of “AWE:...

An analysis of 18 years of Guardian blind dates. “A surprising number of successful dates include something embarrassing: the bill, a late arrival, a misread moment. Awkward doesn’t mean doomed.”

Pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Temple (1906‑1915) will be on display at the Grand Palais in Paris from May 6 - Aug 30, 2026.

Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses.

I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design.

In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver and how it came to have such a distinctive and useful handle.

I grew up helping my dad out in the garage with all sorts of projects, mostly cars, and until watching this video, I had no idea that you could slip a standard wrench over the handle of a screwdriver as a cheater bar. 🤯 (via unsung)

Tags: design · Rex Krueger · video

What Can We Do About Partisan Gerrymandering? Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear with his analysis and historical contextualizing of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Nolen Royalty: “My latest project is Marc Andreessen Egg Game - a game about drawing on eggs to make them look like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.”

Last year in an Alaskan fjord, a surprise landslide triggered a tsunami 1578 feet tall. That’s not a typo…the wave was taller than all but 13 of the world’s tallest buildings. In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down t...

Prophecy At 1420 MHz is the first single from Boards of Canada’s upcoming album. (It’s paired with a short intro track, so we’re basically getting the first five and a half minutes of the album here.)