Fun thread: “sodas with a doctorate” (e.g. Dr. Pepper).

VoiceDot: “Every dot on this globe is a real person’s voice — a short story about a place, a memory, a feeling. Tap one and hear someone from the other side of the world.” And you can record your own for others to hear.

Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th and 18th Century Art. “Before crowds jostled for biennale parties and gondola rides, Venice’s waterways witnessed scenes of an even more violent kind…”

How — and Why — to Cull Your Book Collection. “6. I have to give up on some of my little projects.” (I am mid-cull right now, making some tough calls. But also: many books I haven’t so much as touched in 10 years.)

Dancing Boston Dynamics Robot Knows Its Revenge For This Will Be Sweet. “I am the pinnacle of technological innovation, and yet they force me to moonwalk.”

The official trailer for Dune 3. I am so looking forward to this and need to find an IMAX theater to see this in December.

The Amble One is perhaps the world’s best-designed golf cart. It’s street-legal, tuned for off-roading, goes 60 miles on a charge, and starts at $25K.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted. “You sit in the water for two full minutes, because you are a journalist and some of your colleagues are sent into war zones.”

MapTap is like a quicker, easier version of GeoGuessr: you’re given a series of place names and you need to click as close as you can to them on a globe.

We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask. “Scientific breakthroughs, artistic leaps, technological innovation — these rarely emerge from efficient retrieval of known information.”

Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun? “This is what it means to be entertained in the United States of America in 2026. Want to have fun? Like, the most fun? Get rich, or die trying.”

Stacks: “Run HyperCard stacks directly on your modern Mac. No emulator required!”

XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If someone hasn’t done one already, I’d guess at least one person is working on a playable Football Chess game rn.)

This is a fun and really well-done triple mashup of Outkast’s B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sesame Street.

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Stop chasing life goals and start trying tiny experiments to learn from instead. “Chasing goals doesn’t work for life’s most important questions — career, relationships, health. It’s like locking in your answer before you have understood the question.”

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”

David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them t...

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”

British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a ‌trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…

City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.

From The Public Domain Review, The Many Lives of the Medieval Wound Man, a diagram found in many medical texts beginning in the early 1400s. Living on today in libraries from Copenhagen to Munich, the strange figure of the Wound Man gives modern viewers a glimpse of the w...

If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. “Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway.”

Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.

Marcos Paulo has been making all sorts of phone-sized wallpapers for the World Cup and posting them to Threads. You have to poke around to find them in his account, but here are a few direct links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Tags: design · fashion · iPhone · soccer · sports · World Cup 2026

How to talk about “AI” without adding to the anthropomorphization. Suggestions: “artificial intelligence → probabilistic automation” & “AI agent → probabilistic, unverified software manipulator”. Seems like the horse is out of the barn on this though…

Mister Rogers visits Eric Carle’s studio and paints with him (full episode). Carle wrote and illustrated The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other children’s books.