From an article in The New Yorker about a bookstore that only sells signed books:
Even before he learned to love to read, Reiss the retail genius recognized what every real reader knows: a book is not just its contents but also, and inseparably, a special kind of object, a portal of sorts between people and places and ideas.
WIRED
• Dell Cameron
Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.
Do you know your Gaia from your Cronus from your Zeus? In fewer than 15 minutes, this video provides a comprehensive overview of all the important Greek & Roman gods, goddesses, nymphs, heroes, monsters, demigods, and other assorted spiritual beings, who begat who, and what all of their domains were. (via open culture)
WIRED
• Emily Mullin
A 2023 law championed by Republicans requires the CDC have a director confirmed by the Senate. For months, though, it's had only acting directors—and the White House won't say when that will change.
The New Stack | DevOps, Open Source, and Cloud Native News
• Frederic Lardinois
Gavriel Cohen built NanoClaw, a lightweight alternative to OpenClaw, in a weekend after learning about security flaws in the popular agentic framework.
The post NanoClaw’s answer to OpenClaw is minimal code, maximum isolation appeared first on The New Stack.
McSweeney’s
• Andrew Paul
TL;DR: Enjoyed a 4-day weekend and completely forgot about weeknotes, spent way too much time troubleshooting a Tempest arcade machine that's been broken for 6 years (might actually be making progress?), dealt with the sad news that our favorite Portland bar closed, got Cosmo back from the vet looking very spaced out, started planning a Catsby tattoo, and collected yet another pile of bookmarks about AI coding agents while the cats increasingly tolerate each other.
The Color Game. “Humans can’t reliably recall colors. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it. We’ll show you five colors, then you’ll try and recreate them.” I scored 39/50 but got a perfect score on one color.
Some of the best drone shots from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
‘Viking’ was a job description, not a matter of heredity, massive ancient DNA study shows. “These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social. To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.”
An app called NonUSA is surging in popularity in Denmark; it “helps you identify and avoid American products in everyday life”. (Ironically, iOS-only for now…)
The Trump regime is still deporting people to wherever they want, facilitated by a corrupt Supreme Court.
“I am slowly coming around to a theory on the new cool: You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself.”
The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family. “‘Look at the Pelicot family.’ They had been ‘confronted with the impossible dilemma,’ he said. ‘How to make suffering coexist.’”
In a video for the V&A Museum, stone carver Miriam Johnson hand-carves a pair of hieroglyphs “using both sunken relief and raised relief techniques”.
The video has minimal narration; mostly it’s just a master craftsperson quietly tapping away at the stone — and getting bits of rock all over the sleeve of her jumper. The effect is pretty relaxing, especially with the more rhythmic tapping for the second carving. (via the kid should see this)
Tags: art · Egypt · language · Miriam Johnson · museums · sculpture · V&A Museum · video
An appreciation of Flickr’s URL structure. “It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs.”
Toy Story 5 joins the fight against screentime for kids. “Toys are for play, but tech…is for everything.”
In-browser puzzle game: “Enclose the horse in the biggest possible pen!”
