kottke.org

Review of a new book on Stephen Hawking.

Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades.

From our own Edith Zimmerman for the New Yorker, some Updated Jane Austen Titles like Dead-Ass Karen and Red-Flag Baddie and Brain-Rot Third Space.

“Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs.”

New book from Ed Yong!

Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was.

By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery.

Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture.

The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.

The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983.

With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone.

This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass e…

The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs.

Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present.

“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women.

Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway.

Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall.

Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software.

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”.

One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory.

We Must Create the Shit Machine.

The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price.

Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a “hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen” infected almost 50 children.

Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect.

Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon.

The Tube Computer was recently constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe.

For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man.

Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals that Elon Musk has always been a racist, sexist fraud.

With a new installment every seven years since 1964, the Seven Up series has followed a group of 14 British schoolchildren from adolescence to adulthood.

Over the past six months (leisurely) and in the past three weeks (intensely), I’ve cleaned out and packed up my entire house where I’ve been living for the past 10 years.

A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists: “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.”

From a curator at the Getty, ratings of every “framed picture” emoji.

The 2026 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize include papers on “a more precise definition of kissing”, “An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”, and the discovery “that milk proteins from cockroaches pack 3X as much energy as milk proteins from cows”.

Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around.

Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday, a stationary store run by (former?)

Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26 million??!

From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry.

I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make some of the best video game explainer videos out there — hell, some of the best YT videos period) and here’s their newest one: The Tournament That Changed Tetris Forever.

In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod fishing due to overfishing.

From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.

We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys.

The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11.

Neat little prototype demo of a Bluesky reader that uses the UI of the long-retired Paper app.

A late 90s guide to Super Metroid was written in monospaced type, fully justified with no double spaces or hyphens.

Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment.

“In almost every [US] county, extreme heat is at least as bad as it was 30 years ago.

VC Isn’t VC Anymore — Understanding the Rise of Cancer Capital.

At the beginning of a clip from this podcast episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend with Matt Groening, Conan talks about one of his favorite things they did on The Simpsons: It’s a phenomenon that the Simpsons did so beautifully, which is — and we did t…

“Gimme is a dazzling ever-growing type family of multi-chromatic and variable display typefaces…” This is bonkers…letters made from Battleship pieces, Connect Four boards, playing cards, wooden railroad tracks, etc.

Bring Blockbuster Video back to your town/city by setting up a little free library of VHS tapes & DVDs.