The Farmers’ Almanac, citing a “chaotic media environment”, will cease publication after their 2026 edition. The almanac dates back to 1818. (The Old Farmer’s Almanac, started in 1792…

This seems promising: researchers have demonstrated that a “nanoparticle-based vaccine can effectively prevent melanoma, pancreatic and triple-negative breast cancer in mice”.…

Well, this is fun. (via Chris)…

GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking System Card Addendum I was confused about whether the new "adaptive thinking" feature of GPT-5.1 meant they were moving away from the "router" mechanism wher…

Yancey Strickler, founder of Metalabel and Kickstarter, wrote an interesting piece titled What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor.…

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” – Vincent van Gogh…

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl…

Greetings, Design Pals. Here's issue #58 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🗡️ Artist Julien Curi is making another animated film called Knig…

Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers OpenAI announced GPT-5.1 yesterday, calling it a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. Today they've added it to their API. We actually got four new models tod…

Datasette 1.0a22 New Datasette 1.0 alpha, adding some small features we needed to properly integrate the new permissions system with Datasette Cloud: datasette serve --default-deny option for…

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation Max Woolf provides an exceptional deep dive into Google's Nano Banana aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, still the b…

My dear friend Maggie Doyne is an embodiment of love and without a doubt the most remarkable woman I know. I love her deeply. She just made her documentary, Between the Mountain and the Sky, available…

On Monday, this Court entered an order requiring OpenAI to hand over to the New York Times and its co-plaintiffs 20 million ChatGPT user conversations [...] OpenAI is unaware of any court orderin…

Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren't training for your benchmark? The strongest argu…

After 230 years, the US Mint has ended production of new pennies. One of the very few things that incompetent stopped clock in the White House has gotten accidentally right.…

The Northern Lights Put on a Show. “A powerful geomagnetic storm brought spectacular light displays to night skies across the Northern Hemisphere, with sightings of pink, red, and green lig…

Put wings on your car. “We call it a private jet for tax reasons really. Private jets don’t pay duty on fuel, so by adding wings to the vehicle, we should qualify for the same exemption.�…

Recently discovered 55-million-year-old crocodile eggshells perhaps belong to “drop crocs”, a species that “perhaps [hunted] like leopards — dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting…

More women are riding the streets of Tehran on motorbikes, in violation of the law & social restrictions. “There is not any political manifesto or social agenda here. It’s just that since…

For his Yakuza project, photographer Anton Kusters spent two years documenting some members of the Japanese mafia. A limited edition of a book containing the photos is available. Steward M…

A group of archaeologists has proposed “applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to glean insights into how hum…

“The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.” Private equity is ripping media into shreds. 💬 J…

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime Normal APIs are promises to developers, becaus…

22 Thanksgiving Main Dishes That Are Better Than Turkey. I’ve been trying to get the fam to pivot from turkey to chicken (with all the usual sides in place), but no dice.…

Just as You Feared — Life in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. “Breakfast is sugar-free pea fibre from the state-run ZohranMart. I wish that I could give my son something better — it’s his…

Fun-reliable side-channels for cross-container communication Here's a very clever hack for communicating between different processes running in different containers on the same machine. It's bas…

Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer: A synopsis: The size of a football field, the Intern…

Meet the 2025 National Book Award Finalists. “Literary Hub caught up with the finalists to ask them a bit about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives.” Some great stu…

As I think about how command line AI tools can be used, I know it's already a bit of the wild west not disimilar to the way we install npm modules. I've seen a bit of writing about how these tools sho…

A simple but effective fix to working with web components and VS Code. I wanted to get syntax highlighting and prettier support (to auto fix indenting, quotes, etc) in my component's templates. The ex…

Scaling HNSWs Salvatore Sanfilippo spent much of this year working on vector sets for Redis, which first shipped in Redis 8 in May. A big part of that work involved implementing HNSW - Hierarchi…

Agentic Pelican on a Bicycle Robert Glaser took my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark and applied an agentic loop to it, seeing if vision models could draw a better pelican if they got the chanc…

Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen. [This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2016.] Tags: Bill Wurtz · Jap…

I've been upgrading a ton of Datasette plugins recently for compatibility with the Datasette 1.0a20 release from last week - 35 so far. A lot of the work is very repetitive so I've been outsourci…

Mattias Krantz bought an octopus from the fish market and taught it how to play piano. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

The trailer for Train Dreams, a film adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson. “In select theaters November 7 and on Netflix November 21.” 💬 Join the di…

Jamelle Bouie: “I’m gonna make a case to you that no matter what you’ve heard about the filibuster, you should want the filibuster to be sent to the ash bin of history.”…

Jessica Guo: “If there’s something out there that calls to you, I hope you listen. Give yourself permission to do the thing.” Guo just finished hiking both the the Continental Divide Tr…

Here’s the trailer for The Age of Audio, a feature-length documentary about the invention and popularization of podcasting, from Adam Curry to Ronald Young Jr. I ran across this movie vi…

Fonts based on the type generated by the Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer (1980). 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

For a More Creative Brain, Travel. “New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.”…

“China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world’s biggest polluter has managed to hit its target…

I’ve been drawing comfort from the way established artists will typically vanish for a while and suddenly re-appear with a fully-formed new body o…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Launched in 2007, the ILT blog is now 18 years old. It was last redesigned in 2015. A lot has happened in that decade, including the launch of our Font Store, ILT Aca…

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025, ★★★★ Among other things, I remain very appreciative of Lanthimos’s rare appetite for adventurous typography. Tagged: November 2025, film diary,…

High Horse: The Black Cowboy is a three-part documentary about the culture of Black cowboys & cowgirls and their erasure from the history of the western United States. From executive produ…

Netflix asks partners to consider the following guiding principles before leveraging GenAI in any creative workflow:  The outputs do not replicate or substantially recreate identifiable charact…

Going to Art Galleries Can Improve Wellbeing. “Enjoying original works of art in a gallery can relieve stress, reduce the risk of heart disease and boost your immune system, according to th…

A zoomable, fully searchable archive of every single page of every single issue of BYTE magazine from 1975-1998. “I hope seeing everything in single, searchable place offers a unique perspe…

Notes on Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay Notes on American Fascism, which was dismissed at the time but now seems prescient.…

A two-hour version of the music played in the Wellness Center in Severance. “Please try to enjoy each listening session equally.” See also Severance: Music To Refine To. ✅ Added to m…

A Journey to Vietnam to Uncover the Origins of Phở. “If you want to find the origins, you must go to Nam Ðịnh province and a village called Vân Cù.” �…

From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brookly…

If you’re looking for a typeface with Radio Shack logo vibes, try Megazoid. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“I’m trying to take a moment and see things from his perspective,” I comment to another parent as a teacher takes my son aside for a walk because he was running around instead of “dancing”…

Coulou’s vinyl cafe (no. 2). “Even though we’re traveling from jazz to funk to middle eastern and Indonesian 70s disco then hip hop, then folk and even more genres, to me this felt like…

“I wish we could ignore Bill Gates on the climate crisis. But he’s a billionaire, so we can’t,” says George Monbiot. “His [recent climate] essay reads like nothing so much as a peac…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts Gieo Text is the debut release of type designer Linh Nguyễn’s fledgling ÁccentiaType foundry. What began during her Masters in Type Design at the university of R…

Pelican on a Bike - Raytracer Edition beetle_b ran this prompt against a bunch of recent LLMs: Write a POV-Ray file that shows a pelican riding on a bicycle. This turns out to be a harder chal…