North America kind of sucks at elevators. “Elevators cost nearly three times as much in North America compared to its peers. What is going on here?” (Maintenance fees can be 10x as expens…

How Will the Miracle Happen Today? “Kindness is like a breath. It can be squeezed out, or drawn in. You can wait for it, or you can summon it. To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a cert…

There’s a guy named Orion who surfs the St Lawrence River in the winter, sometimes dodging massive chunks of ice and sometimes riding them downstream, looking for waves. If you’ve ever…

Thoughtful lessons from a Google software engineer. “The punchline isn’t ‘never innovate.’ It’s ‘innovate only where you’re uniquely paid to innovate.’ Everything else should…

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about this 2015 observation on Tumblr about the dangerous conflation of respect of personhood and the respect of authority.…

Today, I'm very excited to finally share the pre-release of Clauthbound (our latest typeface) with Secret Club members.✨Secret Club members get all of our fonts including pre-releases plus…

The main point of Adam Bonica’s post The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls is about the optimism of this moment: that the US could be ripe for a Berlin Wall-falling moment that opens the…

Astronomers have discovered an “almost-galaxy” called Cloud-9 (no, really), a failed galaxy that contains no stars. “There’s nothing like this that we’ve found so far in the univers…

Condé Nast forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet and so a group of journalists grabbed it and are relaunching the food magazine as a worker-owned co-op. Love it.…

Discover the 100-Year-Old Self-Playing Violin, One of the Most Complex Music Players Ever Made. “It featured three vertically mounted violins, each with a single active string, played by a…

“I feel stuck and sad and I don’t know what else to do.” Yeah, same.…

Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it’s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform…

Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. “This page contains a collection of small computer programs which implement one-player puzzle games.” 💬 Join…

Out of the 1000 most-discussed books on Hacker News, it looks like around 50 of them were written by women.…

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that kottke.org moved servers over the weekend. You shouldn’t have noticed anything, except perhaps that the site is faster now. There was a small is…

A wreck on the Lehigh Valley trackage in South Somerville, NJ circa 1918. (via shorpy) Tags: this is a metaphor for something · trains…

I loved watching this quick video recap of how Penguin designer Elisha Zepeda made the book covers for 10 books that came out in 2025. Zepeda has a much longer look at his process on YT.…

Using lidar, scientists discovered a 400-foot-long wall composed of “60 massive granite monoliths, set directly onto the bedrock in pairs at regular intervals”. The wall is 30 feet underw…

Added to the music library:Hyper VigilanceRamleh, 2025The Shallowest EndNape Neck, 2025I’m Not HereOh Mr James, 2025Added to the film diary:Girl with HyacinthsHasse Ekman, 1950, ★★★No Other…

Read the book, Typographic Firsts It is a treat to find a typeface that tastes as good as it looks. The Noeler family, designed in 2025 by Michael Rafailyk, a new novelty family that looks as eatable…

words.zip is “an infinite collaborative word search where anyone can find and submit words — no account required.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org �…

There’s a shark called the cookiecutter shark because it leaves bite marks the shape of “neat, circular holes resembling the cut of a cookie cutter”. 💬…

Burn Harry Burn: Reckoning With My Harry Potter Fandom as a Trans Person. “I dug a fire pit in my backyard and burned my complete set of hardcover Harry Potters.”…

A soaring US vs a stagnant EU? “Europeans benefit from more leisure time than Americans, higher life expectancy & lower inequality levels, all w/ comparable productivity rates. However one…

Alexandra Petri: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. “I have just driven six and a half hours to Ohio in order to forecast my own weather. From a hot-air balloon.” She also…

What You’re Watching Isn’t What You’re Really Watching. “You think you’re watching an innocent woman being shot and killed in cold blood by the federal government, but what you’re…

Greetings, my friends. Here's issue #66 of Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday. 🧑‍🚀 MTV Rewind is an ad-free website that collected over 3…