The official number of exoplanets tracked by NASA has reached 6000. Astronomers have found “planets covered in lava; some with the density of Styrofoam; and others with clouds made of gemst…

Musician Plays the Last Stradivarius Guitar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679. I had no idea Stradivari made guitars. 💬 Join the discussion on ko…

A company called Blackdot has built a tattooing robot. The company says the machine is less painful and the tattoos look like they are laser-printed. 💬 Join t…

Craig Mod is off on another of his long walks of Japan and is writing a pop-up newsletter (subscribe!) along the way. I am feeling this bit from his first missive recently: To have a day lik…

A new kind of bone glue that “mimics how oysters stick to underwater surfaces” can bond bone fragments together in 2-3 minutes, “even in blood-rich areas where most adhesives fail”.…

Daniel Stenberg's note on AI assisted curl bug reports Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg on Mastodon: Joshua Rogers sent us a massive list of potential issues in #curl that he found using hi…

25 years ago today, Radiohead released Kid A. This morning, I’m celebrating by, um, listening to Kid A. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

“Scientists reflect on the life and work of [Jane Goodall], whose discoveries made them rethink what it means to be human.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottk…

When attention is being appropriated, producers need to weigh the costs and benefits of the transaction. To assess whether the appropriation of attention is net-positive, it’s useful to disting…

Damien Leone, 2013, ★ It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all t…

aavetis/PRarena Albert Avetisian runs this repository on GitHub which uses the Github Search API to track the number of PRs that can be credited to a collection of different coding agents. The r…

Two new models from Chinese AI labs in the past few days. I tried them both out using llm-openrouter: DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp from DeepSeek. Announcement, Tech Report, Hugging Face (690GB, MIT license)…

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters. “A bold, thoughtful and beautifully lyrical exploration of how amateur creativity shaped the internet.”…

Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing. [This is a vintage post originally from Jan 2014.]…

The driest desert on Earth (non-polar category) is blooming in a gorgeous phenomenon called El Desierto Florido. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

From Haymarket Books, an Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police Reading List. “In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and…

The latest video from Kurzgesagt imagines a scenario in which an advanced civilization called the Noxans can potentially survive the heat death of the universe. With five hours of the full…

Anil Dash on Mariah Carey’s unreleased “Hole-inspired grunge album” called Someone’s Ugly Daughter, recorded in the mid-90s with “an album cover featuring a dead cockroach on the fr…

Which one of these paintings of a guitar player is by Johannes Vermeer? Both? Neither? They’re hanging side-by-side in London for the next few months so you can decide for yourself.…

In his latest video, Evan Puschak looks at the differences between Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation. In every adaptation across art…

Trump Has No Mandate to Destroy America. The manifestation of a Trump mandate is understandable for the party trying to overthrow democracy, but for Democrats to go along with it is inexcusab…

Five More Things I Want to Tell My White Friends. “Please understand the degree to which Black and brown people (and LGBTQ+ folks) in this country are particularly scared and feel abandoned…

I just sent out the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. The sections this month are: Be…

This pair of presentations from Calder Ruhl Hansen and C.C. Elian examines the fascinating writing systems they’ve created at the intersection of typography, calligraphy, hierog…

I really appreciated this thoughtful piece about Ta-Nehisi Coates & Ezra Klein. Andrea Pitzer says “lost” folks like Klein “don’t have a clear idea how this moment fits into history a…

12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots. “There are kitchen tables, laptops open amongst the charming chaos of daily life, and desks appropriately equipped with the tools of…

I love this self-portrait by Na Kim. It’s somehow bold and subtle? Wow. Tags: art · Na Kim 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

This question from Ta-Nehisi Coates in his recent conversation with Ezra Klein re: Charlie Kirk’s death jumped out at me: “But was silence not an option?” Too much attention-seeking and…

Speaking of Benito Mussolini and fascism, the excellent Poster House museum in NYC has a new exhibition on for the next few months: The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.…

Having watched this morning's Sora 2 introduction video, the most notable feature (aside from audio generation - original Sora was silent, Google's Veo 3 supported audio in May 2025) looks to be…

How to actually live like a local. “The thing is, nobody ever actually wants to ‘live like a local’ when they are traveling. Instead, they want to live like a romanticized, idealized ve…

A long profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW. “Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeo…

Anne Frank, 1947 When I changed high schools after the ninth grade, there was some confusion about how each school handled its history curriculum, and in the shuffle, I lamentably never g…

Coding agents like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex CLI represent a genuine step change in how useful LLMs can be for producing working code. These agents can now directly exercise the…

On May 22, 1981, for the finale of the show’s 12th season, Mister Rogers visited Sesame Street. With apologies to the Avengers, this has to be the greatest crossover event in history. In…

New book from Patrick Radden Keefe (Say Nothing, Empire of Pain): London Falling, “a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was…

Yes, this exactly: “The government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government.”…

An oral history of Deltron 3030’s stupendous debut album. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Huh, the original version of the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy tale is a bit different: “An impudent old woman enters the forest home of three anthropomorphic bachelor bears…”…

A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc. The David Bowie Centre is a working arch…

They’re bringing back Reading Rainbow, hosted by Mychal the Librarian. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Antonio Scurati’s 2018 “documentary novel” M: Son of the Century was a worldwide bestseller about the early political career of Benito Mussolini and the rise of fascism in post-WWI Ital…

Natalia Newsome is a 5’11” sophomore volleyball player for SMU; she’s got a 40-inch vertical and can touch almost a foot above a regulation basketball hoop. It is bananas how high she r…

Bisa Butler makes quilted portraits and recently debuted a show with some of her newest work called Hold Me Close. From her artist’s statement: This body of work is a visual response…

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5 today, with a very bold set of claims: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the best coding model in the world. It's the strongest model for building complex agents. It’s…

Ismail Ibrahim worked as a fact checker for an unnamed magazine (it was the New Yorker). “Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling m…

In post-Soviet Russia, Sauron is good actually? “It became a story about hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men oppressing the not-so-evil Sauron and his nation of Mordor.”…

Armin Ronacher: 90% The idea of AI writing "90% of the code" to-date has mostly been expressed by people who sell AI tooling. Over the last few months, I've increasingly seen the same idea come…

M. Gessen: This Is the Feeling of Losing a Country. I Know It Well. “When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you…

Nikole Hannah-Jones on the bipartisan tributes of Charlie Kirk & the mainstreaming of extremist, bigoted speech. “You know, the Good Book, the Bible, says you judge a man as he lived, not a…

An asteroid discovered in 2024 has a small chance of hitting the moon in 2032. “Lunar ejecta could increase micrometeoroid debris flux in low Earth orbit up to 1000 times above background l…

Given a week or two to try out ideas and search the literature, I’m pretty sure that Freek and I could’ve solved this problem ourselves. Instead, though, I simply asked GPT5-Thinking. After f…

We’ve seen the strong reactions to 4o responses and want to explain what is happening. We’ve started testing a new safety routing system in ChatGPT. As we previously mentioned, when conversat…

Robert Altman, 1980, ★★ I always assumed there must be something transcendent about this 1980 live-action Popeye adaptation, seeing as a) it sure seems like a really dopey idea, b) th…

Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners Fascinating new paper from Google DeepMind which makes a very convincing case that their Veo 3 model - and generative video models in general -…