Dan Wang on his forthcoming book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. “China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in con…

Python: The Documentary New documentary about the origins of the Python programming language - 84 minutes long, built around extensive interviews with Guido van Rossum and others who were there…

A group of 15-20 families in South Portland, Maine have installed landlines for their kids instead of giving them cellphones. The landlines “helped their children become better listeners an…

This post is an excerpt from our comprehensive online course, Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens. The course digs into everything that goes into creating design token systems and themeabl…

These contact lenses give their wearers the ability to see infrared light, even with their eyes closed. Sign me up!! 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

A collection of kooky-but-rideable bikes (treadmill bike, pull-up bike, etc.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

Light pollution has lengthened birds’ days. “Their day is almost an hour longer. They start vocalizing about 20 minutes earlier in the morning and they stop vocalizing about 30 minutes la…

Hear a Prehistoric Conch Shell Musical Instrument Played for the First Time in 18,000 Years. “The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, like…

Kevin Kelly recently published a guide called “Everything I Know about Self-Publishing”. “The way I approach publishing today is with as much self-publishing as I can handle.”…

Werner Herzog doesn’t use a cell phone, but he has joined Instagram.…

“The world’s biggest frogs build their own ponds” is art as a headline because it sounds like an adage your grandfather would tell while fishing one afternoon, but also oops the adage h…

“More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a…

Just wanting to let y’all know the cops have never had to chase a bear out of my ice cream shop, though I suppose that’s what an ice cream shop would say if they had had to have cops chas…

Are the AirPods Pro 3 coming soon? Here’s what the rumors say. “Apple is said to be testing a faster audio chip that drives ‘much better’ Active Noise Cancellation than the already‑…

We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on Ma…

This hilarious commercial for a 90s mail-order punk CD is for a compilation with hardly any punk music on it. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I…

I love these author cards from McSweeney’s in the style of baseball cards. For years you’ve seen athletes, web-slinging superheroes, orcs, and pocket monsters get the trading-card…

Prosecutors Fail to Secure Indictment Against Man Who Threw Sandwich at Federal Agent. It’s nice to hear that ordinary citizens still have some power and some sense in wielding it.…

“The evidence for millionaire tax flight is scant. If high earners were truly fleeing high taxes, low-tax states would be swarming with millionaires. Instead, the highest concentrations of…

A thoughtful post by Philip Bump on the careful use of your power. “[Substack authors] have transferred their power to a company that has used it to promote toxic rhetoric in the guise of �…

Rock guitarist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) has made a playlist called Fuck ICE, “a rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood”.…

Piloting Claude for Chrome Two days ago I said: I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely. Today Anthropic announce…

Artist Amy Sherald: Censorship Has Taken Hold at the Smithsonian. I Refused to Play Along. “History shows us what happens when governments demand that museums perform loyalty. Nazi Germany…

“Welcome to the Atlas of Space — an interactive visualization to explore the planets, moons, asteroids, and other objects in the Solar System.” 💬 Join t…

Silicon Valley is full of wealthy men who think they’re victims. “I couldn’t, and still can’t, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity.”…

I don’t know exactly what my expectations were of how lettering is painted on city streets, but this was not it. The level of precision and artistry is surprising. Reminds me of this vid…

The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz profiles Patricia Lockwood. Regarding her forthcoming novel: “‘I wrote it insane and edited it sane’; it is a collaboration between two different p…

Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country. From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is t…

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.”…

Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines Great piece from Andy Baio demonstrating quite how convoluted the usage ethics and backlash against generative AI has become.…

I disagree with Quentin Tarantino on what his best film is. “So I think Kill Bill is the movie I was born to make, I think Inglourious Basterds is my masterpiece but Once Upon a Time … in…

TMAP is a screen reader-friendly tool for creating tactile street maps. Raised lines and textures represent roads, pedestrian paths, and railways. 💬 Join the…

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? “Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that ther…

Video: “Environmental police in Rochedo, Brazil stumbled on an unexpected sight: thousands of orange-and-black bumblebee catfish scaling the slippery rocks behind waterfalls on the Aquidaua…

Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, thi…

American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate. “In 2023 there were about 700,000 “missing Americans” — those who died in 2023 but would be alive if they had lived somewhere else.…

21 Ways People Are Using AI at Work. A high school music teacher used the prompt “make it more Gen X” for helping her write rejection letters that were direct and “thoughtful, but didn�…

Radiohead’s music and art are inseparable, and a constant source of inspiration for me. I couldn’t miss this exhibition at The Ashmolean in Oxfo…

Still one of my favorite McSweeney’s articles: E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone. “MikeAtYahooDotCom@hotmail.com” �…

Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet The security team from Brave took a look at Comet, the LLM-powered "agentic browser" extension from Perplexity, and unsurp…

Static Sites with Python, uv, Caddy, and Docker Nik Kantar documents his Docker-based setup for building and deploying mostly static web sites in line-by-line detail. I found this really useful.…

Spatial Joins in DuckDB Extremely detailed overview by Max Gabrielsson of DuckDB's new spatial join optimizations. Consider the following query, which counts the number of NYC Citi Bike Trips fo…

From John Ganz in Nov 2024: “a list of things I thought the fascism theory of Trumpism predicted could happen”. Many have come to pass. The obstinance in recognizing what’s plainly happ…