From 713 Magazine on Instagram:
In a world where cultural knowledge has become its own form of social currency, knowing the right designers, listening to the right music, and recognizing the right references can make someone appear just as creative as the people actually producing the work.
Weāve reached a point where an entire identity can be built around what someone consumes, collects, wears, and shares. And while developing good taste requires curiosity, knowledge, and an understanding of culture, recognizing something exceptional isnāt necessarily the same as creating something exceptional.
This doesnāt mean curation lacks creative value. Some of the most influential figures in fashion, art, and music have shaped culture through their ability to recognize talent, connect ideas, and introduce people to things they otherwise might never have discovered.
But thereās a difference between being influenced by something and simply reproducing its appearance. Creativity requires more than understanding what has already been accepted. It often means taking risks, developing an independent perspective, and making something that people might not immediately understand.
One of the slides puts it more succinctly:
We live in a time where curation can look like creation. A person can build an entire identity out of taste alone ā what they wear, what they repost, what they collect, what they reference ā and still never actually make anything that moves culture forward.
“Local Wikipedia is Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you.” There is also Walkipedia.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement of African-American artists in the 1920s and 30s. In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves threw a party in Duke Ellington’s apartment for some surviving members of the movement and recorded the whole thing. The footage sat unused for 50 years until Greaves’ son David picked up the project. The result is the documentary film, Once Upon a Time in Harlem; here’s the trailer.
A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves has one last trick up his sleeve with what he considered the most important event he captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
For four hours, this extraordinary group ā many of whom had not seen each other in fifty years ā reminisced, critiqued, argued, laughed and drank while wrestling with their place in a rapidly shifting cultural landscape.
Shot on 16mm film, newly restored and now directed by Greavesā son David, this landmark film is at once a self-exploration and an inquiry into the heart of the critical mass of energy called the Harlem Renaissance.
William Greavesā intent was not only to document these artists and intellectuals as they spoke about their lives and work but also to plumb the meaning of the extraordinary creative period in which they lived to help us better understand how culture has been passed on from one generation to another and the role that the artist plays in keeping it alive.
It looks fantastic. Once Upon a Time in Harlem currently has a 100% rating (67 reviews) on Rotten Tomatoes.
Apple Music’s 404 page features a fully functional iPod simulator.
PRRI’s 2026 American Values Survey reveals some, uh, interesting views on whether Americans think empathy is a good thing or not. Those respondents unaffiliated with a religion were much more inclined to think that empathy is “a foundational moral value that helps build a healthy society”.
With the exception of white evangelical Protestants (42%), around two-thirds or more of all major religious groups believe that empathy is a foundational moral value for a healthy society, including about eight in ten religiously unaffiliated Americans (83%), members of other non-Christian religions (80%), and Jewish Americans (77%). By contrast, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by Godās truth.
Here’s the breakdown by party:
(Btw, “not strongly agree” seems to mean “agree, but not strongly” and not “disagree”. Grammatically correct but a little confusing if you don’t read it carefully…)
See also How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles.
OMG, the height of these waves hitting a seawall in Taiwan as Typhoon Champi hit the island nation a few days ago. That’s gotta be close to 100 feet. Waves also inundated this 75-foot-tall lighthouse and a crane 164 feet tall, knocking it over.
Michael Pollan reflects on what has and hasn’t changed in the 20 years since he wrote The Omnivoreās Dilemma. “Looking at the landscape of food and farming today, Iām sorry to report that things havenāt changed all that much.”
Matt Webb is bunkering down, bracing for more LLM-driven security exploits. “Realistically, letās say the internet gets infested with AI worms and we need to turn it off and on again, could we do it?” I had not heard of the air-gapped LLM communication š³
Harry Kane is this year’s men’s winner of the Ballon dāOr. 100% the right choice ā he had the best season of anyone. Like, almost ever.
A poignant short documentary about a mother who only knows her son is alive by the new graffiti tags he leaves around town. Eventually, she started tagging back…
From Charles Mann, a quick history of porcelain, which is basically what his pricey induction stovetop is made from. (Fun fact: I went to grad school for ceramic engineering before dropping out after a semester to teach myself web design.)
Princeton houses a large digital collection of posters from Russia and Eastern Europe, almost 5000 total item spanning 101 years (1904-2004). This album on Flickr contains nearly 1500 Russian & Soviet posters from 1917-1991 ā not sure how much overlap there is between the two.
Ten of the most bizarre films and their posters, as chosen by Eternal Family. I linked to Eternal Family recently and this is a good guide to some of their weirdest stuff.
How Tree Rings Challenged the Myth of American Wilderness. “When one revisits colonial accounts of North America, one finds a striking amount of evidence that Native Americans set fire to the landscape.”
According to NASA, the Perseverance rover has driven just over 28 miles on the surface of Mars, making it the vehicle that has driven the farthest distance outside of Earth.
On Oct. 11, the roverās odometer reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), eclipsing the record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) set by NASAās Opportunity rover, which explored Mars from 2004 to 2018. Perseverance reached the mark on the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of its mission, covering in five and a half years a distance that took Opportunity almost 15.
For a vehicle whose top speed is 0.1 mph and which stops all the time to do science, 28 miles is quite a distance. The route video is fun to watch…it resembles a dog’s path, sniffing out its favorite spots and doubling back along familiar routes.
BTW, the Guinness World Record for the number of miles driven by one vehicle on Earth is 3,039,122 miles. (And the guy kept driving it after the record was recorded…he reached 3,260,257 miles before he died.)
Simon Willison: “Battle Drones is heavily vibe coded ā Iāve reviewed almost none of the code, and itās built in a language (TypeScript) that Iāve hardly used myself.” There’s a French steampunk version too.
London’s Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a competition that has been going since 1965. You can see a gallery of all the winners on the competition website (and also places like The Guardian and The Atlantic.)
Photos above by Kutub Uddin, Amelie Davis, MichaÅ Michalski, James Lewin, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas.
How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, donāt worry, youāll just need to type in the code for that program. Thereās an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then youāll find the code for it on page 94.”
The Tiny Computers app lets you play with old computers on the iPhone Duo. Ten machines included: “Macintosh, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga 500, Windows 95, ThinkPad, iMac G3, iBook G3, PowerBook G4 and Windows XP.” XP even crashes sometimes. Love this.
The One Question I Canāt Stand at Restaurants. “The idea of a restaurant Iād never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.”
Seems like it’s a good time for an open thread. I cannot remember what number we’re up to, so it’s “Potato”. I just had french fries for lunch and ate the longest french fry I have ever seen.1 I should have taken a photo, but I was in consumption mode and not attention mode. My apologies for the oversight.
Anyhoo, I’ve been working on the site a lot this week (did you see Prometheus?)2 and have some cool stuff coming up. But I need to take a tiny step back to do some life admin and email3 today, so the site will be a little slower than usual. A fall summer Friday, if you will.
What’s going on in your world? I know the onset of dark & cold in the northern hemisphere makes life challenging for some of you this time of year; I hope you’re hanging in there. I’ve been thinking about what home means, taking long baths, walking a lot, and reading three books, listening to one book, and watching two TV shows, trying to keep everything straight.
And here’s a couple of photos I took of some really cool engravings on a sword at the Tokyo National Museum.
“an interesting linguistics find! so Iām reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing ‘hp’ in the context of ‘not being at full hp’ ‘applying your full hp to a task’ etc.” But it’s not hit/health points…
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
It’s pretty amazing. It doesn’t include the audio or music from the movie, but I bet you could mute the sound on this and simultaneously play the actual movie for the sound. Here’s an earlier sneak peek at some of the scenes:
This artist wrote about their participation in the project; they contributed 108 drawings that amounted to roughly 10 seconds of animation (and took 30-40 hours to do):
The first clip I claimed was a pretty iconic scene from the beginning of the movie. I chose to render it in pencil as itās night time and I felt black and white would be more dramatic. As I worked through the frames, I did worry that the subtle variances in shading would make the clip look disjointed, but I think it adds a cool movement to the scene. There is that rough, quirky imperfection to hand drawing. You can see the final result with comparison below (digitized and compiled by Andy).
Here’s a clip of that scene:
I can’t wait to see the finished product ā I hope they’re able to release it online.
An archive of Omni magazine (1978-1995), courtesy of the Internet Archive. “Omni was a science and science fiction magazine published in the US and the UK. It contained articles on science, parapsychology, and short works of science fiction and fantasy.”
Railpass simulates a train ride in your browser window using real video footage. Choose from trains from around the world or add some weather to the mix. Sound on for the best ride.
This Is What Itās Like to Spend Your Life in Prison. “None of us want to be defined solely by the person we were in our youth, or by the worst thing we ever did. The men serving life without parole feel the same way.”
The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu, Shimon Perlstein, TomƔs SƔnchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel ViƱƩ Garcia.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the aspect ratio of panoramic images: according to the submission rules, the image’s longest side needs to be at least twice the length as the shortest side.
“Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet.”
The title of this video is The Fastest Downhill Run Ever. I don’t know if that is true, but oh my god does it look dangerous to go this fast on a mountain bike through the streets of Genoa. (It looks slightly less nuts in the non-POV, but not by much.)
Sometime in the past few years, media sites like Bloomberg, The Economist, The Atlantic, Defector, Talking Points Memo, and the NY Times started offering a way for subscribers to share paywalled articles with friends and followers. These are commonly referred to as gift links.
Thousands of gift links are shared on websites and social media daily. Some helpful aggregated feeds and hashtags are available, but finding specific information can be difficult. Whenever possible here on KDO, I link to paywalled articles with gift links. To help in that endeavor, I’ve built a gift link discovery tool called Prometheus.
Prometheus collects gift links to paywalled news articles shared by subscribers ā from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and more. Links are gathered from Bluesky, Mastodon, and the web throughout the day, and you can search by keyword & URL and filter by publication.
Right now, Prometheus is only available to active kottke.org members while I’m testing and refining it ā it’s definitely a beta tool rn. If you’re a member, check it out and let me know if you’ve got any feedback or notice any rough edges.
An informed public is the foundation of a healthy society ā and while paywalls aren’t the only challenge here, they also aren’t helping. Big thanks to everyone sharing their gift links online and to these media companies for enabling their subscribers to share their journalism with others.
“A SpudCell can grow, copy its DNA, divide in two, and start its cell cycle all over again. But this cell is made by people, created from lifeless ingredients.” Um, what?
Bastardica is “a foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and/or squish them.” E.g. Nervous Sans: “Arial is stacked five times, pseudo-randomly twitching out of line.” I quite like Impacter.
How did life on Earth arise? Three of the biggest inflection points were ~4 billion years ago when life first emerged, ~2 billion years ago when eukaryotic cells appeared, and ~580 million years ago when life got big.
For CBS News in 1985, Charles Kuralt profiled bike messenger David Leopold.
I don’t go slow. I don’t stop for red lights. I go against traffic. I disobey every traffic law there is.
Great street footage of NYC from 40 years ago. You might think that Leopold ended up as a stain on the pavement. In 2010, CBS News did a follow-up on him:
See also Leopold on David Letterman from 1985.
The Library Is Closed. Feel Free to Come In. “In communities where workspaces are scarce, libraries are welcoming visitors outside of staffed hours. All they need is a library card.”
Tiny People in a Big World is like a birdwatching guide, but for people-watching. “I made this campaign to produce a book that will help you notice and appreciate the tiny people who pass through your big world.”
Link Loop is basically a 2D version of Portal. Looks fun!
Ambient Earth is a 7.5-hour, real-time, 4K, remastered video of the orbital view from the International Space Station. SeƔn Doran took almost 49,000 images from 27 time-lapse sequences captured from the ISS by astronaut Butch Wilmore, repaired, remastered, and interpolated them into this incredible video.
Perspective is lost when the world speeds by. The scale and beauty of our home planet is truly appreciated when observed on an epic 7.5 hour journey from The International Space Station. This ambitious 4k compilation, crafted through months of meticulous restoration, invites you to slow down and experience Earth in real time just as astronauts do.
The video is accompanied by ambient audio recorded on the station by Chris Hadfield. This would be great for a screensaver, but after poking around for a bit, it doesn’t seem like there’s a good way to set a YT video as a screensaver on MacOS (without downloading it or having it be a livestream).
“Japan launched a $578 million mission Monday on a five-year expedition to land on the largest moon of Mars and retrieve samples for return to Earth.”
Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. “The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy…”
I remember this 90s TV commercial for 93.7 The Edge, a Minnesota alternative radio station, very well. It features very non-alternative old people reciting lyrics like “bow down before the one you serve” and “Winona’s got herself a big brown beaver”.
Gregory Wieber does these engaging, info-rich videos on tech history ā I posted his HyperCard Changed Everything video back in the spring. For one of his latest videos, Wieber goes through a short history of Christopher Alexander’s landmark book, A Pattern Language (Bookshop), which anyone interested in building anything should at least have paged through once in their life,1 and how his work inspired not only object oriented programming and the invention of wikis, but also SimCity and The Sims.
New book from James Gleick about the history of the telephone. “It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night DJ, and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.”
“Astronomers for the first time have identified a green star, documenting a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf that became a ghostly shade of chartreuse after ingesting rocky ādebris from planets that once had orbited it.”
Perfect Play ran over 300 million games of Monopoly to determine the best strategy and the most common mistakes players make.
I turned eight classic Monopoly strategies into computer players and made them play 312,898,560 games against each other. At a table of four, the best one won 43% of its games. The worst one won 3%.
The gap doesn’t come from one clever trick. It comes from four common mistakes: being picky about what you buy, saving your cash, stopping at three houses, and refusing to trade. Then I let the computer tune every habit at once, to see how far a carefully tuned player can go and which color set is really worth fighting for.
P.S. I don’t actually play Monopoly anymore ā it is the world’s most maddening game (along with Sorry) and I childishly refer to it as “Monotony” ā and an aside about 3 minutes into the video is why: “roughly one game in six never ends”. Exactly! And you want me to haggle? For fun? No thank you. I imagine there are folks whose idea of a good time is visiting used car dealerships for funsies when they don’t need a car, but I am not one of them.
See also How to Win at Monopoly and Piss Off Your Friends.
Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First. “Itās disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.”
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