New novel from Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven): Exit Party. “Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted.”
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Wes Anderson’s Criterion Closet Picks
Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys.
One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark.
One surprising thing about this video: I was expecting Anderson to go for Kurosawa, Tati, Truffaut, Welles, and some other of his big influences but instead selected family friendly fare suitable for a trip. The man has a wide array of influences. Here’s the full list:
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
I love seeing Flow on there. What a great little film.
See also Wes Anderson Talks Up Some of His Favorite Movies in a Parisian Video Store and this delightful video from 20 years ago or so featuring Anderson and Jason Schwartzman picking out music & movies in a Borders:
“The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government” are striving to make the world safe for grift, corruption, and theft, with their mob boss president leading the way.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listWalking Men Worldwide
Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide.
I love all of these little people. The Warsaw one reminds me somewhat of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Some of the ones from smaller places have more personality, but I feel like the New York and Boston ones are my favorites aesthetically. Weirdly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here.
A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the Walking Men Worldwide website. (via @jessicabrillhart)
Instant click for me: how NYC street signs are made. “The sign shop…has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles.”
The History of Concrete, a new documentary film by John Wilson, who one review called “the Werner Herzog of the mundane”. This looks great!
Review of a new book on Stephen Hawking. “The uncomfortable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored…”
The Blind Birdwatcher
Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades.
I think that because I’m blind, I enjoy birds differently. Bird songs are my way of appreciating and understanding this world.
Culasso is aided in his quest by his incredible sense of of hearing:
Culasso is blind, but his hearing is so acute (he has absolute pitch) he can identify over 3,000 components of birdsong and differentiate among more than 700 species in his native South America (he’s Uruguayan). Ten years ago, he won a $45,000 prize in a National Geographic competition by accurately identifying 15 random bird calls.
You can find dozens and dozens of his recordings on Spotify. Filmmaker Johnny Holder made a 22-minute documentary film that features Culasso called Sonora; you can watch it on Vimeo. (via the kid should see this)
From our own Edith Zimmerman for the New Yorker, some Updated Jane Austen Titles like Dead-Ass Karen and Red-Flag Baddie and Brain-Rot Third Space.
“Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs.” But: “Artists who become successful for a signature style are then accused of monotony for being hired to reproduce it.”
Nirvana On the Cusp
This is a video of Nirvana playing Smells Like Teen Spirit in a small club just two days after Nevermind came out in 1991. There’s a freight train bearing down on those boys and they don’t even know it. (via digg)
See also The Notorious B.I.G. freestyling on a Brooklyn corner at 17 and LL Cool J plays to a mostly empty gymnasium in Maine…he was also just 17.
Update: And here’s 40+ minutes from the same show at which they played Drain You, Polly, and Breed. (via @fimoculous)
New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. “A bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean…” Out in April, pre-order now.
Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was. This summer “was the hottest on record for the contiguous U.S., beating the previous champions of 1936 and 2021 by 0.4°F. Compared to the average over the 20th century, this summer was 3° hotter.”
Using a Railway as a Massive Flatbed Scanner
By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery.
It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train (or ferry) as a massive flatbed scanner.
I knew from the start that I’d need to measure the speed somehow, but I was naïvely hoping that I wouldn’t need to measure it that well and could simply fudge it. This image, however, shows that even small variations of speed matter. This was my first glimpse into how much of a pain dealing with speed would turn out to be.
I love little hacky projects like these.
Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture. “We created reading spaces throughout the ship. A large circular bench was placed on the rear deck, and children can even lie under the sun.”
The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all.
With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone. “The program and others like it across the world are opening up a new frontier for people with reduced mobility, out on the open sea, free from the limitations of buildings and streets.”
Max Verstappen vs. 100 Normies in Go-Karts
This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler alert: he only needed 35 minutes. (And yes, his kart was the same speed as everyone else’s…you can see it in the straights later in the race.) Update: the video got taken down. You can find shorter highlight videos on YouTube.
They had F1’s lead commentator Alex Jacques call the race and used a feature called Proximity Chat, where Alex, Max, and whoever Max was fixing to pass did a three-way live voice chat. They should implement this in F1 (only half kidding).1
I guess this is part of an occasional KDO series about normal folks competing against world class athletes; previous installments include The Worst NBA Player Is Way Better Than You, Soccer: 55 vs. 2, All for One and One for All (three expert fencers vs 50 amateurs), and Olympic Gold Medalist Dominates the 100m at Her Kid’s Sports Day Event.
And perhaps this fits here as well, tangentially: “Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans.” Hmm!
Could you imagine though? Drivers could try and emulate the voice of their opponent’s crew chief and hit ‘em with a “Kimi, showing a slow puncture in the left rear, box box…” ↩
Genius Design Details: Pips and Nubs
The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used for locks or stops that can be released under pressure. Craighill even has a pips + nubs category in their online store. (thx, rion)
“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”
Danny MacAskill Plays in the Endless Light of Norway
Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful.
As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep stuff looks insanely insane. Makes me want an eMTB, which I suppose is the whole point of the video.
Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. A live album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hell yes yes yes! 13 songs are available now plus 9 more tracks when the full album drops in October.
Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software. But where are the AI-coded killer apps? “[AI is] very good at reproducing things that look and feel like what came before.”
The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”. There are no gender divisions and winners are decided by who gets closest to their predicted finish time.
The Powerful Connection Between Smell & Memory
One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory. I first learned about this relationship in college when I read A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman for a class. It’s still one of my favorite books. Here’s some of what she has to say about smell:
Smell is the most direct of all our senses. When I hold a violet to my nose and inhale, odor molecules float back into the nasal cavity behind the bridge of the nose, where they are absorbed by the mucosa containing receptor cells bearing microscopic hairs called cilia. Five million of these cells fire impulses to the brain’s olfactory bulb or smell center. Such cells are unique to the nose. If you destroy a neuron in the brain, it’s finished forever; it won’t regrow. If you damage neurons in your eyes or ears, both organs will be irreparably damaged. But the neurons in the nose are replaced about every thirty days and, unlike any other neurons in the body, they stick right out and wave in the air current like anemones on a coral reef.
And:
Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them. What you see and hear may quickly fade into the compost heap of short-term memory, but, as Edwin T. Morris points out in Fragrance, “there is almost no short-term memory with odors.” It’s all long term. Furthermore, smells stimulate learning and retention. “When children were given olfactory information along with a word list,” Morris noted, “the list was recalled much more easily and better retained in memory than when given without the olfactory cues.” When we give perfume to someone, we give them liquid memory. Kipling was right: “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.”
And:
Smell was the first of our senses, and it was so successful that in time the small lump of olfactory tissue atop the nerve cord grew into a brain. Our cerebral hemispheres were originally buds from the olfactory stalks. We think because we smelled.
Our sense of smell, like so many of our other body functions, is a throwback to that time, early in evolution, when we thrived in the oceans. An odor must first dissolve into a watery solution our mucous membranes can absorb before we can smell it. Scuba-diving in the Bahamas some years ago, I became aware of two things for the first time: that we carry the ocean within us; that our veins mirror the tides. As a human woman, with ovaries where eggs lie like roe, entering the smooth, undulating womb of the ocean from which our ancestors evolved millennia ago, I was so moved my eyes teared underwater, and I mixed my saltiness with the ocean’s. Distracted by such thoughts, I looked around to find my position vis-a-vis the boat, and couldn’t. But it didn’t matter: Home was everywhere.
I could basically quote the whole smell chapter…it’s interesting throughout. Great book — if you’ve never read it, I’d recommend checking it out.
We Must Create the Shit Machine. “I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT.”
The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price. “Most organizations should ideally be using open models as the default for the majority of their work, according to [a report] from Mozilla…”
Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a “hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen” infected almost 50 children. Reality: always weirder than the weirdest sci-fi.
Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.
Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You
Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental.
As it turned out, his work had touched many catastrophes of American life — the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, for example, which the agent helped to inspect, or the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, when the agent was in charge of sifting debris in the immediate aftermath — and also lesser-known events, historical footnotes that were nonetheless telling. What interested Simon were not just the events themselves, but also their reverberations, far beyond any immediate blast radius. What happened, for instance, to the physical ruins from the TWA crash? What became of the woman who tried to take a photograph of the smoldering Pentagon, whose film the F.B.I. agent had confiscated? Or to the Iraqi diplomat who ran the country’s U.S. embassy during the Persian Gulf war, whom the agent had monitored? Or to the child of a couple accused of being Russian spies, whose house the agent had raided?
The piece describes the project, which includes over 1000 photographs and other material, as “a Great American Novel in visual form” and “huge and fractal: biography as butterfly effect”, which sounds fascinating.
Even Jodie Foster makes an appearance; this particular agent had trained Foster at the FBI Academy in Quantico as preparation for her role as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
Father Country I Do Love You debuts at the Guggenheim in NYC on September 18 and runs through March 14, 2027.
The Tube Computer was recently constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe. “The Tube Computer has a pleasant homely aroma from the hundreds of double triodes, all quietly burning off their dust.” It heats the room too.
Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2026
For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man. I am not a Burning Man person but I always enjoy this set.
See also a playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set on Soundcloud, currently 147 tracks and some 252 hours of music. (via @mikeakers.bsky.social)
Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals that Elon Musk has always been a racist, sexist fraud. “Musk’s ex-wife Justine, whom he married in 2000 and divorced in 2008, says the man the world began to see in 2020 was the one she’d always known.”
With a new installment every seven years since 1964, the Seven Up series has followed a group of 14 British schoolchildren from adolescence to adulthood. The final installment, 70 Up, directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy), is out this week.
The Spice Drawer
Over the past six months (leisurely) and in the past three weeks (intensely), I’ve cleaned out and packed up my entire house where I’ve been living for the past 10 years. I went through every bit and bob of what I owned and either:
- gave it away (fiddle leaf fig, grill, chairs, stuffed animals,1 blender, rugs)
- sold it (car, coffee table, lamp, iPad)
- put it into storage (art, mementos, chairs)
- took it with me (very little, mostly clothes & computing things)
Parting with my possessions was surprisingly easy. I’d been planning this move for a while now and had time to get used to the idea and say my farewells. And the concept of having a bunch of stuff, 95% of which I never used or thought about or even remembered owning, was really starting to make me itch. So out it went; I felt lighter with each thing that exited the house.
But I wasn’t expecting the spice drawer.
I was working my way through the kitchen when I opened the drawer with all of my spices and baking supplies. A pause. What do I do with these? I picked up a jar of smoked paprika and was suddenly flung back in time to 12 years ago. I remember exactly where I bought that paprika and why.
I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and was still trying to figure out how my new household was going to work. My kids came over a few times a week; what the hell were we going to eat for dinner? I was competent but not confident in the kitchen; Meg is a great cook and I couldn’t match her effort or output. I had to come up with my own meals that a) I could cook, b) the kids would actually eat, and c) were somewhat healthy.
One of the recipes I found was for smoky corn chowder, so I headed to the grocery store on 23rd St. to buy ingredients, including a jar of smoked paprika. The kids loved the corn chowder and it became a favorite of ours — something that they only ate over at Dad’s house.
Over the years, the kids and I amassed a small collection of recipes we loved and often had at my house — caldo verde, lasagne, buttermilk pancakes, taco salad, apple pie, and others — and the spices to cook them: oregano, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder, basil, baking soda, Ortega Taco Seasoning Mix 😂. I pulled each spice container out of the drawer and tried to remember what I’d cooked with it, what dishes it was in that we’d eaten together. I opened the tops to sniff some of the spices and was more strongly pulled back into those times when my kids were small and I was worried — no, I was terrified — about not being up to the task of filling their tummies, minds, and souls with the good stuff on my watch.
Man, so much of our time together revolved around food. The spice drawer hit me hard because it was a powerful olfactory reminder not only of the delicious meals we’d shared but also of my insecurity around parenting, how I slowly gained confidence, and how I eventually found freedom & pride in what I was able to offer my kids.
In the end, I had to throw all the spices out — no takers for half-used, decade-old containers of parsley flakes or jars of cumin — but I’ll always remember cleaning out that drawer and all of the memories it stirred up. Proust had his madeleines, but I doubt I’ll ever pass by a jar of smoked paprika in the supermarket or in someone’s spice drawer without feeling all of it all over again.
I gave away a bunch of miscellaneous stuffed animals that my kids had accumulated over the years — not the beloved ones — and I was sitting working on my deck when a woman showed up to collect them. “Are you the stuffed animal guy?” she called to me. “Yes,” I said, “and I don’t think I’ve been referred to like that before.” In telling this story to others, she became “the stuffed animal lady”. Everything is relative. ↩
A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists: “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.”
The Great Dude Battles of the 1880s
E. Berry Wall was a dude. But not just any dude. In 1888, he was declared “King of the Dudes” in a competition against another gentleman, one Robert Hilliard.
Wall became famous after meeting Blakely Hall, a reporter hungry for good copy. Thereafter, every week or so, Hall’s articles publicizing Wall’s adventures in clothing appeared in newspapers across the country. Then one of Hall’s competitors set up a rival, actor Robert “Bob” Hilliard, another flashy dresser. Thus began the Battle of the Dudes, in which each sought to eclipse the other in sartorial extremes. According to the Times, Wall finally won when, during the Great Blizzard of 1888, he strode into the Hoffman House bar clad in gleaming boots of black patent leather that went to his hips. (Nonetheless, some social historians claim Hilliard won with the high boots, supposedly part of his Western gambler’s costume from a play in which he was then appearing).
But it was Wall who won a later sartorial marathon:
Wall won another contest in Saratoga when daredevil financier John “Bet-A-Million” Gates wagered that he could not wear 40 changes of clothes between breakfast and dinner. On the appointed day, Wall repeatedly appeared at the racetrack in one flashy ensemble after another until, exhausted but victorious, he at last entered the ballroom of the United States Hotel in faultless evening attire to wild applause.
I wonder how Wall would have done against the likes of Kanye and his entourage? (via @mrgan)
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik.
From a curator at the Getty, ratings of every “framed picture” emoji. “A total rejection of nature and reality. Why is the horizon rounded? Has this artist seen planet earth before?”
The 2026 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize include papers on “a more precise definition of kissing”, “An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”, and the discovery “that milk proteins from cockroaches pack 3X as much energy as milk proteins from cows”.
Rocky Sleep, You Watch, Question?
Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.
Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday, a stationary store run by (former?) graphic designer Sam Potts, who announced the shop back in March in a KDO open thread. Lots of nice touches here, including a used pencil exchanger.
Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26 million??! It took 2 hours and 20 minutes and the previous record was 29 million. At level 255, you hit “rebirth” and the pieces slow down to level 0 speeds again. Totally bonkers.
A Deep Dive Into the Full Bayeux Tapestry Story
From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry.
This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…
Completed within a decade or two of the events which it depicts, the tapestry is back in the news & public consciousness because it’s back in England for the first time since it was made and on display at the British Museum.
I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make some of the best video game explainer videos out there — hell, some of the best YT videos period) and here’s their newest one: The Tournament That Changed Tetris Forever.
In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod fishing due to overfishing. It was devastating for Newfoundlanders. This year, for the first time since then, the govt has “upgraded the cod stock’s status from ‘critical’ to ‘healthy’”.
Two-Hour Mix of the Jazz in Haruki Murakami Novels
From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.
‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest’ —Kafka On The Shore
The playlist features tracks by Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Dizzy, the Bill Evans Trio, Monk, Mingus, and Miles Davis. Some of the video’s comments:
I had just prepared a light meal and hit play on this playlist when the telephone began to ring.
about to make my morning matcha, a spring breeze is flowing through the open windows, the air smells of optimism
Early morning, sun shining to balcony, having espresso and writing.
Studying the day before the exam with a bittersweet optimism while playing this and holding on to my hopes
Canned cold beer, windows open on a warm summer night, just after finishing a simple dinner of rice and salmon and sitting next to my cat
See also Classical Music from Murakami Novels. Both of these are going straight into my Underscore collection.
We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys. Today’s tech titans took all the wrong lessons from the science fiction of their youths and now they’re each building their version of the Torment Nexus.
The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11. “The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking.”
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