Since Reporters Without Borders started tracking their World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago, the global rating has never been lower than the 2026 score. From a summary of their analysis:
For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low. Since 2001, the expansion of increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — has been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries. The Index’s legal indicator has declined the most over the past year, a clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide. In the Americas, the situation has evolved significantly, with the United States dropping seven places and several Latin American countries sliding deeper into a spiral of violence and repression.
The United States ranks 64th out of 180 countries, a pathetic showing for a country that claims to value the First Amendment:
US President Donald Trump has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy, pushing the US down to 64th place (-7). The detention of Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who was later deported, has contributed to the deterioration of an already tense security environment marked by police violence. The drastic cuts to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) workforce had global repercussions, leading to the closure, suspension and downsizing of international broadcasters such as Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) in countries where they were some of the last reliable sources of information.
Some other takeaways from the 2026 report:
Post-Assad Syria has seen the biggest improvement in press freedom of all the countries and territories in the 2026 Index, climbing 36 places in the ranking.
In 2002, 20% of the global population lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorised as “good.” Twenty-five years later, less than 1% of the world’s population lives in a country that falls under this category.
In some countries, the information space has shrunk over the past 25 years due to political changes and increasingly draconian regimes. This has notably been the case in Hong Kong (140th, -122) since Beijing tightened its control on the territory; in El Salvador (143rd), which dropped 105 places since 2014 and the start of the war on maras, or “gangs”; and in Georgia (135th), which has dropped 75 places as the crackdown on the press has intensified in recent years.
Twenty-five years after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, expanding the scope of defence secrets and national security has become a means to prohibit coverage of issues of public interest in many countries. This trend, which is particularly prevalent in authoritarian regimes, has also gained traction in democracies and typically goes hand in hand with abusive applications of the law against journalists, notably in the name of combatting terrorism.
(thx, margaret)
Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.
Jamelle Bouie thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is positioning herself for a 2028 presidential run. “Yeah, she’s running.”
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
I feel like Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece on robotaxis, People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions, rhymes with Hertzfeldt’s comments:
For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases — such as the invention of ride-sharing apps — Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before.
Study: “A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right‑wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly.” People using the “For You” feed were more likely to favor GOP policies, less likely to want Trump prosecuted, and were more pro-Russia (vs Ukraine).
Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.
Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.
Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.
Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster read the piece and realized she was aphantasic. Webster recently interviewed MacFarquhar for Cultured: What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self, which I read with a lot of head-nodding. Like:
I didn’t have a lot of memories, which I always sort of chalked up to trauma, but I got memories back over the course of analysis. I realized while reading your piece that my memories were always spatial. I would remember a space or placements of things. I was always reconstructing a landscape, but without it really being imagistic.
And this is exactly how college was for me:
When I realized I had aphantasia, I reflected on how I always thought I had a photographic memory. For example, when I took tests, I would make notes, and I could see what I wrote on the page because I knew where I had written it. But it’s not a photograph; it’s a spatial memory.
As I said last year:
The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me.
(via @timoni)
We’re Diversifying the University by Hiring More Crackpots. “For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints…”
Digg has (sorta) relaunched (again) and instead of an underwhelming Reddit clone, it’s now just scraping noted fascist cesspool “X” for AI news and telling us that Sam Altman is influential in AI? This is embarrassing. It’ll probably be a huge success.
How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer. “Every subsystem must be designed to survive cosmic-ray bit flips, radiation-induced latch-ups, and hardware faults without a single second of downtime.” (A: An extreme level of redundancy.)
Remember Desktop Tower Defense? I played it for a bit this weekend and it’s still great fun. One of the very best games from the Flash era.
Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies. “It identified your device with enough specificity to distinguish it from most others on the internet.”
Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video.
The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was the “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has claimed 17 lives so far.
Interesting thread about why rural towns don’t vote blue: they don’t have to because small towns “actually operate very similarly to the ‘socialist agenda’ they pretend to be so afraid of” and “they’ve already been having to take of their own…”
Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death.
I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world.
People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions. “We are living in the ultimate revenge of the nerds, driven by a crew of socially awkward tech bros who won’t stop until the society that they never quite fit into is obliterated.”
Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS.
At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” said a visitor. This film shows how a brief encounter has a strong impact and gives us insight into our own lives.
You can watch the complete documentary on the PBS site (like US-only). (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
Where are the public benches on the internet? “Like cities that have prioritized cars, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes.”
Now open in NYC: a pop-up called The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which consists of “all 3.5 million pages, 3,437 volumes, and 17,000 pounds of the released and partially redacted Epstein files”.
The Hidden Cassettes. “This is going to sound insane, but when I was a kid I found out my dad secretly recorded our phone calls.” (Be sure to read the “What?!” link.)
Someone in a private forum I belong to mentioned fountain pens and thus I became acquainted with the role of a nibmeister, a person who can remake the nib of your pen more to your liking (different angle, better flow, etc).
PBS Kids and The Jim Henson Company have collaborated on a kids special called Wowsabout! that focuses on the experience of wonder.
Wowsabout is rooted in a rich curriculum developed by Dr. Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and author of “AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” The special, shot on location in breathtaking Sequoia National Park, aims to help children recognize and name the feeling of awe by experiencing moments of wonder alongside Roxy and Ronald. Through nature, music, storytelling, and friendship, children learn how awe sparks curiosity, creativity, kindness, and a desire to explore and care for the world around them. The special inspires children to notice awe in everyday moments and begin their own “Wowsabouts,” fostering connection to others and to the planet.
The full episode of Wowsabout! is available to watch on YouTube and at PBS Kids.
Dr. Keltner, one of the advisors on Pixar’s Inside Out, outlines “eight categories of experience that set the stage for awe” in his 2023 book on the topic. A summary of the “eight wonders” from a Psychology Today article:
1. Moral beauty. We can feel awe when we observe other people engage in acts of courage or kindness. Moral beauty also describes the experience of seeing someone overcome obstacles, or watching people with rare talents.
2. Collective effervescence. This occurs when a gathering of people is attending to the same thing, moving together, and converging on similar emotional experience. Think attending a concert, dancing in a crowd, or attending or playing in a basketball game.
3. Nature. When we are outside, we can find awe in the sights, sounds, and smells of nature.
4. Music. Both making music and listening to music attune us to what is happening outside of ourselves and connect us with others and a broader expanse of time and place.
5. Visual design. This includes visual art, movies, geometric patterns, even the elegance and complexity of machines.
6. Spirituality and religion. As personally defined by each of us, this might include connection with the Divine, or experiences that transcend our self or understanding.
7. Life and death. We can experience awe when we witness or are connected to birth and death.
8. Epiphany. This includes the experience of uniting facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding.
Reading through the list, it occurs to me that many of the things I post about on KDO touch on one of more of these elements of awe and wonder. (thx, caroline)
An analysis of 18 years of Guardian blind dates. “A surprising number of successful dates include something embarrassing: the bill, a late arrival, a misread moment. Awkward doesn’t mean doomed.”
Pioneering abstract artist Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Temple (1906‑1915) will be on display at the Grand Palais in Paris from May 6 - Aug 30, 2026.
Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses.
I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design.
In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver and how it came to have such a distinctive and useful handle.
I grew up helping my dad out in the garage with all sorts of projects, mostly cars, and until watching this video, I had no idea that you could slip a standard wrench over the handle of a screwdriver as a cheater bar. 🤯 (via unsung)
What Can We Do About Partisan Gerrymandering? Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear with his analysis and historical contextualizing of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
Nolen Royalty: “My latest project is Marc Andreessen Egg Game - a game about drawing on eggs to make them look like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.”
Last year in an Alaskan fjord, a surprise landslide triggered a tsunami 1578 feet tall. That’s not a typo…the wave was taller than all but 13 of the world’s tallest buildings.
In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down the fjord. The tsunami was 1,578-feet-tall, or one-and-a-half times the height of the Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, no one was caught in the wave since it hit around 5:30 a.m. local time. If the tsunami hit later that day, about 20 cruise ships and numerous recreational boaters and kayakers could have been impacted by the giant wave.
In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers studied this “near miss” event, finding that the continued effects of climate change were likely the cause.
The mass of rock that set off the wave contained “a volume 24 times larger than that of the great pyramid of Giza”, with the initial wave moving at ~150mph. Professor Dan Shugar explains what happened on that morning and shows a simulation of what happened:
From this piece in the NY Times:
The Tracy Arm landslide was preceded by an unusually rapid retreat of the South Sawyer Glacier, leaving the rock slope that ultimately collapsed bare and unsupported. That same rearrangement of land elements is increasingly occurring throughout Alaskan fjords and around the world. As glaciers retreat and thawing permafrost lubricates slopes, these giant landslides may become more frequent.
Incredibly, this isn’t even the largest recorded tsunami; a 1958 earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 to 8.3 triggered a rockslide that created a wave 1,719 feet tall in Lituya Bay. If you don’t want to waste a couple of hours, I’d suggest not clicking through to the megatsunami Wikipedia page.
See also When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up.
Prophecy At 1420 MHz is the first single from Boards of Canada’s upcoming album. (It’s paired with a short intro track, so we’re basically getting the first five and a half minutes of the album here.)
David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor:
The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and this is through Cassian’s.
The remixed Rogue One will be out on May 25, available in 4K with 5.1 surround sound. Kaylor has previously produced cuts of all three original trilogy Star Wars movies, Star Wars: Episode III - The Siege of Mandalore & Revenge of the Sith (a combo of the third prequel and part of the 7th season of Clone Wars), and Star Trek: Picard: The Last Generation (a recut of Star Trek: Picard’s 3rd season).
This edit is not to be confused with Andor: The Rogue One Arc, which recuts Rogue One into an Andor-like three-episode arc, leaning heavily on Andor’s soundtrack to set the mood.
This edit is kind of an expression of that with a movie I generally really liked - moving its energy from emulating the jaunty, swashbuckling OT, to more in line with its prequel show’s feel.
Up front, I don’t actually think this elevates or changes Rogue One in any meaningful way. The movie is still the movie, still fast paced and action oriented, particularly compared to Andor’s fiercer, slower, and paranoid ethos. But I do think the elements Andor is rooted in become far more apparent foregrounded to this soundtrack. Where the movie somewhat failed to recapture the energy and excitement of traditional Star Wars (and not for lack of Giacchino effort), the places where it takes itself seriously should now feel less dissonant in a [tonal] context that seriously considers them.
I’ve watched The Rogue One Arc and am looking forward to comparing it to The Andor Cut. And I’ve been seriously contemplating yet another rewatch of the TV series.
A brief history: lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction. “Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?”
The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC.
The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.
It is meant to serve as a tool for abolitionist resistance grounded in a long view of the struggle, tactics, and goals.
The map is available as a PDF and as an interactive version. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
Chess Peace is an iOS puzzle game where you have to place chess pieces on a board so that none of them attack each other. Simple + clever!
One of the coolest things about honey is its theoretically infinite shelf-life. 3000-year-old jars of still-edible honey have been found in Egyptian tombs — they used it medicinally for all sorts of things.
Ok, this is incredible: this person on Reddit discovered that if you take a bunch of the sequential photos of the Earth captured by the Artemis II crew and animate them, you can see that some of what appear to be stars are actually satellites, buzzing around the Earth like flies. You can see them really clearly in Seán Doran’s remastered animation. Totally totally gobsmacking. Literally awesome.
“Podcast sloplords” are flooding the zone with AI-generated podcasts. By one count, almost 40% of new podcasts are written by AI chatbots and presented by “AI voice synthesizers [that] can sound eerily humanlike”.
Lines, Ranked. “2. Assembly. It’s not glamorous, but hot damn is it effective.”
New episode of Great Art Explained on Francis Bacon. “A new generation was starting to ask - who gets to decide what is right? And who has the authority to tell us how to live?”
20 years ago: a guy interviewing for an IT job gets pulled onto live TV. “Mr. Goma is being celebrated as a folk hero of sorts for anyone who has ever found themselves ill-equipped for a challenge in the workplace.”
Jon Krakauer writes about what has changed about climbing Mt. Everest since he wrote Into Thin Air. “The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine.”
Infants are dying because parents are opting-out of vitamin K shots. “In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention.”
My pal Matt Haughey recut the first season of Apple TV’s Murderbot into a 3.5-hour-long movie. “I did it fast so there are a few jarring cuts, but I now have an entertaining as hell movie with zero interruptions.”
This is nuts: Fred Again has uploaded a video of every single show he did during his USB002 tour (except Mexico City) — it’s four and a half days long. “im told this is the longest video on YouTube ever?”
Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile)
What now-familiar domain names looked like before they were bought by big-time companies, e.g. openai.com was “the personal homepage of a guy named glenn”, doordash.com was a porn site, threads.com sold spools of thread.
Pocket forests. “The Miyawaki method of reforestation inserts small, densely packed wild acreage into urban environs. It’s proving wildly successful.” The key is densely planting diverse & native species…this isn’t just planting some trees.
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