Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has died at the age of 86. He passed at home in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.
He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.
A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.
Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?
This is hard news to take, even though Stewart lived a full and fulfilling life. The Next Generation will always be my favorite Star Trek series and Picard my favorite captain. Stewart got off to a rough start on the series:
So when he was on set shooting the show’s debut season and co-stars like Jonathan Frakes, Denise Crosby and Brent Spiner would tease him or ad-lib a joke or laugh when they flubbed their lines, it would low-key infuriate him.
“I could be a severe bastard,” he writes. “My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious… On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that’s when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby’s, ‘We’ve got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick’ comment by saying, ‘We are not here, Denise, to have fun.’”
“In retrospect,” Stewart continues, “everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at. I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.”
But he found his footing and eventually found meaning in the role of Picard (archive):
Q: There’s a passage where you say that, from your father, “I drew Picard’s stern, intimidating tendencies. But I like to think that my mother is in the captain too, in his moments of warmth and sensitivity.” Do you see Picard as your way of reconciling that conflict between your parents?
A: Very much so, yes. Both Star Trek and therapy have been responsible for that. Having to open the doors into my childhood in order to be an actor became utterly intriguing to me in a way that it never had been before. And I regret that when I look back on some of the roles I played, what I might have brought to them if I just released myself a little bit more.
Might watch an episode or two this evening in remembrance. If you’re not a Trek fan, you can watch Stewart play Macbeth in 2010:
An Italian farmer planted some decades-old seeds he found in his attic. Wheat with seven ears per stalk came up and the farmer found a reference to this type of nutritious, drought-resistant wheat in the Bible’s book of Genesis.
Somehow I’d never heard of this before: NPR produced and aired1 radio dramatizations of the films in the original Star Wars trilogy. The first program was particularly popular, garnering NPR hundreds of thousands of new listeners. The original versions are available in full on The Internet Archive:
Or get all three parts ripped from the CD.
All three programs contain elements of John Williams’ original soundtrack. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised their movie roles for the first two radio programs2 and some other bold-faced names made appearances throughout: Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, John Lithgow as Yoda (??), Ed Begley Jr. as Boba Fett (???), David Alan Grier as a nameless X-wing fighter pilot, and Nia Vardalos.
The radio programs were based on the original film scripts with some added scenes; from Open Culture:
With science-fiction novelist Brian Daley brought on to add or restore scenes to the script of the original dialogue-light feature film, the story stretches out to thirteen episodes for a total runtime of six hours. The series thus stands as an early example of the expansion of the Star Wars universe that, in all kinds of media, has continued apace ever since.
And from Wikipedia:
Daley adapted the script partly using material from earlier drafts of Lucas’s scripts, and restored several scenes cut from the final edit of the film, as well as adding original new scenes created specially for the audio version. The narrative of the first two episodes takes place entirely before the opening scene of the 1977 film, and expands the background to events leading up to the capture of the Tantive IV spacecraft above the planet Tatooine. Episode 1, largely based on cut scenes from the original, explores the life of Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. During the story, Luke’s skyhopper (a vehicle seen in the background in Luke’s garage during the film) is damaged during a desert race; Luke sees the distant Star Destroyer battle in the sky; and he is reunited with his childhood friend, Biggs Darklighter. Episode 2, made up of material written entirely by Daley, provides backstory to Princess Leia’s acquisition of the Death Star plans from agents of the Rebel Alliance on the planet Toprawa. In scenes set on the planet Alderaan, Leia discusses the plans with her father, Prestor Organa, and determines to go in search of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
There are recut fan versions of the three programs as well, including Nigel’s Edits (Hope, Empire, Jedi); he added some of Ben Burtt’s sound effects into the mix:
These versions, boldly called The Definitive Editions (Hope, Empire, Jedi), include opening scrolls and images taken from Star Wars comic books and trading cards:
Yes, that’s a script turned into a movie turned into an audio drama turned into a, uh, quasi-cinematic Powerpoint? (via open culture)
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
Dumpster Archeology. “Lew Blink’s passion for dumpster diving, his tenacity in connecting the dots, and his magnetic charisma as he unearths the secrets of others were a captivating lens through which to explore themes of privacy, waste…”
What’s the largest tweetable number? You’ve got 280 characters. So: “9999…” or “one centillion” or “googol!!!!!!…” or an image of a number? Turns out it’s complicated!
Rolling Stone: The 200 Greatest Rock Songs of the 21st Century So Far. I cannot argue with the top pick: Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. There’s a Spotify playlist with all 200 songs…a great way to spend 15 hours and 25 minutes.
I’ve been reading a bit about the recent election in Serbia and some of the details are fascinating. A student-led coalition toppled the 12-year corrupt reign of “the increasingly authoritarian leader” Aleksandar Vučić in recent elections. But in order to ensure voters and allies that this wasn’t a grab for power on the part of the students, the students ruled themselves out.
Supporters had the votes, but they needed the losing side to stay. The strict rules were a promise: to those who had opposed running, that it would not turn the movement into a party; to voters, that the list was no party in disguise.
No student may run: anyone enrolled in 2024/25, or with studies on hold, is excluded. The drafters wanted no suggestion that students were building political careers. Former members of the ruling coalition’s 20 parties are barred, and so are former officials of parliamentary opposition parties. That leaves doctors, academics, artists, former athletes and activists. Ordinary members of opposition parties were not barred, but almost none with a party past. The list is led by Ilija Srdanović, a cardiologist and professor in Novi Sad.
The result is the Student List. From a pre-election piece in the NY Times: Something Astonishing Is Happening in My Country. The World Should Take Note.
The students’ list of 250 candidates is remarkable in itself. Comprising professors, scientists, doctors, workers, actors and activists, the candidates — most of whom had been unknown to the public — were selected through a lengthy sequence of scrutiny and interviews. University faculties proposed candidates, then reviewed nominees from across the country. After discussing the options, student assemblies made their choices. Thousands participated in this decision-making process — an extraordinary experiment in bringing direct democracy into mainstream politics.
The established opposition, meanwhile, has been pushed aside, with many of its parties backing the student list. The student movement has turned the election into something like a referendum on the regime, captured in its slogan: “Serbia or the mafia.” Many assumed the students were too inexperienced or naïve for electoral politics. But with some polls putting support for the student list above 40 percent, the race appears to be tight.
The students are coming for the machine. And, astonishingly, they might win.
Super interesting, right? US electoral politics don’t work the same as Serbia’s, but I wonder if there’s a way to inject some aspect of the Student List into US elections?
See also How to Give Away a Fortune, which resonates with the Serbian movement IMO.
The NY Times recently asked readers “what they can no longer afford, or have given up on having”. Among the answers: medication, car repairs, new clothes, having more kids, eating out, and contact lenses.
This is great: Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) sifted through the archive at newspapers.com to find the goings on of long-ago celebrity name doppelgängers (follow-up post). A few of my favorites:
I made a small tweak to Prometheus (gift link discovery site) that kinda kicks ass: NYT Cooking is now a separate source (which you can filter by). The Rigatoni With White Bolognese recipe is a favorite of mine. 🤌
Errol Morris shot ads for Theranos and recently revealed he has a two-hour interview with Elizabeth Holmes that he’s considering releasing. “Did I have any reason to believe that she was a fraud? I did not. Did that change as time went on? It did.”
Remember the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game? Turns out: “Kevin Bacon is not the center of Hollywood. In fact, he never has been, and almost certainly never will be.”
A bunch of items from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive will be auctioned off early next year, including Jack Torrance’s axe & the sisters’ blue dresses from The Shining, Kubrick’s director’s chair, and a chess set owned by the director.
The Moving Image Archive is a collection of over 120,000 clips from almost 2300 archival films drawn from public domain collections.
The internet is full of forgotten films, and this archive is a growing library of that collection. When synthetic footage can now fabricate the past, preserving verifiable history matters more than ever before.
A few things I found while poking around:
- [Amateur film: Chicago World’s Fair] (1933). “This 1933 amateur film features Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair and scenes of New York City.”
- Story of a City: New York (1946). “This 1946 film explains the historical and economic forces behind New York City’s growth into one of the world’s largest cities and its vital relationship to the rest of the United States.”
- Alice In Wonderland (1915). “This tinted, 42-minute cut of the 1915 silent fantasy film Alice in Wonderland, based on Lewis Carroll’s work, is available with a synchronized soundtrack sourced from an early vinyl recording or as a silent version.”
- Apollo 11 — 30th Anniversary (1999). “Marking the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11, the film combines mission footage with later interviews featuring Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.”
- Story of Television (1956). “Story of Television traces the development of television from early experiments in transmitting images across distance to RCA’s electronic systems, which improved picture quality and expanded broadcasting nationwide.”
- A is for Atom (1953). “This animated film explains atoms as the fundamental building blocks of matter, identifying elements by the number of protons.”
- Space Shuttle: A Remarkable Flying Machine (1981). “This 1981 NASA film documents Columbia’s maiden space shuttle mission, from its April 12 launch at Kennedy Space Center through onboard tests conducted by astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen to its successful April 14 landing on Rogers Dry Lake in California.”
It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical. “It was disappointing how easily money turned a lot of them into sudden conservatives, full of right-wing doctrine about bootstraps and the fantasy of a black capitalist utopia…”
Scientists are studying whether “many chronic diseases we treat as separate failures of separate organs may share one deeper problem: cells struggling to extract and use energy from food” (diabetes, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, etc.)
I’ve been vaguely aware for awhile that researchers had traced the origins of HIV/AIDS back to Sub-Saharan Africa. But I didn’t know the whole story, which turns out to be really fascinating.
For decades, one man was blamed for bringing AIDS to America. But the “Patient Zero” story was wrong. This is the story of how genetic detective work traced HIV’s true origins — from chimpanzees in Central Africa to a global pandemic — and how science unraveled one of the biggest myths in modern medicine.
Disappointingly, they didn’t list any of their sources for the video. I poked around a little and found a book called The Origins of AIDS that a Science magazine review called:
Extensively referenced, the well-written book reads like a detective story, while at the same time providing a didactic introduction to epidemiology and evolutionary genetics. As far as the origins of AIDS are concerned, unless some completely new evidence emerges, it will be difficult to come up with a better explanation than Pepin’s.
The YouTube comments are worth a read too, filled with remarks from those who lived through the early years of the pandemic or knew someone who did (or someone who didn’t).
Had a gay uncle who lived in San Francisco in the 80s and 90s. He would get so upset when he talked about HIV/AIDS. He lost so many friends to the virus. When I went to visit him in the 2000s, we visited 27 graves over the course of a weekend and laid flowers. Rest in peace to all those young people.
I worked in blood banking at Cedars -Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. It was policy to freeze blood samples from patients that expired due an unknown cause. Once the HIV test was approved the samples were tested and some were reactive to it. The samples were collected over decades, going back to the 1950s.
I have family who were foreign hospital workers in the now-DRC in the 1970s, where what we call AIDS was known as the Slims because of how the patients wasted away and died. People on the ground knew there was something going around, but they didn’t have the resources to figure it out.
They Stopped 57 Shootings. Everyone Was Just Fired. “A program called Peace Orlando hired neighborhood residents closest to the violence…who could see a shooting coming and talk people down.” It worked…and then the program was shut down.
Sprout is planning to sell replacement motherboards for certain iPods. “Sprout only replaces the motherboard and uses your iPod’s original parts. No soldering required, and fully reversible.” Bluetooth, WiFi, 500K songs, USB-C, even streaming.
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.
We’ve 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 isn’t necessarily the same as creating something exceptional.
This doesn’t 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 there’s 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 — what they wear, what they repost, what they collect, what they reference — 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.
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 – many of whom had not seen each other in fifty years – 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 Greaves’ 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 Greaves’ 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 God’s 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 Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Looking at the landscape of food and farming today, I’m sorry to report that things haven’t changed all that much.”
Matt Webb is bunkering down, bracing for more LLM-driven security exploits. “Realistically, let’s 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 😳
Harry Kane is this year’s men’s winner of the Ballon d’Or. 100% the right choice — 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 — 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 rover’s odometer reached 28.10 miles (45.22 kilometers), eclipsing the record of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers) set by NASA’s 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 — I’ve reviewed almost none of the code, and it’s built in a language (TypeScript) that I’ve 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, Michał Michalski, James Lewin, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas.
How to Install an App on Your Commodore 64. “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll just need to type in the code for that program. There’s an article explaining what MLX is, which you can read really quickly on page 93, and then you’ll 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 Can’t Stand at Restaurants. “The idea of a restaurant I’d 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 I’m 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 it’s 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 — 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 It’s 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, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel Viñé 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.
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