“I have travelled all over the world in the last 30 years, and have never seen anything like the density of assholes I just encountered in Japan, [i.e.] tourists being an unbearable menace specifically while on and around their phones.” [aftermath.site]

There's something so relaxing about watching this art conservator restore a damaged painting. [kottke.org]

Marbles Squared is a puzzle game 30 years in the making that you can play on the web, Game Boy, ZX Spectrum Next, and Palm Pilot. [marbles2.com]

Ben Prunty has composed the soundtrack to a new game, Subnautica 2. Prunty did the FTL: Faster Than Light soundtrack back in the day, which I love. [youtube.com]

Perhaps businesses are collecting too much data for their own good. “Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place.” [undermanager.ghost.io]

Mike Monteiro on how to deal with your suddenly grown-up kids. “When your kid leaves it is the happiest day of your life and also the saddest day of your life. And a lot of other feelings in between.” In the midst of this right now; it’s been a lot. [buttondown.com]

What's Your Favorite Recipe? Some of my go-tos include white bolognese, mushroom risotto, smoked haddock chowder, caldo verde, and the world's best pancakes. How about you? [kottke.org]

I have always liked Steve Kerr, but I did not expect to read this whole 15,000-word profile of him at ESPN. Really interesting throughout. [espn.com]

Handy app: “Point your camera at anything (a dress, a paint swatch, a flower, your kid’s drawing) and What Color Is This? names the color instantly.” I like the increasingly specific color labels (e.g. blue to light blue to Tiffany blue). [apps.apple.com]

“In 2014, the Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos first noticed that the Icelandic version of Dracula was in fact not a translation, but was rather a very different novel from Stoker’s version.” The “translation” was published in 1901. [en.wikipedia.org]

Am I a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images because I am a fan of Richard Scarry books and Wes Anderson movies or am I a fan of Scarry & Anderson because I'm a sucker for these kinds of ultra-detailed images? [kottke.org]

This is wonderful: a Redditor uploads their grandmother's diaristic comics that she drew circa WWII. "I never got to meet my grandma, she passed away young in 1977 but finding her 1940s sketches felt like she was finally introducing herself to me." [kottke.org]

From There I Ruined It, a version of Toto's Africa but the lyrics are a listing of every country in Africa. They should teach this in American middle schools, not even joking. [kottke.org]

Times New Resistance is a free font that's identical to Times New Roman but autocorrects some words as you type, e.g. "ICE autocorrects to the Goon Squad and the word Trump autocorrects to Donald Trump is a felon". Brilliant. [kottke.org]

De La Soul's Tiny Desk Concert! Stakes is High! Me Myself and I! Enough said. [kottke.org]

The official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is 24/7 livestreaming the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death. [kottke.org]

Physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on who should read books about physics. “The question of ‘What is space-time?’ doesn’t belong only to scientists. It belongs to everyone who has ever wondered about the bigger picture.” [news.chanda.science]

Quaker principles line up quite well with modern parenting research. “Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior.” [theatlantic.com]

The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses… “Empowerment won’t fix the mess we’re in. Women know it now. They’re mad as hell. Anyone trying to sell them advice instead of a way to use that anger to build a better world for women deserves to be fired.” [nytimes.com]

The Night Witches were an all-female Soviet bomber regiment that attacked Nazi forces during WWII. "An attack technique...involved idling the engine near the target & gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence." [kottke.org]

25 Books That Capture This American Moment. They include Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland, and Rabbit Redux by John Updike. [time.com]

Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains. “[Some] developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.” [404media.co]

On “rich guy has an opinion” journalism, i.e. “entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage”. [stringinamaze.net]

This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It's based on Joseph Priestley's A New Chart of History (1769). [kottke.org]

New York’s Neue Galerie Will Merge With the Metropolitan Museum. “The merger will significantly bolster the Met’s holdings of early 20th-century Austrian and German art…” [theartnewspaper.com]

The Neanderthal dentist: archaeologists found evidence of a decayed tooth being drilled out with a stone tools 59,000 years ago. “It’s now the oldest known evidence of dentistry — or any direct medical treatment.” [arstechnica.com]

Sarah Rose (who is blind): “Meta glasses are absolute game changers for the blind community…they are completely revolutionary.” And: “It really is incredible to talk to your glasses and ask them what they see and have them tell you.” [bsky.app]

What's gutting about this is that Juniper seems to have had a family who supported and loved her, she was in a community that has been explicitly welcoming to trans people, and a man still murdered her. She was living the life so many trans people can only dream of, and it simply didn't matter.

How Russell Vought Became the Shadow President. "One of the biggest assholes in the Trump regime is Russell Vought — and that's really saying something; it's a fierce competition." [kottke.org]

Omg, Amazon Prime inserted an ad for Febreze in the midst of the most famous match cut in the history of cinema (in Kubrick’s 2001, when the ape-thrown bone turns into a spacecraft). I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (rn, it’s both). [bsky.app]

A very good, very 2026 headline: Japan Runs Out of Robot Wolves in Fight Against Bears. “Starting at around $4,000, each bespoke Monster Wolf is now equipped with battery power, solar panels, and detection sensors.” (via @unlikelyworlds.bsky.social) [popsci.com]

Are we gonna save democracy or not? "The question is whether this country holds or comes apart — and coming apart is what’s happened every other time in human history that a critical mass of people figured out their participation was decoration." [kottke.org]

“I believe in myself. That’s why I commit.” A young skater doesn’t give up trying to land a three-stair kickflip. [instagram.com]

Zendaya co-created a new collection for On, the Swiss fashion company, and Spike Jonze directed this cool promotional video starring the actress. [kottke.org]

The Guardian asked authors, critics, and academics to help compile a list of the best 100 novels of all time. They’ve done 41-100 so far. Selecting a book will show you who voted for it, then click on the voter’s name to see their other choices. [theguardian.com]

The 2026 National Recording Registry inductees were announced today. “The 2026 selections mark the first recordings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé chosen for the registry.” Also: music from Weezer, The Go-Go’s, Chaka Khan, and Johnny Cash. [blogs.loc.gov]

This Tiny Celestial Body Past Pluto Shouldn’t Have an Atmosphere—but Astronomers Say They May Have Detected One. [smithsonianmag.com]

A Moment That Changed Me: I Saw My First Total Solar Eclipse — and Its Beauty Shook Me to My Core. “I knew the theory, but I was not ready for the experience.” [theguardian.com]

What Childhood Folklore Did You Learn As a Kid? Typing 80085 on a calculator? Padiddle? Cootie catchers? Doing cat's cradle? Holding your breath while passing a cemetery? Miss Susie had a steamboat? The cool S? [kottke.org]

I Want to Live Like Costco People. “Embracing the Costco lifestyle means accepting the fact that I am, in many ways, becoming my father.” [tastecooking.com]

Robin Sloan writes about the personalized, AI-written, promo emails he’s been getting recently (I have too). “The form is subtler than a one-sized-fits-all promo blast, but it sucks way worse, because it’s fundamentally dishonest.” [robinsloan.com]

What Would J.R.R. Tolkien Think of Palantir? "If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations." [kottke.org]

Meet the Sad Wives of AI. “Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot.” [wired.com]

Just dropped: Foo Fighters’ Tiny Desk Concert. The setlist includes Learn to Fly, My Hero, and Everlong. [youtube.com]

Two sequences from Dr. Strangelove done in Lego. [kottke.org]

Adam Serwer: “Violence serves an authoritarian agenda.” [theatlantic.com]

A map of the regions of the US, as voted on by Reddit users. I think this seems mostly correct? One funny artifact: Washington state got some votes for “Northeast”, probably because ppl confused it with D.C. or with “Northwest”. [brilliantmaps.com]

“So, at about 14, I became the team’s unofficial basketball musician,” writes Theocharis Papatrechas. “A big shot earned a triumphant snare drum roll with a resolving crash. And if someone missed badly — an airball — I’d drop in a ‘du-ba-dum’”. [theguardian.com]

The World Press Freedom Index at Global 25-Year Low. "Increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — have been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries." US rank: 64/180. [kottke.org]

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. [youtube.com]