Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.” [thenation.com]

The 2026 issue of the HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”. [thehtml.review]

Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.” [marksimonson.com]

“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.” [dirt.fyi]

For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer. [podcasts.apple.com]

Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc. [anildash.com]

NASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.” [sciencenews.org]

The future of energy is being decided now. "The US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We're going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate." [kottke.org]

Help! My Favorite Athlete Is an Idiot (Alt headline: When Sports Heroes Have Terrible Opinions). “Just root for the jersey and not necessarily the nitwit wearing it?” [nytimes.com]

Astronaut Michael Fincke was rendered unable to speak while on the ISS, prompting an evacuation to Earth. “We’re almost 100% sure that this is a space-related thing.” Uh, I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi recently; this is *exactly* how It starts. [nytimes.com]

A new study shows that since 1990, the United States has caused $10 trillion in global climate damages. China is responsible for $9T. “Our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world.” [theguardian.com]

Jesus Clarifies Return Will Be Strictly Limited To Carpentry Business. “My sole focus during this Second Coming will be various woodworking projects and not the establishment of a messianic kingdom.” [theonion.com]

I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad). [threads.com]

Ultra-Rare DJ Set From Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter. You can watch the entirety of his collab DJ set with Fred Again on YouTube. [kottke.org]

Folks, the first 5 mins alone 🤘🏼🤩 #FredAgain #DaftPunk #DJset

Ultra-Rare DJ Set From Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter. You can watch the entirety of his collab DJ set with Fred Again on YouTube. [kottke.org]

Test footage from a slime simulator game made by former Epic Games employee Asher Zhu. You try to stay hydrated in the hot Tokyo summer by showering and drinking beverages from vending machines. [youtube.com]

A list of chain restaurants whose names contain unusual structures, presented in decreasing order of how appealing it would be to eat in such a structure. (White Castle, Waffle House, etc.) [onefoottsunami.com]

There’s an upside-down “H” on the facade of a Frank Lloyd Wright building in Illinois. Here’s a deep dive into how it got there. [inconspicuous.info]

A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven. [tools.simonwillison.net]

Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…” [deadline.com]

“Feminism is far from dead, but people love to write its obituary,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “In reality, it’s naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy…could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime.” [theguardian.com]

We watched Zoolander last night and right before the Derelicte DJ throws on Relax, there’s a 2-second snippet of something that sounded super familiar. It took me a bit to track it down, but it’s trance banger Free by Mono Culture. [youtube.com]

A new edition of On Liberty, a canonical work of political philosophy, “is the first to officially name Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author alongside John Stuart Mill”. [dailynous.com]

“COVID probably killed 150,000 more people in its first two years than official U.S. tolls show”. Not surprising when you look at excess mortality numbers for that period. [scientificamerican.com]

“Plain text accounting is a way of doing bookkeeping and accounting with plain text files and scriptable, command-line-friendly software.” [plaintextaccounting.org]

Just renewed my membership for The Kid Should See This, a genuine internet treasure. [thekidshouldseethis.com]

I'm taking some time off. In the meantime, we're doing another open thread: what's going on in your world? What are you working on? Reading or watching or listening to anything good these days? [kottke.org]

An interview with Andy Weir about the accuracy of the science in Project Hail Mary. “I’m proud that the only true violation of physics in the story is something you have to go down to the quantum level to find.” [nytimes.com]

“Stop naming things after people, living or dead. No schools. No streets. No courthouses. No fountains. Just quit it.” [fritinancy.substack.com]

This is great: MTV Rewind allows you to watch music videos from the 70s to the 20s, organized by decade. There are also “channels” for 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Yo! MTV Raps, etc. 33,000+ videos in all. Nostalgia bomb. [kottke.org]

Shel Silverstein’s short poem Homework Machine (1981) was prescient about the limitations of LLMs. “I guess it’s not as perfect / As I thought it would be.” [kottke.org]

A cartographer posits that our maps should be messier. “The idea that we must have a crisp line dividing one country from another is often inaccurate when it comes to what states are actually claiming.” [chathamhouse.org]

2006 kottke.org: RSS feed, member supported, free to read for everyone, lengthy blogroll to other great blogs 2026 kottke.org: RSS feed, member supported, free to read for everyone, lengthy blogroll to other great blogs

This is a diabolical phishing attack. “That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers.” [ma.tt]

This is hilarious. A man was pictured in two different photos on the same front page of a local newspaper: one of him painting a holiday sign and a gs station security cam still of him taking a wallet. [nowiknow.com]

“Some countries are better positioned to weather this energy crisis than they would have been just a few years ago. That’s because of the rapid growth of renewable energy, battery systems and electric vehicles…” [npr.org]

"Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them." [kottke.org]

An online museum of Chinese cigarette packaging art. [ciggies.app]

The words shark (the animal) and shark (a predatory scoundrel) may have two different origins. “This would make ‘shark’ possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly.” (via @kissane.myatproto.social) [bsky.app]

Parachord is “a new kind of music player that invites all your streams, local audio files, and playlists scattered across multiple services to the same party”. Interesting! [parachord.com]

Every Fashion Designer, Explained. If you don’t know anything about fashion, this video will get you up to speed quickly. Vivienne Westwood, Nigo, Issey Miyake, Miuccia Prada, Dapper Dan, Hubert de Givenchy, etc. etc. [youtube.com]

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible. (via @bourgwick.bsky.social) [archive.org]

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.” [10m.co]

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” [smithsonianmag.com]

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”. [economist.com]

From above, the Sicilian city of Centuripe looks like a person. [kottke.org]

Gender Play in Nineteenth-Century Theater. “The most popular Shakespearean roles for women in the tragic repertoire were Romeo and Hamlet, but women also played Macbeth, Cardinal Wolsey, Shylock, Richard III, and Iago…” [daily.jstor.org]

A study pitted adults vs little kids to see which was better at making paintings in the style of Jackson Pollack. “The researchers found that the kids’ paintings made in this manner resembled genuine Pollacks more than did those from adult painters.” [nautil.us]

Dawn Wilcox’s quest to chronicle the life & death of every woman in the US killed by a man. “Did women have no choice, Wilcox wondered, but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?” [magazine.atavist.com]