Comin’ right at you: The New Zoo Revue celebrates the Bicentennial youtu.be/PzXue5jC_yM?...

Trump on the civil war: "It was a very big, big deal at the time"

this guy is the co-founder of Airbnb

Happy Fourth of July.

Happy birthday, America.

This came out in 1979, but reminds me of the bicentennial. John Ritter’s Chet Roosevelt is a much better president than Trump, but the movie has some Trump-like ideas such as raffling off the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nobO-zdISvk

Here’s what I was doing 50 years ago this weekend. (By myself, unsupervised—12-year-olds could do anything back then.)

one of my favorite dopey movies ever, I plan on watching it tomorrow and you should too

Thinking about the bicentennial reminded me of this movie, which I loved when I saw it upon original release. I don’t think anyone else paid attention even then, and it went on to be totally forgotten. But it’s funny! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lN9kdEzW1g

More bicentennial goodness: Byte’s celebratory cover.

More proof of how much cooler, and far better planned, our Bicentennial was: This great photo essay from the WSJ, which captures how we celebrated 1776 in 1976. And check out how full the Mall in Washington is. Gift link: www.wsj.com/us-news/how-...

A little late, but not only did I just realize that Slate recently turned 30–I know the date because I still have the email announcing the site going live.

The bicentennial was very good to comic books, and vice versa.

The email app I vibecoded for myself has a stats page, which finally lets me get hard numbers on just how much mail I get and what I do with it.

William Daniels & Bonnie Bartlett were married on June 30, 1951 and are celebrating their 75th anniversary!

The funny thing about most people who are opposed to birthright citizenship is that they have it themselves and don’t seem inclined to renounce it.

Seems more appropriate for a Slugworth series. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-willy-wonka-reality-show-ai-gene-wilder-voice-1236633800/

Apple Photos thoughtfully created a Memories album of the time I’ve spent with Tim Cook, which has mostly involved him being on a stage and me sitting in the audience. (I assume Apple is doing this for every user to mark its CEO transition.)

This wasn’t actually in question.

If you Google "Jack Benny" the results page identifies him as an "American Violinist," which seems borderline witty, if not an accurate description.

not directly rewarding slop on your platform seems like it would result in less slop, and a healthier ecosystem generally (and more users jumping from your competitors). will be interesting to see if it plays out that way for tidal www.404media.co/tidal-says-i...

Surely he has better things to do with his time.

John Denver would like a word with you. https://youtu.be/LkKn1OqBXig?si=nOAFDtL_Ff_NIk1L

The 1976 bicentennial was really fun, guys. There were patriotic ice cream flavors & my grade school buried a time capsule, which I’m dying to dig up, it was probably stuffed with MAD Magazines & Sunshine Family dolls. My personal contribution was making an Abe Lincoln square for a Girls Scout quilt

Mel Brooks factoid: You may not know that Max Bialystock’s office is decorated with posters for real Broadway flops, including my cousin Irene Kamp’s The Great Indoors, which ran for only 7 performances despite starring Geraldine Page, Curt Jurgens, and a pre-Mod Squad Clarence Williams III.

Maude celebrated the bicentennial with a telethon, as was her wont. https://youtu.be/bvHaw2q4w9E?si=Le_33ZFEQxNYtVX3

The U.S. of Archie lasted one season, in 1974, but might be the weirdest bicentennial artifact of all. All of the Archie gang’s ancestors looked like the gang and had the same names. In episode one, they helped run the Underground Railroad! https://youtu.be/wqe_c6UhWV4?feature=shared

If Nixon had managed to avoid resigning over Watergate, and Congress had been too feckless to impeach, and the Supreme Court had protected him, he would have still been president for the bicentennial. That would have put a damper on things. https://youtu.be/dJ9LeL_Y9Hk?si=dE_WbpYn43sz8P12

The bicentennial made such a tremendous impact on American *pop* culture--I remember the Barney Miller episode about it!--there were tricorner hats everywhere, hit songs, a movie, and the logo and local parades all year long. This year it feels as empty as the mall.

I understand that AI can be hard for us to wrap our brains around, but I’m still flabbergasted by how incredibly stupid it makes a fair percentage of people who should know better. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/

The American Apparently Really Not Great At All State Fair. (Also, isn’t it odd to hold a “state fair” in a place you won’t make a state?)

Mel Brooks’ first movie (as creator and narrator) was the ad-libbed cartoon short The Critic in 1963. Here it is! https://youtu.be/PramR5oxn50?si=ZfXtvdEh8CQzWZD4

If any other president posted that an entire country “will no longer exist” if they don’t comply, the outrage would be deafening.

The bicentennial really was good. I might spend next weekend consuming media made to celebrate it.

he doesn’t know passports are given to people who already live here does he

Thank you for the idea. I’m quite pleased with this, even though my wife’s instinctive question was “Does he blink?”

Latest vibecoding project: an app for making custom Apple Watch faces.

I visited the Haight’s miraculously surviving Fotomat yesterday. I’d missed the news that it now houses a radio station! (We need a database of extant Fotomats, and what happened to them.) https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/abandoned-sf-building-radio-22161965.php

A great @gruber piece on his friend Om Malik. 13 years on in my own career, I'm still trying to be like Malik and get to the éminence grise of tech journalism. daringfireball.net/2026/06/om

The Death of Stalin was funnier, but not by much.

“We do a Watergate twice a day” is a crazy way to confess your own corruption…

I hope that Om Malik’s On My Om blog stays up forever, and that people will continue to revisit it, as I will. Tech blogging is barely a thing anymore, but he was doing transcendent work. It’s going to be weird wondering what his take is on future news and realizing we’ll never know. https://om.co/

Prescient from Om: www.newyorker.com/business/cur...

I wrote about Runway’s AI film festival. The medium hasn’t had its Luxo Jr. yet, but actual interesting storytelling is happening. https://www.fastcompany.com/91565229/runway-ai-film-festival

Among his many achievements, Om Malik had a column in Fast Company for a time. Here’s his 2014 look at Waymo, nee Google’s self-driving car project. https://www.fastcompany.com/3035221/sometimes-a-car-is-not-just-a-car?mvgt=fafbddyxqbjA

This is awful news. He was an extremely good human being, and had been doing the best writing of his life in recent months. What a loss. https://om.co/2026/06/24/1966-2026/

As Dropbox will tell you, offering a neat email client and then killing it is a rite of passage. (I was excited about Notion Mail but didn’t end up using it, since there was no iPad app.) https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/notion-shutting-down-its-ai-powered-email-client-including-mac-and-ios-apps/

How can it make sense that Polestar is banned from the U.S. but Volvo is not? Does not compute. https://insideevs.com/news/799796/polestar-exits-us-market-authorization-denied/

It’s a shame the MacBook Neo has already lost its product-defining price. I wonder if it will ever get it back. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-just-increased-prices/

Really worth reading dept: 100% recommend reading this just-now-unsealed shareholder complaint about utter corruption of Trump/Intel deal. Villain #1: Trump et al. Villain #2: Skadden Arps. Doing "pro bono" work for Trump. Check it out. Seriously. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....