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looked away for like 2 seconds and it was spring  incredibly belated 2026 winter olympics-themed links that now feel ancient but that I really enjoyed collecting in february:  • “Which Other Olympic Mascots Could Italian Stoats Tina And Milo Slaughter In Cold Blood?” by Sabrina Imbler  • “Are The Fellas In Sync?” by Sabrina Imbler  • “Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier capture bronze in ice dance” @Olympics on YouTube  • probably my favorite skating performance! I may have shed a single tear  • “Mikhail Shaidorov Celebrated Gold By Skating In A Panda Suit” by Lauren Theisen  • bonus link that is olympics-related but not winter-2026-specific: “The Alternates” by Tim Struby and Eric Petersen  • Victory Journal remains consistently incredible - kind of miraculous they're not paywalled  math stuff:  • “Infinite Pancakes, Anyone?” by Siobhan Roberts  • “New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem” by Paulina Rowińska  • love how a random undergraduate always pops up and is like "I got this"  really good and specific websites:  • Xikipedia by Lyra Rebane  • Barry’s Borderpoints by Barry Arnold  • Mechanical Pencil by Bryan Macomber (thanks MC!)  • The Peppermills of Jens Quistgaard  • yes these are literally pepper mills. yes they are incredible.  • Library of Juggling  • kind of reminds me of Ian's Shoelace Site... china:  • “Sinophobic Sinophilia” by the Editors of n+1  • “How China Learned to Love the Classics” by Chang Che  personal essays:  • “I sell onions on the Internet” by Peter Askew  • “My journey from foreign correspondent to Uber driver in Trump's America” by Steve Scherer  • “Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler” by McKay Coppins and Tyler Comrie  browser games:  • “List animals until failure”  • 2025 by Thomas Colthurst (thanks KQ!) • WikiGacha  • kind of obsessed with this. pulled a super super rare card on my first pack just now and it was "Japanese Canadians in British Columbia" 💅 animals: • “Rockhopper Penguins’ Athleticism Makes Them the Daredevils of the Animal World. Will a Warming Climate Slow Them Down?” by Cheryl Katz and Chris Linder  • “Meet the Gorgeous Winner of Japan’s Capybara Bath Contest” by Eugenie Shin  really nice data visualizations: • “Where’s My Package?” by Benjamin Y. Fong  • “Fit 4 a Teen” by Amanda Sakuma and Jan Diehm  just north american things:  • “We Asked The Mayor Of Ottawa Why He Keeps Posting Such Grim Photos” by Barry Petchesky  • “SPIRITUALLY DEPRAVED & MISERY-INDUCING LANDSCAPES OF NORTH AMERICA Episode 1” by @Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t on YouTube  • come on, you know you want to click on this link  • A List of Chain Restaurants Whose Names Contain Unusual Structures by Paul Kafasis  web stuff, apps, and gadgets:  • “A Website to Destroy All Websites” by Henry Desroches  • somewhat less interesting than the title implies, but the web design of this page (and the author's personal site) is gorgeous • “My perfect Music app doesn’t exist” by Jon Hicks  • “I spent a week living with Mario’s Talking Flower and it tormented me nonstop” by Giovanni Colantonio  • so good. read all the way to the end for an anecdote that sticks the landing.  sad things (very much worth reading but very sad):  • “Could the Girls of Camp Mystic Have Been Saved?” by Kerry Howley (unpaywalled) • Kerry Howley is an icon and this a great but quite tough read • “The World Is an Easier Place Without You In It” by Karen Shepard  the misc category:  • “Who Sets the Doomsday Clock?” by Emily Strasser  • “The century of the maxxer” by Sam Kriss  • obligatory Clavicular discourse piece. send this to someone you want to cause psychic harm to.  • “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing” by Lincoln Michel  • “The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you” by @ZachAhern1 on YouTube  • KQ this may be for you specifically  • “Aragorn’s Tax Policy and Other Weird Shibboleths” by Liz Bourke  • “H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery” by Paul Lukas 

happy feels-like-january-33rd! some of these links are from early December, which feels about 10,000 years ago. ❤️‍🔥 to the twin cities and springfield.  games, puzzles, and trivia:  • Normie.club  • Words.zip  • Sandwich Alignment Game  • rotatingsandwiches.com strikes again! • Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection  • LearnedLeague  • did not know this league existed before last week but it's fascinating. fellow trivia sickos, hit that "random questions" button and prepare to get pummeled  drinking water:  • “My Sparkling and Surreal Experience As a Water-Tasting Judge” by Adrian Ma   • “Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water” by David Ferry  (unpaywalled) animals:  • StreetCatWiki  • simply one of the best things of all time.  • some of my favorite guys: Stupid Idiot, Mrs. Geometry Dash, Ms. Lag, and Brown Tabby That Hates The Poor  • “Bird feeders have caused a dramatic evolution of California hummingbirds” by Rachel Nuwer  • “What A Week Of Freedom Can Do For A Lab Mouse” by Sabrina Imbler  design and art:  • Bluesky thread on typography in the Soviet Union by @spavel.bsky.social  • Web Design Museum  • ASM Agar Art Contest: 2025 Winners  • “The Best Book Covers of the Last Decade” by Emily Temple  • mildly disturbed at the realization that “last decade” now starts in 2016 • Archivo Grafica Italiana  science stuff: • “The Death of the Scientist” by Sara Imari Walker  • “Built to spill: The life of a crash test dummy” by Camila Domonoske  • “How many holes does the human body have?” by Kit Yates  heartwarming things:  • tastebuds_nyc @ TikTok  • “How Will the Miracle Happen Today?” by Kevin Kelly  rhetorical question headlines in the New York Times:  • “Why Does A.I. Write Like…That?” by Sam Kriss  • this reads kind of like a crazy throwback to 2019 but I particularly liked the phrases “A Gun Is Out There” and “New and Ugly Injuries to the Brain”  • “Have Some Spare Time? Why Not Build a Medieval War Machine?” by Dwight Garner  • do you ever read a book review that makes you immediately want to read the book  • “Can the American Oboe Sing Again?” by Jesse Green  • PHENOMENAL. can't recommend this enough. some of my favorite bits:  • the author's bio: “Jesse Green was 8 when he was handed his first oboe. Ten years later it was mercifully taken away from him.”  • the comment that reads: “Pretty sure the bassoon is the most complicated and difficult instrument. Typical non-fact-checked piece sponsored by Big Oboe.”  • the reference to http://oboes.us/, which I immediately beelined to (bonus link)! now THIS is a Web Site!!!  profiles of fascinating people:  • “The Quad God Performs Another Miracle” by Kathryn Xu  • watch the video embedded in this one! i saw this guy hit a backflip in person last year and it put my jaw on the floor. happy Winter Olympics everybody! can't wait for him to become a megastar  • “14,445 and Counting” by Christa Hillstrom  • “If a Tree Falls” by Rosa Lyster  • “Queen of Hearts” by Nina St. Pierre  and everything else:  • “How Gamefaqs changed RPG consumption - an history of RPG walkthroughs, from clue books and hearsay to the digital age” by Magnvs  • “Two Nights Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes And Travis Kelce’s Steakhouse” by Liz Cook  • “Where Do the Children Play?” by Eli Stark-Elster  • “The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference” by Abhishaike Mahajan  • “ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering” by Alex Harri 

happy (early) winter holidays!  animals: • “The History of Exploding Whales Is the History of the Internet Itself” by Andrew David Thaler  • "There are very few universal truths about the internet, but one thing is certain: Since the very beginning, we have loved watching whales explode." • raccoons specifically: • “Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication” by Marina Wang  • “Raccoon goes on drunken rampage in Virginia liquor store and passes out on bathroom floor” by Emily Rose Grassi  • in case anyone missed the instantly iconic viral drunk raccoon photo  • “A special Galapagos photo essay” by Ed Yong  • Ed Yong is the best and these are phenomenal photos!!  • “Why Won’t Nora the Leopard Seal Abandon Her Dead Pups?” by Sabrina Imbler  • “Meet the semi-slug – a snail without a home” by Bec Crew  • this blew my mind  • “Army of Crabs Protect Spy Robot From Stingray | Spy In The Ocean | BBC Earth” by BBC Earth @ YouTube  • the footage of the stingray eating the unfortunate crab is pure horror  • “On Anteaters” by Jodi Ettenberg  • :) comically sized clothing:  • “His Jeans Are Gigantic. His Internet Fame Is Too.” by Jacob Gallagher and Saeed Rahbaran (unpaywalled)  • please look at the photos  • Linen Jacket for a very tall child by Fashion Brand Company  • EM this could be you!!!  climate/nature:  • “How to Photograph an Active Volcano Without Getting Vaporized” by Shona Sanzgiri  • The “50 States 50 Fixes” series by the New York Times  • “The Last Resort” by Ash Sanders  design:  • LIT Lighting Design Awards  • did you know there were lighting design awards?  • In Common With • speaking of lighting, check out the lights-off feature on this website :)  • The Bad UX World Cup  • The personal website of Dr. Richard Evan Schwartz  • now this is a web site!!!  • “Fran Sans Essay” by Emily Sneddon  • N-Judah forever 😤😤😤 • “The Land of Giants” by CHOI+SHINE   computing and math: • “Using History To Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines” ed. Atsushi Akera and William Aspray  • The Resonant Computing Manifesto  • “First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself” by Erica Klarreich  • this also blew my mind  • “Spurious correlations” by Tyler Vigen  books: • “Meet the 2025 National Book Award Finalists” by Emily Temple  • Rabih Alameddine’s interview (the very first one) won me over, but one really marvelous feature is that the author interviews both the authors and the translator(s) of every single translated fiction nominee!  • “Escape Artists” by Daniel Yadin  • this was controversial and as a non-romantasy reader I have little stake in it, but I will die on one hill: Naomi Novik is not a romantasy author!  crime/mystery/fraud in which no one dies:  • “The Missing Kayaker” by Jamie Thompson and Caleb Alvarado (unpaywalled)  • I forgot all about seeing this in the news earlier this year and was gobsmacked. it's a really good read.  • “The Blue Book Burglar” by Jack Rodolico  • “Is your Casio F-91W a fake?” by Andy C  gambling:  • “Lost Vegas” by Luke Winkie  • “Ten thoughts on sports betting” by Matt Glassman  titles of important questions: • “Are You Smarter Than an Eighth-Grader From 1899?” by Jack Denton  • “Why Don’t People Return Their Shopping Carts? A (Somewhat) Scientific Investigation” by Hannah B. Waldfogel  • “What happens when a city takes women’s unpaid work seriously?” by Rachel Cohen Booth  cold (beer and snow):  • “I made a song entirely from 50 country artists singing ‘cold beer’” by There I Ruined It @ YouTube  • “WSDOT Shuksan Station: The Patron Saints of Plowing” by Amanda Monthei  and everything else:  • “How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life” by Kurt Streeter and Ruth Freemason  • shoutout to KQ for getting to this one first lol  • “One Night at Kachka” by Erin DeJesus, Danielle Centoni, and Jen Stevenson  • an oldie but a goodie!  • “Everything the Baby Currently Believes to be Basketball” by Daniel Lavery  • Level Devil by unept  • I tried playing a few levels of this and laughed out loud at how evil it is  • “The Airport-Lounge Wars” by Zach Helfand  (unpaywalled) 

happy November! is everybody alive out there? books, book reviews, & writing: • “Where writers write: 12 Booker Prize 2025 nominees share their writing spots” by Rosa Bertoli  • two pieces on Philip Pullman just because I really like him (& about to get my hands on The Rose Field):  • “‘I’m alive, but battered’: Philip Pullman’s new novel was a struggle” by Sophia Nguyen  • “Philip Pullman’s Anti-Escapist Fantasy” by Lev Grossman (unpaywalled) outdoors-y sports-y things: • “Raising the Dead” by Tim Zimmermann  • “Rewriting What’s Possible in the Mountains” by Scott Cacciola and K.K. Rebecca Lai  • “The Man Who Held His Breath for 24 Minutes” by Sean Williams  • “Eye of the Tiger” by Benjamin Meadows-Ingram and Stacey Rozich  • this is not about sports but it is a history of Tiger Balm in the U.S.!  extremely self-indulgent video games section: • “Exposing a Non-Gamer to Computer Roleplaying” by Trip Harrison  • some stuff from Bullet Points Monthly because I just discovered & really like them (there's so much good stuff in their backlog):  • “I broke a baseball bat over the head of a ghost” by Ed Smith  • “The Silent ‘U’” by Gareth Damian Martin  • “It’s Always Heads” by Joshua Calixto  some excellent websites: • Seat61  • recently used this website to plan a train trip and I forgot how unbelievably good it is • Flatwoods Monster  • Space Type Generator  • Interacting Incorrectly by Isabel Fish  • click through this one :)  tech / AI / web culture things: • “Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem” by Julian Crockett in conversation with Ted Chiang  • “The Future of Being Trans on the Internet” by The Verge  • "Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI” by Tommy Craggs  • worth it just for the "Temu Kara Swisher" burn  • “The Scammer Next Door” by Snigdha Poonam  • “The Age of De-Skilling” by Kwame Anthony Appiah (unpaywalled)  masculinity i guess, lol:  • “The Rage in the Cage” by PJ Vogt and Pablo Torre at Search Engine  • NUMBER ONE RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS ISSUE. yes it is a podcast episode but yes it did make me chortle not once but twice...perhaps even thrice  • “The Goon Squad” by Daniel Kolitz  • serious (NSFW) content warnings for this one and there's been so much discourse around it, but I did find it extremely compelling to read (in wincing horror) while waiting at the doctor's office. two snapshots of the discourse that I thought were interesting as well:  • “’But PornosexualGooner101 Died 35 Years Ago...This Very Night!’” by Daniel Lavery  • even more insane content warnings for NSFW language/discussion in this one. this one is only for the true internet sickos, but it adds a lot of nuance.  • “The Monks in the Casino” by Derek Thompson  • inevitable tie-in to another increasingly inescapable strand of discourse: sports gambling discourse  serious longreads: • “Experiences in Groups” by Lily Scherlis  • “How I Became a Populist” by Alvaro M. Bedoya  • “She Was Ready to Have Her 15th Child. Then Came the Felony Charges.” by David Gauvey Herbert (unpaywalled) • one of my top recommendations in this batch. read the whole thing pretty much making the scream emoji face: 😱 • "The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace” by Robert Sanchez  and everything else: • “Fear of supernatural punishment can harmonize human societies with nature: an evolutionary game-theoretic approach” by Shota Shibasaki, Yo Nakawake, Wakaba Tateishi, Shuhei Fujii and Ryosuke Nakadai  • yes this is a full-on scientific paper but it has really charming figures  • “The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman” by Jim Waterson  • deeply baffling and yet somewhat enchanting • “Aldi unveils jacket potato jacket complete with silver foil poncho” by Ruby Betts  • just as satisfying as the title implies  • “Making babies” by Gillian Goodman  • despite the misleading title, this is actually about the business of making advertisements featuring real life babies lol.  • “Shopping Margaret Thatcher’s Estate Sale” by John Paul Brammer  • dying to see under the paywall but the single listing (for the duckfoot pistol) is still worth it. • “A journey to Vietnam to uncover the origins of pho” by David Farley and Ivana Larrosa  • Royal Family   • KQ this one is probably for you specifically • "Why the Subjects of McMansion Hell Have Ascended to McMansion Heaven” by Kate Wagner  • this one barely made it through because I don't think the content is very interesting, but it does have a phenomenal title and I am an avowed McMansion Hell fan 

every few weeks I get an email notifying me that a not-insignificant number of people I assume I don't know personally have visited this website and/or looked at my posts. if that's you, a person looking at this with your human eyeballs: thanks for visiting I guess. hope you enjoy the links.  food:  • “Inside the World of ‘The Great British Bake Off’” by Ruby Tandoh (thanks EM!)  (unpaywalled) • some stuff from Vittles, which has been killing it lately:  • “White People Spicy” by Kerry McInerney  • kind of in conversation with last month's link to that Slate article about the guy trying to figure out if restaurants were neutering his food specifically but not his Asian partner's. also: lmfao @ the Danish for this one specifically • “Who Makes the Rules?” by Sanam Maher and Noorulain Ali  • a non-revealing title but this is about sushi in Pakistan. fascinating!  • “‘Welfare is a right, not a privilege’” by Jack Franco  • also a non-revealing title but this is about the author running around Paris eating at inexpensive canteens and talking to people about them. also so interesting!  • “The Life and Death of the American Foodie” by Jaya Saxena  • Jaya Saxena's features always hit!!  • “Stew Kids on the Block” by John Devore  internet stuff::  • “I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down” by Trevor Quirk  • “Wikipedia is Resilient Because It Is Boring” by Josh Dzieza  • “Tit for Tat” by Piper French  • this is about the economics of OnlyFans and it's fascinating.  • I’m Not a Robot by Neal Agarwal  • not gonna lie: I was defeated by the Minecraft level 😔 • “Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop” by Kate Crawford  tech "hardware" stuff:  • obsessed with the reviews coming out about the Friend, which apparently hates your guts. who fine-tuned this thing and have they ever had a human friend?  • “I Hate My Friend” by Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison (unpaywalled)  • “With a Friend like this, who needs enemies?” by Victoria Song (unpaywalled)  • “The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle” by Kris De Decker  • “Requiem for the Rangefinder: An iPhone Air Review” by Ben Sandofsky  • “One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies” by Brendan I. Koerner (unpaywalled) animals: • “Bear found behind the counter of a South Lake Tahoe ice cream shop” by Summer Lin  • unfortunately, it was not scooping.  • “Snake Charmer” by Taylor Stanberry as told to Cleo Levin  • 60 pythons?!   • "Unlike Our Stupid Human Arms, Octopus Arms Are All Equally Beautiful And Talented” by Sabrina Imbler  "design" catch-all category (clothes, business cards, and one weird/cool website):  • two good things about clothing design from "Articles of Interest":  • “Single-Handed” by Kurt Kohlstedt for Articles of Interest  • “Skaters + Curves” by Avery Trufelman  • “The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word” by Elizabeth Goodspeed  • Crumpler  • ok this is an Australian bag company but the website transfixed me. also look at this fish bag.  it's kinda cool but kinda weird when the New York Times writes about video games (also this might be a section appreciated by no one except exactly me):  • “A Group of Socialists Created a Hit Game That Tore Them Apart” by Tom Faber  • two types of people in the comments: Disco Elysium fans and old people arguing about the use of the word "socialists" in the headline  • “When You Fall on Your Face, a Philosophical Designer Succeeds” by Rollo Romig • Bennett Foddy was a virtual guest once in a game design course I took in college and every day I wish I had taken better notes   misc:  • “Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children” by Alexandra Petri  • “The History of the New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department” by Zach Helfand  • “Cryptid Tier List” by John Paul Brammer  • smacked into the paywall like Wiley E. Coyote but thankfully it's still funny even above the paywall  • “When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer” by Katie Engelhart  • this one is so touching and lovely!  • "GoPro: New World Champs Winning Run! - Jackson Goldstone - 2025 DH MTB World Championships” by GoPro Bike @ YouTube  • this like 3-minute video made me gasp several times so it's in here  • “What Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson Knows About Pain” by Sam Anderson and Jack Davison (unpaywalled)  • what a superb celebrity profile! my only wish is that it was like 3x longer so I could read more of it 

happy September! 🍂 science and math:  • “The Most Interesting Email I Ever Received: Remembering the Incredible Life of DIY Geneticist Jill Viles” by David Epstein  • the original article: “The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene” by David Epstein  • these are so interesting. what an incredible person!  • “At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery” by Kevin Hartnett  • “Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way” by Andrew Aquino, Russell Samora, and Jan Diehm (thanks KQ!)  • not gonna lie: I was way more into admiring the onion font than I was in finding out the mathematically optimal way to dice an onion  • “The Relativity of Wrong” by Isaac Asimov  animals:  • “Dining with Robins” by Robert Francis  • this entire Substack looks great. bird history!  • “Empire of flight” by Antone Martinho-Truswell  • “All Hail the Mighty Snail” by Dina Bachman  • worth it just for how much you can tell the author enjoyed writing this  • “Unmasking the Sea Star Killer” by Craig Welch  • death to purple urchins! sea stars forever!!!  • two new pieces by the inimitable Sabrina Imbler:  • “Brother May I Have Some Rat”  • “Where Are You Going, Fish?”  people doing daring and adventurous things:  • “At 40, She Discovered She Was One of America’s Best Free Divers” by Lauren Larson  • I also enjoyed this piece from the archives which was recommended at the bottom: “Down in the Depths” by Stephen Harrigan  • 1) reading nonfiction about diving is one of my semi-niche interests, and 2) dang, should I be reading more of Texas Monthly?  • “Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like” by Jeremy Thomas Gilmer  food:  • “The Great White Spice Conspiracy” by Chason Gordon  • Links to: “Why is Everything Spicy Now?” by Ellen Cushing (unpaywalled)  • “Rice Krispies Treats Are Upending the Billion-Dollar Athlete-Fuel Wars” by Cindy Kuzma  • love the image of this guy riding the Tour de France with 10+ rice krispies stuffed in his vest  • “The Great French Fry Mystery” by Harley Rustad and Graham Roumieu  • McBroken by Rashiq Zahid  two profiles of authors I admire in The New Yorker:  • “The Otherworldly Ambitions of R.F. Kuang” by Hua Hsu (unpaywalled)  • “Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral” by Alexandra Schwartz (unpaywalled) misc, this time consisting of: solar power, swords, yo-yos, mushrooms, and emails:  • “Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape?” by Bill McKibben  • “The Great Sword Heist of 2025” by Talia Lavin  • which led me to check out: Battling Blades, for all your sword needs  • “Hajime Miura – 3A World YoYo Champion – World YoYo Contest 2025” by International YoYo Federation @ YouTube  • which led to a recommendation to watch: “The Player Who Broke Competitive Yo-Yo” by RESPRiT @ YouTube  • first of all this dude is incredible. second of all, is it supposed to be "YoYo" in camelcase? "Yo-yo?" "Yo-Yo?"  • The Mushroom Color Atlas by Julie Beeler, Brad Johnson, Danny Rosenberg, and Yuli Gates  • delightful to scroll through • “E-Mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone” by Michael Ward  • there are only five of them but it does deliver on its promise. 

did you know that if you search "it's august" in duckduckgo one of the top results is for a bougie organic menstrual care product company? now you know  animals: • “The Wild Within the Walls” by the Homo Ambiens Collective and Krista Langlois  • “The Fish That Climbed a Mountain” by Alex Brown  • “Bill Shapes, Ranked” by Barry Petchesky  • defector has been on fire recently!!  • “‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times” by Jake Buehler  • huge W for me personally, someone who sometimes uses a photo of an anteater as a profile photo  tech: • Historical Tech Tree by Étienne Fortier-Dubois  • “The tech that the US Post Office gave us” by Emma Roth (unpaywalled) • Making Software by Dan Hollick, specifically the first chapter "How does a screen work?"  • those visualizations!  art and music:  • “Heavyweight: An Art Project About Lawyer Vibes” by Kendra Albert  • “The Art of Roland-Garros” by Juan Buis  • these are so excellent. personal favorites: 1983, 2007, 2018 :)  • “Shark Dentist combines two phobias into one ridiculous roguelike” by Claire Lewis  • obsessed with this concept  • dipped my toe very slightly into music journalism because I liked this one author's style:  • “The Battle to Save the Soul of City Pop from AI” by Kieran Press-Reynolds  • “How Phonk Became the Most Lucrative Yet Lifeless Genre of the 2020s” by Kieran Press-Reynolds  • iykyk 🙈 • “Raving in Electrolimbo: Why Won't the Industry Embrace the Future?” by Kieran Press-Reynolds  being online:  • “What Does Virality Taste Like?” by Tanya Bush  • “in the belly of the MrBeast” by Kevin Munger  • kind of obsessed with this one  • “In my zombie era” by Sam Kriss  • “Knock it off!” by Mia Sato (unpaywalled)  • “My Scammer” by Alexander Sammon  things specifically relevant to new york city for some reason:  • Weather Watching by Riley Walz  • can someone explain what "wearing pants" is supposed to tell me about the weather.  • “NYC’s Urban Textscape” by Yufeng Zhao and Matt Daniels (thanks MC!)  human interest:  everything in this section is good and I'd highly recommend any of them! I did read all of them closely and from beginning to end with my human brain 👍 (not a sarcastic statement)  • “I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened.” by DJ Bracken  • “My Family and the Flood: A Firsthand Account” by Aaron Parsley  • “A Family Doctor’s Search for Salvation” by Joshua Rothman (unpaywalled) • “The Girl in the Window” by Lane DeGregory, Melissa Lyttle, and Lara Cerri  • “Seven Days at the Bin Store” by Jen Kinney  infrastructure:  • “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It” by Charles C. Mann  • The Maintainers Study Guide  misc:  • ThanAverage by Fred Wordie  • definitely try this one out! the design is really good too  • “New Sphere-Packing Record Stems From an Unexpected Source” by Joseph Howlett  • “The Penny Farthing Is Alive And Well In 2025” by Riley MacLeod  • What Dan Read (thanks KQ!) 

happy mid-June (?!)  food and cooking:  • “The Practicalities and Pleasures of Homemade Train Food” by Nylah Iqbal Muhammad  • “WTF is a Hormbles Chormbles?” by Jaya Saxena  • now this is a deranged candy bar made by real sickos. 10g protein no sugar? • “Three things we learned about Sam Altman by scoping his kitchen” by Bryce Elder (unpaywalled)  • if someone wrote this about me and my kitchen I'd simply explode  • “A Passion for Fruit” by the editors of Archaeology Magazine  • :)  design-y things, Internet and otherwise:  •  “Power Houses” by Gillian Laub  • only linked this because I like being nosy about furniture • “Airbnb’s relaunch and the texture era of design” by Kyle Chayka  • compost.party  • “My website is ugly because I made it” by Taylor Troesh  • (the website in question) art and making stuff:  • Trailer for “The Quilters”  • “Sebastião Salgado: A Life in Pictures” by Clinton Cargill  • these are spectacular!  • “The Vexing Art of Duchamp, Picasso and FromSoftware” by Ethan Davison  • what a weird thing to see in the New York Times. • “In the age of slop, craft is rebellion” by Anu Atluru and Neal Agarwal  current events-ish......💀 • “against the fleeing to europe industrial complex” by Kate Wagner  • “Efficiency Without Morality is Tyranny” by Matt Duffy  • “Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice” by Abi Olvera  • special Harvard section:  • “Come At Me, Bro” by Yona T. Sperling-Milner  • “Hey you, hold onto your humanity. You’ll thank me later.” by Alexandra Petri  • “Low-Risk Flier” by J.P. Brammer  • “Playing Secretary” by Kerry Howley (unpaywalled)  • really good. the men with canes..... tech things, loosely defined:  • Antikythera by Benjamin Bratton  • worth a scrollthrough - look at that web design!  • “Progress Unraveled” by Spencer Wright  • “The Political Dimensions of Solarpunk...Ten Years Later” by Andrew Dana Hudson  • Ethnologue database bird things:  • “The Snowy Owls of Logan Airport” by Anna Miller Multimedia  • “The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch” by Forrest Wickman  • this one's a banger, highly recommended!!  non-bird fun things:  • “‘The Only Person in the World Claiming to Be the Pope Right Now’” by Ruth Graham  • Ye Olde Blogroll  • “We Bought a ‘Peeing’ Robot Attack Dog From Temu. It Was Even Weirder Than Expected” by Esat Dedezade (unpaywalled) • as good as the title promises. • “An Ode to the Lowliest (Deepest?) Horror Subgenre: Shark Movies” by Jim Vorel  • read all the way to the end for a spectacular punchline. • “Why is Everyone Here Wearing a Bald Cap?” by Callie Holtermann and Ayesha Kazim  ian's shoelace site :) • Ian’s Shoelace Site by Ian W. Fieggen  misc:  • “Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?” by Katie Engelhart  • “The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins” by Scott Sayare  • “How to like everything more” by Sasha Chapin  • “Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker” by Jonathon Owen  • extremely boring and perhaps only of interest to me. 

how are we hanging in there?  art, design, architecture, stationery:  • “Windows on Washington” by Shannon Mattern  • “One Painting Got Me Through Winter” by Jason Farago  • “The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967” by Carson Monetti   • “Digression 2: From MANUALS to YOUTUBE (with a detour) - Two Assault Rifles” by Stewart Brand  • don't take the title at face value--this piece is excellent!  • “The Original Beaver Map & Its Legacy” by Swann Auction Galleries  • “What’s Your Type? A Reading List on Typefaces with Wild Tales to Tell” by Kanya Kanchana  variously slimy and/or wet creatures:  • “100+ pictures of this eel” by @heyitspoppymae  • a fellow moray eel enjoyer??! • “Octopus jumps shark and goes for a ride on its back” by Marina Dunbar  • Leech.com  • content warning for photos of leeches (lol) but please click on "Ask a Leech Question" on the left sidebar and scroll to your heart's content. Also scroll to the bottom of the page--truly, No One Does it Better than Leech.com!  • “Colossal squid captured on video in deep sea for first time” by Frances Vinall  • huge news!!!  • also, yes, this is that Eric Schmidt lol.  • Owls in Towels  travel:  • Hamilton Nolan’s travel writing:  • “Among the Junketeers: 90 Hours in Vegas, Selling Out Hard”  • “Hell Is Empty And All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio”  • “Cuba Welcomes You, Yankee Imperialists!”  • “My Kasual Kountry Weekend With the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”  • “My Failed Attempt to Suck the Walmart-Flavored Blood of Real America”  • “My 10-Day Crash Course on Surviving the Apocalypse” by J Wortham  • “Our Giant Travel Reading List” by Alex Postman  food: • “Apple Rankings” by Brian Frange  • if you've never seen this page--a delight! although I think he's wrong about the Pazazz.   • Jenny G. Zhang’s Regular Food Reviews  • special endorsement for Scallion Pancake with Egg :)  good longform stuff (these are all great):  • “The Free-Living Bureaucrat” by Michael Lewis  • “The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row” by Lawrence Wright (archived)  • “High-School Band Contests Turn Marching into a Sport and an Art" by Burkhard Bilger and Brian Finke (archived)   • “Does Luck Exist?” by Eric Boodman  • “Angles of Approach” by Sally Rooney (archived)   tech: • “An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1” by Jeremy Reimer  • “Split Keyboards Are Superior And The Reason I’m The Writer I Am Today” by Chris Person  • “Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?” by Radek Sienkiewicz  • many people are asking this.  work and the things people do at work:  • “The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs” by Mike Colias (archived) • “Going Soft” by Lily Scherlis  big misc category:  • “Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits” by Jules Roscoe  • “Why Did the Government Declare War on My Adorable Tiny Truck?” by Dan Albert  • “Hi, I’m a Four-and-a-Half Year Old at the Rick Owens Show” by Yves  • This thread of vintage transportation report covers by Rachel Cole  • that first one!  • 368 Chickens  • “On the Best (Worst) Best Man Speech Ever (at My Super Mario-Themed Wedding)” by Mike Drucker  • “Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town” by Ynes Sarah Filleul  • “Tropical tree in Panama has evolved to kill its 'enemies' with lightning” by Jacklin Kwan  • if only the rest of us could be so lucky.  • “Zombies on TV: A Dead Serious Quiz” by Meghan Morris and Tala Safie  • “Resurrector: “Like a G6”” by Chris Gayomali  • a surprisingly hard karaoke song. 

been hoarding these links like a dragon and it's time to release them  on emails:  • “How to Professionally Say” by Akash Rajpurohit  • I don't even remember why I liked this one, but I think it's charming that it's just a big JSON library.  • “Good Sign Offs” by Meg Miller  • or, as Hungry Paul from Leonard and Hungry Paul would say, "you may wish to note the above." design, maps, infrastructure:  • “Notes, 2025-02-16” by Spencer Wright  • “The hardest working font in Manhattan” by Marcin Wichary  • this one's incredible if you haven't already seen it!!  • “Reliability Compounds” by TW Lim  • “How Giant White Houses Took Over America” by Dan Kois  • this one linked to: “the hairshirt doldrums” by Kate Wagner, which is not about architecture but is also worth a read.  • lol just realized Dan Kois is also the legend behind "A Totally Normal Interview With Author Emily St. John Mandel" • “Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library” by Elizabeth Goodspeed  politics / current events I guess:  • “Red Hats, Red Blood: Roleplaying The January 6 Insurrection In A Brooklyn Warehouse” by Rowan Zeoli  • “This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World” by Anne Helen Petersen  tech/AI: • “My Machine and Me” by Greta Rainbow  • "The AI We Deserve" by Evgeny Morozov  • still working through the responses but this is a really good collection of authors.  animals and toys shaped like animals:  • “A visit to dog college” by Lauren Leffer  • “Who Killed the Footless Goose?” by Owen Long  • worth it for the photos alone.  • “How a Stuffed Animal Named Billy Possum Tried—and Failed—to Replace the Teddy Bear as America’s National Toy” by Howard Dorre  • “Caterpillar Roadshow” by Annie Rosenthal  • this one is amazing!! it's a podcast episode but you can find the transcript if you click around. highly highly recommended.  • “The Challenge of Deep-Sea Taxonomy” by Sarah Deweerdt  life and death:  • “When This Professor Got Cancer, He Didn’t Quit. He Taught a Class About It.” by Kate Selig  • "What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?" by Joshua St. Clair  catch-all category:  • “Patrick Mahomes Was In Hell” by Barry Petchesky  • this is sooo out of date but I still think the photos are funny.  • “I Wish This $56,000 Mattress Wasn’t So Incredible” by Caira Blackwell  • boggled my mind. men will come to your house and fluff your mattress for you?! • “Extremely Petty and Incredibly Stupid Grudges” by David Mack  • “RETURNING TO THE UMAMI THEORY OF VALUE” by Nemesis.global  • this is kinda cool and interesting but why do all of these brand strategy people write like the Joker  • “And the 2025 Stunt Award Winners Are …” by Brandon Streussnig, Bilge Ebiri, and Roxana Hadadi  • The West Virginia Hot Dog Blog • :)  • “Will Shortz is Back in the Game” by Matthew Schneier 

sure 😬 is 😬 a 😬 time 😬 to 😬 be 😬 alive!  fish news (click for the photos!):  • “Police charge minor after finding something fishy at Utah ATMs” by Pat Reavy and Eliza Pace  • two versions of the same charming story: “Sunfish that got sick after aquarium closed has recovered — thanks to human cutouts” by Mari Yamaguchi and “Lonely sunfish in Japan gets cardboard human friends” by Koh Ewe  • sunfish can get lonely??? 😭 art:  • “At Ceramic Brussels, an Eclectic Array of Works Offers a State of the Medium” by Grace Ebert  • “A Hardened Detective and an Angry Rock Star: How a Vast Art Fraud Was Cracked” by Norimitsu Onishi and Brett Gundlock  bypassing paywalls lol:  • “How Bad is Bypassing Paywalls?” by Ben Lindbergh  • “archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet” by Jani Patokallio  food:  • “How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell” by Caity Weaver (unpaywalled) • “Invasive Crabs Have Taken Over New England. One Solution? Eat Them.” by C.J. Chivers  • “The Last Days of American Orange Juice” by Yasmin Tayag (unpaywalled) • "Everything Sucks. At Least There Are Jalapeño Poppers." by Jaya Saxena  tech (broadly defined):  • Stimulation Clicker by Neal Agarwal  • “How random, really, is Spotify’s shuffle feature?” by Heather McCalden (unpaywalled) • “The Future Is Too Easy” by David Roth  • “Cozy Comfort” by Tiana McGee and Daisy Chung  • “I Would Think Nothing Of Being Shot In The Chest With This Plasma Cannon” by Chris Thompson  • "Hiring Squad" by Megan Marz  • “The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic” by Anna Wiener (unpaywalled) fun catch-all category:  • Wikenigma  • “He Was Compared to Tiger Woods. So Why Did He Walk Away From Golf?” by Andrew Keh  • if it sucks, hit da bricks!!!  • “Winners of the 2024 Close-Up Photographer of the Year” by Alan Taylor  • “Pilgrim’s Progress” by Joel Mayward  • a "professor, pastor, author, and film critic" reviewing Hundreds of Beavers, the best film (unironic) of the 21st century??? • “Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash” by Kyra Dempsey  unfun catch-all category:  • if you can, please consider donating to the ACLU or Public Citizen, or spend time on 5 Calls calling your Congressional representatives. defend civil servants who are holding the line––many of them are on Reddit at /r/fednews. ok bye!

this January sure has lasted 300 years, huh?  general tech category:  • “An Age of Hyperabundance” by Laura Preston  • for the haters.  • “Century-Scale Storage” by Maxwell Neely-Cohen  • this is an incredible banger for fellow data storage enthusiasts!!! • “On the Grid” by Zoë Hitzig  • “The Contingency Contingent” by Leigh Claire La Berge  • these three are particularly interesting read back-to-back as a trio (in any order):  • “The Case for Software Criticism” by Sheon Han  • “Seeing Software” by Tara McMullin  • “So you want to escape the algorithm” by Elan Ullendorff  books: • "best of 2024" things that should've been in the last list but I didn't see them in time: • "The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2024” by LitHub  • “The Best Book Covers of 2024” by Matt Dorfman  • (Knife is my personal favorite) • “Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us” by Hua Hsu  • sprinted to Overdrive right after finishing this and put The Overstory and Playground on hold. reminded me very strongly of a Kim Stanley Robinson book event I went to in 2020 that I think about often. Powers: “The world is still here. The world will still exceed my comprehension and astonishment by orders of magnitude. The world will open up to me if I attend to it,’ then let’s see what happens.” • “Laboratories of the Impossible” by Joshua Roebke  rare and fleeting fashion section:  • “On the Road: Grail Hunting Across America” by Viv Chen  • The photography of Simbarashe Cha at the New York Times  • not really a single link per se, but every single one of his columns is a must-read. to me. :)  "being outside":  • “We Quit Our Jobs to Build a Cabin—Everything Went Wrong” by Bryan Schatz and Patrick Hutchison  • “Chasing the Myths of Mexico’s “Superrunners”” by Francine Russo  mildly deranged (in its miscellany) catch-all section:  • “How America lost control of the bird flu and raised the risk of another pandemic” by Amy Maxmen  • sigh. • “How to translate a game with no words” by Nicole Carpenter  • mild spoilers for Chants of Sennaar...? which I haven't finished so I also got spoiled for.  • Sold a Story by Emily Hanford and APM Reports  • this is a podcast series that I just started listening to but it's BONKERS. highly recommended. got linked to this by a video of some 20-year-old Twitch streamer struggling to read the word "nationalist" and a bunch of commenters yelling about how this guy can't read. which...he might not be able to???  • “She Made Things Better Down Where It’s Wetter” by Franz Linz  • MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM STANS RISE UP. also did you know that apparently it was founded with nepo baby money from one of the Hewlett Packard founders? now you do!  • “Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners' legs” by Jim Waterson  • really good headline for the kind of hyperlocal journalism that I like lol. it's paywalled halfway through but you get the gist.  finally, some fun interactive things/websites as palate-cleansers:  • DOOM: The Gallery Experience  • don't forget to interact with the art!  • Thinking With Moss  • click around! my favorite link was "Ornithological Interiors at the Bronx Zoo." 

meant to send this in late December and then dropped the ball lol...better late than never! happy belated new year!  fun/heartwarming stuff section at the top this time:  • “The Violin” by Zach Klein  • “IMG_0001” by Riley Walz  • “The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years” by Dan Kois and J. Bryan Lowder  • Lol My Thesis • “Taiwanese barista wins 2024 World Latte Art championship” by Yu Hsiao-han and Bernadette Hsiao  • “Behind the Scenes with Wildlife Response: Overnight Walrus Care Shift” by the Alaska Sea Life Center  some great reporting:  • “Fatal Dose” by Barbara Wade Rose  • “The Invisible Man” by Patrick Fealey  some bangers from The Verge right before they put their paywall up:  • “How to Watch a Baby” by Kristen Radtke  • “Bad Influence” by Mia Sato  • “Friend or Faux?” by Josh Dzieza and Stormy Pyeatte  some fun design stuff:  • “Branded in Memory” by Signs.com  • “The UX of Lego Interface Panels” by George Cave  article that gets its own category because this grinds my gears so much:  • “Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars” by Nate Rogers  and finally, a group I dearly wish I was qualified to join (please read their About page):  • The Suspicious Cheese Lords  ✨special bonus new year's category✨—a non-exhaustive list of some random newsletters that I enjoyed in 2024:  • Counter Craft by Lincoln Michel (writing)  • Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak (science fiction)  • Making It Work by Youngna Park (parenting)  • I Heart Mess by Emily Kirkpatrick (celebrity fashion)  • Chris Arnade Walks the World by Chris Arnade (travel & walking around)  • Shop Rat by Emilia Petrarca (shopping) • Rat Cruise by Vera Brosgol (art, the practice of science, & a very singular form of travel; no relation to Shop Rat)  • Paklan by Brian Lam (woodworking)  • my favorite local bookstore's mailing list • & two local events/news publications, one of which I now pay for :)  ✨✨extra special bonus new year's category✨✨—some favorite books from 2024, by the months in which I read them: • Among the Braves by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin (January) • Walking Practice by Dolki Min, trans. Victoria Caudle (February) • Exordia by Seth Dickinson (March) • Whalefall by Daniel Kraus (April) • Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane (May) • Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin (June) • Moonbound by Robin Sloan (July) • The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing (August) • I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko, trans. Bela Shayevich and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (September) • Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder (October) • Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib (November) • What’s Cooking in the Kremlin by Witold Szabłowski, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones  (December)

well it's certainly been a month so far 💀 some palate-cleansing links:  books: • “The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century” by Christina Orlando  • some great picks in here. I've read all but nine of the top-32 category and I don't think there's a single miss on that list. (and check out that excellent translated fiction category - Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez fans rise up!!) • “The Seventy Percent” by Yiyun Li  • love Yiyun Li, don't really love the "my students are the problem" take, but I think it's worth reading regardless.  • “Power Button” by Rachel Plotnick  • love the concept and description of this book!  photography:  • “Inside Nike, Oregon USA” by Alastair Philip Wiper  • for the architecture/office space/industrial machine enthusiasts. check out of the rest of his portfolio too!  • “Spawning in Forests, Figures Pose as Human-Sized Fungi” by Jackie Andres  • exactly as promised by the title. • “Passport Photos” by Max Siedentopf  • please click this one, it's delightful.  design/eye candy:  • “Type Revival for Film & TV” by Leah Spencer  • so specific but so cool!  • Horse  • kind of a fun internet browser concept, but also scroll down to the bottom of the page :)  • The Quilt Index   • the website's a little wonky, but what a wonderful database!  discourse about being Online:  • “Why So Few Matt Levines?” by Gwern Branwen  • for the fellow "Money Stuff" enthusiasts  • “IYKYK: When Novels Speak a Language Only Part of the Internet Gets” by Greta Rainbow  • conceptually extremely annoying, but throwing this in there as a hate-read. reminds me of one of the most annoying novels I ever read where the author wouldn't stop name-dropping San Francisco businesses and it made me want to throw the book out the window.  • “Going Dull” by Katy Schneider  • obsessed with the author's personal journey in this piece but also her fascination with these perfectly normal, perfectly lovely-sounding people. "He started posting pictures of something he’d considered too boring to share elsewhere — the specific-to-Wisconsin “rustic roads” he likes to drive with his wife on the weekends. People responded with mild-mannered enthusiasm — informing him that they too like to drive on quiet roads with their wives on weekends."  videos:  • “Then Comes the Body” by Jacob Krupnick  • a really fantastic 15-minute documentary film about an unlikely ballet school, recently eligible for the Oscars!  • “Pachelbel’s Train Horns” by Pavel Jirásek via Rion Nakaya  • lol. extremely annoying to listen to but also extremely charming. excellent for annoying someone who's in the same room as you but who can't see your screen.  science/medicine: • "Jonathan Haidt Started a Social-Media War. Did He Win?” by Stephanie M. Lee (unpaywalled) • the social-media's-effect-on-children discourse train rolls every onward... • “This Fish Has a Leg Up on the Competition” by Sabrina Imbler  • what a weird-looking fish!  • “Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?” by Marty Makary  • who wrote this headline and why is it so bad??? it's an interesting excerpt nonetheless. • The Cephalopod Page by Dr. James B. Wood  • it uses this image as bullet points :) random fun stuff:  • “Crossing the USA by train” by blinry  • the author's enthusiasm and amateurish phone photos are very endearing.  • “I Love These Oddly-Specific Cleaning Products” by Chris Person  • Chris Person strikes again! 

happy Halloween! an assortment of treats:  tasty literary discourse (the first two on Sally Rooney's novels):  • “A Trapdoor of Her Own” by Emmeline Clein  • “Normal Novels” by Becca Rothfeld  • “Forget Gladwell” by W. David Marx  two articles about birds:  • “If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow” by Thomas Fuller and Alana Paterson  • "crow grudge" sounds like a Magic: The Gathering card. or an evil wizard's spell.  • “How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong” by Rivka Galchen  the New York Times on sports:  • “How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular” by David Garvey Herbert  • this story is long but definitely recommended. consider this bonkers quote: "The control that Jeff Webb was assuming over cheerleading is difficult to overstate. It was as if Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, also operated youth camps, owned Nike, hosted the N.B.A. Finals, called those games on TV and ran U.S.A. Basketball." • “Wait, NFL players eat how many Uncrustables?” by Jayson Jenks  • what do these men have against crusts?? a catchall category for tech-related stuff:  • “Common Grounding” by Allison Talking  • “Confessions of a Spotify Vandal” by Andy Cush  • kinda obsessed with this guy.  • “You are Jeff Bezos” by Kris Lorischild  • a choose-your-own-adventure game about...well.  • “A complete guide to luddite horror films” by Brian Merchant  • “Meet ZachXBT, the Masked Vigilante Tracking Down Billions in Crypto Scams and Thefts” by Andy Greenberg  • anything Andy Greenberg writes about cybercrime is worth reading, but especially this one!  two separate articles from different authors at different outlets (!) on thinking about AI like the Amish:  • “Why We Need Amistics for AI” by Brian J. A. Boyd  • “The Amish Approach to AI” by Ethan Zuckerman  and some random fun stuff: • “Hello Kitty Forever: Celebrating 50 Years of an Icon” by Jake Silbert  • worth checking out for the photos. hello kitty forever!!  • “Earth from space: Bizarre 'pet cloud' reappears above its favorite spot in New Zealand” by Harry Baker  • a cool-looking cloud and its favorite spot :)  • “Who’s this Medieval Dead Guy at the Bottom of a Castle Well?” by Becky Ferreira  • really good headline, but also a fun rundown of some science news. • “I Don’t Know Why Women Keep Laughing at Me When I’m Out Driving my Tesla Cybertruck” by Tinsae Aregay • lmao it's funny even if it's fake. (actually if you click on the author's name it looks like writing about the Cybertruck is his entire beat for this outlet? I respect it.) 

🎃🍁 • “Growing beyond the computer” by Willa Köerner and Cortney Cassidy  • pure fantasy wish fulfillment of "what if I threw my computer out the window and became a professional gardener instead" (EM read this one!)  • “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by Rose Horowitch (unpaywalled)  • including this not only because it made a lot of people online extremely mad, but also because it made me say "huh? wuhhh??" out loud at my computer. it's also soooo funny that the author graduated college in 2023 and is diving right into higher education discourse. the sample size is one! • and a rebuttal: “The Atlantic Did Me Dirty” by Carrie M. Santo-Thomas  • “Where Do Genres Come From?” by Charlie Jane Anders  • not sure I agree 100% with this take, but it's an interesting one.  • “The Cult of Wellness” by Olivia Stren and Grayson Herriott  • this one is just mesmerizing in how weird it is. it also contains someone saying the following to describe Toronto: “We need a hub of working people who are on their phones all the time, where the weather is cold and everyone is a bit miserable. A place where people are struggling.” • "The outside world knows Wim Hof as the eccentric Iceman. His family suffered domestic violence” by Anneke Stoffelen and Robert van de Griend  • content warning for descriptions of domestic violence.  • this one does something really interesting in that it punctuates the text with expert commentary. it still presents both sides of the narrative, but the commentary adds additional context. definitely worth a read.  • “Digital Divinity” by Cengiz Yar and Rest of World  • a fascinating series!  • “Allrecipes, America’s Most Unruly Cooking Web Site” by Ruby Tandoh  • yes, the author is the Ruby who was on Great British Bake-Off lol. did you know that Allrecipes was started by a bunch of college bros?  • “Sports Celebrate Physical Variation—Until It Challenges Social Norms” by Bethany Brookshire  • worth a skim. • “In pictures: Europe's car-free plazas reclaim their former glory” by Aitor Hernández-Morales  • worth a scroll for the photos. • The "Who is Government?" series by The Washington Post (archive.today will bypass the paywall on these). these are all superb, I can't recommend the series enough. the ones I've read (in descending order of how eagerly I'd recommend them) are:  • “The Canary” by Michael Lewis  • “The Sentinel” by Casey Cep  • “The Cyber Sleuth” by Geraldine Brooks • “The Number” by John Lanchester  • “Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information” by Chris Person  • funnily enough it looks like "Chris Person" is his real-life government name??? this is a fun resource. it also contains a link to the iconic forum thread in which a bunch of bodybuilders argue about how many days are in a week (iykyk). 

lmao you know how last time I said there were too many links? get ready for EVEN MORE LINKS.  the kitchen appliances, food, and foodstuffs category:  • “A $700 Kitchen Tool That’s Meant to Be Seen, Not Used” by Ellen Cushing (unpaywalled) • this one is too short imo but I'm always down for KitchenAid discourse  • “Stalking the Wild Banana” by Jack Truesdale (unpaywalled) • gosh this one is so good...contains many inviting photos of bananas but somehow none of the profile subject, who casually says things like “‘My default mode of being alive is “What is that banana?”’ and “I’m invited in with special banana eyes.” it also contains a reference to the next link.... • “Gonna Pop These Overripe Bananas in the Freezer Until I’m Ready to Take Them Out and Throw Them in the Garbage” by Alexis Pooley  • self-explanatory (it's a McSweeney's article)  • “The Perfect Cup of Coffee Doesn’t Exi—“ by David Friedman  • a surprisingly fascinating profile of the guy who invented the Aeropress!  • “Food Voyages” by the New York Times Magazine  • this series probably requires a full Times subscription because of the formatting but the photography's really fun.  • “The Tradwives Are Making Incredibly Weird Bread” by Anna Merlan  • tradewife discourse, while annoying, is also kind of my kryptonite but this is genuinely funny  • it also links to the next link..... • the Wordloaf newsletter by Andrew Janjigian  • a newsletter that's all about making (non-weird) bread! I'm definitely not the target audience for this one but the author seems kind of delightful  • “Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children” by Matt Reynolds  • ok this is not about food per se but it is a super interesting and well-researched history of rehydration therapy for cholera, soooo.... • “NEED EGGS • CALL EGGS MAN” by @freddie93 on the platform formerly known as Twitter  • call eggs man!  animal science and conservation:  • “Punching Octopuses Lead Fish on Hunting Parties” by Elizabeth Preston (unpaywalled) • :)  • “The Machli I Knew: Remembering the grand old dame of Ranthambore National Park” by Valmik Thapar (unpaywalled) • a tiger obituary (as in, an obituary for a tiger) that I wish was about four times longer and had more photos!  cars are too damn big (kind of self-explanatory):  •  “The Death of the Minivan” by Ian Boost (unpaywalled)  • “Too Much of a Good Thing” by The Economist (author unknown?) (unpaywalled)  technology and internet stuff:  • “Drowning in Slop” by Max Read  • max read always hits!  • “Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops” by Gaby Del Valle  • interesting stuff to think about as California rolls out digital IDs.  • “The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age” by Thea Lim  • "If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers." the random catch-all category:  • “What if every movie with a grim ending got a Speak No Evil-style remake?” by Tasha Robinson  • ok the title of this one is kind of lame but it's genuinely pretty funny  • “Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas” by Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe and Susan Carroll  • really good investigative journalism • “Plutocrat Archipelagos” by Jack Self and Pit Lempens  • the illustrations alone are worth checking out! also peep the author and illustrator's interesting names...they kind of sound like video game characters. • “Wisconsin’s Wooden Skyscrapers” by Matt King  • really cool and interesting! also for some reason the photos and headline reminded me strongly of this short story I read years ago but still vividly remember: “The Minnesota Diet” by Charlie Jane Anders 

too many links, as usual  • “The Asteroid-in-Spring Hypothesis” by Kerry Howley (unpaywalled) • insanely riveting paleontology drama. consider this quote: "The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex." • “Can a YouTube video really fix your wet phone?” by David Pierce  • belated song of the summer is “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )” • “The Bookmaker” by Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht  • one of several interesting critiques of Nate Silver's new book  • “America Must Free Itself From the Tyranny of the Penny” by Caity Weaver  • Caity Weaver never misses!!  • “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” by Ted Chiang  • kind of tired about discourse on this one but any Ted Chiang article is always an interesting read  • An interesting response (thanks EM!) “Ted Chiang Is Wrong About AI Art” by Matteo Wong (unpaywalled) • And another response: “Even if AI makes art, it may be bad for culture” by Henry Farrell  • “Who Gets to Kill in Self-Defense?” by Rachel Louise Snyder  • content warning for domestic violence / gendered violence  • “Break Up Big Econ” by David Deming  • lol I just thought this was kind of funny. break up big econ! (I wonder if anyone would describe economics as "a snake pit of personality disorders"?)  • “List of pangrams” by Richard Rutter  • particularly enamored by “Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn’t baking my quiche.”  • “The neolithic dad guide to what time to leave for the airport” by Stephen Collins  • good stuff • “Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons” by Laura Jedeed  • this one rocks. go go Colonial Williamsburg!  • “Why Physics Is Unreasonably Good at Creating New Math” by Ananyo Bhattacharya  • cool! • The Temu croissant lamp TikTok by @froginahatgirl  • hate linking a TikTok but this one is mesmerizing. the sound it makes at the end... • “38-pound rescue cat Crumbs gets stuck in shoe rack while trying to escape from fat camp: ‘He caused a ruckus’” by Ben Cost  • worth it just for the photo of the cat stuck in the shoe rack.  • “How to Monetize A Blog” by this guy named Tyler  • gotta open this one on desktop to really appreciate the gonzo web design 

link bonanza -- it's been a busy two weeks! sorry in advance for how many New York Times pieces are in here (use archive.today to unpaywall them as usual). two pieces about Costco for some reason: • “Costco in Cancún” by Simon Wu  • “How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche” by Ben Ryder Howe  the first piece is a really interesting meditation on how we imagine the future via architecture, but it links to the second piece at the end, which is all about an object of my personal fascination, ~the Sphere~:  • “The Concrete Oasis” by Noah Putnam  • “The Sphere” by Elena Saavedra Buckley  a pair of urgent and essential pieces on AI-powered image manipulation from The Verge:  • "No One's Ready for This" by Sarah Jeong • "Hello, you’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop" by Jess Weatherbed  cool visuals, photography, and/or web design to scroll through: • “Lost Highway” by William Poor  • “The Disciples” by James Mollison  • "Heralding the ancient and otherworldly charm of Future Medieval graphics" by Elizabeth Goodspeed  a pair of random but kind of heartwarming visual-heavy human-interest pieces from the Times: • “A Shoe That Goes 65 M.P.H.” by Steven Kurtz and T.J. Kirkpatrick  • “A 12-Minute Show, Played Only Once, Just Might Live Forever” by Chris Almeida and Jon Cherry  the funniest thing I read all month, written 41 years ago by the guy who would go on to become the founder and CEO of Audible.com (??!?):  • “The King of the Ferret Leggers” by Don Katz   obligatory piece of food writing because I like reading it:  • “The Katsufication of Britain” by Tim Anderson and Sinjin Li  for anyone else who is consistently tickled by the fact that there's a fax machine emoji and occasionally likes to read Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (anyone? anyone?? *cricket noises*):  • "Alive and Well, As a Matter of Fax" by Jake Widman  and finally, three tweets that I liked that have thematic resonance with each other (click the last two open because they've got photos):  • "Alien is the best horror movie because most of the first half of the movie is the crew pressing buttons and flicking switches. But they’re fantastic buttons, they look very clicky and chunky and fun to press" by @laserboat999 • quote-tweeting the above: "ALIEN conceptual artist Ron Cobb deserves another massive shout-out, in particular for his semiotic standard. Just look at this thing of beauty." by @NOTGH_Holly • "why do we keep doing superfluous rework instead of pushing the boundaries of knowledge" by @provisionalidea

unsorted because i realized i had too many links backed up!  • “Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps” by Ben Buckland  • charming!  • “A Guide to Miyazaki’s Weird Little Guys” by James Grebey  • endearing! • “Keanu Reeves Wrote a Book. A Really Weird One.” by Alexandra Alter  • scroll through for some genuinely weird (but also charming) celebrity photography! • Rat Cruise by Vera Brosgol  • cannot recommend this newsletter highly enough--it's by an artist who is currently on a residency with a bunch of scientists island-hopping in an Alaskan maritime reserve! i am learning so much! did you know that anti-nausea medication can make you lose your vision? i did not!  • One Minute Park  • soothing!  • “The Unexpected Poetry of PhD Acknowledgements” by Tabitha Carvan  • heartwarming!  • “‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player” by Conor Niland  • depressing!  • “Is Sleep Training Harmful?” by Tom Valiant  • really cool analysis & web design!  • “Everyone Who Made This Happen: Meet the Many People It Takes to Produce One Thing” by Kate Guadagnino  • interesting! also more great photography in here!  • "Inside "The Machine"" by Anne Helen Petersen  • threw this in last-minute because i read it this morning and it boggled my mind! (this is part 2 of a weeklong series on Greek Life at the University of Alabama, and it looks like it's shaping up to be a banger.) 

good stuff in this batch!  a few really interesting exposés:  • “Fast Crimes at Lambda School” by Benjamin Sandofsky  • “Escape From the Box” by David Dayen  • “‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town” by Andrew R Chow and Jake Dockins  really good longform from nymag (clear your cookies + refresh to get past the paywall):  • “Against ‘Women’s Writing’” by Andrea Long Chu  • this one especially is for fellow Rachel Cusk fans!  • “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained” by Mary H.K. Choi  a crazy-ambitious accomplishment in classification and web design:  • “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler  • Kate Crawford (of Anatomy of AI fame) remains a legend  citizen science! • “Did this citizen scientist develop the perfect, chemical-free lawn?” by Linda Zeldovich (unpaywalled)  commentary on american society (sigh...) • “Everyone Into the Grinder” by Hamilton Nolan  and two bonus links that I originally deleted because I had mixed feelings on them:  • One Million Checkboxes  • “Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia” by Lauren Smiley 

lots of links! short on time though so limited commentary :(  animals: • Armadillo Online! by Joshua Nixon  • :)  • “'Quite a big creature': Kiwi bird surprises sawmill workers near Whangārei” by Peter de Graaf  • click through for photos of the biggest kiwi I've ever seen  • “’If Not Friend, Why Friend-Shaped?’ A Beary Scientific Investigation” by Carin Leong and Allison Parshall  a couple of very cool websites: • Close.city  • Primarium: Handwriting Education in Primary Schools  and everything else: • “Spreadsheet Superstars” by David Pierce  • “Don’t Call It an ‘Ethnic’ Grocery Store” by Priya Krishna and Tommy Kha  • “The Encyclopedia Project, or How to Know in the Age of AI” by Janet Vertesi  • “Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression” by Adam Curtis and Yancey Strickler  • “Cormac McCarthy Did Not Talk Craft, With One Surprising Exception” by Walker Mimms  • “What Will Become of American Civilization?” by George Packer and Ashley Gilbertson  (unpaywalled link)  • this one's really good. I opened it intended to skim through but ended up close-reading it in one sitting.  • “He Memorized the World With Google Maps. Now He’s Exploring It” by Tomas Weber  • click the last link in the article for the Google Maps easter egg! 

two recommendations related to Google deciding to jam "AI overviews" into search results:  • The Ten Blue Links Chrome extension • cleans up the Google search results page. • UDM-14 • does the exact same thing as Ten Blue Links, only without having to install an extension. automatically adds the "udm=14" query string to every query in order to kill the AI overview feature.  three articles about animals:  • “Big crab with mussel hair-do fascinates beachgoers” by Rosie Mercer  • exactly what it says on the tin.  • “What My Dog Taught Me About Mortality” by Sam Andersen (unpaywalled, text only) • this is partially about the author's dog Walnut. Walnut sounded so familiar to me...until I realized that he's the subject of one of my favorite passages in recent memory, from:  • “Why We Take Animal Voyages” by Sam Andersen (unpaywalled) • here's the iconic passage: "The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.  The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)" and the rest of them:  • “Super Cute Please Like” by Nicole Lipman  • “The 7 Grueling Months to Reclaim the Bookstore Dream a Fire Stole” by Jordyn Holman and Hiroko Masuike (unpaywalled) • “Why restaurants are so loud, and what science says we can do about it” by Bishop Sand, Leslie Shapiro, William Neff, and Béatrice de Géa (unpaywalled, text only) • “Ten Lessons in Neighborliness From a Cohousing Community” by Courtney E. Martin  • “The Talented Mr. Schuman: Love and Mistaken Identity in the Internet Age” by Anna Akbari 

a mini-collection of three not-too-recent links related to design/graphic design/design thinking:  • “The Age of Average” by Alex Murrell  • “Beware the Digital Whiteboard” by Megan Marz  • “Five Beautiful Book Covers and the Stories Behind Them” by Zachary Petit   and the rest of them:  • “Tuna Crabs, Neither Tuna Nor Crabs, Are Swarming Near San Diego” by Jules Jacobs (unpaywalled link) • great headline, great photos. the tuna crabs look like they're at the best rave imaginable.  • “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has an unlikely, lasting place in gaming history” by Nicole Carpenter  • yeah yeah, maybe a deep cut. but it's a genuinely interesting exploration of game design, creative collaboration, and the recent history of the game industry. nothing but respect for the all-male dev team who came at this silly little mobile game with real care and empathy.  • “Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?” by Madeleine Schwartz (unpaywalled link) • interesting and elegantly written!  • “Welcome to the Chainification of America” by Eater  • I love when Eater puts out these theme pieces that always have great graphic design and like 4-6 real, meaty (pun intended) food journalism pieces in them. this one is another win.  • “World in a Box” by Shannon Mattern  • "social history of the cardboard box"? don't mind if I do!  • “Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?” by Anthony Lane  • really good. it's about literature! it's about AI! it's about tech people building embarrassing products! it's about lines like this: "Imagine Wittgenstein, never less than agonized at the best of times, hearing those words. His head would explode like a grenade." 

 good season for links!  • “What if We Replace Guns and Bullets with Bows and Arrows?” by Kris De Decker  • from Low-Tech Magazine, which has a really interesting website and ethos! definitely recommend poking around and reading some of the other pages, like this one. • “Traveling at the Speed of the Soul” by Nick Hunt  • "As a travel writer, my attention has always been on the “away,” on setting out into the desert — or the mountains, or the woods, or the streets of unknown towns — rather than grubbing about beneath the soil of home. The treasure has always been elsewhere; home is where I bring it back to. [...] The fear that I had dropped my treasure on the road or jettisoned it from the plane turned out to be misplaced. It was there waiting for me — I just had to dig for it." • “Escape from Noma” by Adam Roberts  • unparalleled schadenfreude!!! the food photos are also gorgeous but I can't believe this man got served not one but two extremely intact whole fish heads.  • “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Matthew Olzmann  • poem surprise! an oldie but a goodie • “Swing Sets Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore” by Alexandra Lange  • great visuals and use of gifs in this one • “The children who remember their past lives” by Caitlin Gibson (unpaywalled link) • a lil spooky, really empathetic and well-written • “The Battle for Attention” by Nathan Heller  • starts off kind of milquetoast (“wah wah phone bad”) but quickly reveals itself to be a profile of this secretive group called the Order of the Third Bird (!!!). mystery and magic and the humanities are alive in the world!  • p.s. if you run out of New Yorker free articles, clear your cookies and refresh the page; repeat until it forgets your initial session.  • “The Book Review’s Best Books Since 2000” by the New York Times Book Review (unpaywalled link) • linking this less as a book recommendation list and more as an abridged journey of the past 20+ years of mainstream book cover design. (look at the books from 2000 - half of them look dated but the other half look like they could come out tomorrow!)

good week for links i guess. truly, we are all Salted Water for Boiling. • “Welcome to Chicken Town.” by Erica Hall  • really good url + really good website. • “The robots are coming…for your wedding” by Maura Judkis (unpaywalled) • this one is really good. contains the following line that's just been ping-ponging around my head for the past week: "It is a pity that the giant baby's desires will never be satisfied." what a great combination of words.   • Music for Programming • music for programming!  • “Why You Can’t Get a Reservation” by Adam Iscoe  • lol @ nyc • “Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions” by Michael B. Habib  • really cool visuals! • “Salted Water for Boiling” by Epicurious  • scroll down to receive gems like the following: “One fun little fact about this recipe-- it actually garnishes itself! Just leave a big batch of this sitting on a giant rock, and in a just few billion years it'll be full of squid, cattle, grapes, and other delicious additions! Truly, we are all Salted Water for Boiling.” • “Models All the Way Down” by Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp  • obligatory AI article, but this one's really cool! 

• “A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed” by Chris Helzer  • unbelievably good. can't recommend this PDF highly enough. • speaking of PDFs, a bonus recommendation: Dangerzone for converting potentially-sketchy files • “Microlino electric bubble car review: urban delight” by Thomas Ricker   • yeah yeah it's a car review, but it's a fun car review. look at the photos of the wee car!  • “Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show?” by David Segal  • for fellow trivia enthusiasts  • “The Magic of Bird Brains” by Ben Crair  • for anyone who's also wondered "hey what happened to that hypothesis that we could train crows to pick up trash for us?"  • “The Cloud Under the Sea” by Josh Dzieza  • for fellow internet infrastructure enthusiasts  • “Mario meets Pareto” by Antoine Mayerowitz  • me finding out that Shy Guy isn't Pareto-optimal: :( 

on sea creatures:  • “How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold” by Ross Anderson (unpaywalled link) • “The Crabs Are Coming” by MinuteEarth on Youtube  two good New York Times book reviews: • “This Book Is Baffling, Debauched and Perfectly Human” by Dustin Illingworth, on Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin • “A New Voice in Fiction With a Mean Left Hook” by Dwight Garner, on Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel  • contains the following bizarre line that I can't stop thinking about: “Boxing is a pulverizing sort of waltz; you pair up with your opponents as if they were Bluetooth devices and then do everything you can to disconnect them.” what an unwieldy yet memorable simile.... a very good misc category: • “Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain” by Kate Wagner  • this is the infamous Formula 1 article that immediately got pulled (allegedly) from the Road and Track website for being too anti-capitalist. that alone makes it worth reading, but it's also by Kate Wagner (the legend behind McMansion Hell), so it's doubly worth reading.  • “Why Are Pants So Big (Again)?” by Jonah Weiner  • “What I missed when I went to North Korea” by Sophie Schmidt  and finally, some elegant website design and visual analysis: • “Airfoil” by Bartosz Ciechanowski  • check out the rest of the blog too, it's really excellent!  • “Full of Themselves: An Analysis of Title Drops in Movies” by by Dominikus Baur and Alice Thudt 

ordered (subjectively) from least funny to most funny:  • “His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him.” by Peter Holley  • content warning for descriptions of grievous injury, but worth reading for sure. it's also very sad.  • “Superb Owl Sunday VIII” by Alan Taylor  • chiefs who? (owl pun intended) • “What Do We Gain by Eating With Our Hands?” by Ligaya Mishan and Kyoto Hamada  • great photos! made me think a lot about hand modeling. • “Delta has been keeping a secret for the past 20 years—and pilots really want you to ask about it” by Rachel Ventresca  • the pilot in this article seems like a stand-up guy.  • “Caps for Sale” by B.J. Novak  • this kind of feels like half an essay, but I still really liked it.  • “Things Unexpectedly Named After People” by Roland Crosby • factual, very short, and very good.  • “How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living in a Fjällräven Parka” by Ross Bullen  • the joke kind of overstays its welcome but whatever, raccoons are funny. • “Madame WebMD” by J.P. Brammer  • you may have to be extremely online in order to get the most out of this, but I can't recommend it highly enough. 

some great stuff these past few weeks: graphic design! crabs! train heists! skiing! Patricia Lockwood meeting the Pope!  • “The Menu Trends That Define Dining Right Now” by Priya Krishna, Tanya Sichynsky and Umi Syam  • “Shame-faced crab has nothing to hide about” by Bec Crew  • “The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century” by Malia Wollan  • “Redesigning Cormac McCarthy’s Brutal ‘Blood Meridian’” by Bobby Aaron Solomon  • “How to Build an Origami Computer” by Jordana Cepelewicz  • “Against Disruption: On the Bulletpointization of Books” by Maris Kreizman  • “When I Met the Pope” by Patricia Lockwood  • “Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits” by Simon Akam 

(happy very belated new year! featuring some extra links because I fell into the time vortex of November and December) two great pieces from The Verge on SEO optimization:  • “The people who ruined the internet” by Amanda Chicago Lewis  • “The Perfect Webpage” by Mia Sato and Richard Parry  everything else:  • “A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft” by James Somers  • “The Last Lighthouse Keeper in America” by Dorothy Wickenden  • "Wolf Spiders, Actually, Are All Around” by Sabrina Imbler  • “What killed the fight scene? And is it finally coming back?” by Ryan Broderick  • “Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group” by Johannes Lichtman 

• Index of Aesthetics  • "My Quest to Downsize Without Throwing Anything Away” by David Pogue  • “The Most Powerful New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of” by the NYMag Editors  • “The Lurker” by Erica Hayasaki  • “Internet Artifacts” by neal.fun  • "The surprising benefits of switching to ‘lamb mowers’" by Michael J. Coren  • why: worth it just for the little looping video at the top of the article of the sheep getting out of their little trailer. it's like a clown car full of sheep. they're so fluffy.  • “Sam Bankman-Fried is going to talk himself right into jail” by Elizabeth Lopatto  • why: now this is what I call court reporting!! contains some real gems, such as the following passage about prosecutor Danielle Sassoon: "Unfortunately for [Sam Bankman-Fried], the cross-examination was conducted by Sassoon, who looks like someone who uses “summer” as a verb, and often appears deceptively timid, with her hands held close to her chest. In her cross, she simply unhinged her jaw and ate Bankman-Fried." previously, Sassoon is described as "beat[ing] him like a piñata." it's good stuff.

• “The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes” by Lane Brown  • “The Era-Defining Aesthetic of ‘In The Mood for Love’” by Kyle Chayka  • why: dream team; love a good Kyle Chayka piece about Internet aesthetics  • “The Maestro” and “The Unraveling” by Kevin Sieff   • "Washington is full of rats. These dogs are happy to help with that.” by Maura Judkis (major no-kidding content warning for violence, blood, and gore)  • why: really good photojournalism. reads like an old-school National Geographic Magazine feature even though it's about little dogs mauling rats.  • “Three Simple Rules for Protecting Your Data” by Ellen Cushing and Somnath Bhatt  • “That cone was too big” by s (@emptynsters) on the platform formerly known as Twitter  • why: idk I feel like I might just want to look at this tweet later  • "Who the hell are 2girls1bottl3?” by Nicolaia Rips  • why: last-minute sleeper hit! a really good celebrity profile about influencers who are also kind of fascinating artifacts of Internet culture. their videos also unironically kind of rip (pun intended given the author's name) 

mixed bag this month... • “How States Are Threading the Needle on Flag Design” by Mitch Smith and Sarah Almukhtar  • “Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter” by Casey Newton  • Rotating Sandwiches  • “I Got Gobbled Up by a Whale” by Julie McSorley as told to Heather Schwedel  • “This USB button helps Jeopardy! contestants get their buzz on” by Andrew Marino  • Why: niche gadgets...good • “My Horny Raccoon Roommate and Me” by Lauren Lefter (mild content warning. lmao.) •  Why: it's charming science writing! she gives the raccoon a fun name! there are (sfw) videos!  • “How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth” by Andrew Long Chu  • Why: anything Andrew Long Chu writes is worth reading, but especially book reviews 

• “Sailing Boat Rescued by the Götheborg”  • Why: tfw you're rescued at sea by an 18th-century merchant ship • “‘A certain danger lurks there’: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI” by Ben Tarnoff  • Why: “There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.”  • “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing” by Laura Hartenberger  • Why: the subjectivity is the point!!!  • “It’s Bloodsicle Time” by Maggie Kloza as told to Dan Kois  • Why: sometimes it's nice to learn about something you've literally never thought about before.  • “The ‘Scammer’ and the Scammed” by Tyler Foggatt  • Why: ok this is for a niche audience of maybe just me (e.g., people with Internet brain poisoning who are also fascinated by the act of memoir-writing)

• A really good website: endless.horse  • "Can a Dance Class Free Men’s Bodies in a Place Meant to Contain Them?” by Brian Seibert  • this thread comparing different styles of film/TV fight choreography by @kungfupete on Twitter, complete with great GIFs  • “In 7 Great Cities, 7 Great Walks” by The New York Times  • “What’s your type? Try these tests to pick the perfect font for you.” by Emma Kumer, Geoffrey A. Fowler and  Leslie Shapiro • “The Titan Submersible Was ’An Accident Waiting to Happen’” by Ben Taub  • “The Art of Translation” by Sophie Hughes 

the links are coming fast and furious!!! • “queen of the rodents” by @weirdlilguys on Twitter, @.sukakucing on TikTok  • why: I have watched this video dozens of times  • “How to Get Absolutely No Sun This Summer” by Madeleine Aggeler  • why: thinking about this as I contemplate buying a sun hat for the 100th time. maybe it’ll be a sun umbrella (parasol? sunbrella?) summer. • thread: “infrastructure that looks like sci fi” by @kane on Twitter  • why: cool images make brain go brr  • “Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag” by Alexander Wells  • why: I desperately wanted to send this like two months ago and was relentlessly paywalled, but recently clicked open the link to read the opening paragraph again and found that it has miraculously been un-paywalled! highly recommended, it’s excellent and contains the very memorable line (one of many memorable lines): “As for Finger Food: Hell yeah, brother! Food for your fingers!”  • “Observations From Paris” by Coby Lefkowitz  • why: lovingly written, with some wonderful photos! • “My Benihana, Myself” by Jaya Saxena and Christian Rodriguez  • why: charming and pretty funny, but also unexpectedly heartfelt 

what a great month for articles and posts of various kinds! • “There Are Two Kinds of Farmer’s Market” by Daniel Lavery  • why: he's right!!! • “I Get No Mail and It’s Glorious” by David Friedman  • why: actually extremely useful tips in here. can personally vouch for OptOutPrescreen; it is a real pain in the ass to print and physically mail the form, but it works! worth it to stop getting credit card offers for five whole years.  • “Are You Thunder or Lightning?” by Sophie Haigney  • why: great conversation starter prompts in here. (i'm a thunder + a helluva town guy.)  • “The world is ready for Rose Zhang. Is she ready for the world?” by Brendan Quinn  • why: love a good profile where the writer also gets to flex their style. still hate golf though. • “This is What It’s Like to Lose a Jiu-Jitsu Match to Mark Zuckerberg” by Vince Mancini  • why: unfortunately the title is better than the actual interview, but the premise is really good. dude seems like a nice guy. 

really good stuff out there these past few weeks!  • “The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai” by Heidi Blake  • “Mean Images” by Hito Steyerl   • “Trapped by War, Saved by Two Students with a Taxi” by Declan Walsh  • “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” by Ted Chiang  • “Bad Manors” by Kate Wagner  • “Generation Connie” by Connie Wang and Connie Aramaki

food-themed edition!  • “Melba’s Contains Multitudes” by Rein Fertel and Casey Joiner  • why: some gorgeous and fascinating photojournalism  • “The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan” by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid  • why: don't you want to know?  • “How to Prepare and Eat The Little Mermaid Cast” by Rebecca Alter, Nate Jones, Nicholas Quah, Kathryn VanArendonk, and Alison Willmore  • why: is the title alone not enough?  • “Dave’s Hot Chicken will have you begging for more, and maybe for mercy” by Tim Carman  • why: the imagery in this rips. also, more food writing should be funny.

• “The Shape of Kirby” by Ash Parrish  • This tweet thread from James Vincent and Liam Galvin about the AI chatbot “grandma exploit”  • “Raising Ducks” by Sarah Leung at The Woks of Life  • “They Saw the Horrific Aftermath of a Mass Shooting. Should We?” by Jay Kirk (subject warnings; read with care)  • “Why You Need to Think for Yourself” by Michael Ignatieff 

• “Who is Still Inside the Metaverse?” by Paul Murray  • “Questions People Have Had For Me Now That A Third Dog Is Here” by Daniel Lavery  • “Heaven on Earth” by Laura Bannister  • “Frog” by Anne Fadiman  • “AI and the American Smile” by Jenka Gurfinkel 

special (?) sports and AI edition I guess • “No coach, no agent, no ego: the incredible story of the ‘Lionel Messi of cliff diving’” by Xan Rice • “I don’t want to log in to your website” by Elizabeth Lopatto • “You Are Not a Parrot” by Elizabeth Weil • “I Spent 7 Straight Hours on a Chairlift. Here’s What I Learned About Why We Still Ski.” by Gloria Liu • “Inside the Suspicion Machine” by Eva Constantaras, Gabriel Geiger, Justin-Casimir Braun, Dhruv Mehrotra, and Htet Aung

• “The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation” by Andrea Long Chu  • “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” by Ted Chiang • “Saving a Life” by Patricia Lockwood • "Mall Food Madness" in Eater, but especially: • "Fountains of Youths" by Jamie Loftus • "The Holdout" by Wei Tchou

• “The World’s First Robot Lawyer Isn’t A Lawyer, And I’m Not Sure It’s Even A Robot” by Kathryn Tewson • “How Literary Translation Can Shift the Tides of Power” by Jen Wei Ting • “Things I Do Not Like Hearing” by JP Brammer • “‘As bad as it gets without body bags.’” by James Fallows