#Kottke

India’s Hottest District Shuts at 10 AM as Mercury Breaches 48 Degrees Celsius Mark. “After 10am, Banda becomes deserted. At first, you see one or two people outside. Then, as the day rises, there is

Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Among the buildings are a school in Mass., a hospital in Rwanda, a prison in Norway, and a lighthouse in Maine. Intrigu

A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”

Mariame Kaba’s letter to young activists: “I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live different

Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.1 So what manner of pre

You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”

From Universe Today, an ongoing series of articles on A Brief-ish History of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Part I is entitled “Where is Everybody?”

Contemporary pop artist fnnch’s essay on How to Make a Living as an Artist is pretty great. Lots in here that resonates with my experience of turning a creative hobby (KDO) into a business. Mos

My friend Adriana wrote about her story game based on Dante’s Inferno. “In Vya, I modeled Pom after the poet Alice Notley, whose Descent of Alette (1996) is one of the great contributions to the liter

This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not s

Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming: On the

At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks. “Apparently, eating a fistful of iguana tranquilizers for breakfast every morning has turned me cold-blooded, and I am no longer appropriately adapted for lif

Free admission to Canadian national parks this summer! “From June 19 to September 7, no fees apply for: admission for all visitors to all national historic sites, national parks, and national marine c

Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. “Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were ly

“US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts.” Just so fucking stupid and maddening and wasteful and dangerous and callous and evil.

Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m

This is impressive: an AI model has disproved an 80-year-old conjecture by Paul Erdős. “The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for ma

One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was o

Paul Brown’s iPod. This is a lovely remembrance & time capsule: a playable iPod emulator of “the music on the iPod my dad had in 2018 before he died”. Click wheel works and everything.

The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy. “To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.” As an proficient player of Yell Answers At The TV Jeopar