I have mentioned and recommended Shirt Pocket’s Mac backup app SuperDuper quite a few times over the years, and for good reason: it performs very important functions very well. Version 4, which shipped just over a month ago, is an extraordinary update to an extraordinary app. Visually, the interface is all new. That took some getting used to, but not much. It didn’t take long for me to see how the new UI is better in every way. The style of presentation is new and modern, but the core idea remai [more]

Teaser trailer for You Can See Everything from Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim. “Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move.” WHAT WAS THAT?

Glyphs 4 is here: a Mac-native app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge glyph sets, explore variable vector designs with complex higher-order interpolation. Build and manage massive font families and icon sets with ease, export all modern font formats, SVG, PNG and PDF. Hundreds of refinements and native Tahoe support make designing, testing and shipping your vectors smoother than ever. Glyphs 4: Create. Love th [more]

Trackables: There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started. Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface. Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a pa [more]

The Onion: The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry? Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.  ★

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall: McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again! McKinley is Mac-asse [more]

Matt Birchler: So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well). My evidence for this i [more]

Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to: United States: “Lake America” Canada: “Lake Ontario” E [more]

Plus, good reads you might have missed in August 2026

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with WebKit for richer chat content. In other words, this is not an Electron app or a repackaged iPad release. It includes Mac-specific hooks, making the desktop experience more robust than the Meta AI mobile app. Quick Invoke uses Opt [more]

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact. Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill. Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.  ★

Matt Haughey: One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It’s a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight up Chevy. Even though the keys say Honda on a Prologue, it’s a General Motors key design with a Honda logo over it. But one big difference the Prologue has from the Blazer it is based on is this: it includes Apple CarPlay and An [more]

A handful of Temu-style knockoffs of games like Flappy Bird, Snake (that’s the one where you round up border-crossing migrants), and, most notably, Tetris (the one where you “build a wall” to keep border-crossing migrants out) — the copyright to which is held by the notoriously litigious The Tetris Company, which tweeted: At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you [more]

Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link): The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estimated $30 billion a year and can be very challenging to manage. Apple’s app marketplace is loved by many consumers, but often criticized by developers and subjected to increasingly onerous regulations. It was a busy, all-encompass [more]

How does this even happen? Who is this for? What possible purpose could by served by injecting a “We value your privacy” dickover into an RSS feed via iframes in the entry bodies?  ★

In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame): But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who recently returned to X. So I made Litterbox, a Safari extension that opens x.com links in a popup. The idea is you open it, take a look, gag a little, then close the lid. [...] Litterbox doesn’t send your cookies when you open those [more]

Gloria Steinem, in a posthumous essay for The New Yorker: For me, saying that I am a feminist has always meant that I believe in the social, economic, and political equality of all males and females of all races and groups. I know this sounds too simple to need a word, but equality is still the exception, not the rule. Maybe we should call it egalitarianism, or even humanism. The problem with humanism is that it is often interpreted as being anti-religion, so I don’t think it’s inclusive enough. [more]

Marco Arment: And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything. The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends.  ★

Annie Palmer, CNBC: Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company said. He will also join Adobe’s board. I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great [more]

Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link): The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules to help funnel millions to Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and are being fined $30 million, the league announced. Ballmer has been suspended for one year, the [more]

I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes: This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes. One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.  ★

Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.) Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the [more]

Read to the end for all the bass

Marcin Wichary, writing at Unsung, regarding a rather subtly astonishing FAQ for the game Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s by “rs1n”. It’s over 17,000 words long, and the whole thing is full-justified when viewed with a monospaced font, using no trickery with extra spaces or hyphenation to achieve the layout: The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom: What program did you use to justify the text? None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand si [more]

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. The service, dubbed Nexus, claims [more]

Simon Willison: GPT-6 Astra is “rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS” — I’ve not tried it yet myself, so I don’t have a great deal to say about it yet. It’s going to be API priced at the same rate as Claude Fable 5 and 5.1: $10/million input and $50/million output. This is clearly OpenAI’s Fable competitor, and appears to score higher t [more]

A third loss in antitrust court leads to ... very little. PLUS: GPT-6 Astra and 'the AGI era'

My move is coming down to the wire (omg so many things to juggle!), kids are heading back to school, I’m going to be traveling, and it’s a holiday weekend here in the States, so there’s probably not going to be too much going on here until next week. Thanks for your patience…I can’t wait to get back to work here. In the meantime, I thought I’d open up this thread for folks to share what they feel like sharing. I’ll go first below… Tags: kottke.org · open threads

Mark Gurman: Apple Inc.’s Phil Schiller, one of the most visible and influential executives across both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, has stepped down from his role leading the App Store and product events. The 66-year-old executive, who was Apple’s senior vice president of marketing until leaving that job in 2020, made the latest change in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the matter. This is true, I’ve confirmed. Seems natural for this to coincide with the CEO transition. [more]

Finya Swai, reporting for The Hill two days ago: MapQuest has surged in popularity on the app charts after the mapping service said it would not rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after President Trump signed an executive order changing its name. The company said its mobile app received hundreds of thousands of downloads after it announced Thursday that the name Lake Ontario would remain on its apps, despite Trump directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the Geographic N [more]

Writer, journalist, and feminist activist Gloria Steinem has died. She was 92.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: “iPhone Handoff” can be set up from the Settings app, under the Cellular menu. During the setup process, you can choose which iPhone you want to be the main device that you use most often and which one you want to be the companion device. Apple says a user’s main eSIM will remain on the main iPhone, while the companion iPhone will receive a companion eSIM, and this will enable you to switch between the devices back and forth while using the same phone number. All cellul [more]

Read to the end for a good RFK roundup

Jamelle Bouie: The details of what is happening here are important — that’s why I laid them out — but it’s also important to step back and make a more fundamental point: the president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself. And this is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the Ameri [more]

Gina Trapani: The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer. I’ve always been a little 3D printer-curious and this looks like a good resource to start with.

2 Odysseus 2 Ithaca: Emily Wilson is completely retranslating The Odyssey. “It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version.” This is the exact opposite of resting on one’s laurels.

Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail. “The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”

Tim Cook: There is something truly special about Apple. I am most proud of what an annual report could never capture. This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it. That purpose is part of what makes this place extraordinary. Apple helps nurture it, but I believe it lived within each of you long before you arrived here. It is what brou [more]

The thing about me is if I see a making-of video for pencils, I’m gonna stop and watch it and then post it to my website, especially if said pencils are Blackwings, made in Japan. Take a first-ever, in-depth look at the Blackwing pencil manufacturing process. This short film gives a glimpse into its manufacturing facilities in Japan and California. Beginning in Kofu, Japan, the film details the intricate graphite formulation and cutting process, then transitions to the woodworking facility in To [more]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: In today’s filing, Apple says that Liu’s lawyers recently handed over his MacBook that he used after leaving Apple. According to Apple, an “initial forensic analysis” of that MacBook revealed four things, quoted from Apple’s filing: Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI; Far from his unauthorized access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well-awa [more]

Industry Standard Tools. “Every trade has a small number of items so entrenched that they’ve become the de facto tool that nearly everyone in that trade uses.”

This is a fun read: If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Sperm Racing World Cup. “The cells then race through courses less than a half-centimeter long that are etched into microfluidic silicon chips.”

Nationally, unsubsidized ACA premiums to jump *another* ~15% next year. We can’t continue like this (but I feel like this has been the case for the last ~10 years and will in fact likely continue…)

Here’s how noise-cancelling headphones work (and when they don’t). “This is why ANC is better suited for reducing low, sustained sounds like those of motors and airplane engines, and it’s why such headphones can’t filter out screaming kids.”

Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact. Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill. Learn how it works →  ★

The AI industry is begging for a slowdown. Maybe we should listen?

read to the end for New York Sora

Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America. Totally pathetic and stupid. Maps are wayfinding tools and this toadying political change will help no one find their way.

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner inspired by paper day planners. I wrote quite a bit about Finalist when it first sponsored DF back in December — you should read that post. I’ve been using Finalist ever since. It’s a really good app. I’ll just reiterate from the first post that what really resonates for me is the idea of adding tasks [more]

Ahhh, relax with the sights and sounds of the Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator.

Voting is now open for the 2026 Tiny Awards, featuring 10 sites that celebrate “the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web”. You have until Sept 25 to vote.

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors, has an exemplary review of the experience: I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person. Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach — an [more]

Heat waves are disproportionately harming people with schizophrenia. “The bodies of people with schizophrenia, especially those on medication, simply regulate temperature very differently than others do.”

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Here are the full details on the price increases: Apple TV (monthly): $14.99 (up from $12.99) Apple TV (annual): $119 (up from $99) Apple One Individual: $21.95 (up from $19.95) Prices for other Apple One plans are unchanged. When Apple increased the price of Apple Music last month, it also raised the Apple One Family and Apple One Premier plans, but not the Individual plan. The higher prices go into effect today for new subscribers. Apple says existing subscribers will b [more]

Jack Loftus, writing at McSweeney’s: People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders an [more]

I think at least half a dozen people have sent me a link to this video and now that I’ve watched it, I understand why. Perfect.  ★

I mentioned earlier that for anyone going along with the ruse that Lake Ontario is now named Lake America, the HOMES mnemonic no longer holds, the only two valid words in English with the new five letters are hames and shame, and that hames is rather too obscure. But it’s not so obscure in Ireland, where they use it in an idiom: to make a hames of something is to make a mess of it. With that in mind, it’s hard to say which is more apt for this embarrassment, hames or shame. (The other longstandi [more]

Read to the end for a very good dog video

Matt Walsh, described by Wikipedia as “an American far-right political commentator and podcast host” (a description that sounds harsh, but I’d say is describing him euphemistically), on Twitter/X (retweeting the official White House account’s announcement of the name change): This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There [more]

Yours truly back in February 2025: The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. I’m starting to worry how well that’s going to hold up. And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the Uni [more]

Jackie Llanos and Jenna Monnin, reporting for NOTUS: President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order meant to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” taking his apparent jab at Canada one step further as a trade war between the two countries escalates. The president said the name change was “effective immediately” during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the Geographic Names Information Service to reflect the name [more]

Jack Queen, Reuters: A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic, ​the latest turn in the Claude maker’s high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic’s lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabo [more]

Clara Shih on how AI will soon displace the first few rungs on the career ladder — and why she left Big Tech to do something about it

Jeff Halter has done it again: after bringing back the single greatest After Dark module (Ben Haller’s Lunatic Fringe game, via a modern runtime named Lunacy), he’s now released Afterglow: Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow. Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark mod [more]

Fun (but depressing?) data analysis project from Louis Abraham, showing how repetitive Claude is in the words it chooses when submitting GitHub pull requests. Abraham, in the project’s readme: GitHub pull request descriptions, grouped by the words they are written with rather than by anything they were told to look for: eight ways of writing, and every description belongs to one of them. One of the eight was 1.0% of the corpus at the start of 2025 and is 45% of it by the middle of 2026. If you w [more]

Speaking of tariff refunds, here’s an official statement from Senator Elizabeth Warren from a few weeks ago: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Target, Apple, Amazon, Nike, Motorola, Walmart, and Energizer pushing these companies — each of which have or are expected to receive massive rebates from the Trump Administration for tariffs paid last year — to provide refunds to customers. “I urge you to pass along any refund you may receive to the consumers who paid higher prices for you [more]

Nicole Carpenter and Diego Argüello, reporting for Game Developer: “There was a specific window of time this year where we charged tariffs to customers,” Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser explained in an e-mail to Game Developer confirming the news. “We tried absorbing the cost for a while, but that was financially difficult for a small company like ours. We made the tariff a very obvious and clearly labeled line item on checkout for any customer affected.” Panic also set up a website to explain the [more]

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac that the ads rollout in Maps began in the last few days. And it will continue ramping in the weeks ahead to all users. There are two places you’ll find ads in the Maps app: Before searching: Suggested Places in the search screen will feature an ad. After searching: Ads will appear in search results when relevant. Before searching, I saw an ad for an HVAC contractor 12 miles away in “Suggested Places”. Knock on wood but I currently have no HVA [more]

Alain Pannetrat, founder of Lectronz: Lectronz is a marketplace for open-source hardware makers and DIY electronics. Most of our sellers are not factories or well-funded start-ups. They are engineers, independent designers, and hardware enthusiasts working from spare rooms, garages, and tiny workshops. Some earn a living from their products. Some sell only a handful of boards each year. Others build ten units simply because they created something useful and want to share it with the community. O [more]

Ok, we’re gonna go a little old school today. I’m talking the late 1990s and early 2000s, back before permalinks (sorry), RSS, and social media turned blog posts & tweets into their own little discrete units packaged to be easily passed around and things were less homogeneous. Back then, blogs — at least the ones I loved — tended to be more of a stream of consciousness thing, just an unordered and uncurated list of whatever happened to pop into people’s heads or cross their screens. So, I’ve cur [more]

Will significant changes to Facebook and Instagram be enough to beat back a global wave of bans?

Wikipedia: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. It is used in systems theory, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can or should be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or un [more]

Read to the end for Dolly Parton’s “Stairway To Heaven”

On the fifth episode of her late 80s variety show Dolly, Dolly Parton was joined by Kermit the Frog for a lovely rendition of Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 hit Everyday People. You can also watch the clip on Instagram and Reddit. The full episode, which features special guest stars Delta Burke, Terence Trent D’Arby, and the Oak Ridge Boys (in addition to Jim Henson as Kermit), can be seen on YouTube (not very good quality unfortunately). Tags: Dolly Parton · music · The [more]

In lieu of flowers, Dolly Parton’s family is asking for donations to her Imagination Library, which has distributed over 330 million books to kids.

RIP Dolly Parton, a gem and a hero. She died today at the age of 80.

“Ultimately there are people who want to live, not in a world of reconciliation, but in a world without repercussions.”

“At least 1-in-4 of all the people who have played in the NFL might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy [CTE], according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.”

More Fucked Today than Yesterday. “I keep wanting to write a post showing off my latest graphics along with the latest data and forecasts, because the picture they paint is one of a truly fucked planet.”

Apple today announced an all new lineup of Mac Mini (M6 and M5 Pro) and Mac Studio (M5 Max and M5 Ultra) desktops. The Apple Newsroom announcements for Mac Mini and Mac Studio only note base model prices. Here’s my attempt to put all of the RAM/SSD configurations into condensed tables, so you can see which storage and memory options are available for each chip, and how much they cost. Mac Mini M6 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU: $900 RAM: 16 GB $0 24 GB $200 32 GB $400 [more]

Flock banned Benn Jordan from their recent convention (they even emailed his hotel to cancel his room) but, taking a page from law enforcement & Flock itself, he electronically surveilled the whole thing from outside, sniffing Wifi, Bluetooth, mics, etc.

Target’s now-pulled children’s Halloween costume is so unbelievably racist that it had to, on some level, be purposely done by someone in the decision chain and everyone else was like, “seems ok to me”.

Wesley Hilliard, reporting for AppleInsider last week: A report from Irish Independent detailed the European Commission’s response to Apple’s new business terms for the EU. They share that they welcome the changes and will monitor Apple’s implementation of the terms. Here is the EC’s full statement: “The Commission welcomes Apple’s changes to their business terms, which follow a close dialogue between the Commission and Apple after the Commission issued a non-compliance decision related to Apple [more]

Read to the end for a pretty good TikTok

Homing pigeons may sense the Earth’s magnetic field using superparamagnetic macrophages in their livers. So metal! 🤘

Just quickly reupping this post to remind you things might be slower than usual around here for the next few weeks…moving crunch time is here. (I’ll still be posting though…it’s nice to sit down and flow state through some links occasionally.)

Meat proxy (noun): “A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.”

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? “Any stream, from the littlest brook to the mightiest river, has a length that’s proportional to its drainage area raised to the power of 0.6.”

Opinion columnist Karen Attiah won her arbitration against the Washington Post. They are ordered to reinstate her and pay full back pay. The Post fired her almost a year ago for her remarks in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Jodi Ettenberg on living grief and a serendipitous discovery. “Living grief lacks the tapestry of rituals, language, and social permissions around grieving that a person is offered with death.”

Walking the Length of Manhattan. I did this, solo, right before I moved out of NYC. Loved it. Will do it again someday.

“When Jason Ganos was asked to help sell an old box full of NES cartridges…” How 97 Copies of an Unreleased Version of Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt Were Discovered in a Wisconsin Warehouse.

Read to the end for the Tumblrpillar

What a great idea for a book: Cookbooking: A Fan’s Guide. “An eclectic, visually stunning pop-history, Cookbooking explores the most influential and beloved cookbooks through photographs, listicles, graphics, and snappy writing.”

Every CEO Dan Shipper on doubling headcount while automating everything, building an agent out of 30,000 copyedits, and the “dirty secret” of writing with AI

“The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge,” says Jamelle Bouie. “Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government.”

Holy moly, NPR’s Tiny Desk has been going for a long time. Weird Al Yankovic first stopped by the desk in 2010, so early that they didn’t even have it on YouTube until more recently. And the other day, they had him back for a second session! Yankovic focused on originals the first time around, but for this show he brought parodies of Don McLean’s “American Pie” (“The Saga Begins,” from 1999’s Running with Scissors) and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” (“eBay,” from 2003’s Poodle Hat), as we [more]

Anil Dash built a standalone Touch ID sensor to use with your Mac if you don’t have a newer Apple keyboard. It’s open-source…the code and instructions are on Github.

Analysts Warn U.S. Economy Becoming Overly Dependent On Anne Hathaway. “We estimate that Anne Hathaway films currently account for a staggering 63% of all U.S. exports.” Zendaya is the other 37%.

When you take screenshots of posts in iOS social apps like Bluesky or Threads, they use this little trick to replace the “Follow” button with the app’s logo.

“All our neighbors worked for those firms — Facebook, Google and Apple. None of them would let their children interact with any screens. They all knew how addicting they were and how to protect their own children.”

Long past time to quit X. “Those who continue to post on X — in particular those X users who are not racist psychopaths — are enhancing the site’s usefulness to [Musk] as a propaganda tool by drawing more eyes to the platform… “

And everything else I learned about productivity this year

This is a wild story: The Scientist Who Lived with Dozens of Children from the Pacific Islands. “I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years.”

“Scientists have found that people are being exposed to more toxins than previously known, and beyond damaging lungs, wildfire smoke may affect hearts, brains and other organs.” (Research is preliminary & ongoing but sheesh…)

Portuguese photographer Rui Santos captured this shot of the recent solar eclipse. Stunning. Here’s what makes this shot look a little different from other eclipse photos; from APOD: Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizo [more]

How to make a good Star Wars movie for once. “Stop making stuff that’s so self referential and start focusing on projects that once again are bringing things from the outside and putting them in a Star Wars container.” Fan service is bad storytelling.

And also a trailer for season 2 of Star Wars: Ahsoka. Huh. Lots of Anakin, but where are the space whales?

Trailer for VisionQuest, the third leg of the Wanda/Vision/Agatha trilogy. Huh. “Ultron! Human avatars only!”

In Bourgogne, they’ve been recording grape date harvests since 1354. This year’s harvest set a record for earliest start: Aug 8. “From 1354 to 1987 the average start was 28 September. Since 1988 it runs 13 days earlier.”

Post-pandemic vaccination rates of US kindergarteners continue to fall and “nonmedical exemptions” based on “personal or religious beliefs” jumped 0.8% in just 1 year.

Whoa, Columbia House (12 cassettes for 1¢) is finally going out of business after 71 years and several pivots (records to reel-to-reel to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to VHS to DVDs to Blu-ray).

The area known as Tornado Alley continues to shift eastward (from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) due to “a warming climate that helps transport warmer and more-humid air farther north and east than in the past”.

“Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99% female sea turtles instead of the historical 50–50 ratio, creating a reproductive bottleneck that could collapse populations within two generations.”

A.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of Puzzling”, Will Shortz and came away with seven lessons he learned from him. “Creativity is usually more about evolution than revolution.”

Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab. “If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.” Lots of related links in this piece too.

We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.

For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best employ color. When you watch later Ozu films, you’re struck by how similar two people can be. How often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns. In the recent [more]

Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary series New York will soon air on PBS. “Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since Sept 11th.”

Yale study: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”

Read to the end for the Discord barreled shotgun

Tressie McMillan Cottom on AOC’s presumed presidential run. “But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down.”

Jean-Denis Greze on AI assistants, building a better corporate workspace, and avoiding "egg on face"

We haven’t done an open thread for awhile, so… What have you been working on? How are you feeling? What’s on your mind these days? What’s the best thing you’ve seen this week? Have you called a plumber to your home lately? Are you new here? Introduce yourself if you feel like it. Heck, if you’re a regular commenter, reintroduce yourself if you’d like. Tags: kottke.org · open threads

We were promised a transport revolution. Instead we got cars tracking us and serving us ads.

Read to the end for a good flight tracker

What Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands about powerful AI

Read to the end for 'Hereditary' The Musical

His criticisms are responding to industry hype, not the real harms of generative AI

Read to the end for a good cover

Amjad Masad on the "self-driving company," why a CEO is a glorified router, and what's left for humans when agents do the work

Six months after trying to automate myself, I gave Claude Fable 5 a bigger job: replacing Casey

Read to the end for someone who would appreciate some empathy right now

Plus, a recap of tech stories you missed in July 2026

Some platforms are turning against AI-generated content. Others are embracing it. What gives?

Read to the end for a good Instagram Reel

Read to the end for a good sociopolitical breakdown of various backyard animals

Granola CEO Chris Pedregal on invisible AI bots, the coming fight over who sees your transcripts, and why he turns down the companies that ask for them

Read to the end for a good comic

In the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack against Hugging Face, few seem ready to acknowledge the implications

Read to the end for "The Odyssey" in 70mm VapeMAX

Why does the media keep debasing itself for a man who despises them?

Read to the end for some real good 'Project Hail Mary' fanart

As more details emerge about OpenAI's cyberattack against Hugging Face, lawmakers are taking an interest. PLUS: Meta's cynical new ad + "pervert glasses" damage control

Read to the end for a good advertisement for high heels

Glaze's Thomas Paul Mann on disposable software, the SaaS apocalypse, and why half the software you use in a few years will be something you made. PLUS: OpenAI's rogue model, and the distillation debate

Read to the end for a good video about Boston

Read to the end for a cool butter recipe

The imperial project of Silicon Valley and the US government is out in the open. Countries need to reclaim their sovereignty.

16 books for you to consider bringing on your vacation

How apps like Uber make taxis seem unappealing

Preorder my new book about the growing cost of data centers

Plus, a recap of top stories you missed in June 2026

The many problems with Mark Carney’s AI strategy for Canadians

Experiments with an imperfect policy are delivering more thoughtful social media rules

Is it time to pull back for the endless stream of content?

A trip to Zambia (temporarily) gone awry

In its bid to push AI, it’s destroying its products and trying to kill the web too

And you're getting a free month!

PLUS: A rich and evocative Iraq War (?) rom-com

PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education

Roundup 05/03/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 04/27/2026

With Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, and John Ganz

Let’s pretend it’s January, because I’m ready and excited to present to you the #new chips, cookies, cereals, and assorted garbage I found in the wild during 2025!! Last year, we started a new (temporary?) Panic tradition — at the very end of our Monday status meeting, I run through all the new snacks I’d found […]

Roundup 04/20/2026

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

Roundup 04/14/2026

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

Roundup 04/06/2026

On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals

Roundup 03/29/2026

A Read Max re-run

Roundup 03/23/2026

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Roundup 03/17/2026 (Plus: a bonus book rec!)

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Roundup 03/09/2025

This post is about a found mural, a lost artist, and a conference talk. It’s the full story of Wes Cook and The McDonald’s Mural. Grab a beverage, sit back, relax, and thank you for joining me. Ten years after giving my first talk at XOXO, Andy (Baio) and Andy (McMillan) asked if I’d like […]

When I was kid, on a road trip with my family, we stopped in Vacaville, California. And there, drawing us off the freeway with a wooden glow, was a brand new roadside attraction: Wooz. The pitch? It was a maze. A big maze. Wooz stood for “Wild Original Object with Zoom” (!), opened in 1988, […]

Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with […]

Welcome to 2025. The vibes are a little heavy, so, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things I can control — and yes, that includes remembering to share things that delight me like the latest #new snacks and cereals I find at the grocery store!! Yeah. It’s an age-old, very-odd Cabel tradition. This time, […]