“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper: Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction. [more]

I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.

Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new [more]

A group of “unauthorized users” have accessed Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which the company recently said they couldn’t widely release because it was too dangerous. Whoopsie doodle! Maybe don’t use guessable paths for your powerful cyberattack model?

Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet fr [more]

Read to the end for a cool burger fact

The New York Times (gift link): A correction was made on April 21, 2026: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day. This is to New York Times corrections what “Headless Body in Topless Bar” was to New York Post headlines — perfection.  ★

Wow, this interview! “I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron.”

“In a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” [Israeli professor of Holocaust & genocide studies] Omer Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7th.”

Ben Thompson at Stratechery, “Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing”: Cook was, without question, an operational genius. Moreover, this was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s operations — centered on Apple’s own factories and warehouses — were a massive drag on the company; Cook methodically shut them down and shifted Apple’s manufacturing base to China, creating a just-in-time supply chain that year-after-year coordinated [more]

Lessons from a 1969 documentary on Nazi-occupied France on how fascism takes root. “A former undercover British agent recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it.”

A new short story from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc.) called Constellations about a mission that has crash-landed on a distant planet.

We thought this day would never come. But we kept the faith and now we can begin to reap the rewards: there is actually a trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie and the movie itself is actually coming out on Aug 28. Quick recap of the situation so far: Ian Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1990 about an imagined lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company. Fast forward to 2022-23: James Gunn, Dave Green, Will Forte, and others make a movie based on the NYer article…and th [more]

Well, here it is at last: the new Boards of Canada album is called Inferno and it will be released on May 28. Pre-order or pre-save the album.

Jamelle Bouie on the truly unprecedented open corruption of the Trump regime. I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.

Rec League is a new app for sharing what you’re into. Catalog recommendations into tidy collections: your guide to Rome, your open tabs, your bookshelf. Follow people whose perspectives you trust, and discover brilliant, unexpected intel. Recently featured as the “Best New App” in the App Store. One user calls it “the only social media I feel better after using.” Download now to share what you love.  ★

PLUS: Everyone has feelings about Tim Cook

Is the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years: a) The Silence of the Lambs, b) The Princess Bride, c) The Return of the King (LoTR), d) Apocalypse Now, or e) Jurassic Park?

A French corporation was recently found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. “The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime.”

This is an animal called the leaf sheep: It’s a species of slug that is partially solar-powered, like a plant. Leaf sheep are kleptoplastic organisms that steal chloroplasts from algae, store them in their bodies, and then can rely on photosynthesis for their energy needs: The Costasiella sea slug not only looks like a succulent—it acts like one, too. One of the few animals able to photosynthesize, this tiny invertebrate (also known as the leaf slug or leaf sheep) acquires chloroplasts by munch [more]

The president of the United States, on his blog this morning (all capitalization, punctuation, and missing/wrong words verbatim): I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young, and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as Pre [more]

Everyone Is Blaming AI for the Water Crisis. We’re Looking at the Wrong Culprit. “One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks.”

The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. “This clock displays the current time alphabetically.” Totally deranged…I love it.

Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade. One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia. If you’re not familiar wit [more]

As I watched the teaser trailer for season three of Silo, I discovered that I am very much looking forward to this new season. July 3, 2026. Tags: silo · trailers · TV · video

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 […]

Trials for a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine: “Nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive up to six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is around 13%…”

“NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life of Earth.” And: “We think we’re looking at organic matter that’s been preserved on Mars for 3.5bn years.”

It’s Getting Harder to Spot AI in Contemporary Publishing. And That’s Very, Very Bad. “The word salads that we might identify as AI today may not be the kind of machine-made writing that we will see tomorrow.”

ReciproCard: “Start by searching for your home library above to instantly see every free reciprocal agreement you qualify for.” Use this to have more options for Libby ebooks.

“The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.”

How tech CEOs use the threat of job loss to distract from how AI is really used against workers

It’s a profoundly different feeling today than the last time Apple’s CEO announced his transition to chairman of the board, and his chosen successor was promoted to replace him as CEO. In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more. Jobs wrote, in his letter to the company’s board and the Apple community: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my [more]

Tech companies hope a check in the mail will calm the AI backlash — but there are reasons for skepticism

Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.  ★

Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”: For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world. You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossibl [more]

Apple Newsroom, with a veritable “boom”: Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process. Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus [more]

Read to the end for a really good Instagram video

Apple Newsroom: In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today, Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 remain down over 60 percent compared to 2015 levels, holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant business growth. The report highlights additional progress in renewable energy, materials innovation and recycling, water stewa [more]

Roundup 04/20/2026

Marc Malkin, Variety: Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her political thriller series “The Savant.” [...] “Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica. As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release. Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.  ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius. The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions, and read their deep dive for more.  ★

Vittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas): The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by [more]

Nicole Nguyen, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Mac Minis with larger-capacity RAM chips — a base M4 model with 32GB of RAM, starting at $999, and the M4 Pro models with 64GB of RAM, starting at $1,999 — are “currently unavailable” on Apple.com. And estimated shipping wait times for any other Mini model start at about a month, and in some cases is up to 12 weeks. (This Mini scarcity extends to other retailers as well.) The more powerful Mac Studio makes up an even smaller share o [more]

Apple Design: Avoid pestering people. Repeated rating requests can be irritating, and may even negatively influence people’s opinion of your app. Consider allowing at least a week or two between requests, prompting again after people demonstrate additional engagement with your experience. Prefer the system-provided prompt. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer a consistent, nonintrusive way for apps and games to request ratings and reviews. When you identify places in your experience where it makes sense [more]

I wrote yesterday: And the apps that do the right thing — like Godier’s Current — and never solicit a review like a needy hustler are penalized. On Mastodon, Steven Troughton-Smith responded: Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of revie [more]

Nancy Friedman notes the decline in quality in movie taglines. “As movies have become louder, flashier, and more expensive, their taglines have atrophied: they’re limp, lackluster, and uninspiring.”

The 16th season of the Dissect podcast is a deep dive into Daft Punk; here’s the 1st episode.

The Bodega Cats of New York project documents the working cats of NYC’s delis, bodegas, and corner stores. The cat at the local deli wasn’t a pet. She knew the regulars. She kept the mice out. She gave people a reason to walk an extra block. And she was technically a violation of city health code. That was six years ago. Since then, the project has documented over 150 shops, collected 13,500 petition signatures, and helped introduce the first legislation in New York City history to classify bode [more]

A few years back, the Mini Cooper’s taillights were designed to look like the Union Jack flag, which is fine until you turn the blinker on and it looks like an arrow pointing in the wrong direction. I hated this design the moment I saw it on the road.

Read to the end for a good post about space travel

Oh my gosh, look at these tiny snow leopard cubs from the Melbourne Zoo. 🥹

PLUS: Has Forum Brain crossed the gender divide?

The Astronomy Picture of the Day, in which the International Space Station looks like it’s landing on the Moon.

I’d vaguely heard of Project Plowshare but good god, what a ridiculous and dangerous waste of time and money. At the height of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were seen not only as devices of destruction, but also as tools for progress. Project Plowshare was a bold attempt to use atomic explosions for more practical purposes: from digging canals and creating harbors to reshaping entire landscapes. This project was designed to push the limits of what seemed possible, but instead turned into an envi [more]

“Here are some things that have been found in donation bins: A live puppy. Live Japanese grenades. An 1854 tombstone for Rebecca Jane Nye. Old skulls. A stolen Frederic Remington sculpture. Customized Air Jordans made for Spike Lee.”

Historian Eric Cline, author of 1177 BC, explains how the collapse of several civilizations circa 1200 BC was the result of an “overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once”.

This is a map published in 1927 by Paramount Studios showing the areas of California & Nevada that doubled as shooting locations for far-flung locales, including Siberia, Wales, the Nile, New England, the Red Sea, and the Alps. Tags: Hollywood · maps · movies

Terry Godier: For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review. [...] You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly no [more]

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: If you’ve been on TikTok this year, you’ve more than likely encountered ads for Freecash. The app has been marketed as a way to make money just by scrolling TikTok — and jumped to the top of the app stores in recent months, peaking at the No. 2 position in the U.S. App Store. In truth, Freecash pays users to play mobile games — all the while collecting a heaping amount of sensitive data, according to cybersecurity company Malwarebytes. [...] On Monday, after [more]

New research confirms that LLMs often perform better when you encourage them. But why?

Anton Troianovski, reporting for The New York Times under the headline “Trump’s Portrayal of the War in Iran Collides With Reality”: President Trump is trying to cast his Iran war as all but over, a done-and-dusted success. But after years of trying to impose his own reality on the world, he has now run into a crisis that is not bending to his narrative. On the one hand, I’m loath to complain about the Times finally stating the obvious and treating Trump like they would any other official. Same [more]

The Associated Press Stylebook, on Threads: We updated our style for telephone numbers in 2024 to drop parentheses. We now recommend the form: 212-621-1500. For international numbers use 011 (from the United States), the country code, the city code and the telephone number: 011-44-20-7535-1515. Use hyphens, not periods. No parentheses. The form for toll-free numbers: 800-111-1000. If extension numbers are needed, use a comma to separate the main number from the extension: 212-621-1500, Ext. 2. I [more]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: The change began rolling out a few weeks ago, and user frustration is mounting. On Reddit, there’s a growing thread of Netflix subscribers saying they are canceling their subscription because of this change to the Apple TV app. [...] The change also means you lose access to full payback controls using the Apple TV Remote app on your iPhone. You can’t enable Enhance Dialogue from the video player. That clever Apple TV feature that automatically enables subtitles when you r [more]

Juli Clover, MacRumors: The process requires the victim to have Express Transit Mode enabled for payments, and a Visa card linked for those payments, among other steps. As it turns out, it’s a Visa-related security loophole rather than an iPhone issue, and it doesn’t work with a Mastercard or an American Express card because other cards use different security methods. It also doesn’t work with Samsung Pay on Samsung devices, and it requires the specific combination of a Visa card and an iPhone. [more]

Researchers have found that some aspects of sperm whales’ communication are “remarkably similar” to human languages.

What Was the Very First Plant in the World? “Scientists believe the first true plants evolved from green algae around 470 million years ago.”

This is so cool: in the early 1900s, a mechanical engineer named Louis Brennan invented a self-balancing train that ran on a single track. This video demonstrates how the train worked using a clever system of gyroscopes. This is the Brennan Monorail, a train from the early 1900s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input. It’s kind of incredible how well Brennan’s sy [more]

One more thought re: the item I posted this week speculating on what Apple will name their much-rumored two-screen folding iPhone this year. If they do name it “iPhone Ultra”, I think Apple using that name for the folding iPhone will imply that they have no plans whatsoever to ever make a “rugged” iPhone — a model akin to Apple Watch Ultra. I suspect Apple has no plans for a dedicated rugged iPhone. People who want that just buy extra-thick cases for regular iPhones. A watch is different. I know [more]

Feature story and short film, well worth watching, from Apple: One winter day in January 2024, 16‑year‑old Rory Goss experienced something jarring while in construction class at Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, Northern Ireland. He could no longer see the whiteboard at the front of the room. As a straight‑A student in 11th grade, Rory was in the midst of studying for his A‑levels and was about to start applying to university. Passionate about golf and cars, and eager to start d [more]

I mentioned this book in a previous post but it deserves its own thing: Timothy Ryback’s 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy will hit shelves in September. A must-read for me.

As part of his Real Time series, artist Maarten Baas has created The People’s Clock, a timepiece that lives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. To create the clock’s “workings”, Baas recorded more than 1000 volunteers moving as the clock’s hands over a 12-hour period. If you look carefully, you can see a single individual dressed in orange at the edge of the circle acting as the second hand: Each of the installed clock’s faces is a looped video of that recording, synced to the current time. Here’s [more]

The Great American GLP-1 Experiment. In the last few years, people have come up with all sorts of off-label uses for GLP-1s, including treating concussions, menopause, long Covid, IBS, drug addiction, anxiety, hair loss, and arthritis.

David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang): Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app. P [more]

Shawn Hickman: A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part. Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers throughout the app so you can see where you stand at a glance. Your home screen shows what’s next with one-tap checkboxes to keep things moving. Five ways to track, depending on what fits: just enjoy with zero setup, tap to log, co [more]

A rare event to capture on video: an underwater volcanic eruption in the Solomon Islands.

From a few weeks ago: Bush’s Tiny Desk Concert. Machinehead and Glycerine still hit.

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs: When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say. This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion [more]

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. “From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product. That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.”

Read to the end for a great Bluesky post

Two Japanese aquariums have released their 2026 flowcharts of their penguins’ relationships. “Penguin drama can include serious crushes and heartbreaks but also adultery and egg-stealing.”

I love these oversized prints of vintage Pan-Am luggage tags from artist Ella Freire. The typography and colors are just perfect. (via daringfireball) Tags: art · design · Ella Freire · travel

Fun trompe-l’œil graph paper drawings.

Don’t Just Replace Chavez — Rethink Monuments. “A memorial based on the great-man theory of history is a tale only half told.” And: “There are elegant ways to pay tribute to groups of people.”

I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today). The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well. Tags: books · Margaret Atwood · movies [more]

David Pierce, writing at The Verge (gift link): The Pixel 10 Pro solidified a feeling I’d been having through all of my tests: Android is a better operating system than iOS. [...] If all you got from your phone was the out-of-the-box experience, I’d have picked the Pixel. But unfortunately for Android, app stores exist. And the App Store absolutely wipes the floor with the Play Store. Lots of the apps I use every day — apps like Puzzmo, NotePlan, Mimestream, and Unread — either don’t exist on An [more]

Listen to the NYC Subway play some Train Jazz. “Every dot is a real subway train. Eight hundred of them, give or take, form a small jazz combo (walking bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes) that has been playing without pause for over a hundred years.”

The Engineer Guy Bill Hammack has written a book based on his great YouTube channel: The Things We Make: The Unknown History of Invention from Cathedrals to Soda Cans.

Steven Troughton-Smith: If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’). These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which gives you large magnifier glass window to drag around the screen) to Full Screen Zoom, which is more lik [more]

I reported last week that signs of activity have been detected from Boards of Canada in the form of mysterious VHS tapes sent out to fans. Yesterday, the group’s record label posted a bunch of photos of posters hung up in cities around the world (NYC, Tokyo, LA) that match BoC’s style. First new album since 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest? Let’s hope so! Tags: Boards of Canada · music

Molly White, at Web3 Is Going Just Great: After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5 million dollars to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained. One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my [more]

Tim Hardwick, last week at MacRumors: Apple’s first foldable iPhone may not carry the speculative media-derived “Fold” branding after all, according to Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station. In a new post on Weibo, the oft-accurate leaker claimed that Apple’s book-style foldable could launch as the “iPhone Ultra.” Meanwhile, domestic Chinese manufacturers are allegedly deciding whether to follow Apple’s lead by tentatively branding their own upcoming foldables as “Ultra” models, but likely with a [more]

If Every Congressman Facing Credible Rape Allegations Resigned, We’d Have No One Left to Govern the Country. “It’s naïve to imagine the government can continue to function without the tireless dedication of our best and brightest rapists.”

The Houston Chronicle: Kristin Tips, the longtime presiding officer of the embattled Texas Funeral Service Commission, is no longer on the board. “Governor Abbott appreciates Kristin Tips’ service,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, said in an email Tuesday. “An announcement on a replacement will be made at a later date.” [...] Tips, who has run San Antonio’s prestigious Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries & Crematories with her husband, Dick Tips, was appointed to the board by th [more]

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac: On the iPhone and iPad, Apple made the new Creator Studio features available as updates to the existing App Store releases. On the Mac though, the rollout was a lot more confusing. Apple kept the old iWork apps for Mac available on the App Store and launched entirely separate iWork versions with the Creator Studio features. Starting today, though, that oddity is no more. Per Aaron Perris, Apple has officially removed the old Pages, Keynote, and Numbers apps from the Ap [more]

You know who else wanted to construct gaudy buildings in his own image? Here’s Timothy Ryback on Adolf Hitler’s obsession “with adding an expensive new wing to the Reich chancellery”. The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted [more]

Google, on their Search Central Blog: Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions. What is back button hijacking? Why are we taking action? Good for Google to penalize sites playing such dirty tricks, but, if they believe the user experience comes first, why are they only addressing this now in 2026? Here’s a Redd [more]

This looks interesting: Quiche is a highly customizable but simple browser for iOS.

Amazon: Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via [more]

Speaking of John Calhoun, he chimed in on a Hacker News thread last month regarding his experience working with Steve Lemay at Apple: I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view — even when we argued. When Jobs came back to Apple in the latter 1990’s “Design” slowly came to have an outsized role. I was one half of the engineering team that owned Preview (the application) whe [more]

“The internet known within China is a very different internet to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling.”

For decades, a guy named Aadam Jacobs has been recording live music shows. His collection of over 10,000 shows since 1984 feature the likes of Nirvana, R.E.M., The Pixies, Björk, Depeche Mode, Liz Phair, Sonic Youth, The Cure, Phish, Fugazi, and so many more. With the help of archivists, the entire collection is making its way onto The Internet Archive. The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s [more]

On the network effect of the weekend: “The essential characteristic of the weekend is not just the having of a day off, but rather that other people have the day off.”

A brand designer’s “compendium of transit tickets” from around the world. Many of these are from the 90s and 00s. Design inspiration for daaaaays. (via meanwhile) Tags: design

Richard Moss, back in 2010: John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and about Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later versions. I caught up with Calhoun over email recently, and quizzed him on the origins and development of the series. This is the first part of that inter [more]

The Death of the Basic American Car. “Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income.”

An AI bot created by Andon Labs is running its own retail store in San Francisco. The bot has hired a pair of human employees and “has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras”.

Roundup 04/14/2026

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog): I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store. (Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Thanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on. 11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you consider that Calhoun shipped the original Glider back in 1988, that puts things in perspective. If [more]

OpenAI’s CEO is asking the public to lower the temperature on AI. But who turned it up in the first place?

The Playlist: The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.” [...] That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi, stripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but not a replacement for them. “[It [more]

Federico Viticci: Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, updated to support all the latest Apple devices, and designed to support even more personalization options. For the first time ever, Apple Frames supports multiple colors for each device, allowing you to mix and match different colored [more]

Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a [more]

Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius. The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions. Read the deep dive →  ★

Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon: We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are. Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows. Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.  ★

Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago: John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today. He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for several other Mac site [more]

Read to the end for a really good flowchart

I’d never before heard of this museum, but now that I’ve seen Wichary’s photos, I want to go. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his shots are details of vintage keyboards. I keep pausing on this one, a “RE-START” key with the word broken across two lines. It’s clearly wrong but somehow feels right. I’m linking to his album at Flickr, but he posted a long thread of images to Mastodon too.  ★

For The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz go deep profiling Sam Altman under the mince-no-words headline “Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted?” 16,000+ words — roughly one-third the length of The Great Gatsby — very specifically investigating Altman’s trustworthiness, particularly the details surrounding his still-hard-to-believe ouster by the OpenAI board in late 2023, only to return within a week and purge the board. The piece is long, yes, but very much worth your [more]

Read to the end for a very good Facebook page

Nine months after an expensive overhaul, the company says it's back in the AI race — but the race keeps getting faster

Sam Altman wants intelligence to be a utility that you pay him for

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

The company says it has built its most dangerous model yet. Can its coalition of internet companies fix the internet before others catch up?

OpenAI, one week ago, in an unbylined post on the company blog: Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion. For comparison, here are the current market caps and 2025 annual profits for public companies in that valuation range: .table-6BC6F0DB-597A-48A9-8793-B6C02805510C th:nth-child(1) { text-align: left } .table-6BC6F0DB-597A-48A9-8793-B6C02805510C td:nth-child(1) { text-align: left } .table-6BC6F0DB-597A-48A9-879 [more]

Video of our conversation from Night of IDeas

11 books to get your brain moving through the spring

A strange purchase, executive reshuffling and a New Yorker investigation are raising questions ahead of an IPO

Read to the end for ghoulmaxxing

Roundup 04/06/2026

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

Read to the end for a good Tumblr post

Shifting priorities and budget pressures could bring an end to the company’s experiment in independent governance, sources say

Pogue was my guest on The Talk Show a few weeks ago to talk about his new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, and the show was a lot of fun. But the book is so good, so comprehensive, so fun that it feels essential to link to it whilst we celebrate Apple’s 50th year. I’m a print guy, generally, but the print edition of this book is especially good — it’s a gorgeous book printed in full color throughout (not just, say, 16 color pages in the middle). Apple’s history is both literally and figuratively [more]

Read to the end for a very good Aprils Fools’ Day post

The verdicts in last week’s social media trials have alarmed open-internet advocates. But it’s possible to regulate platform design while also protecting speech

Meta’s CEO said he didn't want to be the speech police. Then he texted Elon Musk

Read to the end for a really good dinosaur thread

Roundup 03/29/2026

Read to the end for a very motivational TikTok video

A Read Max re-run

Read to the end for a truly incredible TikTok video

The company is taking new steps to stop AI impersonation — but across the internet, the problem continues to grow. PLUS: Anthropic in court, and Meta loses in New Mexico

PLUS: the White House's new AI agenda

There aren’t any good arguments left to stay on Elon Musk’s platform

Read to the end for a predynastic Egyptian terracotta bowl with human feet

Roundup 03/23/2026

Read to the end for The Peg

The company's new support chatbot is better than what came before — but still missing the one feature that millions are clamoring for

A recording of our livestream for paying subscribers

Here's a good post about Daylight Saving Time

Do Sam Altman and Fidji Simo have an alignment problem?

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

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg called privacy the future of social networking. Not anymore

Read to the end for a game that will absolutely give you a headache

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Read to the end for some Flash games

Read to the end to find out why

Read to the end for Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review

Roundup 03/09/2025

Greetings from Read Max HQ!

Roundup 03/02/2026

Trying to make sense of the conjuncture

It's READER SURVEY time

OpenAI CEO downgrades humanity in pursuit of goal to merge with computers

Roundup 02/23/2026

Talking A.I. and politics with John Ganz?

Roundup 02/18/2025

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 […]

We need comprehensive rules on social media far more than age limits

Canada needs real digital sovereignty, not our own digital colonizers

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, […]

13 books to keep you thinking through the winter

Regulators need to stop cowering before the richest man in the world

Donald Trump’s “attack on sovereignty” in Venezuela has terrible consequences for the world

Getting off US tech led me to a wider questioning of digital convenience

It would be the next step in the degradation of culture to serve commercial ends

Maybe your grandma doesn’t need that Alexa smart speaker

Governments are deluding themselves into believing investment justifies allowing AI to upend society

9 books to consider for the rest of the year

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, […]