Before he died, David Lynch talked to Natasha Lyonne about AI. “Natasha, this is a pencil. Everyone has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. It’s how you use the pencil. You see?”
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Entries for July 2025
That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose. “Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers [can mean] many of the calls disconnect on their own.” 🤬
Editorial Template for Every Time the United States Goes to War. “President [GUY WHO HAS COMMITTED MULTIPLE WAR CRIMES], a [REPUBLICAN / DEMOCRAT], sidestepped his [COMPLICIT / COWARDLY / TOTALLY INEPT] Congress…”
“The plot of this movie aged extremely well.” A remake of The Running Man directed by Edgar Wright? Yes, please. Here’s the trailer.
Living Colour’s Tiny Desk Concert
Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.1 They still got it!
- I probably saw their performance on Arsenio as well, but the SNL set is the one that sticks in my brain.↩
Slice of Life
Slice of Life (trailer) is a feature-length documentary about the American Dream through the lens of former Pizza Huts that have been transformed into everything from bars to churches to candy stores to cannabis dispensaries. A woman who runs an LGBTQ+ church out of a former Pizza Hut says:
It’s the stained-glass windows that draw people and touch people, and I think really takes it out of the realm of a Pizza Hut. It’s the power of transformation. When things continue to transform, beauty can come from it, good things can come out of it.
You can rent or buy the film from their website.
I’ve written before about how Pizza Hut was a special place to visit when I was a kid:
Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut.
John Nichols remembers his colleague & friend, the legendary journalist Bill Moyers. “I can’t help but think that Bill Moyers was the best president we never had.”
“[Showing] people they are not alone in caring about an issue” is an important and overlooked function of protest. “Silence begets silence, which begets further misunderstanding about what a society actually collectively believes or wants.”
“When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”
ImillaSkate: The Cholita Skaters of Bolivia
ImillaSkate is a Bolivian female skate collective whose members dress in traditional cholita clothing. This is a great short documentary about the group, the challenges they face, and the change & joy they’re trying to bring to their communities.
Some people in my generation are embarrassed to wear a pollera [traditional skirt]. Because the pollera highlights your features. Your indigenous features. Highlight what we are as indigenous people, as the daughters of women of polleras. It’s a part of my family legacy. And without my family, I’m nobody. It’s about giving the pollera new meaning.
I wrote about ImillaSkate a few years ago as well. I poked around to see if they were raising funds for their activities (lessons, building a skatepark) because I wanted to contribue, but didn’t find anything — if anything pops up, I’ll let you know. You can follow their adventures on Instagram and via their website. (via @lizziearmanto)
Busting the Top 5 Myths About the Big Bang. “Even asking this question relies on a misconception: a misconception that the Big Bang was like an explosion. As we’ve just covered, the Universe didn’t explode; it simply expanded.”
The Internet Archive estimates the Wayback Machine will hit a lifetime total of 1 trillion archived web pages later this year in October.
Now that summer is in full swing, you might need this Comprehensive Guide to Yellow Stripey Things, so you can tell harmless bumblebees (you can pet them!) from “asshole” yellow jackets.
“He Painted Bugs Like Jewels”
In a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Evan Puschak made a video about 16th-century Dutch artist (and all-around polymath) Joris Hoefnagel, who painted some of the first dedicated and detailed images of insects in the world. His paintings were so accurate that if he’d lived 200 years later, you would have called him a naturalist.
I love how some of the caterpillars in the last image are crawling along the “frame” of the painting — that strikes me as a modern flourish.
From The Marvelous Details of Joris Hoefnagel’s Animal and Insect Studies:
These watercolors served as sources for a series of 52 prints engraved by Hoefnagel’s teenage son, Jacob. That series, Archetypes and Studies, offered the earliest printed images of dozens of species.
The relatively cheap prints enabled little beasts to multiply and crawl out into the world. They inspired a broader interest and study of nature which continues today.
Some of Hoefnagel’s insect images are on display at the NGA in the Little Beasts exhibition, which runs through Nov 2, 2025.
Trying to cut back on social media? The methaphone is a phone-shaped slab of clear acrylic that you can carry instead of your phone to “help you manage cravings and withdrawal symptoms”.
Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers. “We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”
“The Big, Beautiful Bill assigns each American a billionaire who will live the American dream for you. You can check in on your billionaire at intervals and see how he is using your money. Maybe he’s building a 19th pool…”
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