Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a few hours after posting this), you might need to sign up again. Sorry for the inconvenience — my email account got flagged and I needed to rectify this pronto. 🙏
For the rest of yous: you’re doing great, stay the course. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter and you like reading things in your inbox for some reason, you can subscribe as well. The newsletter goes out twice a week and includes links to everything I post here. Thanks.
A thoughtful review of Nolan’s The Odyssey, comparing it to the original Planet of the Apes movies. “I was very influenced by seeing The Planet of the Apes when I was a kid. We had the Statue of Liberty half destroyed. That idea of a fallen monument.”
I always learn so much from Evan Puschak’s videos about art. In this one, he takes a look at the work of Mary Cassatt, who, unlike many of her male peers, used the flattened perspective of Impressionism to reveal the thoughts and feelings of her subjects.
Like Manet, she’s dispensing with traditional modeling and perspective. In fact, her choice of a mirror as background is a brilliant way to literally and figuratively foreground the deceptive nature of perspective. Like Degas, she’s exploring the changing effects of artificial light on flesh and fabric. And she’s experimenting with off-kilter viewing angles.
But Cassat isn’t just adopting these techniques for the sake of it. She’s putting them to work in service of her deeper interest in psychology. She realizes that by not allowing the viewer to get drawn into the narrative space opened up by perspective, this new style of painting actually makes it possible to depict the subtle psychology of everyday life, a psychology uncontaminated by allegory or sentimentality. The trick was to combine the immediacy of Manet’s methods with a meticulous observation of posture, gesture, expression, and activity.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
3D models for every single object in Katamari Damacy, all 1680 of them. You can download models and animated gifs of each one.
Ross Anderson on NASA’s recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which may “be able to deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light” as well as measure the effects of dark energy.
Canyon Groove. What if the grooves on a record were shaped like actual canyons? What would that sound like? “The floor sets the key. The shape of the walls sets the mood. The width sets how long one pass takes, and the depth sets the echo.”
So that companies can use them to make accessories like cases and bands, Apple maintains a collection of downloadable dimensional drawings and tech specifications for many of their products, including the iPhone, AirPods, Watch, and iPad. They are beautiful.
I love their corner & edge measurements…you can see how fiddly Apple is with their curves. Curiously, the only Mac listed is the Macbook Neo. I guess that’s the only one that needs accessorizing?
Also, I presume if you’ve got a 3D printer, you could use these to make your own very precise accessories?
What’s your “origin” video game? “I’m talking about the game that flipped that little switch in your brain and made into a life-long gamer.” Mine is Lode Runner. Reflexes + puzzles + constraints + make-your-own levels = hooked for life. You?
TIL Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (aka The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was written in part to help save the cathedral from demolition.
“The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big AI needs to follow all current laws—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t. When Big AI breaks those laws, they must face prosecution and penalties—just like everyone else. So far—they haven’t.”
Ed Sheeran tried to stay neutral on a moving train. “If [celebrities] remain neutral (silent), they won’t offend anyone and they will, hopefully, appeal to everyone. They use the facade of neutrality as shelter, as a place to take refuge.”
Monopoly as a metaphor for racial inequity. “During the first half of the game, we said that Cas and I could buy property, but you could not, then halfway through the game, we say, ‘Now the rules are even. Now the rules are the same for everybody.’”
Relationships are key to human happiness. “The top five [determinants of subjective well-being], ranked in order of impact, were romantic and familial relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, and health.”
In the 70s, photographer Langdon Clay took photos of cars parked on NYC streets at night and compiled them into a project: Cars, New York City | 1974-1976.
Using his Leica CL, Kodachrome 25, and a 40 millimeter lens, Clay traversed the streets of 1970’s Manhattan finding automobiles that paralleled their environment. The cinematic images are a result of time exposure, sodium vapor street lights, and the tenacity of youth.
Luc Sante wrote about Clay’s car photographs for the New Yorker:
One of the things that used to make America so distinctive was its cars. If you lived there, you would really have to go abroad for a while and then come back to appreciate the difference. In most countries of the world, cars were modest things, little bean-shaped units designed to take two or three people from here to there. In America, cars were real estate. They were enormous boats in which you could eat, sleep, make love, change clothes, throw parties, maintain an office, practice unlicensed dentistry—or take your six best friends out for a spin. They were a testament to America’s unlimited natural resources: oil, steel, rubber, naugahyde, and, above all, space. American cars could be so huge because the nation’s highways were endless, its city streets were wide, and there was abundant free parking everywhere you went. And that included New York City then, since most of its population took the subway.
A 2016 book featuring these images is out of print, but you can find copies for several hundred dollars. (via atlas obscura)
The Film Experience is a free online course from MIT about movies & cinema. “This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers…”
The Film Experience | Literature | MIT OpenCourseWare · ocw.mit.edu
This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers and westerns, and European and Japanese art cinema. It explores the work of Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Hawks, Hitchcock, Altm
I didn’t know Beehiiv had a program to support independent journalists. Members get access to tools, a health insurance stipend, legal protection, and waived hosting fees. Oh, and they don’t proudly host Nazis like Substack. ✌️
Imagine playing chess against a seven-year-old who’s dancing around and barely paying attention to the board (bc it’s all in her head) and she just casually checkmates you like this. Oof.
Oh my goodness, I love the look of these cups.
They were made by Indonesian potter Nabila Nareswari using the nerikomi technique. From her about page:
Nerikomi is a technique in pottery that creates decorative patterns by stacking, rolling, and slicing colored clay. Patterns produced by it are structural rather than painted on, which allows the potter to make detailed images or complex repetitive patterns on both sides of the clay slabs.
Nareswari posts videos of her process on Instagram; it is painstaking.
Nerikomi takes a lot of patience and heart 🤍
I think Iris is the epitome of trusting a process. No other work of mine takes as much patience as these lovely mugs and cups do. There isn’t really a shortcut to having them done quicker, you just have to do one thing after another, after another, and before you know it, it’s there in your hands! Albeit two months later😜
She has a shop but all of her Iris collection is currently sold out.
“Starring Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston, and Willem Dafoe, Tenzing follows the true story of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s historic first summit of Mount Everest. History remembers the summit, but not always the man who made it possible.”
I believe I have featured login.jp_ here before — they pair electronic music with different locations around Japan to highlight the Japanese experience. For their latest video, they had English DJ & producer Bonobo play some downtempo ambient electronica in a Shinjuku dyeing workshop.
Standing on a street corner in the middle of Shinjuku, Fujiya Senkobo has preserved one of these techniques, known as hikizome or brush dyeing, for over 70 years. Dyeing is a traditional local industry in Shinjuku dating back to the Taisho period, and about 40 dyeing workshops still exist in Shinjuku Ward today. Composing patterns in his mind and dyeing extended fabrics with a brush, Takatoshi Nakamura, the third generation owner, states that staying sharp and maintaining perfect physical health are essential in hikizome, where mistakes are simply not permitted.
This story, about a dressage trainer who shot his female student and got away with it, is completely bonkers. “Largely through the medium of Facebook, Kanarek had driven Barisone mad.”
I am stunned that we are still finding new species of cat in 2026. “The analysis revealed that the sanctuary cat belonged to a previously unrecognized species whose lineage split from its relatives about 1.4 million years ago.”
Cole Escola’s Broadway smash Oh, Mary! is coming to HBO in 2027. Excited for this…I’ve never seen the play.
Amazing piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones about the betrayal her child felt at her school choice. “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
New novel from Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven): Exit Party. “Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted.”
Wes Anderson steps into the mobile Criterion Closet to select some films that he enjoys.
One unsurprising thing about this video: Anderson says he has his own Criterion closet at home with all of the Criterion films. That’s maybe a $40-50K investment? (He probably gets them free from Criterion tho.) I wonder how many films he watches a day? Two? Three? If Soderbergh’s yearly watch/read lists are any indication, it’s probably in that ballpark.
One surprising thing about this video: I was expecting Anderson to go for Kurosawa, Tati, Truffaut, Welles, and some other of his big influences but instead selected family friendly fare suitable for a trip. The man has a wide array of influences. Here’s the full list:
The 39 Steps (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch, 1943)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)
Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024)
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1964)
I love seeing Flow on there. What a great little film.
See also Wes Anderson Talks Up Some of His Favorite Movies in a Parisian Video Store and this delightful video from 20 years ago or so featuring Anderson and Jason Schwartzman picking out music & movies in a Borders:
“The clan of predators currently in charge of the U.S. federal government” are striving to make the world safe for grift, corruption, and theft, with their mob boss president leading the way.
Artist Maya Barkai assembled a collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide.
I love all of these little people. The Warsaw one reminds me somewhat of Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Some of the ones from smaller places have more personality, but I feel like the New York and Boston ones are my favorites aesthetically. Weirdly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here.
A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the Walking Men Worldwide website. (via @jessicabrillhart)
Instant click for me: how NYC street signs are made. “The sign shop…has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles.”
The History of Concrete, a new documentary film by John Wilson, who one review called “the Werner Herzog of the mundane”. This looks great!
Review of a new book on Stephen Hawking. “The uncomfortable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored…”
Uruguayan birder Juan Pablo Culasso, who was born blind, has been recording and collecting bird songs for more than two decades.
I think that because I’m blind, I enjoy birds differently. Bird songs are my way of appreciating and understanding this world.
Culasso is aided in his quest by his incredible sense of of hearing:
Culasso is blind, but his hearing is so acute (he has absolute pitch) he can identify over 3,000 components of birdsong and differentiate among more than 700 species in his native South America (he’s Uruguayan). Ten years ago, he won a $45,000 prize in a National Geographic competition by accurately identifying 15 random bird calls.
You can find dozens and dozens of his recordings on Spotify. Filmmaker Johnny Holder made a 22-minute documentary film that features Culasso called Sonora; you can watch it on Vimeo. (via the kid should see this)
From our own Edith Zimmerman for the New Yorker, some Updated Jane Austen Titles like Dead-Ass Karen and Red-Flag Baddie and Brain-Rot Third Space.
“Szilveszter Makó’s surreal portraits have become nearly as recognisable as the celebrities he photographs.” But: “Artists who become successful for a signature style are then accused of monotony for being hired to reproduce it.”
vintage post from Aug 2016
· gift link
This is a video of Nirvana playing Smells Like Teen Spirit in a small club just two days after Nevermind came out in 1991. There’s a freight train bearing down on those boys and they don’t even know it. (via digg)
See also The Notorious B.I.G. freestyling on a Brooklyn corner at 17 and LL Cool J plays to a mostly empty gymnasium in Maine…he was also just 17.
Update: And here’s 40+ minutes from the same show at which they played Drain You, Polly, and Breed. (via @fimoculous)
New book from Ed Yong! Life Beyond Measure: Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. “A bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean…” Out in April, pre-order now.
Yes, this summer really was as hot as you think it was. This summer “was the hottest on record for the contiguous U.S., beating the previous champions of 1936 and 2021 by 0.4°F. Compared to the average over the 20th century, this summer was 3° hotter.”
By taking a camera, pointing it out the window of a train, and keeping track of how fast the train is moving, you can create very wide panoramic scans of the scenery.
It’s a little more complicated than that — all the details are here — but you’re essentially using the train (or ferry) as a massive flatbed scanner.
I knew from the start that I’d need to measure the speed somehow, but I was naïvely hoping that I wouldn’t need to measure it that well and could simply fudge it. This image, however, shows that even small variations of speed matter. This was my first glimpse into how much of a pain dealing with speed would turn out to be.
I love little hacky projects like these.
Japanese architect Tadao Ando designed a floating children’s library and donated it to Kagawa prefecture. “We created reading spaces throughout the ship. A large circular bench was placed on the rear deck, and children can even lie under the sun.”
The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all.
With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone. “The program and others like it across the world are opening up a new frontier for people with reduced mobility, out on the open sea, free from the limitations of buildings and streets.”
This is fun: Red Bull took over one of the karting tracks at Silverstone (home of the British Grand Prix), put 100 regular folks in karts, positioned four-time F1 champ Max Verstappen at the back of the pack, and gave him 75 minutes (or 30 laps) to pass everyone. Spoiler alert: he only needed 35 minutes. (And yes, his kart was the same speed as everyone else’s…you can see it in the straights later in the race.) Update: the video got taken down. You can find shorter highlight videos on YouTube.
They had F1’s lead commentator Alex Jacques call the race and used a feature called Proximity Chat, where Alex, Max, and whoever Max was fixing to pass did a three-way live voice chat. They should implement this in F1 (only half kidding).1
I guess this is part of an occasional KDO series about normal folks competing against world class athletes; previous installments include The Worst NBA Player Is Way Better Than You, Soccer: 55 vs. 2, All for One and One for All (three expert fencers vs 50 amateurs), and Olympic Gold Medalist Dominates the 100m at Her Kid’s Sports Day Event.
And perhaps this fits here as well, tangentially: “Earlier this year I made a bet with Craig Mod. He felt sure that robots would soon be able to play basketball better than humans.” Hmm!
The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is used for locks or stops that can be released under pressure. Craighill even has a pips + nubs category in their online store. (thx, rion)
Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present.
“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”
Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful video, backed by a Max Cooper soundtrack. As one of the commenters notes, MacAskill makes a relatively heavy eMTB seem extraordinarily playful.
As a mountain biker myself, some of that looks insanely fun but the narrow steep stuff looks insanely insane. Makes me want an eMTB, which I suppose is the whole point of the video.
Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. A live album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hell yes yes yes! 13 songs are available now plus 9 more tracks when the full album drops in October.
Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software. But where are the AI-coded killer apps? “[AI is] very good at reproducing things that look and feel like what came before.”
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