This is the most 2026 thing I’ve ever heard: Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter Bella Freud has a video podcast on YouTube where she interviews people (Cate Blanchette, Lorde, Graydon Carter) while they lie on a psychiatrist’s couch.
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A Boston man discovered a document passed down through his family: his ancestor’s freedom papers. “When he touched that paper he was touching the same place his relative touched in 1834.”
Lumière, Le Cinema!
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
KDO Rolodex a list of kindred spirits, friends, open web enthusiasts, role models, fellow travelers, and collaborators
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see full listAstrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”
“Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the [company] unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken…without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements…”
Why Attack Iran?
There are many possible and plausible answers to this simple question. Timothy Snyder offers a useful perspective in helping answer it:
How do [we] understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts that we do know.
These facts suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.
From the United States, the most plausible angle of view is domestic politics, not foreign policy.
Trump is not a conventionally intelligent person and is losing his wits to age, but he remains an instinctual genius. There’s no grand plan here and there doesn’t need to be; he’s just moving towards his flame: enrichment for himself, entrenching power, and instability for everyone else.
“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”
The Candy Factory
Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time.
This is a lovely little short film.
Do people still worship the ancient Greek gods? “Hellenism – also called Hellenic ethnic religion, or Dodekatheism – which is the practice of worshipping ancient gods, has been growing in popularity since the 1990s.”
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. “Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice.”
Marks found on 40,000-year-old artifacts might be a proto-language. “They found that these sign sequences displayed an information density very similar to the earliest examples of the cuneiform forerunner called proto-cuneiform.”
The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can
The aluminum soda can is a humble testament to the power and scope of human ingenuity. If that sounds like hyperbole, you should watch this video, which features eleven solid minutes of engineering explanation and is not boring for even a second.
More science/engineering programming like this please…I feel like if this would have been on PBS or Discovery, it would have lasted twice as long and communicated half the information. For a chaser, you can watch a detailed making-of from an aluminum can manufacturing company:
Pope Leo XIV to his priests: stop using AI to write sermons. “‘To give a homily is to share faith,’ he said, and AI ‘will never be able to share faith.’”
Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees. “Composition II with Red, Blue, and Yellow is in the U.S. public domain. It has been since January 1, 2026. No amount of Spanish law or invented ‘dual copyright’ theories changes that.”
The NY Times has added another daily crossword to the line-up: the Midi. “The standard Times daily crossword, you see, is a 15×15 grid. The Mini is 5×5. The new Midi is 9×9, snug in between.”
Satellite’s Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse Photo Taken From Orbit
During the recent annular solar eclipse on February 17, the ESA’s PROBA-2 satellite captured this great shot of the Moon passing in front of the Sun. Cue up the Johnny Cash.
“Eclipses have been connected with the fate of rulers since at least ancient Mesopotamia, around 4,000 years ago.” But more recently: “In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England made it a felony to use horoscopes to predict her death or her successor.”
Calculating the longest line of sight on Earth: 530km (329 miles) between “an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan”.
“x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.”
Ali Akbar, the last newspaper hawker in Paris, has been awarded a knighthood by French president Emmanuel Macron. “Macron went on to refer to Akbar as ‘the most French of the French — a Voltairean who arrived from Pakistan.’”
Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Codebreaker
The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together:
cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI
did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships
chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard
co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology
broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition
testified in court against Al Capone
debunked the claim that Francis Bacon had secretly written Shakespeare’s plays
J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her “uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943”, knowing that her wartime work was classified and she couldn’t correct him
From an NSA press release in 2020:
She began solving these encrypted messages and providing the Coast Guard with vital intelligence that supported their efforts to interdict smuggling. She also trained a small team in cryptanalysis to expand the crime-fighting intelligence effort. Elizebeth and her assistant solved about 12,000 coded messages between the so-called rum runners and smugglers, which resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions. In addition to criminals violating the Prohibition laws, some of the messages Ms. Friedman solved also enabled the arrest and conviction of a number of narcotics smugglers.
She had a personal role in some of the prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, and frequently became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. For a time, she was one of the most famous women in the country.
From a 2022 piece in the US Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine:
The Zimmermann Telegram, sent in code, changed the trajectory of life for the Friedmans, who possessed skills suddenly extremely valuable to the U.S. government. The military was desperate for codebreakers, and radio and wireless technology was changing the nature of war. There were possibly three or four persons in the whole of the United States who could break codes, and Elizebeth and William were two of them. Elizebeth was the first to decode military messages intercepted from the Mexican Army, working by counting the frequency of letters.
The Friedmans began operating as a team, developing strategies as they went along. For the first eight months of the war, they and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing broader methodologies still in use today. Neither was particularly good at mathematics, but they operated on an intuitive level to devise techniques to discern patterns. Most importantly, their methods were scientific, which is to say the results could be replicated.3 The Friedmans worked feverishly to solve messages as they poured in. They decrypted messages from Scotland Yard revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons to India with German help. William was summoned to testify about how he broke the codes, but before he could take the stand, an Indian man in the gallery shot one of the defendants.
While testifying against Al Capone’s liquor smuggling ring in New Orleans, Mrs. Friedman taught a lesson on the science of codebreaking and the use of mono-alphabetic ciphers right in the courtroom. Col. Amos Woodcock, director of the Bureau of Prohibition said that without the work of the cryptanalysis unit and the expert testimony of Mrs. Friedman, the case would not have been won.
Time magazine: How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War II — and Never Lived to See the Credit:
But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943 — a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.
From the National Women’s History Museum:
Smith met William Friedman, a geneticist at the estate. After spending time together, Smith brought William onto her team to help break the Shakespearean codes. They worked together to show there was no evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, while growing closer professionally and romantically. The couple married in Chicago in May 1917, just after the United States entered World War I. Now using her married name, Smith Friedman worked with her husband at Riverbank to decrypt every single secret message sent to them by the Navy. Trailblazing her way through the field as an expert and teacher, Smith Friedman successfully trained the first generation of codebreakers for the military.
In 2017, Jason Fagone published a bestselling biography about Friedman, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (AMZN). That book was the basis for an hour-long PBS/American Experience documentary called The Codebreaker, which is available for rent at Amazon or as a free bootleg on Dailymotion. Here’s the trailer:
How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account. “The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project.”
Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers (free WSJ piece at MSN). “Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in.”
An Archive of Commercial Illustration (c. 1950-75)
Illustrator Zara Picken maintains an archive of commercial illustration from the mid-20th century. So much throwback inspiration here!
Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses. “The letter…marks one of the most significant erosions of transgender civil rights in the United States to date.”
Physics Is a Conversation
Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:
I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.
And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.
This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.
They’re doing a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation. From the comments on the trailer: “this looks like a temu version of the 2005” and “The Darcy is not Darcying”.
Jayden Hoffman spent more than 4 months customizing this computer keyboard, replacing the letter keys with hand-painted logos (McDonald’s arch for M, Avengers for A, Xbox logo for X, Google for G, etc.)
Is This Waymo a Better Person Than You? “When the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in ‘probably.’ It waits.”
“The CyberTruck is 17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than a Ford Pinto”, a 70s automobile that put the “car” in “exploding car”.
Commenters in this thread shared a bunch of songs “where the drum beats are Morse code that also serve as a separate layer to the lyrics”.
20 Minutes of Excellent Skateboarding Clips
What’s fun about school closing for the wicked blizzard in the Northeast today is last week was February break for Massachusetts schools, which means many kids are home for the the 6th school day in a row, and many will be home for closures tomorrow and beyond. All this to say, it reminded me a lot of the first couple weeks of school closures in March 2020, when I edutained my kids with Youtube videos about BMX, how to make biscuits, early 90s live punk hardcore shows, and skateboarding clips. And THAT reminded me it’s been a minute since I posted a skateboarding video here.
Here’s a 20 minute clip with something for everyone. There’s kick flips, front flips, backflips, flips off bikes, multiple visually impaired skaters and skaters without legs. There’s also lots of kids, stairs, pools, ramps, massive air, ballet, rollerskating on broken skateboards, incredible creativity, and no falls.
Tear Gun by Taiwanese designer Yi-Fei Chen is a contraption that “collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who caused the cry”.
Cover of Such Great Heights by Chvrches
For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.
“I remember walking by a former drug dealer, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a former mobster and a former preacher all sitting around a table together in the prison yard. Surely this was not happening anywhere else in America.”
I Am a 15-year-old Girl. Let Me Show You the Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me on Social Media Every Day. “I frequently feel objectified, dehumanised and disgusted by the hate towards women I see online.”
How to Stop a Dictator. “Democracy is in fact a powerful motivating factor: When people are convinced that there’s a threat to their political freedoms, they can be motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to defend them.”
The Trailer for Season Five of For All Mankind
Just dropped this morning: the trailer for the final season of For All Mankind. When season four’s teaser trailer came out, I caught some flack for suggesting that “if you tilt your head and squint…you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse”. It looks like we’re heading even more in that direction in season five, which begins airing March 27.
Top tier nerd shit. “WalkmanLand is a tribute to the long forgotten portable music players from the 80-90s. The Walkmans.”
Well, this is one of those things I wish I’d known about earlier — sessions with Isabel Wilkerson, James McBride, Ocean Vuong, Rebecca Solnit, Lauren Groff, Judy Blume…all sold out. 😭
Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Is Free to Speak About Fascism Now
Early on in the promotional period for season two of Andor, a series explicitly about fascism that depicted a genocide, Disney asked creator Tony Gilroy not to use the words “fascism” and “genocide”. Now that promotional period has passed and he can speak freely. Here’s Gilroy’s recent interview with Hollywood Reporter. They asked him about the prescience of the show given current events, especially those in Minnesota, and his response is spot-on:
The simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of all of this is really on them, the outside forces. We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.
So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.
In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, “Oh, you’re psychic,” or, “The show is prescient.” But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that.
Gilroy also mentions a book that’s coming out this summer: The Art of Star Wars: Andor (Amazon). He says: “Every page has ideas that we talked about over the course of a million meetings, and it’s just so good.”
A Meta employee who works on AI safety let an AI agent named OpenClaw loose on her inbox and it deleted all her email. (This tracks; companies like Meta actually don’t care about AI safety and hire accordingly.)
I Hate Trump’s Awful Policies, but I Love That He’s a Huge Asshole. “I don’t like Trump’s immigration laws; they’re racist and economically disastrous. But I do love how evil he is.”
Writer Lauren Groff on how she works. “After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again.” And: “We all need to fill ourselves with the ghosts of other writers.” Her new book is out now.
“We” Haven’t Lost Our Sense of Shame. Only Republicans Have. “I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture…”
Token Anxiety. “This voice in my head that says ‘something could be running right now’ just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.”
Unusual Views of the Winter Olympics
Alan Taylor has shared a bunch of photos of the just-concluded Winter Olympics “featuring infrared imaging, vintage cameras, optical filters, digital composites, unusual angles, unexpected subjects, and more”. Two of my favorites:
The first photo is of a curling match taken by Ryan Pierse with a vintage camera. Taylor:
Images in this series were captured using vintage Graflex cameras, paying tribute to the type of camera that would have been used 70 years ago when Cortina previously hosted the games in 1956. In a modern twist, these cameras have been adapted to record images on smartphones, enabling live transmission of the content captured.
The second is a composite image of the women’s snowboard halfpipe final by Hector Vivas, a technique popularized in recent years by Pelle Cass.
See also photos of the Winter Olympics using thermal imaging cameras.
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