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Released a few days ago, this is the official video for Max Cooper’s Becoming, directed by Brandon Eversole. It’s mesmerizing, trippy, and a little bit glitchy. The video is also notable for being so wide that it breaks YouTube’s desktop layout — anything less than stretching my browser window to the edges of my screen and I can’t read the left-most text under the video.
Thomas Bangalter, one half of the legendary duo Daft Punk, played a 75-minute DJ set for The Lot Radio the other day. He played tracks by Boards of Canada, Burial, Sonic Youth, and even Daft Punk (full setlist). The set is also available on Soundcloud.
Bangalter also put recent rumors of a Daft Punk reunion to rest:
Was it scary to be that big? “It was almost performance art where you create these characters and blur the line between fiction and reality.” So it felt like fame was happening to the robots more than you? “I think so, yes.” If not wearing the helmets they would do interviews with their backs to the camera or, on one occasion, with bags over their heads. You can see why he and Homem-Christo, whom he calls “Guy-Man”, decided to wind up the band. “The history of music is made of fruitful partnerships and they usually last way shorter than the 28-year run that we had. It was great but staying in character and not spoiling it became very difficult.”
The teaser trailer for the sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network is here — they’re calling the movie “a companion piece” to the first film. It’s based on The Facebook Files:
Primarily, the reports revealed that, based on internally commissioned studies, the company was fully aware of negative impacts on teenage users of Instagram, and the contribution of Facebook activity to violence in developing countries. Other takeaways of the leak include the impact of the company’s platforms on spreading false information, and Facebook’s policy of promoting inflammatory posts. Furthermore, Facebook was fully aware that harmful content was being pushed through Facebook algorithms reaching young users. The types of content included posts promoting anorexia nervosa and self-harm photos.
Jeremy Strong nails Zuckerberg’s voice & mannerisms. The hint of Reznor/Ross at the end is great, though it looks like Alexandre Desplat is doing the music this time around. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for the first film, writes and directs. Out in theaters October 9th.
The folks at Fred Rogers Productions have launched a YouTube channel dedicated to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They plan to post compilations, clips, and full episodes, some of which haven’t been seen on PBS in years & years. One of the first complete episodes they’ve posted is the one about how crayons are made!
Other full episodes include A Visit with Officer Clemmons, The Very First Episode (from 1968), and Koko the Gorilla Meets Mister Rogers.
And there’s also this 30-minute compilation of fan-favorite factory visits.
Again, here’s the channel if you want to subscribe or explore more.
In March 1976, Talking Heads played a show at The Kitchen in NYC; you can watch the entire show recorded from two angles in this video. The band had formed the year before and was more than a year away from recording and releasing their debut album.
It’s a great insight as to what these early Talking Heads shows were like, and with it also being in color, being good quality, and having two angles for most of the show, this is a must-watch.
The band played for about 90 minutes (2 sets plus an encore), working through tracks like Psycho Killer, Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, and Love → Building On Fire. (via open culture)
Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.
Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.
The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
Andor loves a good monologue. Among the best of them is Nemik’s Manifesto:
Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.
And Kino Loy’s speech to his fellow prisoners on Narkina 5:
There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us.
In this just-released episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak breaks down Luthen Rael’s “extraordinary” monologue about what he’s sacrificed for the cause.
Here’s the original scene and a transcript of the speech:
Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my — what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!
The great thing about Luthen’s monologue, which Puschak doesn’t really get into, is that it makes the viewer rethink the entire basis of the show — and of Star Wars in general. Instead of Good Guys and Bad Guys, you’re asked to consider shades of gray. These blurred lines are hinted at before, mostly through individual character arcs (Han, Anakin, Lando, Rey, Kylo), but Luthen plainly lays out the moral complexity involved: revolutions and rebellions are led by and made up of flawed people who do harmful things for the right reasons…or at least, that’s what they tell themselves, what they need to tell themselves.
Luthen, Mon Mothma, Cassian — there’s no solution to their personal trolley problem, except that they somehow have to keep living after condemning others to suffering and death. Viewed through that lens, the rest of Star Wars reads quite differently.
How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.
The Backward Index evidently turned out to be a useful tool in the pre-electronic age. For example, it could help identify a set of related terms that should be defined in similar ways, including open compounds (Highland pony, Shetland pony, Welsh pony), closed compounds (blocklike, clocklike, rocklike, socklike, chalklike), and morphologically related terms (phytopathological, ethological, lithological, ornithological). Thus, looking up all the diseases that end in –itis or all the doctrines and theories that end in –ism was now possible. Since rhymes depend on word endings, initial research for a rhyming dictionary also made use of the Index, where sequences such as seepy, steepy, weepy, sweepy and dorty, forty, shorty, snorty, porty, sporty, rorty, torty show up regularly.
The index of reversed words eventually grew to 315,000 entries, each one typed up by one of M-W’s many typists.
We do know a few facts. One is that they were typed up. They were typed up by the typist and I interviewed several retired Merriam-Webster employees, at least a couple of them in their 90s. And they all recall this work. They all recall the file and they say, well, that’s what the typists did when there was no manuscript for them to type. When in the process of making the Unabridged Dictionary, for example, there was an enormous amount of copy at the beginning of the project. But then as the typesetting went on, what happened was through revision and later stages of editing, there was less and less and less of the actual manuscript to type. And that left some of the typing pool available to do other projects. And their assignment was to, when they had the time, to type the headwords in the dictionary backwards.
Here are some more examples of entries from the Backward Index:
(thx, margaret)
Let’s the keep the David Attenborough love going: this is a six-hour video featuring 100 of the most iconic moments from the famed naturalist’s work. I got this via Enrique, who rightly asserts that “There’s no such thing as too much David Attenborough.”
See also Three Hours of Unbelievable Moments From Nature, Narrated by David Attenborough.
A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area.
The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished species and help Britain adapt to a very modern problem: climate change.
Britain is famous for drizzle, but climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. Places that didn’t used to flood are now waterlogged. So scientists have enlisted some of the animal kingdom’s best flood engineers — beavers — to help.
In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.
“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.
The beaver-engineered landscape has attracted other animals, increasing the area’s biodiversity:
“By felling trees, they’ve also opened up the canopy, and we’ve seen an abundance of biodiversity,” McCormack says.
Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek, he says, plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats and rare brown hairstreak butterflies, which lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers.
The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:
Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.
And from the website:
Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.
I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.
In the past three years, he’s released 80+ albums and other performances, which are available for purchase on BandCamp. I’ve only had time to listen to bits and pieces of a few albums & videos, but I know a bunch of them are going into my Underscore collection very soon.1 (via johnny decimal)
Underscore is one of my favorite things I’ve ever built because it’s simple, it does exactly what I want, and I use it every day. ↩
I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me.
My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and schiacciata) and so I suggested we make this Bon Appetit recipe that Alana recommended in this recent KDO recipe thread — it’s tough to resist “I am mildly famous for this focaccia. It’s bread for lazy people who love hot bread.” It’s me. I am lazy. I love hot bread.
We made it yesterday and it came out well: very delicious right out of the oven. And it was really the first time I’ve made dough where I’ve been like, “oh, I finally get why people say pizza/bread dough is a living thing”. Today we made sandwiches (mortadella, prosciutto, burrata, arugula) and they were quite good — but the focaccia crumb was pretty dense. Which sent me on a little bit of a research expedition, during which I found this video on YouTube:
Wow! Check out all those bubbles…ours didn’t look anything like that. I actually squealed when she pressed down on the bread and it sprung right back — that focaccia might be able to replace my car’s suspension. This recipe results in a more hydrated dough than the BonApp recipe does. And you work it more and it has different flour (00 instead of all-purpose). And the process looks only a little bit less lazy…manageable for me, I think. Looking forward to trying this out next!
The 250th birthday of the United States is coming up and I know many of us are having a tough time feeling celebratory because *waves hands around at everything*. To mark the occasion in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner, historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a series of one-minute videos, each featuring one of “the many people, places, and events that have built our country and remind us of the power of each person to make history”. From the introductory video above:
From the time of our country’s founding 250 years ago, the story of America has been one of the constant efforts of Americans — from all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities — to make real the belief that we are all created equal and have a right to have a say in our democracy.
Among the first group of videos are those about the AIDS Memorial Quilt (narrated by founder Cleve Jones), the battles of Lexington and Concord (narrated by Massachusetts governor Maura Healey), John Peter Zenger (narrated by Jelani Cobb), and the Erie Canal (narrated by Pete Buttigieg).
You can find the rest of the videos, as well as future installments, in this playlist on YouTube. Richardson wrote about the project for her newsletter:
We designed the videos to emphasize the agency of Americans—mostly everyday Americans—to change the country. Each falls into a category that defines what it means to be an American, including community, democracy, innovation, mobility, civil rights, education, conservation, and creativity.
The day after ending his run on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert hosted a show called Only in Monroe on a Michigan public access channel. His musical director for the show was Jack White, nestled onstage between a boombox and a reel-to-reel recorder. His guests included Byron Allen, Jeff Daniels, Steve Buscemi, and Eminem.
He told viewers during his final Late Show monologue that they might next find him in Monroe:
At the top of his final CBS monologue Thursday night, Colbert paused to mark the occasion: “Tonight is our final broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater.”
When the audience booed, Colbert waved them off.
“No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years, all right? Can’t take this for granted,” he said. “Though technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan for an audience of 12 people. Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.”
Colbert had hosted Only in Monroe once before, about two months out from starting at The Late Show. His special guest that night was Eminem.
Stephen Colbert? The man knows how to commit to the bit.
Water World, created by Seán Doran from imagery captured by a NASA/NOAA weather satellite, is a gorgeous, swirling, painterly portrait of the Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Doran calls it “a meditative slow gaze at Earth’s atmosphere, revealing the hidden depths of activity in the water-filled skies of planet Earth”. It’s 4K, so put it on the biggest screen you can find and just sit back and watch.
One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was often, but not always, “no”.
A few of the guests said “42” but none ever said “69”?
So anyway, the Late Show is coming to an end tonight, a casualty of CBS’s newfound fealty to the Trump regime, and Stephen Colbert finally took the questionert himself. And yes, at last, he revealed the number that he was thinking of…to Robert De Niro no less:
Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m working and it’s great.
Cookie Queens is a feature-length documentary film that follows four Girl Scouts as they navigate the big business & big feelings of Girl Scout Cookie season.
“Cookie Queens” is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and pain points woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season. Captivating, candid, and full of heart, the film follows four girls ages 5-12 as they navigate the annual whirlwind of selling, striving, and succeeding. For these Girl Scouts, selling cookies isn’t just about Thin Mints and sisterhood — it’s a crash course in commercialism. Behind the smiles lie real pressure: long hours, ambitious goals, and weighty expectations. With humor, warmth, and a keen eye for small moments revealing big truths, “Cookie Queens” shows how growing up is shaped by tensions between community and capitalism.
My favorite and also, when I think about it too much, least favorite trailer moment: “There’s no stopping point.” Amen, sister. Opens August 7 in theaters.
Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.:
The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.
The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.
The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.
Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk Apparently Used AI to Write Her Latest Novel:
In a recent interview (conducted and published in Polish), Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk admitted to using AI in her creative process.
The writer Maks Sipowicz, who drew attention to the interview on Bluesky, translated a few of salient bits: “When writing my latest novel… I asked this advanced model what kind of songs my protagonists would be listening to at a dance, a few dozen years ago, and AI gave me a few titles,” Tokarczuk told the interviewer. “Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’ Even though I know about hallucinations and many factual errors in the algorithms in terms of economics and hard data, I have to add that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion.”
Google Search As You Know It Is Over:
At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.
The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.
Gemini Is in Danger of Going Full Copilot:
Gemini has a creep problem.
A few years ago, that little sparkle icon started showing up in all of our Google apps. Gemini in your inbox! Gemini in your Google Drive! It was slow at first, and easy enough to tune out, but something has changed in the past few months. Gemini is creeping. It’s showing up in all kinds of places at a relentless pace, and personally, it’s starting to really cheese me off.
An actual screenshot from Google just now (a la Charlie Jane Anders):
Commencement speakers at recent graduations get booed for casting AI in a positive light:
And that’s just today. 😰
The Night Witches were an all-female Soviet bomber regiment that attacked Nazi forces during World War II.
An attack technique of the night bombers involved idling the engine near the target and gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence. German soldiers likened the sound to broomsticks and hence named the pilots “Night Witches”.
Some of the aviators were Jewish, like Polina Gelman:
She would be among a half-million Jews who are believed to have served in the Red Army, according to Yad Vashem. They fought not only for the survival of the Soviet Union, but also against the annihilation of their people in Nazi death camps in Poland.
“I have decided to go to the front,” Gelman wrote to her mother, adding, “I am a daughter of the Jewish people” with “a particular account” to settle with Hitler.
The women were barely given proper aircraft — crop dusters! — but they were quiet & maneuverable, ideal for night attacks:
The regiment flew in steel-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original uchebnyy designation prefix of “U-“) and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th. The plane could carry only 350 kilograms (770 lb) of bombs, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary. Although the aircraft was obsolete and slow, the pilots took advantage of its exceptional maneuverability; it also had a maximum speed that was lower than the stalling speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, which made it very difficult for German pilots to shoot down…
Zendaya co-created a new collection for On, the Swiss fashion company, and Spike Jonze directed this cool promotional video starring the actress. I’ve always loved his aesthetic — along with Michel Gondry, no one makes these types of videos seem “hand-crafted” (in a way that is hard to articulate) more than Jonze.
Palantir, the data analysis defense contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, was named after the magical seeing stones from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books. This video compares the ethos of the company with that of Tolkien.
The palantiri of The Lord of the Rings are sort of like crystal balls or “seeing stones” that allow their users to communicate across vast distances, see events from afar, and sometimes even peer into the future. But just about everybody who tries to use a palantir in The Lord of the Rings is deceived by it, acting on the visions they’re receiving without the greater context or wisdom of what’s behind them. So why would the people behind Palantir want to name the company and build its culture around these powerful yet easily corruptible magical objects?
J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government, expressing his fears of what would happen when those two forces combined through his fantasy works and his letters to friends, family, and colleagues. If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.
Palantir is one of the purest instantiations of the Torment Nexus in tech today:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
See also The Right Is Obsessed With Lord of the Rings. But They Don’t Understand It.
In Tolkien’s books, it is not the men of Gondor who turn back the forces of evil and save the Shire; it’s those gentle, peaceful hobbits who pull the whole thing off. They’re the only species able to carry the One Ring of Power, because they are, by their nature, unambitious. All they want is to live their peaceful bourgeois lives of tea and toast and jam, so they are able to withstand the temptations of the ring and its promises of power, ultimately carrying it far enough to destroy it. The best the men of Gondor can do to help is refuse to ever touch the ring, because they know that if they pick it up, they will not be able to resist temptation.
To translate this into the metaphor: If you’re taking Tolkien as your guide, and you believe your homeland to be under invasion by the forces of evil, the solution is not to try to consolidate your power, harden your nature, and glory in needless cruelty. The solution is to refuse power whenever it is offered to you and to fight from a place of humility.
Any of these dopes — Musk, Thiel, Vance — would 100% have tried to take the Ring for themselves.
Seán Doran, who I’ve featured here many times before for his remastered astronomy photos & videos, has taken photographs captured by a Japanese weather satellite of Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026 and “repaired, remastered and transformed” the images into this breathtaking 4K video.
The beauty of the storm as seen from above belies its fury and destructiveness. Sinlaku was the “strongest tropical cyclone in the Northern Hemisphere” since 2021 and the strongest overall storm so far in 2026. The Mariana Islands, Guam, and Micronesia all suffered widespread damage and the storm has claimed 17 lives so far.
Aardman’s official Wallace & Gromit YouTube channel is livestreaming what appears to be the four shorts featuring the duo: A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and A Matter of Loaf or Death.
I can’t find any further information about the stream — if those are the only animations that are available, if any of the movies are included, how long the stream will be up. But I’m watching The Wrong Trousers right now and eating a bit of cheese, so all is right with the world.
Anyone of any age can stop by the Grandma Stand in New York’s Central Park to shoot the breeze with a grandmother. The concept has spread around the US and is now the subject of an hour-long documentary on PBS.
At a time when the lack of connection is epidemic, wise witty grandmas sit behind a lemonade-like stand, offering life lessons to passersby in NYC’s Central Park. We see 20 diverse people candidly share their feelings. “Just a little love, a little talking. She’s speaking to my soul,” said a visitor. This film shows how a brief encounter has a strong impact and gives us insight into our own lives.
You can watch the complete documentary on the PBS site (like US-only). (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
PBS Kids and The Jim Henson Company have collaborated on a kids special called Wowsabout! that focuses on the experience of wonder.
Wowsabout is rooted in a rich curriculum developed by Dr. Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and author of “AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” The special, shot on location in breathtaking Sequoia National Park, aims to help children recognize and name the feeling of awe by experiencing moments of wonder alongside Roxy and Ronald. Through nature, music, storytelling, and friendship, children learn how awe sparks curiosity, creativity, kindness, and a desire to explore and care for the world around them. The special inspires children to notice awe in everyday moments and begin their own “Wowsabouts,” fostering connection to others and to the planet.
The full episode of Wowsabout! is available to watch on YouTube and at PBS Kids.
Dr. Keltner, one of the advisors on Pixar’s Inside Out, outlines “eight categories of experience that set the stage for awe” in his 2023 book on the topic. A summary of the “eight wonders” from a Psychology Today article:
1. Moral beauty. We can feel awe when we observe other people engage in acts of courage or kindness. Moral beauty also describes the experience of seeing someone overcome obstacles, or watching people with rare talents.
2. Collective effervescence. This occurs when a gathering of people is attending to the same thing, moving together, and converging on similar emotional experience. Think attending a concert, dancing in a crowd, or attending or playing in a basketball game.
3. Nature. When we are outside, we can find awe in the sights, sounds, and smells of nature.
4. Music. Both making music and listening to music attune us to what is happening outside of ourselves and connect us with others and a broader expanse of time and place.
5. Visual design. This includes visual art, movies, geometric patterns, even the elegance and complexity of machines.
6. Spirituality and religion. As personally defined by each of us, this might include connection with the Divine, or experiences that transcend our self or understanding.
7. Life and death. We can experience awe when we witness or are connected to birth and death.
8. Epiphany. This includes the experience of uniting facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding.
Reading through the list, it occurs to me that many of the things I post about on KDO touch on one of more of these elements of awe and wonder. (thx, caroline)
Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses.
I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design.
In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver and how it came to have such a distinctive and useful handle.
I grew up helping my dad out in the garage with all sorts of projects, mostly cars, and until watching this video, I had no idea that you could slip a standard wrench over the handle of a screwdriver as a cheater bar. 🤯 (via unsung)
Last year in an Alaskan fjord, a surprise landslide triggered a tsunami 1578 feet tall. That’s not a typo…the wave was taller than all but 13 of the world’s tallest buildings.
In the early hours of August 10, 2025, an enormous landslide triggered a massive tsunami down the fjord. The tsunami was 1,578-feet-tall, or one-and-a-half times the height of the Eiffel Tower. Fortunately, no one was caught in the wave since it hit around 5:30 a.m. local time. If the tsunami hit later that day, about 20 cruise ships and numerous recreational boaters and kayakers could have been impacted by the giant wave.
In a study published today in the journal Science, researchers studied this “near miss” event, finding that the continued effects of climate change were likely the cause.
The mass of rock that set off the wave contained “a volume 24 times larger than that of the great pyramid of Giza”, with the initial wave moving at ~150mph. Professor Dan Shugar explains what happened on that morning and shows a simulation of what happened:
From this piece in the NY Times:
The Tracy Arm landslide was preceded by an unusually rapid retreat of the South Sawyer Glacier, leaving the rock slope that ultimately collapsed bare and unsupported. That same rearrangement of land elements is increasingly occurring throughout Alaskan fjords and around the world. As glaciers retreat and thawing permafrost lubricates slopes, these giant landslides may become more frequent.
Incredibly, this isn’t even the largest recorded tsunami; a 1958 earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 to 8.3 triggered a rockslide that created a wave 1,719 feet tall in Lituya Bay. If you don’t want to waste a couple of hours, I’d suggest not clicking through to the megatsunami Wikipedia page.
See also When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up.
David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor:
The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and this is through Cassian’s.
The remixed Rogue One will be out on May 25, available in 4K with 5.1 surround sound. Kaylor has previously produced cuts of all three original trilogy Star Wars movies, Star Wars: Episode III - The Siege of Mandalore & Revenge of the Sith (a combo of the third prequel and part of the 7th season of Clone Wars), and Star Trek: Picard: The Last Generation (a recut of Star Trek: Picard’s 3rd season).
This edit is not to be confused with Andor: The Rogue One Arc, which recuts Rogue One into an Andor-like three-episode arc, leaning heavily on Andor’s soundtrack to set the mood.
This edit is kind of an expression of that with a movie I generally really liked - moving its energy from emulating the jaunty, swashbuckling OT, to more in line with its prequel show’s feel.
Up front, I don’t actually think this elevates or changes Rogue One in any meaningful way. The movie is still the movie, still fast paced and action oriented, particularly compared to Andor’s fiercer, slower, and paranoid ethos. But I do think the elements Andor is rooted in become far more apparent foregrounded to this soundtrack. Where the movie somewhat failed to recapture the energy and excitement of traditional Star Wars (and not for lack of Giacchino effort), the places where it takes itself seriously should now feel less dissonant in a [tonal] context that seriously considers them.
I’ve watched The Rogue One Arc and am looking forward to comparing it to The Andor Cut. And I’ve been seriously contemplating yet another rewatch of the TV series.
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