Soli touchless interactions are coming to Pixel 4

You may remember a few years ago when a video about Google’s Project Soli made the rounds, it promised very fine touch

Ursula K. Le Guin documentary on PBS

If you’re in the US, most PBS stations will be showing the documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin on August 2nd, so t

What do you care about?

Somewhat as a continuation to the previous post on journalism, which included a call to “look at people and how they us

A call for more research and questioning by journalists

Jeff Jarvis with some good comments (based primarily on a paper by Axel Bruns) arguing that the media in general needs

Sato San, duct tape typographer

Lovely story of a Tokyo security guard who’s enhancing his guidance work through constructions sites with some fantast

From Reality TV to YouTube and back again

The transformation of (a lot of) the internet into simply a larger, more diversified series of tv channels continues ap

Ghosts on her shelves

It’s always interesting to see how people feel about books. Some don’t read them, some always have one in hand, even w

Walking, the easy superpower

One of the very few productivity tips I trust 100% (ok, probably the only one) is the recommendation for getting up an

Rare encounter with a piglet squid

This one is a super short article about a deep sea encounter between the Nautilus research vessel and a rare piglet sq

This tree stump is kept alive by its neighbours

It’s sometimes easy to think that we know how most things work, especially those that surround us and we take for gran

Serendipity v algorithmy

I’ve always liked the concept of serendipity, even more since being involved in the early days of coworking, where we u

Mateusz Urbanowicz’s Tokyo storefronts

Gorgeous work by a Polish illustrator working in Japan. Originally found him through this page about his Tokyo storefr

Fortnite World Cup

Incredibly (I guess), I’ve never played Fortnite. I have however been paying some attention to the game / platform, bu

Verticality, media, and China

This is the collision of two interesting “topic fields” I like to pay attention to. China in general, especially how me

The Best Supermarket Beer

This is a fun one; over at The Takeout, they did a fantasy draft where each of the writers picked his/her favorite supe

The Builder’s Remorse

It’s nothing new for people who built tools to later have remorse when seeing those tools abused. Sometimes that remors

Chuck Klosterman On How He Chooses Books To Read

I superficially resemble Chuck Klosterman — we’re redheaded dudes with glasses and beards — but wouldn’t call myself a

“I Am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I Am a Woman, and I Am Fast.”

For Out magazine, Michelle Garcia profiles track star Caster Semenya. Immediately after that mind-blowing 800-meter f

Photos from Opening Day at Disneyland in 1955

Alan Taylor of In Focus has curated a selection of photos taken during the first few days after Disneyland was opened t

A Fresh Guide To Florence With Fab 5 Freddy

Music pioneer Fab 5 Freddy is most well-known for hosting the seminal Yo! MTV Raps, but his earliest public attention c

The Story Format Leaps from Instagram to Big Media

I know this probably isn’t brand new, but in the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed a few articles published by big medi

Archaeology of the 99%

Archaeologists are increasingly looking past the splashy artifacts of ancient elites to seek & find the dwellings a

Climate Change Is a Humanitarian Crisis

From The New Humanitarian, a mid-year update on 10 humanitarian trends and crises to watch in 2019 (here’s their initia

101 Things Changing How We Work

From the BBC, a list of the 101 people, ideas, and things changing how we work today. I pulled out a few of things I th

One 8-Second Sample Yields 800 Radically Different Songs

Last year, music software company Ableton gave music producers a challenge: take an 8-second sample of audio and make a

The 100 Best Movies of the 2010s

Indiewire is early out of the gate with their list of the 100 best movies of the decade, betting that anything coming o

Trailer for Harriet, the Harriet Tubman Biopic

Harriet is a biopic about freedom fighter Harriet Tubman coming out in November. Tubman is played by Cynthia Erivo, wh

Lovely Panoramic Paintings of US National Parks

Heinrich C. Berann’s panoramic paintings of US National Parks aren’t just art and aren’t just maps but sit somewhere

Sony’s Proto-Walkman that Went to the Moon

50 years ago, the Sony TC-50 cassette player and recorder accompanied the Apollo 11 crew to the Moon and back. (Here’s

Cars! What’s the Matter with Cars Today?

I read four things recently that are all related in some way to our cities and how we get around in them. 1. Was the Au

What It Feels Like to Die from Heat Stroke

From Outside magazine, an article on what your body goes through and what it feels like to die from heat stroke. A perh

Abstract Aerial Art

The Andrews brothers travel the world taking overhead drone photos that they offer as prints on their site Abstract Aer

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Well, this trailer for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is our first look at Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers and, hmm

What Neil Armstrong Saw from His Window As He Landed on the Moon

I was away this weekend at a family function and mostly without internet access, so I didn’t get to watch the coverage

The Spine-Tingling Trailer for Star Trek: Picard

Here I was, flying along fat, dumb, and happy (like my dad used to say), not really wanting or needing any more The Ne

Live TV Coverage of the Apollo 11 Landing and Moon Walk

You’ve heard by now that it’s the 50th anniversary of the first humans landing on the Moon. On July 20, 1969, 50 years

Highlights from In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

You may know of Erik Larson from his excellent book on the 1893 World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City. Larson’s In