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The Plight of Art Models

Also: the troubling trend of "Crusadercore," pet monkeys in Ancient Rome, and what's really going on in those Vanity Fair photos of Trump's top advisors?

Hyperallergic •

Our practice

What do you do regularly? Where do you show up, what do you publish? Who do you ask, and what do you answer to? What gets better because you persist? Are there systems you support or work to change? What do you do when you don’t feel like it? Especially then. The ocean is made

Seth's Blog •

Hear Debussy Play Debussy: A Vintage Recording from 1913

A century ago, the great French composer Claude Debussy sat down at a contraption called a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano and recorded a series of performances for posterity. The machine was designed to encode the nuances of a pianist’s playing, including pedaling and dynamics,

Open Culture •

Machine With Concrete

Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear ratios According to a piece in Make , the input shaft spins at 200 rpm, which is reduced by

kottke.org •

Nature: The Best Science Images of 2025

Nature magazine has chosen its favorite science images of the year . I’ve featured a few of these on the site already — Skydiving the Sun , red sprites in the New Zealand sky — so I picked a couple of other favorites to share: The first was taken by Francisco Negroni of the

kottke.org •

The Lies and Falsifications of Oliver Sacks

In a recent bombshell piece for the New Yorker ( archive ), Rachel Aviv explored the personal journals of the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What she found was shocking: he had fabricated and embellished some of his most well-known work — like Awakenings and

kottke.org •

The Birth Keepers

"Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births–now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world."

Longreads •