The Vilcek Foundation awarded $250,000 to Peter Do, Jacques Agbobly, Marcelo Gutierrez, and Uyen Tran. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Vilcek
A group of 50 Chilians recently spent several hours powering a human-operated chatbot . Some questions were answered quickly but “when they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Tanya Meléndez-Escalante, Diego Bendezu, Jalan and Jibril Durimel, and Natalie Nudell received the 2026 Vilcek Prizes in Fashion & Culture for their contributions to fashion representation.
Late last week, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello led a crowd gathered at the iconic First Avenue music venue in a spirited rendition of the band’s Killing In the Name. The band handled the music while the crowd, in the absence of Rage frontman Zack De La Rocha, sang the
The Border Patrol Is the Problem. It Always Has Been. “If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
"Crystal Garden: Seasons" blends natural growth with artificial coloring. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Wenting Zhu Cultivates a Kaleidoscopic
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more poetry in the coming year, so we began taking turns each week choosing a line
New revelations from the Epstein files, a hilarious protest against Melania's doc, the problem with archival art, our monthly crossword, and more.
The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board - by Peter Lukacs Read on Aeon
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself... You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of
Sports analogies often let us down. A colleague was explaining how measurement was difficult in many organizations, unlike a basketball game, where the time, the score and the stats are clear and obvious. He said, “everybody wants to win.” Depending on how you define ‘win’,
Last year, we featured here on Open Culture the story of how a samurai ended up in the unlikely setting of seventeenth-century Venice. But as compellingly told as it was in video essay form by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, it ended just as things were getting
Three mothers, one struggle: saving their children with schizophrenia.
"About 26 billion chickens occupy Earth, but apart from the lucky ones in backyards, most are condemned to the hellscape that is industrial farming."
Photo by Al Aumuller, via Wikimedia Commons Like another famous Okie from Muskogee, Woody Guthrie came from a part of Oklahoma that the U.S. government sold during the 1889 land rush away from the Quapaw and Osage nations, as well as the Muscogee, a people who had been forcibly
Elon Musk and other internet racists started an internet war over Christopher Nolan’s casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, thereby immediately disproving their point. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Early this month, a wily coyote swam across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz. He was in such rough shape, observers thought he’d probably die, but he’s been snacking on birds and rodents and was recently observed fat as a pickle . 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
"There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear... People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult."
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later. A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary
The artist confirmed to Hyperallergic that he was present at a 2013 dinner but said that he “did not have a relationship with Epstein” beyond that event.
What do you call the artistic technique that creates contrasts of light and dark?
A seminal Vito Acconci performance, Nona Faustine and Ocean Vuong’s explorations of identity, Sita Gómez’s celebrations of womanhood, and more.
Archival work has a place in historical recovery and cultural self-understanding. But not every artwork must be archival, and our politics shouldn’t end with presence rather than action.
The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed . “Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.” (My kid goes to a liberal arts school & anecdotally can confirm.) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Residencies, fellowships, grants, open calls, and jobs from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Rubin Museum, and more in our monthly list of opportunities for artists, writers, and art workers.
A recent paper in Nature details what scientists found at the Huayuan biota: Here we report the Huayuan biota — a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South China.
The recent restoration, which bears an uncanny resemblance to far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, is currently under investigation.
"Pizza Hut Classic is fast becoming a cultural obsession. I spent a day at one to find out why."
Culinary Students Given Live Baby To Learn How To Care For Bag Of Flour . I laughed so hard at this. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
During an exhibition, Japanese volleyball player Yuji Nishida hit a courtside judge in the back with an errant serve. He immediately sprinted across the court and dove prostrate in apology. The gesture was a sort of sliding dogeza : Even in a country where a sincere apology can
"Fresh out of college, we were a bunch of misfits, in a chaotic, run-down communal home, desperately trying to figure out who we were meant to be."
As part of their coursework, students at UC Berkeley are contributing edits to Wikipedia about “LGBTQ+ history, with an emphasis on queer and trans people of color” . They’ve added 300,000+ edits and 3,000+ citations. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
"Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment."
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent. The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss
The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis . “As thousands of ICE agents arrived, kids started staying home from school. A local principal, teachers, and parent volunteers have banded together to keep the families safe.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
The action unfolded during the $75 million film’s premiere, days before Trump announced the two-year closure of the performing arts center.
Autocratic backfire : when dictators construct echo chambers, overestimate their abilities, and dismiss their adversaries’ capabilities, leading to weakening or ruin. Examples: Mussolini, Putin, and now (hopefully) Trump. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Wilson, like Wright before him, wrestled with the psychic toll of racial violence on Black families in his paintings and lithographs.
"Ninho Globo" evokes a nest or a giant seed pod tumbling through the landscape. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Celestial Nest by Atelier YokYok