Headlines

Open Thread #Potato

Seems like it’s a good time for an open thread. I cannot remember what number we’re up to, so it’s “Potato”. I just had french fries for lunch and ate the longest french fry I have ever seen. 1 I should have taken a photo, but I was in consumption mode and not attention mode.

Culture •

Traction!

Tribologists study friction: what happens when things rub together. It’s indispensable, from the wheel to the paths of stars - by Jennifer R Vail Read on Aeon

Culture •

Au Revoir, Art Basel Paris

French museums and galleries are shuttering before nationwide protests tomorrow. Plus: What does it mean for a woman artist to “reach her prime”?

Culture •

The relentless math of bandwagoning

It often seems that everyone is talking about what everyone is talking about. No one cares about a song or a movie or a political issue–and then they do. Then it’s everywhere. But of course, that’s precisely why. Most people feel safe when they’re engaging within the expected

Culture •

The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are

Culture •

The Flipbook of the Rings

For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey , more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually

Culture •

The hotlist

I just built a page containing many of my books. Click on any one of them and it’ll take you to a directory of where you can get a copy. And the page then re-indexes based on which ones get the most clicks. https://hotlist.sethgodin.com Thanks for reading.

Culture •

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled

Culture •

The Winners of the 2026 International Pano Awards

The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu,

Culture •

Introducing the Museum of Delight

After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of matter: clay, thread,

Culture •

How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands

One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown up with —

Culture •

The Dominican Baseball Factory

"Teams make handshake deals with players as young as 11 while moneylenders prey on their families. The industry is corrupt, but Major League Baseball and the players union have done little about it."

Culture •