Moment of non-political distraction: Racket has a thoughtful piece on dive bars and glass block windows (ranking them, natch). Highlighting one of my faves in NE Minneapolis (Knight Cap):
Big glass block window? Yes. Nearly-as-big off-center sign? Sadly, also yes.
False spring came early to the midwest. Had to dig quite a trench out of this heavy, semi-wet hazard in the morning. Also nice to see Noah Kolina, photographer up in Lumberland, NY, saw a similar “ice storm”.
I’ve tried all the Mac launcher utilities over the years, including the legendary Quicksilver (RIP, even though they still seem to have a site up for it…), and keep coming back to Launchbar, currently in its sixth version. It’s a complete package — buy once, has all the features it says it has, no AI (a bonus), and is exceptionally fast with file/folder actioning. Comparatively, Raycast is bloated and burdened with a focus on enterprise accounts. Alfred is suitable, but feels archaic and neglected in 2025.
If you know, you know. Minnesota’s legendary dive bar frozen pizza brand of choice › Racket has a piece on how Doug Flicker builds new installments for Heggies pizzas.
…the brand-new Italian Beef pizza that’s already hitting bars and grocery stores? Flicker says he perfected it over three months, toying with five or six different beef brands, several cheese blends, and a handful of giardiniera recipes. The standard-issue Heggies sauce got tweaked “a tiny bit, but not too much.”
Kottke has a rundown on the recently released 4K restoration of Seven Samurai. Funny he mentions getting a Blu-ray player and returning to physical media… I just bought a handful of favorites from Criterion a few weeks ago. Feels good to have a real backup in case, you know, the worst happens.
Derek Thompson’s interrogation into adult loneliness corresponds with a wavelength that connects to what’s going on politically, with capitalism/branding, and probably the future of the human race. It’s an astounding change in our species.
Om Malik predicts a major evolution of the browser:
While browsers are so ubiquitous that it may be hard to imagine life without them, the truth is that we humans have had to adapt to what has been a document-centric web experience. We have been forced to adapt to technological constraints, rather than technology truly adapting to human needs.
I’m seeing more and more of this concern amongst friends and coworkers, and journalists/artists in particular are flabbergasted:
Cinema, theatre and great novel writing has always had the power to entrance, to get us to suspend our disbelief. But we knew where the border between fantasy and reality ran. Now with AI we are entering a world where those lines will be harder to discern – and many people just don’t care.
We once distinguished reality from fantasy and used this difference for high art: interpret authors’ perspectives to embrace emotion, challenge thought, and employ critical analysis. Perhaps I’m lamenting the loss of preference for older formats. Though long-form television remains popular, the proliferation of ultra-short-form video and the lack of authorship or authenticity are the new norm.
Louie Mantia has been on a tear lately releasing (or re-releasing?) new icon packs, the latest of which reflects on the controller button styles of the Sony PlayStation.
Jim VandeHei (Axios co-founder) on The Grill Room podcast regarding new media vs the old:
“What I tell our staff is, I don’t have time to be romantic. Whatever was will not be in the future. You damn well better figure out what’s happening on the ground.
Honestly, at this point, good advice.
Westenberg’s How to Destroy a Generation:
When every feeling becomes a guiding star, resilience takes a back seat. Minor setbacks start to feel like existential crises, and any challenge to your perspective feels like a personal attack. Soon enough, you have a population that’s constantly on edge, unable to handle adversity, and primed to overreact to the smallest discomfort.
Sometimes new stories are just old stories badly remembered.
China tightens control of rare earth minerals — what’s the plan here?
At least Steve Ballmer is trying to reinforce the “twin pillars” of democracy and capitalism through his continued investment in USAFacts.org. What good it does is up to news organizations and government, fortunately/unfortunately — prime example:
Ballmer has taken his just-the-facts pitch to Capitol Hill, trying to convince Congress to ground its legislation in facts and to sign a document saying it believes in government data. “I don’t feel like I got much traction,” he admitted.
How endemic will AI feeds and content become? Sounds like this is the plan for Meta, at any rate, according to Jason Koebler:
Both Facebook and Instagram are already going this way, with the rise of AI spam, AI influencers, and armies of people copy-pasting and clipping content from other social media networks to build their accounts.
Save us all, humans + RSS.
At this point, what industry hasn’t been upended by private equity.
An intriguing idea, as I for one am interested in seeing Submerged but am not buying a Vision Pro to do it:
Apple should sell tickets to go sit and experience these special Vision Pro events.
Green Day de-masters their landmark Dookie album into 15 inconvenient, throwback musical formats in a brilliant audio experiment. The big mouth Billie bass is neat, but the answering machine? Divine. (Via Kottke. )
Movie theater popcorn solved: refined coconut oil and Flavacol.
Butter has nothing to do with it.
I concur, Matan Budy, on buying things you use:
…I press the pay button with love. It makes me feel good that I upgrade my life, or that I support someone who is working really hard for something I care about.
One of those unexpected, sudden rising to fame stories that happens every so often in the literature wold: this time with Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series. I’ve only watched the Apple TV series so far (which is stellar and on its 4th season), but I’ve got my eye on the books next…
➔ Patrick Rhone has a nice “Rhoneism” today regarding clothes, and remarks specifically:
[...] fashion and the idea of having multiple items of various pieces of clothing is a fairly recent idea history-wise [...]
Nice to see an intersection of this thinking × capsule wardrobe trending, too.
Six Colors' Interview with Zach Gage on Puzzmo and specifically, Pile-up Poker. He’s got an agreeable rationale for why it’s limited to five hands per day, something I’d been curious about since it was launched.
Ingenuity in ’re-agriculture' has led to successfully transitioning out of factory farming into medicinal tinctures, mushroom coffee blends, and solar panel surplus energy. “If all goes well, the profits from mushrooms could exceed what the farm was generating from hogs during the best of times.”
Great new video from coffee guru James Hoffmann covering celebrity coffee products. Few have captured the egotistical rationale (me = “founder”) and business machinations (scaled but mid production) driving this celebrity trend than he does. It’s still all about merchandising recurring revenues.