The winners of the 2026 iPhone Photography Awards. . . What rhymes with this famous photo (Behind the Gare St. Lazare) by Henri Cartier-Bresson
The Spectacle: Has Taking the Perfect Photo Ruined Tourism?
Fordite is an artificial gemstone made up of dozens of layers of automotive paint that built up and hardered over time.
This material is typically found in the paint booths of auto factories, where cars were spray-painted by hand. As the paint sprayed over vehicles, excess paint would build up on the equipment and surfaces around the painting area. Over the years, these layers of paint would harden, creating colorful, agate-like structures.
Fordite is no longer being produced: “The switch from solvent-based paints to more environmentally friendly, quicker-drying paints in modern automotive plants has virtually ended the creation of new fordite, making it a finite material.”
Infinite Digest: a collection of infographics about DFW’s Infinite Jest.
Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See, “a 40-minute crash course in design thinking”. Found this via Edward Tufte.
Debbie Millman on the fleeting euphoria of success (YouTube).
March Forth is a feature-length documentary about Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was incarcerated at 16; “after his release, Betts went on to become an acclaimed poet, author, lawyer, activist and MacArthur Genius Award winner”. Trailer.
The Professor Who Taught People How To Think (1962). This looks great; shades of Feynman.
Screenshots of various operating systems (1983-2005). See also The Virtual OS Museum (“1,700+ pre-installed operating systems, ready to run”).
The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum. Got this from Andy so you know it’s good.
Speaking of Andy, he recently posted about Amazon’s decision to shutter Mechanical Turk. Kinda shocked it was still going tbh.
2018 PBS special hosted by Michael Keaton: Why Mister Rogers Still Matters Today. I’m gonna make some time to watch this one after my move is done.
AI privacy: What does AI know about you?
Proton Blog: “Every chat with mainstream AI leaves a record behind. Anything you type is stored and analyzed, and you’re liable to end up training their models and building a profile on yourself.
Even casual prompts can reveal deeply personal details, from your work and routines to your relationships and identity. AI Paper Trail is a free tool that helps you see that exposure for yourself. Upload your exported data to get a private report of exactly how much your AI knows about you — and what you can do about it. Try AI Paper Trail – Pete Weiss
A single prompt might not give away much about you. But weeks or months of them — whether it’s drafting work emails, getting advice for personal health and relationships, or just something you were too embarrassed to Google — can reveal who you are with uncomfortable accuracy. Your personal data is extremely valuable.
A behavioral profile based on what you ask, what you worry about, and what you’re likely to buy can be worth thousands of dollars to advertisers and data brokers. This is how AI profiling works in practice, and is exactly why Big Tech AI tools are designed to collect as much of your data as possible. Here’s what most popular AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, retain about you by default:
- Conversations and responses
- Uploaded files and documents
- Usage patterns, such as how often you use the tool, what features you use, and how long your sessions last
- Device and network data, including IP address, browser type, operating system, and approximate location
- Account information, such as your name, email address, and any profile details you’ve provided..”
The Case for Tracking Everything
Gizmodo: “…I-Min Lee is an epidemiologist at Harvard University School of Public Healthwhose research helped debunk the idea that 10,000 steps was a golden ticket to vitality. She told me and others back in 2020 that a key motivation for identifying the origin of 10,000 steps was because people were so obsessed with the number and the quest to achieve it, despite the fact that “there is limited information on how many daily steps are needed for health, particularly as related to clinical end points and mortality,” she and co-authors wrote in their 2019 study in JAMA Internal Medicine.
The Fitbit took a daily activity that up until this point had been more or less inconspicuous to the average person and made it extremely visible: When you looked down at your wrist, you could see precisely how many steps you’d taken that day, for better or worse. When it came to health, ignorance was no longer bliss. Subsequent studies revealed just that; the Fitbit was effective not because it simply tracked movement, but because it made behavior visible in a way that encouraged change.
An oft-cited meta-analysis, which conducted a systematic review and analysis of 37 Fitbit-based trials, found that, among all participants who used the tracker, there was an average increase of about 950 steps per day as well as a statistically significant increase in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Another randomized-controlled trial (not funded by Fitbit) studied a group of 51 inactive postmenopausal women and split them up into two groups: one that received a standard pedometer and the other a Fitbit (along with some additional instruction and a follow-up call).
The group that received the Fitbit and instruction, on average, walked 789 more steps per day than the comparison group. These studies revealed a key lesson: Tracking has the potential to make you healthier simply and precisely because you are more aware of it…”
How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy
MIT Technology Review: “One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading. For months, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had been cutting a wide swath through federal agencies, gutting teams that worked on everything from scientific research to Social Security to international aid.
So when the employees of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R/FIMI)—a unit tasked with tracking foreign disinformation—received a note asking them to meet in half an hour, many sensed their time had come. “We all had heard … that there was going to be a day they would shut down our office,” says one former staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Darren Beattie, a far-right provocateur who had been serving as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, wasted no time with pleasantries, telling the gathered employees that the office was being shutteredand that their jobs were being eliminated. The mood in the room oscillated between somber and outraged, the former employee says, with “lots of young, dedicated staff crying and wrecked.” But elsewhere at the State Department, the closure of R/FIMI was cause for celebration.
“We ended government-sponsored censorship in the United States through the State Department,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced shortly after in a video interview with a right-wing internet activist named Mike Benz. “This is obviously amazing news,” Benz responded, before teeing up a theory he’d been promoting for years: “We now have so many people wondering, Was I censored because of something the State Department did?” Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics.
The notion that the State Department had been working to silence Americans is perhaps unfamiliar to many people, but it’s a key part of a larger web of conspiratorial ideas that have been promoted for a decade on far-right blogs, podcasts, and social media. The basic theory is that, under the guise of combating disinformation, a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms—or what believers refer to as the “censorship-industrial complex”—has been working to suppress conservative and populist speech online.
The fight against “disinformation,” as Benz put it on a 2025 podcast, “is censorship in disguise.” R/FIMI, along with a predecessor office with the same mission, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), had been among the right’s long-standing targets; now it was one of its latest casualties. The second Trump administration’s war on censorship has contributed to the dismantling of numerous government agencies, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), among others. It’s razed the infrastructure that tracks and counters attempts by foreign powers to influence elections and popular opinion. It has also been used to justify sweeping travel bans and sanctions on targeted individuals and entire industries.
It’s provoked tensions with the European Union over its tech regulations, which these critics say silence Americans. And it’s even reshaped US national security strategy. Its reach, though, isn’t limited to US bureaucracy, academia, or civil society groups. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online—which is to say, just about everyone…”
