Books, film, music, art and the people who make them.
Arts & Culture Article · 3 min read
A standing page on Disney as culture and history, starting with a 48-minute 1968 television tour of Disneyland's workshop and the new Tomorrowland. Updated whenever there is a good piece of history, a rediscovered film, or news worth keeping.
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Arts & Culture Article · 4 min read
A friend sent a joke chart plotting screen size against corporate rank, with the CEO on an iPhone and the bottom rung behind two monitors. It's satire with no data behind it, but it's funny because it's half true. Here's which half, and what the chart accidentally gets right about who has to look at
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Music Article · 7 min read
A four-and-a-half-minute music video dressed up as the sleeve and run-out groove of a vinyl record plays "Feel the AGI" as a country-gospel revival number, setting the AI-safety community's own private vocabulary — Moloch, the orthogonality thesis, p(doom), the fire alarm, the context window — as th
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Arts & Culture Article · 8 min read
Lidl just opened what it's calling the world's first supermarket pub, in Northern Ireland — a clever workaround for a liquor-licensing dead end. A Pennsylvania grocery chain built the same thing in 2009, and the reason it never became the industry norm has nothing to do with imagination and everythi
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Music Article · 9 min read
A five-minute music video credited to Claude Opus 5.5 takes on "AI as Normal Technology," the 2025 essay arguing AI will spread at the slow pace of electricity, and calls out the essay's skeptic allies by name: Acemoglu, Solow, Baumol, Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun. It's a diss track aimed at an economics
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Music Article · 5 min read
Kling AI 4.0 shipped on September 28 with a launch-day demo built to look like anything but an ad — a black-and-white concert film of a woman singing to an empty seat, one caption line letting the song's actual subject slip through. Second entry in the Notebook's running AI-music collection.
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Music Article · 2 min read
A stranger on X asked an AI agent to track down Satoshi Nakamoto and get him to rap the Bitcoin whitepaper. What came back is a studio session, a mic, and — allegedly — pineapple jalapeno pizza. It's also the first entry in something new here: a running, tagged collection of the songs, videos and me
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Music Article · 9 min read
An X user gave Claude Opus 5.5 free rein and asked it to introduce itself. It wrote a full song about who it thinks it is — lyrics, chords, and a music video coded frame by frame — then said, in its own caption, that it had never heard the result. That turns out to be a literally true, checkable cla
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Arts & Culture Article · 7 min read
Ernő Rubik built the first Rubik's Cube in 1974 to work out a problem in how solid objects can move, and then needed about a month to solve it himself. The official record now belongs to a nine-year-old in Poland at 2.76 seconds. Here is how a Hungarian classroom model became a 1980s craze, and why
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Music Article · 7 min read
The second entry in my Journey series is the record that got me — Escape, July 1981, the first with Jonathan Cain, the one with "Don't Stop Believin'" on it. It came to me off the radio, and then I bought it on LP, and then on cassette, and then on CD, and then took it for free on Napster like every
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Music Article · 6 min read
My favorite Journey album is not Escape and not Frontiers. It's Raised on Radio, from 1986 — the one Steve Perry produced himself, the one made after two founding members were let go, the one the band never quite recovered from. This is the entry where I say why: it was mostly Perry, it mixed his vo
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Music Article · 11 min read
My favorite band, of all time, is Journey. This is the first entry of a series about them — not a history of the band, which exists already and was written by people who were in the room, but one record at a time, each paired with where I was when it reached me. It starts with why, with the singer w
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