Sep 22, 2026 | Journal
A 72-year-old American actor won Best Actor at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on 12 September for a black comedy set on Easter Island, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, and he accepted the prize by video from Montreal, where he was busy filming something else....
Sep 21, 2026 | Journal
A library buys a book. The book is, by first-sale doctrine, the library's to lend. The library then scans it, applies DRM, and lends one digital copy at a time, in lockstep with the physical copy it has removed from the shelf. Is the scan a copy the library is...
Sep 20, 2026 | Journal
On 12 September 2026, Complex posted a thirty-second NOAA clip that did what clips from the deep usually fail to do: it registered instantly. A bright yellow sponge sat next to a pink sea star on the abyssal mud, two kilometres down on Retriever Seamount — a submarine...
Sep 19, 2026 | Journal
The Whydah Gally was a slave ship that became a pirate ship that became a 1717 shipwreck off Cape Cod that became, in March 2026, the closest thing we will ever get to a witness in a 300-year-old argument about West African metalwork. Twenty-seven Akan gold pieces...
Sep 18, 2026 | Journal
A month ago this column looked at MoM-BH\-1, the single object that a team led by Rohan Naidu (MIT / University of Hawaiʻi) had just named in the pages of Nature* on 12 August 2026, and noted that the field had not picked a side about what JWST's Little Red Dots...
