I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson.

I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.

I’ve also flagged this New York Review of Books podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn, another NYT podcast with Madeline Miller, and this WNYC podcast with Emily Wilson for future listening.

As for reading, Wilson and Mendelsohn both did contemporary translations of The Odyssey within the past few years: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (I loved this, read it aloud to my kids) and The Odyssey translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Actor Stephen Fry recently did a more approachable reimagining of The Odyssey. The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds is even more accessible, especially for younger readers.

Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it)¹ and The Song of Achilles.

Other novels based on Homer’s works: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.

Mendelsohn also wrote An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic back in 2018; it sounds really interesting:

When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.

Do you have any recommendations for podcasts or favorite Odyssey translations/retellings?

1. I would love to see a $200 million blockbuster adaptation of Circe directed by, say, Céline Sciamma, Sarah Polley, Chloé Zhao, Celine Song, Patty Jenkins, or Greta Gerwig…no shortage of great options. ↩

In his six-part series, Jonas Ussing, who co-owns a visual effects studio in Denmark, takes a look at these “No CGI” films and shows us just how much digital graphical effects goes into them. For instance, did you know that every single flying jet in Top Gun: Maverick, a movie we were assured was all practical effects, was built with CGI? Take a look:

His latest video is all about Christopher Nolan:

I’ve only watched bits and pieces of these videos so far (the Nolan one is 71 minutes long), but when ILM’s Todd Vaziri says something film-related is good, it’s good.

Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked traditions along the Wales/England border, Making Merrie combines craft, performance, and language to reflect on cultural heritage and exchange.

Mummers’ plays are traditional folk performances with roots over 500 years old, often tied to Christmas and New Year. Full of humour and spontaneous revelry, these plays were staged in streets, homes, or pubs by amateur troupes, telling simple stories of combat, death, and miraculous revival. Unlike the religious Mystery Plays, mummers’ plays are secular, carnivalesque, and performed for community fun.

The project features large-scale wicker costumes, handcrafted using regional willow basketry techniques, highlighting basketry as an essential human skill we’re at risk of forgetting—a skill that, if lost, means losing part of what it is to be human.

(via colossal)

57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule (all times EDT):

4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon

4:20:15 pm - 10:51:26 pm: Break in coverage

10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)

Set an alarm on your phone or calendar! Also, this works best on an actual computer but I think it functions ok on phones and tablets if necessary.

Back in 2018, I wrote a bit about what to look out for when you’re watching the landing:

The radio voices you hear are mostly Mission Control in Houston (specifically Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who acted as the spacecraft communicator for this mission) and Buzz Aldrin, whose job during the landing was to keep an eye on the LM’s altitude and speed — you can hear him calling it out, “3 1/2 down, 220 feet, 13 forward.” Armstrong doesn’t say a whole lot…he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”. Note the change in call sign from “Eagle” to “Tranquility Base”. :)

Two things to listen for on the broadcast: the 1201/1202 program alarms I mentioned above and two quick callouts by Charlie Duke about the remaining fuel towards the end: “60 seconds” and “30 seconds”. Armstrong is taking all this information in through his earpiece — the 1202s, the altitude and speed from Aldrin, and the remaining fuel — and using it to figure out where to land.

As it turns out, it was 10,000% important that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was delivered in American accents, beyond just the Emily Wilson linguistics of it all.

It’s because it was about America.

I didn’t think it’d be possible to spoil a 3000 year-old epic, but here’s a 🧵

The emphasis on what’s happening back in Ithaca, with the royal courts and suitors to Penelope reflect upon the internal politics of taking the anxieties of the people about external invaders to attempt to seize power.

Then, Odysseus returns with the revelation: the feared invaders, “The Sea People”, were them all along.

Zeus’ Law has an uncanny resemblance to Christian teaching. “Whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me”. (Matthew 25:40)

That America proudly keeps envoking the Abrahamic God in its identity as a nation, and its government attempting to justify their actions in the name of such a God, yet turn around and gravely mistreat the immigrants on their doorstep, and antagonize their own allies, is a betrayal of its identity.

The film warns: America has broken Zeus’ Law.

Steve Donner shared some interesting thoughts in his reading of the film:

20. The point: Nothing is sacred in war, and we have lost all respect for basic decency and hospitality. We’re all the violators; we are all the suitors, we are all the cyclops. Consequently, all the towers and temples burn (“the burning roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead”). It’s Odysseus’ guilt about his foreign wars manifesting again and he’s spent years avoiding the truth.

21. That’s why he’s unconsciously avoided home for twenty years: he simply cannot face what he has become, nor does he wish to show his shame to his wife and son.

I’m looking forward to seeing the movie again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, what did you think of The Odyssey? And if you read or listened to something interesting or provocative about the film, please share links!

Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. Two years earlier, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination. His father, an overseer on a Maryland estate, and his boss Mr. Goldsboro needed to travel to Washington to check on “the legal status of their 150 slaves”. Seymour got to go along.

It was going on toward supper time — on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 — when we finally pulled up in front of the biggest house I ever had seen. It looked to me like a thousand farmhouses all pushed together, but my father said it was a hotel.

[…] When I finally had been rushed upstairs, shushed and scrubbed and put into fresh clothes, Mrs. Goldsboro said she had a wonderful surprise.

“Sammy, you and Sarah and I are going to a play tonight,” she explained. “A real play — and President Abraham Lincoln will be there.”

After Lincoln was shot, Seymour saw Booth fall from the balcony and run off.

This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.

Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.

What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?

To draw attention to the millions of girls who cannot afford period products, the MENstruation Foundation ran a unique advertisement in three major South African newspapers.

Readers of The Star, The Mercury and Cape Times opened their newspapers this week to find something deeply uncomfortable: period blood stains on the front page, seeping through to the pages beneath — as if the newspaper itself had been used as a sanitary pad.

South African schoolgirls suffering from period poverty are forced to use newspapers, rags, and even cow dung in place of sanitary pads. Here’s a short video of what the ad looks like as you page through the paper, culminating in a full page highlighting the foundation’s free sanitary pad dispensers placed in schools.

Maybe one of the best advertisements I’ve ever seen? (thx, caroline)

Rougeux wrote a post on the history of The Naturalist’s Library and how the project came about.

The Library is credited with having a significant democratizing effect on the study of natural history because Jardine and Lizars prioritized affordability and portability. Each book was only 4 by 6 inches and priced at six shillings, making them a much more accessible alternative to the “unwieldy folios” from other naturalists. This led to a tremendous demand for each one, resulting in tens of thousands of copies being printed overall. Just two years into publication, a notice appears at the beginning of one volume stating, “we have sold upwards of 60,000 volumes, in which there have been nearly 2,400,000 coloured plates given as Illustration.” Exact sales numbers are difficult to come by but history has shown that the series was very popular with estimates of 10,000 copies sold for each volume, totaling at least 400,000.

In order to help with his research, he borrowed a biography of Jardine from the library and built a custom rig out of K’nex construction toy pieces to scan the whole thing.

About a month later, I discovered a 2001 biography about Jardine, Sir William Jardine: A Life in Natural History, which only existed as a physical copy. I emailed the publisher to ask for a digital copy but had no luck. So I did what any self-respecting researcher would do and borrowed it on an inter-library loan and made my own digital copy by building a very janky custom rig out of old K’nex parts to take pictures of each page with my phone that I later combined into a searchable PDF. The OCR on it could be improved but having it available digitally allowed me to consult it in my research.

You can check out the shop for posters of the illustrations as well as a complete, bound, 800-page volume of all 1300+ illustrations.

Two of the best football players in the world, one a Barcelona legend and another a Barca legend in the making. Both came up through the ranks of the club’s La Masia youth academy. Both wore number 19 for Barca before switching to the number 10. And if Argentina can advance past England in this afternoon’s semifinal match, the two will face each other in the World Cup final on Sunday. It’s like if there was a photo of Muhammad Ali holding Mike Tyson as a baby. Remarkable.

And the way the photos happened is completely random; Yamal’s family didn’t have footballing connections or anything like that. The photos were taken by photographer Joan Monfort in 2007 for a UNICEF fundraiser (UNICEF was the jersey “sponsor” for Barca’s 2007-2008 season).

“UNICEF did a raffle in the neighbourhood of Roca Fonda in Mataro where Lamine’s family lived,” said Monfort. “They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a Barca player. And they won the raffle.”

“He [Messi] didn’t even know how to hold him at first,” Monfort said, recalling the difficulties of the shoot. “Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he’s shy. He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated.”

More from Monfort in The Athletic:

“It’s the most famous photo I’ve taken in my life, by a long way. So many people have been interested, again during this World Cup now. If Lamine keeps growing like he is growing, the photo will be even more historic. The chances of all this happening was like winning the lottery. Although it’s not sorted me out financially for life (laughs).

“I’m just really happy it happened. It’s especially nice in today’s football, when so much is to do with money and power.”

The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing for them. Messy folks who repeatedly get it wrong but never stop trying to get it right anyway. Kindred spirits. Loud laughers. Pals who make the grocery store fun. Loved ones who get as excited about your success as you do. The person you feel comfortable crying in front of. Sing-in-the-car friends. People who text you to look at the moon.

I am 100% the friend who will text you to look at the moon or the meteor shower or the aurora.

From Types Of People I Admire The Most:

Someone who isn’t afraid to just be human. The friend who commits to the bit, even if it is well past its expiration date. People who accept that their ducks will always be in a bit of a zig-zag formation. Relentlessly creative folks. Daydreamers. Awkward silence embracers.

From Types Of People Who Will Change Your Life:

Teachers who believed there was potential within you, even when you were convinced you would always be a lost cause. The internet friend who showed you that your art does matter, and it’s needed. The mentor who became the older sister you never had. The ex-partner who showed you there are some types of people you’re only meant to love from afar. The neighbors who became family. The family members who became friends.

More, more, more, more.

Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.

Philip Summers hand-draws game guides for old school video games. He’s done guides for games like Mega Man, Castlevania, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES), and Metroid.

But my favorite one is The Legend of Zelda game guide because Zelda was (and still is, tbh) my absolute favorite NES game — and you can get it for free at the Internet Archive. Somewhere in my personal archive is the map I drew for the second quest of Zelda; I also still have my original game cartridge.

I’d seen that there was a new Tom Cruise movie coming out this fall called Digger, but I was not prepared for the trailer, in which we see Cruise playing a dipshit oligarch in what appears to be a Dr. Strangelove-style satire/thriller.

The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.

The film is directed by Alejandro Iñárritu (Amores perros, Birdman, The Revenant) and also stars John Goodman as a geriatric president, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons. Digger has just moved near the top of my most-anticipated movies of 2026 list.

From XKCD, a tour of some of the Earth’s deepest and most notable holes, including mines, caves, boreholes, subway stations, lakes, tunnels, neutrino detectors, and, of course, the Mariana Trench.

I was surprised to learn that a pair of boreholes, the Kola Superdeep Borehole and the Deepwater Horizon Borehole, are actually deeper than the Mariana Trench. Explain XKCD has more info on each of the various holes, including the truly bonkers Cave of Crystals in Mexico.

Photo credits:

1. Paweł Jagiełło, Ak-Say Canyon, Kyrgyzstan.
2. Azim Khan Ronnie, a rowing team in Switzerland.
3. Chin Leong Teo, the Park Royal Hotel, Singapore.
4. Azim Khan Ronnie, workers harvesting/drying red chili peppers, Bangladesh.
5. Savadmon Avalachamveettil, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage crowd, India.
6. Marcin Zając, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco.
7. Chin Leong Teo, crosswalk in Tokyo.
8. Daniel Viñé Garcia, Cono de Arita, Argentina.

You can see more photos from the winning photographers at the contest’s website, Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography. (via colossal)

This might be my new favorite skate video? It follows a pair of young skaters around the city as they chat about their friendship, share tips about living life, and try skating everything that is even remotely skateable.

Best friends, Ari and Luca are two of the most promising NYC talents right now. They are consistently street skating, crushing events, and are keeping skateboarding exciting for a generation we seemingly missed.

If these two stick with it, we have no problem betting that they’ll be the next big names out of the city, and we were lucky enough to catch them right before they arrive.

(via craid mod)