We Defy Augury: 2026

Sunday, June 14, 2026

Quentin Tarantion Names Black Hawk Down Best Movie of the Past 25+ Years

Variety - "Quentin Tarantino Names ‘Black Hawk Down’ the Best Movie of the 21st Century; His Top 10 Includes ‘Dunkirk,’ ‘Toy Story 3,’ ‘Zodiac’ and More"

"“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve,” Tarantino said about selecting “Black Hawk Down” as his top pick. “Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”"

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Who is Satoshi?

New York Times - "My Quest to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery"

"So I decided to ask Mr. Back for the emails’ metadata. Metadata is to an email what an envelope, postmark and seal are to a physical letter: It shows where the email came from, when it was sent and whether it was altered. The copies of Mr. Back’s email exchanges with Satoshi made public during Mr. Wright’s London trial hadn’t included this information.

I didn’t have high hopes the metadata would tell me anything useful because Satoshi had used the Tokyo-registered anonymous email service, which would have masked his I.P. address. Not only that, Satoshi had probably used Tor to connect to the service to further insulate himself. I still wanted to see it, though, on the off chance I could glean some clue.

But when I emailed Mr. Back my request, he did not reply. I wasn’t sure if he was ghosting me or just busy and I didn’t want to spook him by immediately following up, so I waited eight days to send him another email. Again, radio silence.

I had clearly touched a nerve. But why? With the precautions Satoshi had taken, what was there to even hide? Unless Satoshi had made some sort of mistake?"

China and Drones

New York Times - "China Built the World’s Drone Industry. Now It’s Locking Down the Skies."

Patrick Radden Keefe on Slammers

New Yorker - "The Car-Crash Conspiracy"

Leo Messi and Miami

WSJ - "How Lionel Messi Became Miami’s Billion-Dollar Economic Engine"

Dune: Part Three

World of Reel - "‘Dune: Part Three’ Dazzles Audience as First Seven Minutes Screen at CinemaCon"

Film Auteur Paul Thomas Anderson

New Yorker - "The Perverse, Tender Worlds of Paul Thomas Anderson"

The Magic City Night That Never Happened

The Ringer - "A Magic City Night to Remember"
New York Times - "It Was Going to Be Magic City Night at the Atlanta Hawks. Then the Outrage Poured In."

Atlanta Hawks - "Hawks to Celebrate Atlanta's Iconic Cultural Institution ‘Magic City’ During the Team's “Magic City Monday” Game Against the Orlando Magic on Monday, March 16"

Sunday, March 8, 2026

The rise and fall of monoculture

WSJ - "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture"

"Everyone my age remembers “Jurassic Park,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the early seasons of “The Simpsons.” My teenage son and his friends watch and listen and play different things, sometimes even when they’re in the same room. Whatever it one day means to have grown up in the 2020s, it won’t have much to do with pop culture."

...

"To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they’re a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like “Demon Slayer” and all subscribe to Sony’s streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.

Anime fans were always willing to spend lots of money, it turns out. Before digital distribution, there wasn’t a way to market or deliver content specifically to them, so the business wasn’t viable.

Building a mass audience, meanwhile, is harder than ever, because Hollywood can no longer force content on the country by giving it the best time slot or the best position on the shelves of Best Buy."

I better get that ring. This year.

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Why did a 1983 Bob Grich just sell for $8,885 on eBay?

Reddit investigates.

(Wikipedia, Baseball Reference)

Quentin Tarantino working on "classic British trouser dropping' farce" play for London's West End

The Daily Mail - "ALISON BOSHOFF: Quentin Tarantino to bring 'classic British trouser dropping' farce to the West End"

World of Reel - "Quentin Tarantino’s Next Project Is a British-Style Farce Play Aiming for 2027 Debut in London’s West End"

Ellen Hughes - Mom of Quinn, Jack, and Luke

The Athletic - "She raised 3 NHL stars. Now Ellen Hughes hopes to help the U.S. women’s hockey team win gold"

Nike Reintroduces ACG (All Conditions Gear)

NIKE.com - "Nike Reintroduces ACG: An Outdoor-Performance Brand for Athletes Who Thrive in the Wild"

NIKE.com - "The Birth of ACG: The Summit that Launched a Legacy"

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Humanoid Robots

WIRED - "Your First Humanoid Robot Coworker Will Probably Be Chinese"

Bloomberg - "Rise of Robots Pits Hyundai’s Atlas Against Musk’s Optimus"

The Mandalorian and Grogu

May 22, 2026
Written by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White

Sunday, February 15, 2026

The Kwakwaka'wakw Nation Roots Behind the Seahawks Logo

BBC - "NFL team's logo links Super Bowl fans to indigenous roots"

The Adventures of Cliff Booth

Sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

TBD 2026 on Netflix

Written by Quentin Tarantino

Directed by David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Social Network, Zodiac, Fight Club, Seven)

Starring Brad Pitt, Scott Caan, Elizabeth Debicki, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Carla Gugino, Holt McCallany, Corey Fogelmanis, JB Tadena

The Rise of Bad Bunny and Producing a Super Bowl Halftime Show

The Atlantic - "How Bad Bunny Did It"

"At the center of Bad Bunny’s sound is the rhythm that has ruled Latin American pop for decades: reggaeton, which marries dancehall and rap in crisp, minimalist fashion. Inspiring partying often with just a drum machine and a vocalist, reggaeton first flourished as the sound of working-class urban life in Puerto Rico. “This is where I was born, and so was reggaeton, just so you know,” Bad Bunny boasts in Spanish in one song.

He also grew up as a highly online Millennial at a time when American pop culture was ruled by Fall Out Boy’s pop punk, Lady Gaga’s synth pop, and Drake’s rap blues. All of those touchstones now inform his maximalist take on reggaeton. In any given Bad Bunny song, the melodies roll and sway between emo dejection and childlike glee, the electronic beats call to mind Nintendo games, and the low end churns as ominously as a lava pit. Bad Bunny’s vocal tone is unique: husky and flat, peppered with gasps and grunts, and shimmering with digital effects. He sounds like a ringmaster in a futuristic circus, and you don’t need to know Spanish to feel that a thrilling story is unfolding."

New York Times - "Super Bowl Halftime Is the World’s Biggest Stage. He Designs It."

Jakarta Now the World's Largest City

The Guardian - "Jakarta overtakes Tokyo as world’s most populous city, according to UN"

The Re-Rise of Bathhouses

Bloomberg - "Why We’re All Trading Happy Hours for the Bathhouse
By Madison Darbyshire and Eleanor Thornber

Previously,
The Sauna Lifestyle of Northern Minnesota (Jan. 25)

Nike's 2026 World Cup Kits

Footy Headlines - "Nike 2026 World Cup/National Team Kits Leaked - 30 Kits"

Previously,

The 2026 USMNT World Cup Jersey Leaks (Jan. 26)
2026 World Cup Kits (Nov. 25)

The Rise of Hunting

Bloomberg - "Can a Return to Hunting Change How America Eats?"
By Madison Darbyshire

"Wild game hunting has gained popularity across the US in the past five years, as the pandemic pushed people to seek outdoor activity and popular podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Theo Von became outspoken fans of the sport. Social media platforms — and that same podcast manoverse — allowed internet-famous hunters such as Steven Rinella, Cam Hanes, Adam Greentree and Donnie Vincent to build huge followings.

Rogan and others in the Make America Healthy Again-aligned world have framed wild game as part of a protein-heavy diet, making it more fashionable with a type of supplement-loving American man. But while hunting has long been popular in some regions of the US, guides say new demand for hunts is coming from the coasts and tech centers such as Austin. "

Sunday, January 18, 2026

Is the Dictionary Done For?

New Yorker - "Is the Dictionary Done For?"

"Webster deliberately set out to supersede Johnson. His ambition was to create not a dialect of British English but an identifiably American language. Johnson’s dictionary had about forty-two thousand words; Webster’s had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk,” “boost,” and “roundabout”; words with Native American origins, such as “canoe” and “moose”; words derived from Mexican Spanish, like “coyote.” Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project started in an earlier work of his, a schoolbook speller called “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defence” and “centre,” “public” and not “publick.” He changed the language."