NFC Energy-Harvesting Business Card Twenty-one LEDs, no battery, powered by the phone reading it
Reviews
Mapping India's Clouds A daily pixel map of where it is cloudy
Old Blue Every black robin on Earth is descended from one female who should have died at eight
Odyssey Explorer Seventeen landfalls, every Greek word openable, and a running count of the men who never got home
The Bankes Homer Sixteen columns of Iliad 24, and a second man's handwriting all over them
Pneumatic Tube Mail Twenty-seven miles of pipe under New York, 600 letters to a canister, 35 miles an hour
Every Cube All 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 cube states, laid out on one ruler
Cycloidal Gearbox A fifteen-year-old's 3D-printed 1:9 drive, published with the version that failed and the numbers that prove it
Elevators An interactive case that the fancy elevator kiosk is making you wait longer
Agloe, New York A town invented as a copyright trap, which then opened for business
The Archimedes Palimpsest A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works
David Rumsey Map Collection 149,000 historical maps online, free, and searchable down to the text engraved on them
Wyrm Math An open-source algebra engine where illegal moves have no square to drop into
The 1911 Odyssey The earliest feature-length Odyssey on film — a restored 1911 Italian silent, free to watch
Snewpapers Browse three centuries of digitised newspapers, 1730s through the 1960s
Finds
- Industry Standard Tools The one product everybody in a trade already owns
- Milton Glaser's Ten Rules for Work and Life Including an almost infallible test for whether a person is good for you
- moth-wing Fragile or fleeting — and a noun for the thing itself
- Kindle Comic Converter (KCC) Manga and comics recompressed for true fullscreen on e-ink
- The EuChemS Periodic Table of Endangered Elements All 90 natural elements recolored by how soon we might run out
- NFC Energy-Harvesting Business Card Twenty-one LEDs, no battery, powered by the phone reading it
- Underfoot Recording what the AI in your phone quietly became
- A Life of One's Own Seven years of keeping evidence on your own happiness
- Cosmic Collisions Watch a moon assemble itself out of the wreckage
- Exactly A history of engineering told in orders of magnitude
- Mapping India's Clouds A daily pixel map of where it is cloudy
- 3D-Printed NPT Thread Checker Five minutes of printing instead of calipers and a lookup table
- Sam Learns Things — World Map A geography drill that stops asking about the boring islands
- s-1.space What they said before going public, checked against what happened
- The Tree and the River One tree, one river, not a single word
- The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson Same line count as the Greek, and it moves
- POSIWID The purpose of a system is what it does
- Too-Ticky on uncertainty "All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured"
- If All the Water on Earth Disappeared The ships are the part you had not thought about
- The Book of Human Emotions Words for feelings English never got around to naming
- Pigeons Navigate With Their Livers Superparamagnetic macrophages, and a compass nobody was looking for
- The Book of Delights One delight a day, birthday to birthday
- Conway's Doomsday Rule Two secrets and you can name the weekday of any date
- Infrastructure A field guide to everything that isn't nature
- Old Blue Every black robin alive is descended from one bird
- Solivagant A word for wandering alone, in writing since 1621
- Why Are Rivers So Mathematical? Every stream on Earth is holding to the same exponent
- How Bluesky Draws Its Logo on Screenshots The trick is a humble UITextField
- Folding Globes Print a planet, cut it out, fold it into a sphere
- Odds and Ends A picture book about the last time you did something
- The Wavy Window Paradox Why office glass ripples from outside and not from inside
- Odyssey Explorer Tap any Greek word and the ten-year voyage explains itself
- Baba Yaga's Assistant Answer the want ad, brave the wood, make dinner for the witch
- Nature's Oldest Mandolin A cicada sings with its whole body, and the instrument has not changed in a thousand centuries
- draw.city Draw a shape on the map; find out how many people you just enclosed
- The Lost Art of Carrying Loads Six carry systems that solved it before Cordura existed
- Make: Fun! Forty projects from a man who designed toys at Mattel for a living
- On Looking Eleven walks around one city block, each with a different expert
- Ozu in Color Every Frame a Painting returns to explain how Ozu learned colour
- Rijksstudio 840,000 works from the Rijksmuseum, free to download and free to cut up
- Sandcastles Made Simple A four-foot sand tower with no bucket, no form and no plastic castle mould
- Identify files in APFS using inode numbers Disk Utility tells you a file is broken without telling you which file
- circumambient A word that goes around, and then goes around again
- Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers Two thousand years of ideas, one concept at a time, in 300 words
- How Does an Enigma Machine Work? A 3D teardown that follows one keypress through the whole rotor path
- Everyday Genius A memory champion's techniques, reduced to things you can do this afternoon
- If You Rode a Ship's Anchor to the Mariana Trench The drop to Challenger Deep, in real time, on the Titanic's anchor
- How Ancient Greek Warships Worked A 3D animation that finally makes three tiers of oars make sense
- The Pressed Ginkgo Leaf in Alice in Wonderland Deep time, opened from one leaf kept between two pages
- I Didn't Set A Cookie No cookies, no permissions — and it still knows your device and location
- Other Eclipses What a solar eclipse looks like from other planets and moons
- Pismire The word for an ant, from urine and mire
- The Bankes Homer A 2nd-century Iliad papyrus, now readable at full resolution
- Brushstrokes: Divisionism Seurat's argument that the eye should mix the paint, not the palette
- Pneumatic Tube Mail Sixty years of American post travelling underground at 35 mph
- Supersonic Trebuchet A medieval siege engine producing a very small sonic boom
- Vonnegut's Eight Tenets of Storytelling Rule three: every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water
- The Met's Copyist Program Set up an easel in the galleries and paint the painting
- Rocky's Musical Language Building an alien tongue out of notes, then asking linguists if it holds
- DDIA, as a Live Comic Distributed systems drawn as panels, then pushed until they break
- Why Did We Wait So Long for the Bicycle? Clockmakers in the 1300s, watches by the 1500s, no bicycle until the 1800s
- Every Cube A scroll bar with 43 quintillion stops on it
- insidedb Watch a B-tree split while you read about B-trees
- Rapture To seize, and to be seized
- Assart One word for the field and for the clearing of it
- StratoPi A Raspberry Pi, a weather balloon, and 100,000 feet
- When the bird and the book disagree A birdwatcher's proverb that Audubon never said
- HideUrBits Watch a single letter get hidden inside eight pixels
- Jean Piaget on the Adult in Every Child From The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932)
- Star Patrol A space game you play by fingerspelling
- Thank You, Everything A picture-book litany of thanks, built on tsukumogami
- Eclipse Times 2026 Which floor of your building can actually see the August 12 eclipse
- Why Some People Mow a Lawn Better Than Others 49 squares, 14,589 different ways, and people found all 12 perfect ones
- The Phone in Your Hand Fourteen layers deep, read on the object it describes
- bumbaze To bewilder or stupefy
- NearbyWiki Everything Wikipedia knows about where you're standing
- newold.computer A parts counter for machines that stopped shipping decades ago
- Crotchet The etymological twin of crochet, and no relation to the word you're hearing
- Kakehashi Wine, pointed the other way
- Project ESPAÑOL Ten thousand Spanish poems, sorted by the verb tenses you've learned
- BoredReading Long-form articles ranked by readers, with a keyboard shortcut printed on every control
- Cycloidal Gearbox A fifteen-year-old's 1:9 gearbox, published with the version that didn't work
- Elevators Why the elevator isn't coming, run at 25× until you can see the answer
- The Mind's I Twenty-seven essays and stories on the self, each one argued with by its editors
- Agloe, New York A town invented as a copyright trap, which then opened for business
- The Archimedes Palimpsest A prayer book written across the only known copies of two lost Archimedes works
- ChipBuilder Start at the AND gate, finish running your own machine code
- Disannul A prefix that agrees with itself instead of reversing
- Magnetic Sand Iron filings in a spice shaker, so the field shows up
- Hot Hand Project Pick the real NBA streak out of the coin flips
- Patterns in Nature Why a giraffe's spots look like cracked mud
- tale.fyi A whole public-domain book behind one link
- Etymologue Word origins you can walk forwards as well as back
- Misdoubt A prefix that reinforces instead of reversing
- Antipelargy A word for the care children return to their parents
- Semiconductor Simulator Animations Watch electrons and holes move through a transistor
- Publius All 85 Federalist Papers, presented one by one as they first ran in 1787-88
- Inconspicuous Consumption A newsletter with big enthusiasm for the design details everyone else ignores
- Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map An interactive map predicting how dense Earth's underground fungal networks are, anywhere on land
- Biblioteca Umberto Eco Umberto Eco's 32,000-book personal library, opened exactly as he left it
- Bellwether The sheep that named the trend
- The Computers of Jurassic Park Every screen in the movie, identified
- Expiscate To fish out — the verb for finding something by patient investigation
- Ettercap The Old English word for spider, still the best insult for a gossip
- Auspicate To begin an undertaking is, etymologically, to birdwatch first
- Copybook Generator Printable Chinese and English handwriting worksheets from any text
- Mainichi Learn Japanese by touring all 47 prefectures
- Cormac McCarthy on Shaping the World to Our Convenience From Cities of the Plain, closing the Border Trilogy
- Michel Foucault's Lectures Decades of Foucault's own recorded lectures, gathered in one place
- Ilya's Papers Quest Ilya Sutskever's famous AI reading list, turned into an RPG
- Uncovered Judge a book by its first page, blind
- IKEA Complexity Index Every IKEA product ranked by how hard it is to build
- Gamy Six unrelated senses, one word — and no relation to '-gamy'
- Noodle One spelling, three unrelated word histories
- Heard An EPUB reader with on-device narration and a free library of public-domain classics
- Mathellaneous A free, fully hands-on math museum on a Kansas campus
- The Nature of the Physical World Arthur Eddington's 1928 lectures on why the solid table under your hand is mostly empty space
- Verba Prima Guess the novel from nothing but its opening line
- Pitch Trail Ear training for kids disguised as a color game
- The Syntopicon Mortimer Adler's hand-built index to the Great Ideas
- Tomesphere Atlas Millions of arXiv papers rendered as one pannable, zoomable map
- Wyrm Math An algebra app where illegal moves can't physically be dragged into place
- Inventing ELIZA The first chatbot's rediscovered 1966 source code, back in print
- Worse on Purpose A public ledger of brands that quietly sold out
- SubSmith Turn any video moment into an Anki flashcard
- Alfred Korzybski on believing vs. doubting Both save us from actually thinking
- Origin Myth Map Creation myths of the world's civilizations, plotted on one map
- Uncovered Tinder, but for the first pages of novels
- How the Heck Do Solar Panels Work? Interactive explainer from photons through the full energy chain
- Julius Sumner Miller: Why Is It So? Complete 1962–73 physics demo show archived by ABC Australia
- Learn AI Layer by Layer Free interactive book building LLM understanding from scratch
- Leonardotheka 3,500 pages of Leonardo's manuscripts reunited digitally
- The Map of Physics Animated overview of every physics field and the gaps between them
- Mechanical Pencil Meticulous 3D animations of everyday object internals
- Storied Colors Browseable catalog of 252 pigments spanning 40,000 years
- Works in Progress Stripe's long-form magazine on technology, science, and progress
- Tolstoy's Guide to Daily Wisdom Tolstoy's last project — a year of daily readings from world philosophy
- Camus: "My revolt, my freedom, and my passion" Camus's three consequences of accepting absurdity — not despair but revolt, freedom, and passion. Surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on a 1945 interview.
- EzFurigana Add context-aware furigana to any Japanese text
- Fuel Efficiency of Launching Enemies into the Sun A physics analysis of disposing of objects via the Sun versus interstellar space
- Guerilla Art Guide Keri Smith's how-to for putting art into the world without asking permission
- Juan Ramón Jiménez: "Platero stops eating and looks at me" The Spanish Nobel laureate's prose poem about a quiet exchange of attention with his donkey — surfaced by Maria Popova on tenderness as a vehicle for the eternal.
- Judy Garland: "'Twas not my lips you kissed, but my soul" Quote Investigator traces a widely-attributed Sarah Bernhardt / Mary Magdalene line to a 1939 Judy Garland poem, My Love Is Lost.
- Merriam-Webster's Backward Index 315,000 dictionary entries typed in reverse for suffix lookup
- M.I.T.'s 1973 Civilization Collapse Model Jay Forrester's 'Limits to Growth' simulation said civilization ends around 2040
- Peopleware DeMarco and Lister's classic on why software teams really succeed or fail
- The Math Behind Van Gogh's Starry Night TED-Ed video explaining how the painting captures real fluid-dynamics turbulence
- Kundera: "We can never know what to want" Milan Kundera on the structural irreversibility of life decisions — surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on ambivalence.
- Making Comics by Lynda Barry Drawing instruction aimed at people who think they can't draw
- Manga Kamishibai Eric Nash's book on the Japanese paper theater that preceded anime
- Spirochaete Trail A long-running essay blog on overlooked media and material culture
- Flipbook Type a query, get a machine-generated illustrated encyclopedia entry
- Julian of Norwich "Mercy and forgiveness leadeth us to grace" Wikiquote's Quote of the Day from Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century English anchoress whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book in English by a woman.
- What Would J.R.R. Tolkien Think of Palantir? A video essay on a defense contractor named after Tolkien's corrupt magical objects
- Gary Snyder — "The cage they were tricked into entering" From Earth House Hold (1969), via The Marginalian
- Marianne Moore — "Imaginary gardens with real toads" From Poetry, via The Marginalian
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Shunryū Suzuki's 1970 Zen primer, still the recommended one
- Echoes of Genius: Enduring Wisdom from Great Minds A self-published quote book arranged as a perpetual calendar
- Martha Nussbaum on Human Fragility On openness as a precondition for being good
- Pythagoras on the Philosopher at the Olympics Where the word 'philosopher' actually came from
- Skymap An interactive 3D galaxy catalog in your browser, rendered with WebGPU
- Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change Beauvoir on why a marriage isn't a single decision but a daily one — and why that's its strength, not its problem.
- "If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research." Almost universally attributed to Einstein, almost certainly not his — and a more honest description of how research actually proceeds.
- Anna's Archive Offshore shadow library with 95 million scholarly articles
- Hannah Arendt — Men in Dark Times On the strange humanity available to outsiders
- Machiavelli — "Force or fraud" Wikiquote's quote of the day, sharpened from *The Discourses*
- Magnified Sand One-person archive of sand from around the world, photographed under a microscope
- Mary Oliver — The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac A poem on belonging to your own life, written after cancer