A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still agree to make room for.
Have you noticed that we don’t get any art isms anymore? The 20th century minted them like currency: Expressionism. Impressionism. Cubism. Brutalism. All the big lads, all the heavy hitters of the ism game, all in a Parisian cafe in the 1900s going “what if a face but wrong” and changing the world forever. And now? I went on the Wikipedia page for 21st century art movements thinking I’d find the new Cubism, thinking I’d discover the movement that defines our age, and: it is short. It is 10 ways of saying “art, but with computers, but also online”. There is also something called post-postmodernism which gives me linguistic fatigue. That’s it. That’s the century so far.
Japan has, by some fairly significant margin, the best words. German has the hyperspecificity, but Japanese has the poetry. Komorebi (木漏れ日) is the word for “the dappled light and shadows created by sunlight filtering through tree leaves”. One tidy little word against the limping nine-word-plus English approximation for the thing you’ve definitely experienced and never had a name for and now will never stop noticing. I learned about it because Instagram has decided, in its infinite algorithmic wisdom, that what I need right now is people painting komorebi, and it was right. It’s beautiful. It’s soothing. The algorithm has me.
It’s a relief to be told, gently and without condescension, that a thing you have noticed your entire life has also been noticed, named, and found worthy of painting by other people.
I’ve been vibecoding (the term is bad, I know it’s bad, its badness is part of what it means) my way through a small backlog of projects that have lived on a mental to-do list for years, projects I’d specifically avoided because each had one extremely annoying bit in the middle that I didn’t want to write. But now, with the robots, the tedious plumbing writes itself (or close enough to itself that the distinction has stopped feeling load-bearing).
My favourite-but-least-useful is a page for all the quotes I’ve been collecting for the last decade, which now randomly generates little posters out of them, meaning I no longer have to scroll through a Google Keep note of biblical length to see what past Monica thought sounded good (past Monica had range). My least-favourite-but-most-useful is an album roulette, because I have hundreds of albums I have not listened to since college, and the only honest way to get through them is to surrender to chance.
My grandpa turns 98 today. Ninety-eight. The man is as old as antibiotics. That’s a quantity of consecutive years that feels less like a lifespan and more like a small geological feature. What a genuine fucking achievement. I am 40 and my achievement this week is that I managed to call and reschedule an appointment without crying.