This shot from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun is one of the most breathtaking astronomical photos I’ve ever seen. Holy shit.

Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth.

Thanks to KDO reader Scott for pointing me to NASA’s Flickr account, which is possibly the easiest way to look at photos taken by the Artemis II mission. Like this one:

And this one — then maybe I’ll stop (maybe):

In a period of four years, Belgian photographer Barbara Iweins took a photo of every single thing in her house, “from my daughters torn sock to my sons Lego, but also my vibrator, my anxiolytics… absolutely everything. 12,795 photos of 12,795 objects.” You can explore the entire archive here, indexed and classified by color, material, frequency of use, room, and “what I would save in a fire”. (via @steveportigal.bsky.social)

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

And the cover is great:

I read Lerner’s 10:04 years ago and really liked it…I might pick this one up (and at only 144 pages, I might actually finish it).¹

More reading: Ben Lerner and the Impossible Interview, The Gentle Parenting Of Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’, A Novel as Slim as an iPhone Has a Lot to Say About Technology, Ben Lerner’s Latest Is a Strange and Brilliant Attempt to Resurrect the Novel, and Ben Lerner’s Big Feelings.

1. I’ve not had good luck with reading lately. Lots of audiobooks but I haven’t read more than 20-30 pages of an actual book since returning from Japan in November. ↩

Max Cooper’s music videos are always worth a look. This one, directed by Katia Schutz, is for a song called Pattern Index from his forthcoming album (Feeling Is Structure, May 8).

Cooper describes Feeling Is Structure as an “audiovisual album”, which I take to mean that each song will have an associated video released with it. A second video, Ebb and Flow, is already out too:

I thought the official video of Berghain by Rosalía (feat. Björk & Yves Tumor) was great — “I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral?” — and this recent live performance from the Brit Awards takes the song to the next level. I loved it. (via kenzie)

The commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission to the Moon, Reid Wiseman, took this photo of the Earth as the spacecraft speeds away our planet.

There are two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.

That is so cool. Worth clicking through to see the high-resolution image.

*sigh*

I know when I’m beaten. It’s gonna be KDO Lite for a few more days while I get my life in order. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves…

1. A missed checklist item from when the site moved servers a few months ago.↩

This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.

See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.

I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)

We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet — and I wish I was joking — the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.

Oof. Yeah. Writing a book with that title (and its attendant aspirations) while ignoring the expertise and experiences of the vast majority of the world’s population (and more than half of the US population) is just not good enough at this point. It’s lazy and incurious, especially for an author frequently lauded as the opposite of both.

(Bit of a sharp turn perhaps, but a recent contrast to Brand’s approach is the PBS series The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Instead of yet another retelling of the Revolutionary War focused on battles, Founding Fathers, and heroic tales of the good guys, Burns and his team drew from a broader pool of participants (many voices of women, free & enslaved Black people, Native Americans, etc.) and emphasized the extent to which the Revolution was many different things to many different people: a fight for freedom, a campaign to continue the enslavement of Black people, a cover for raping & pillaging, and the birth of a new colonizing nation. The result was a balanced, truthful, and insightful look at the war, an event that should be reckoned with at least as much as it’s celebrated.)

If you’ve read one (1) book, it’s not difficult to see what is wrong with Andreessen’s assertion and The Nation’s David Futrelle does a good job of rebutting it (archive link). But importantly, he also talks about why Andreessen might say such a thing (either because he honestly believes it or he’s performing the belief):

When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability.

His firm has bet big on war and the companies that provide the technology behind it…

Futrelle goes on to add:

A man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.

Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don’t devote even a moment to self-examination.

As a commenter said on the video snippet I linked to above: “He’s just describing psychopathy. Zero introspection, zero remorse, 100% actions that benefit you.”

One of the grand international stories right now — though it’s very hard when you’re in the midst of as much chaos and insanity as we are to get clear about the big narratives — is that the US is basically aligning itself as the last big petrostate. We’re going to go down with the fossil fuel ship, and China is aligning itself as the first electrostate. It is rapidly electrifying its economy, and it is dominating the technologies that enable an electrostate: batteries, EVs, etc., all that stuff. So where do you think the future lies?

All these emerging nations right now are stuck on coal. The story the US is trying to tell you is “shift to LNG. It’s cleaner than coal.” You’ll get some emission reductions. And then, basically, you’ll become dependent on our LNG. And for emerging nations, that’s an enormous 50 year investment program. They’re thinking now, “well, where is the energy situation going to be in 50 years? Do we think that fossil fuels are going to win in 50 years?” By launching this war, I think we have accelerated the process of pushing emerging nations into China’s arms and faster toward clean energy. That’s going to be the big effect of all this.

For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.