iter

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

A three-minute rant by Harlan Ellison, excerpted from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, on why creative professionals should always be paid for their work rather than work for free or 'exposure'.

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

Science writer Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs as a non-programmer to write, edit and research more productively. He shows his plain-text writing workflow and what led him from tools like Scrivener to Emacs.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in March 2023 whether GPT-4 and similar models could translate literary and popular fiction. He gives his assessment of Japanese-to-English quality.

A film-analysis video essay linking Blade Runner 2049's Cells Interlinked sequence to Nabokov's Pale Fire. It examines the poetry and meaning behind the film's references.

A Studio C sketch in which Captain Literally, a superhero who takes the word literally in its strict sense, causes absurd and painful outcomes. It is a short comedy bit about the misuse of the word.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

An episode of Fall of Civilizations on the Late Bronze Age Collapse around 1100 BC, when many Eastern Mediterranean societies were destroyed in a short span. It explores the Sea Peoples and the lessons for modern globalised societies.

Not Just Bikes explains how SUVs and light trucks have grown in size and share of US sales, and why that is dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and city life. He covers the regulatory loopholes, such as fuel economy rules and the chicken tax, that favored them.

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

Viznut's third bytebeat video presents music generated by very short C programs and JavaScript expressions. It links to online tools and deeper analysis of one-line music.

CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.

The full unedited 2003 ZDF television interview with David Foster Wallace, running about an hour and a half. He talks about literature, boredom, silence, television and what stories do.

In a New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

A 2017 documentary filmed at the Santa Fe Institute in which novelist Cormac McCarthy talks with SFI's David Krakauer. They discuss isolation, mathematics, character and the nature of the unconscious.

An Intelligence Squared debate in which Will Self argues for Brave New World and Adam Gopnik for Nineteen Eighty-Four as the better dystopian warning. It includes acted excerpts and is chaired by Jonathan Freedland.

Jacob Geller's video essay on empty cities and what they say about our relationship to places, using games, literature and aerial imagery. It touches on works such as Invisible Cities.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how close nuclear fusion really is to break-even, and why headlines about ITER and lab milestones are misleading. She distinguishes plasma gain (Q plasma) from whole-system gain (Q total) and shows the latter is still far below one.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

Zach Hartwig of MIT introduces the key concepts of magnetic fusion energy and the state of fusion research. He then presents MIT's proposed pathway of using high-field superconducting magnets to build smaller, cheaper tokamaks on a climate-relevant timescale.

Nerdwriter1 shows how rearranging the scenes of the film Passengers, so the audience shares the female lead's confusion, would change the movie. It draws on discussion of the original script.

Kurzgesagt animates Andy Weir's short story The Egg, in which a person learns that they are every human who has ever lived. It adds music and narration to the original text.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

Kurt Vonnegut's 2004 Case College lecture, with Spanish subtitles, in which he sketches the shapes of stories on a blackboard. He plots story arcs as good and bad fortune against time.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

The BBC radio play adaptation of William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, running about two hours. It features professional voice acting, sound effects and music.

An animated short film of Tanya Davis's spoken-word poem 'How To Be Alone', illustrated by Andrea Dorfman. It gently argues that being alone can be embraced and enjoyed.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

A short film by Max Joseph about his anxiety in bookstores and how to read more books amid constant streaming, social media and news. He looks for ways to rebalance his content diet in favor of reading.

Daniele Procida's PyCon AU 2017 talk presents a system that divides documentation into four kinds, usually drawn as four quadrants. He explains why mixing them makes docs poor and how separating them improves writing.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

A 2004 short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story "They're Made Out of Meat", in which aliens discuss the astonishing discovery of meat-based intelligent life. It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey.

Brandon Sanderson's keynote on AI-generated art, arguing that the artistic process and the journey matter more than the finished product. He explains why he rebels against generative AI in creative work.