sing-along

Not Just Bikes explains missing middle housing, such as duplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings. The video argues that zoning in the US and Canada has made these options almost illegal.

About Here looks at the housing crisis and argues for non-market solutions such as co-op and social housing, drawing on Vancouver's situation. It discusses how public supply can hold down rents.

Oh The Urbanity! tests the theory that banning housing investors would fix affordability, using Rotterdam's ban as a case study. The video finds mixed results.

An animated xtranormal explainer on quantitative easing, what the Federal Reserve was doing and how things got there. It was made by Omid Malekan.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

About Here explains how North American building codes requiring two staircases make small multi-story apartment buildings hard to build, and contrasts this with places that allow single-stair designs.

A Vox Borders explainer on Hong Kong's housing crisis, the least affordable market in the world, and the tiny cage homes and subdivided flats people squeeze into. It looks at why prices keep climbing and how land policy contributes.

A mini-documentary by a Canadian living in Japan explaining how an average family can afford a new detached house in Tokyo. It covers how houses are treated as depreciating assets and how Japanese zoning and building practices keep prices low.

PolyMatter explains China's housing bubble and why around 50 million homes sit empty. It covers cultural and economic reasons behind the overbuilding and the government's bind.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

A Vox Borders episode with Johnny Harris explaining how China is gradually erasing the line between mainland China and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. It describes the one country, two systems arrangement and its expiration date.

A snarky, comedic video essay from Climate Town, with a guest appearance by Not Just Bikes, arguing that American suburban sprawl and single-family zoning are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It covers how zoning rules shape housing and what viewers can do locally, such as attending zoning meetings.

Tom Scott argues that grammatical gender is a silly concept and that the singular 'they' is an established gender-neutral pronoun. The description carries later corrections and reflections he added in 2019.

Not Just Bikes explains that car-dependent suburbs are not the only option, using Toronto's Riverdale as an example of a pre-war streetcar suburb. These walkable neighborhoods are popular but are now effectively illegal to build.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

Dialect coach Erik Singer analyzes how accurate the accents are of 32 well-known actors, including Brad Pitt and Will Smith, in WIRED's breakdown.

Not Just Bikes explains why crossing streets is dangerous in the US and Canada, where roads are designed to move cars fast, and contrasts it with Dutch designs for pedestrians.

A look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a French suburb transformed from modernist urbanism into traditional mixed-use fabric with local-style architecture, green space and a more balanced housing supply.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

An RSA Animate whiteboard adaptation of Dan Pink's talk on what motivates people at work. It argues that beyond simple tasks, autonomy, mastery and purpose drive performance more than money.

A video explaining why Japanese cities look the way they do, through Japan's national tiered zoning system that permits mixed use and flexible development. It compares this approach with more restrictive zoning elsewhere.

Technology Connections explains dishwasher detergent use, arguing people use too much and that powder beats pods and gels. It follows an earlier dishwasher video and covers enzymes, bleach, rinse aids and when salt is needed.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.

Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Technology Connections explains why single-hose portable air conditioners are inefficient and often a poor choice compared with window units. It details how the single hose pulls in warm outside air and wastes energy.

A short 3Blue1Brown video explaining Euler's formula e^(i*pi) = -1 through dynamics, treating velocity as the thing that moves a point to a new position. It builds geometric intuition for why an exponent with i produces rotation.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

Comedian Dominic Frisby gives a ten-minute explanation of land value tax. He argues it would fix problems of rent-seeking and the economics of land ownership.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

Animator Noodle explains why frame interpolation does not make animation better, covering timing, easing, smear frames and using the wrong tool for the job. A pinned correction says the video is partly outdated given later AI developments.

Mark Handley of UCL explains, with simulation visualizations, how early Starlink satellites without inter-satellite links could still give low-latency wide-area communication by hopping via ground relays. He shows it can beat fibre on many long paths.

Dialect coach Erik Singer tours a range of accents across North America with linguists in Part 2 of WIRED's accent series. It covers regional distinctions such as Southern Mississippi, Miami and Utah English.