Patrick Pittman

Happy There Will Come Soft Rains Day, to those who celebrate. Be nice to your smart devices.

Have I slipped too deep into my rural headphase when I catch myself online ordering a traditional Austrian scythe? No, I have not, and you best not tell me so when you see me swinging it.

When my brain broke, I set about trying to fix it the same way I do with anything — by pulling it apart to figure out what's jammed. This started as a cultural history of writer's block, and ended up in the neuroscience of how creativity itself works (or doesn't): thestory.au/articles/wri...

Quite the RFP from the DND/Canadian Armed Forces, this one — a challenge to develop potential tools that "repurpose existing urban infrastructure as a distributed, passive sensing network” with AI as a middleware layer. Can’t see any issues with this! None at all! www.merx.com/public/suppl...

Always dreamed of going to a World Cup game in my city. I’m so glad tickets are affordable and my dream is within reach. 33rd vs 74th ranked teams in the world in a first round match, for the low, low cost of half a house (not in Toronto, to be fair).

Just realized at least some of the letters Barry Lopez and I wrote to each other over the years are now in his papers at Texas Tech. Or at least, I guess, mine to him. His to me sit treasured in a special little cubby on my desk, within reach when I need them. txarchives.org/ttusw/findin...

Inside every FinTech there are two wolves. One wolf runs the beautiful product that lives up to its name and makes investment a maybe enjoyable thing even for us broke folks, and sells it with genuinely brilliant John Wilson ad campaigns. The other wolf does this shit: thelogic.co/news/wealths...

Ah, damn, Fred Wiseman’s gone. I think my single most formative film experience was a documentary class way back in the day where the lecturer brought in a 16mm print of the then still sorta banned Titicut Follies. It completely changed my perception of the whole medium and what it could be for.

Beautiful tribute site to the late great Nicolas Nova @nicolasnova.bsky.social put together lovingly by Fabien Girardin. May this forever be a well to dip into whenever you need to be reminded how to look at the world in different and more generous ways... www.nicolasnova.net

Kitchen sink magic realism is a hell of a tough thing to pull off, to not just use easy wonder as an excuse to wallow in squalor. Andrea Arnold's Bird (on @mubi.bsky.social) is that rarest creature – I'm still feeling the glow of that life-restoring embrace in its immense wings. Absolute master.