📬 Newsletter 151
Damm hot summer.
Summer is here, and I’m handling it worse every year.
At some point between my thirties and now, the heat stopped being something I enjoyed and became something I endure. The moment temperatures start climbing I have a single impulse: go north. Somewhere where the air is different, where you can walk outside at noon without feeling like you’re being slowly cooked. I try to escape to the coast or the mountains whenever I can — a few degrees less is enough to feel like a different planet.
But before I manage to leave, I have a ritual. When the heat really sets in, I put on Do The Right Thing. Spike Lee’s film set in a single sweltering day in Brooklyn — the tension rising with the temperature, the anger accumulating in the air. It’s a strange kind of comfort: seeing the heat treated as a protagonist, as something that changes behavior and breaks things open. If you’re going to feel it, you might as well feel it all the way.
And then there’s the soundtrack. Jazz is year-round for me, but in summer it becomes something else entirely — the right temperature for the music and the music for the temperature. Miles with the windows down. Coltrane late at night. This week I have a specific reason to feel good about it: next Friday, July 4th, Nate Smith and Snarky Puppy share the stage at Noches del Botánico in Madrid. I’ve seen Nate play before — with Vulfpeck, and with his own band in Chicago — and I’ve followed Snarky Puppy for years. Seeing both on the same night in Madrid feels almost unreasonably good.
Here’s what else has been in my tabs.
A physical camera that, instead of taking a photograph, thinks about what it sees and prints out a poem about the scene — in free verse, limerick, haiku, receipt format, or alliteration, and fully customizable. The project sits in that rare intersection of hardware, AI, and genuine wit. There’s something both absurd and touching about the idea of a camera that responds to the world in language instead of light. The kind of object that makes you think differently about what it means to document something.
🧠 Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
This is a dense one, but worth it. Jürgen Schmidhuber — one of the pioneers of deep learning — has published a timeline arguing that most of what drives today’s AI boom has roots in a single group’s work in Munich in 1991. Four technical reports from that year sketched fast-weight mechanisms now viewed as a precursor to the Transformer (the T in ChatGPT), early self-supervised pre-training hierarchies, the foundations of LSTM, and what would later become GANs — all from the same lab, in the same city, in the same year. Around the same time, Munich was also the origin of the first self-driving cars in traffic, going up to 175 km/h. Whatever you think of the credit wars in AI research, the document is a remarkable piece of institutional memory — and a reminder that the tools reshaping everything around us were quietly imagined decades ago by people most of us have never heard of.
⚽ GenCup 2026 + How I Built It
GenCup turns every match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup into a generative poster — an art project where football, code, and graphic design meet. The work is by Zeh Fernandes, who has been doing this for four consecutive World Cups. For 2026 he wanted something different: an organic, painting-like poster of two teams pushing against each other, blurring into the lines — rooted in real match data pulled from the official FIFA website, translated into brush strokes, gravity fields, and a chrono-grid that maps the rhythm of the game. The process writeup is as interesting as the output.
🎬 They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? — The 1,000 Greatest Films
Compiled from 17,747 film lists and ballots, the 21st edition of The 1,000 Greatest Films is quite possibly the most comprehensive aggregate of critically acclaimed cinema you’ll find anywhere. Citizen Kane, Vertigo, 2001, Tokyo Story at the top — the canon is the canon. But the list is most interesting around positions 200–800, where the consensus gets shakier and the discoveries get better. I’ve been using it for years as a reading list for cinema, working through it slowly. Summer is good for this.
My own favorite doesn’t rank particularly high on the list — One, Two, Three by Billy Wilder, a film that moves faster than almost anything else ever put on screen and makes you feel it. Not the most celebrated Wilder, but the one I keep coming back to.
An editorial project by the Readymag team in which Stefan Sagmeister, Shantell Martin, and other creatives reflect on what they had to unlearn after design school. Thirteen written perspectives from influential names across the industry — Erik Kessels, Harriet Richardson, Raissa Pardini, Zipeng Zhu, and others — sharing advice, reflections, and insights into their career journeys. I teach design students and I think about this constantly: what school gives you that’s useful, what it gives you that gets in the way, and what only becomes clear years later when you’ve been wrong enough times. This project handles that question with more honesty than most.
Juan Solo was the MC of Solo los Solo, my favorite Spanish-language rap group. Watching him reinvent himself as a DJ and keep doing things right is exactly the kind of career arc I have respect for. This mix is exactly what the title promises — deep, propulsive, the kind of thing that makes a room move without ever feeling like it’s pushing. Put it on while you’re working or cooking or just trying to get through the heat. Properly good.
☀️ Fckn Hot Summer ‘26 — Playlist
And finally — mine. A Spotify playlist I’ve been building for this summer. Fourteen tracks so far, jazz-forward but not exclusively, with the kind of energy that fits an open window and a warm evening. I’ll keep adding to it as the season goes on. Consider it the audio companion to this newsletter.
That’s it for this one. Stay cool if you can.
— Wences