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September 8, 2026·Edition 46

Who rebranded tarot cards 300 years later?

Internet Microdoses

Turns out tarot was never about your future. It was a card game for Italian nobles. The Morgan Library in New York just reunited the surviving cards of one of the world’s oldest tarot decks for the first time in North America. They were painted in the 1450s, and weren’t used to tell the future for another 300 years. How a card game conned its way into your future

Elizabeth Holmes let Nathan Fielder make a doc about her before she went to prison, and the resulting You Can See Everything just blindsided Telluride. Apparently she’s plotting a “new and improved Theranos” from her cell. It hits theaters October 16. Why Nathan Fielder can’t explain what he filmed

Apple’s September 9 event is shaping up to be one of their biggest launches ever, which is what they say every year. But they might actually mean it with at least six new products — including the foldable iPhone and the iPhone 18 Pro — and one brand-new CEO. Will you fold and buy the new iPhone?

A Ferrari once owned by Michael Jordan is up for sale. Jordan drove the 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello during his Bulls years, and designer Tinker Hatfield later used the car as inspiration for the Air Jordan XIV. After 24 years out of public view, it’s being auctioned by Pharrell’s Joopiter for as much as $1.3 million. The car behind the shoe

Saturn keeps forming perfect shapes, and no one knows why. A giant 10-sided shape just appeared in the clouds over its south pole. It joins a hexagon that’s been spinning over its north pole for 44 years. Here’s what scientists think is going on

Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors, or about $3,000 a title for the books it pirated to train its AI. The court ruled that training on books was fair game, but downloading pirated copies to do so was not. Why authors, agents, and publishers are fighting over the payout

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Aesthetic Study

Data Center Chic

Lately 2016 keeps coming up as a sweet, dumb, innocent time — the last year before everything got heavy.

That fall, the naïveté was on full display at a Chanel show, when Karl Lagerfeld turned the Grand Palais into a server farm. A sign over the door said “Chanel Data Center,” models walked in robot suits, the runway was a corridor of glowing mainframes, and the handbags had blinking eyes. This was 2016, when smartphones had taken over daily life, but the machines running them were still invisible. Lagerfeld dragged that hidden backroom into the light, calling it “intimate technology.”

A look from the Schiaparelli Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2024 collection by Daniel Roseberry

He was all too right, though perhaps not how he intended. In 2026, that glowing corridor is the ominous Eddington-style shed going up outside some unsuspecting town. Now, when we see data centers, we think of online petitions, and some say Lagerfeld’s show would be canceled if staged today.

Prosthetic leg and Silver Scylla Pumps by Invasive Modification

At the same time, big tech has the best seats in the house. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos watch shows, Bryan Johnson walks runways, and AI companies put out merch like yesteryear’s streetwear labels. Balenciaga now sponsors Substack writers directly. Lagerfeld guessed that the robots were coming, but it’s the tech bros who built them that are taking over.

  • How the data center became a midterm villain
  • Seven in ten Americans don’t want data centers anywhere near them
  • Read a review that called the Chanel show the most glamorous runway in fashion
  • Balenciaga returned the favor by sponsoring Substackers
Cover of Data Center Chic collection
Data Center ChicBy @sequencebycosmos
An image uploaded by CultedXO on Jan 25, 2026.
An image uploaded by mellamoo63 on Aug 31, 2026.
An image uploaded on Mar 04, 2026.

September 8, 2026·Interview

Kathleen Sorbara

A Brooklyn vintage shop owner making the case for clothes built to outlast their own moment.

Kathleen Sorbara
Kathleen Sorbara

A moment with

Kathleen Sorbara

A Brooklyn vintage shop owner making the case for clothes built to outlast their own moment.

Kathleen Sorbara has an eye for clothes that outlast the trends that made them. Look no further than Sorbara’s, her Brooklyn vintage shop, which is a haven for the elevated over the disposable. This fall she’s giving the floor to designers she loves, hosting Japanese knitwear and lingerie label Haze on September 17 and LA sportswear brand HORSE on October 1. Here, Kathleen shares the places that move her, the artists whose radical lives she reveres, and the long drives that clear her head.

Three places you’ve felt inspired by.

The Surf Club Restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Florida; Yellow Rose Cafe and Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Lincoln Center, Upper West Side, Manhattan.

What's your hot take?

My hot take is that we need more regular restaurants in New York City. Enough small plates!

What do you listen to on repeat?

Rihanna, “Kiss It Better”.

What are the most worthwhile investment you've made?

The most worthwhile investments have always been in myself. The wear and tear of being a small business owner has really taken a toll on my mental health this summer, so I've tried to maintain as much of a wellness routine as I can sustain. Over the past year, I've deepened my swimming practice, I joined a gym in January. I try to swim a few times a week. I started getting back into swimming after a long hiatus since high school, I used to be on the swim team. I really love Press Massage in Williamsburg (although they have a few locations all over NYC), their entire team is consistent, I've never had a mediocre massage there. I've also dealt with extreme insomnia my whole life, and I finally invested in myself and started seeing a psychiatrist a few years ago. I can very easily say this has been the biggest investment for me with the largest payoff, as having a consistent sleep schedule has made the biggest impact to my health — it's given me the ability to have consistency in my life, build new routines, and achieve goals that I wasn't able to when I was struggling.

What is an unusual habit, or an absurd thing, that you love?

Driving really clears my head. I've driven up and down the East Coast, all the way to NYC from Florida, and back down to Florida. I've done my fair share of driving up and down the West Coast, too! There's something about a long drive (and a full bag of sunflower seeds to snack on) that really clears my head.

Who is your forever inspo?

Georgia O'Keeffe, Eartha Kitt, Liza Minnelli, Giorgio Armani, Marc Jacobs, Gena Rowlands, Alvin Ailey, Suzanne Farrell — the list goes on and on. I feel so inspired by individuals that have lived radical lives and found their unique voices through a deep artistic practice, those life stories are always the ones I find myself drawn to and fascinated by. I have a hard time relating to people and stories that haven't faced much hardship.

Write us a fortune cookie.

You don't have to do anything that you don't want to do.

Check out Kathleen on Instagram and Cosmos →

Object Love

Welded Laptop

Welded Laptop

German artist Alexander Endrullat studied architecture at the Bauhaus University before moving into fine art in Dresden, and that way of looking at things stuck. In his work, laptops and tablets become materials: slabs, joints, shells, surfaces — things to bend, crush, or rebuild.

For his series Unibody, Endrullat took Apple’s idea of a laptop machined from a single piece of aluminum to its logical conclusion. He welded the screen to the base, turning the MacBook into a genuinely solid object with no way in.

It still looks totally normal. Better, even. There’s a little seam where the lid meets the base, but this laptop is never opening again. It just gets to be a nice piece of aluminum, and honestly some days that’s all a laptop should be. No notifications or emails to answer. Just a beautiful object on your coffee table.

Quick Hits

  • CDs are making a massive comeback
  • James Turrell just dropped a new light room in Miami
  • Febreze and Dunkin’ teamed up for some coffee-scented air fresheners
  • LA is about to get a spaceship-shaped museum
  • LEGO rebuilt the original PlayStation in 1,911 bricks

Community Question

Last week we asked, what makes you think about someone you love?

Here's our favorite reply:
Nury said, “A song. I'm 39, happily married with four kids, and my heart will still clench when I hear Loud Places by Jamie xx. Am I driving through the suburbs of Massachusetts, or am I at Mrs. Fish's in DTLA, dancing my broken heart away? When the right song comes on, I can't tell.”

Now for next week:
What’s something you still love about the internet?

Logging off,

Tania