Ethan B. Holland

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover was inspired by Heidi Klum’s intricate costume (by Mike Marino) for the 2026 Met Gala. The theme of the Met Gala this year was simply “Fashion Is Art.” Heidi, as usual, went over the top with a fairly spectacular Hollywood special-effects prosthetic costume that looked like a living…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s theme celebrates one of my favorite Spring traditions: when I run around the mountains in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve outside Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s a challenging desert run that’s about nine miles with around 2,000 vertical feet of elevation gain. Four years ago, I attempted it and bailed. I got…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover theme celebrates the 75th anniversary of the endearingly named “Little Dairy Queen” in Milford, Delaware. I grew up going to this Dairy Queen, since I was a toddler. I would get a DQ sandwich, my mom would get a Dilly Bar, my great-grandmother would get a brown cow,…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover celebrates a recent pop culture moment from Coachella, where Justin Bieber brought Billie Eilish on stage for “One Less Lonely Girl.” If you’re not familiar with the backstory, Billie Eilish was an unabashed Justin Bieber fan as a kid and has diaries, videos, and all sorts of fantastic…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover theme is the hit HBO show Euphoria. I’ve always loved the imagery, including the style of Petra Collins, A24, and director of photography, Marcel Rév (Hungary represent). I almost went with the scene from Euphoria, Season 1, Episode 4, when Jules and Nate meet under this gorgeous tree…

About This Week’s Covers I decided to use a cover theme that would be easy to inpaint with Google Gemini using the API and an image reference. I tried to find something that I could just hot-swap elements of, so I chose a Chanel No. 5 bottle. I went old school with the main cover…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover is inspired by an actual trunk that my grandmother mailed to America after she fled World War II Germany. My grandmother was a single mom and a Hungarian immigrant who came to the U.S. in the 1950s. As the Russians invaded Hungary, my grandmother ran away from Pécs…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover image is inspired by the fun milestone of reaching 50,000 links, manually organized into 59 categories over 129 weeks! It’s important to remind anyone reading this that I have a complete and full life beyond my newsletter. I simply replace a lot of dilly-dallying with productivity. I touch…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s covers are a memorial to my first boss, Ed Riggin. Ed owned Ed’s Chicken in Dewey Beach, Delaware, which was a little chicken shack at the beach and one of the most popular places to grab a bite in one of the biggest party towns in the United States…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s humanities reading inspired the cover image: “If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go in business because we’d be cynical: “It’s gonna go wrong.” Or “She’s going to hurt me.” Or,”I’ve had a couple of bad love…

About This Week’s Covers For this week’s cover image, I wanted to reference the tension between the Pentagon and Anthropic, so I used the promotional poster from the classic ’80s movie WarGames. I gave Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 the task, since this week also marks the release of the latest image model from Google. I’m…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover is inspired by a short film produced by one of China’s top movie directors, Jia Zhangke, using ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. It’s a five-minute video that is almost impossible to tell is AI (Spoiler alert: he purposefully made a few bits look like AI, because they “play AI in…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover image celebrates my winter offline hobby of floating in the freezing cold bay for ten minutes at sunset every Sunday from Thanksgiving through the start of Daylight Saving Time. The cover is an image I took during my February 1st bay bath. I spent ten minutes in 28.8°…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s newsletter category covers honor the passing of musical great Brian Wilson. Beyond music, Brian had an exceptionally tough life and I admire him as an incredibly gentle soul. Since Brian was such a big part of The Beach Boys, I asked GPT-o3 to create a rubric I could use…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s covers celebrate my great friend Mike Bernstein, who introduced me to the Beastie Boys’ album “Paul’s Boutique” many years ago. I asked GPT-o3 to create a rubric I could use for batch producing derivative newsletter covers in the spirit of the Paul’s Boutique album cover. The main cover is…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s covers are in honor of my great friend John Bayalis, who is an incredible painter, photographer, and New Order fanatic. A few years ago, John decided to paint all 64 official Joy Division and New Order releases on 3×3 inch canvases. I’m thankful to be the caretaker of more…

About This Week’s Covers This week’s cover is a tribute to the 35th anniversary of Public Enemy’s classic album, “Fear of a Black Planet.” To make it relevant to artificial intelligence, I changed the theme to fear of the paper clip maximizer. The paper clip maximizer is a popular ethical warning where an innocent request…