Welcome back to The Catalog. Here's what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

CONTENTS

1. New Arrivals (Foldable iPhones, Nvidia Buying Hugging Face, OpenClaw 2.0)

2. The Feature (My Favorite Book of the Summer)

3. Observations (Netflix Video Games, Tools of the Trade)

NEW ARRIVALS

01 · New Foldable iPhone

Apple's first foldable phone, rumored to be called iPhone Ultra, is expected to be announced next week. Mashable projects a folding iPhone will cost $2,399 (nearly 2x the price of a standard iPhone).

Apple's design is using a double layer of glass to remove the iPhone fold crease. Users might still feel a downgrade the moment they pick it up. According to MacWorld, the complex folding design forces Apple to drop Face ID, the biometric authenticator feature standard on every iPhone since 2017. It'll be the first flagship iPhone without it in a decade.

02 · Nvidia to Buy Hugging Face

Chipmaker Nvidia just agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Hugging Face is basically the app store for AI models, where 18 million developers go to find and share what everyone else is building. Nvidia has made unprecedented gains selling AI hardware. Now it's buying the marketplace developers use to find what runs on it.

Hugging Face has stayed neutral, working as well with AMD and Intel chips as it does with Nvidia's. Nvidia makes $89 billion a quarter selling its own chips. CEO Jensen Huang says that won't change. Regulators aren't just taking his word for it: the deal still needs approval in the US and Europe before it can close.

03 · Lots of Lobster

OpenClaw made headlines in early 2026, pushing agentic systems into public consciousness. OpenClaw 2.0 was just released, rebuilding the platform around shared cloud sessions instead of solo terminals. VentureBeat calls its new features "multiplayer AI coding," where a team can now watch, join, and edit the same running agents together.

It still seems technically complex and overwhelming for non-technical people to install. I'm interested in this collaborative work pattern, though: several people inside one agentic running session. I expect it to be common next year.

THE FEATURE

My Favorite Book of the Summer

Summer is unfortunately over and Maintenance of Everything: Part One was the best book I read this season, mostly in the sun during a family beach vacation on Marco Island. It's written by Stewart Brand, editor of the influential 1960s Whole Earth Catalog publications. These were highly influential to early tech pioneers, and in a 2005 commencement speech, Steve Jobs compared Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogs to a pre-internet Google. In his new book, Brand focuses on maintaining objects.

Brand argues that maintenance is both obviously necessary and endlessly easy to defer. He weaves history and philosophy around that simple concept as he applies routine care to sailing, motorcycles, automobiles, guns, and the slow chemistry of rust.

Maintenance reads like a book about patience, and he follows a similar premise across different mediums: the early, endlessly fixable Ford Model T vs the precision-mastered Rolls-Royce, forgiving AK-47s vs precision-built M-16s, and even the Statue of Liberty rebuilt at $277 million because nobody owned its upkeep. I liked how he described the difference between maintenance and sustainment. Maintenance is tactical upkeep of a thing. Sustainment is strategic funding of the whole system. Neglect can cause the bill to come due all at once.

The book opens with a gripping example of the 1960s Golden Globe Race, the world's first nonstop solo sailing race around the world. The race is described in fascinating detail by contrasting the approaches of multiple contestants. I've already ordered another book by one of the sailboat racers, Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way. Moitessier maintained every inch of Joshua, his boat, by hand, and fundamentally understood every aspect of it. He was winning the race, and after he cleared Cape Horn ahead of everyone, he had nothing left to do but sail home and win. At the end of the race, he didn't want to be done, cross the finish line, deal with the press, and go home. Instead he fired a message to a passing ship by slingshot, said he was staying at sea "to save his soul," and then kept sailing to Tahiti. Brand echoes Moitessier's stance throughout the book, advocating for genuinely understanding how the objects you use daily work and keeping them in working condition.

I've started noticing and appreciating the things I hang on to and use year after year, like the wooden pocket knife that I carry daily. There's my wool blanket that's kept me warm on the couch for decades, and my waxed canvas jacket for cold or rainy days that probably needs to be reconditioned soon so it stays waxed canvas. I've used the same trusty Canon DSLR for long enough to know its faults. Each of these items was an initial investment and then a small, deliberate refusal to treat important things as disposable.

I see similar patterns in my own work with clients. I've facilitated workshops and advised leaders at large brands trying to figure out how to use new technologies and martech tools well. New software and agentic work patterns push brands toward the newest tool, the faster platform, the next version of whatever they're already running. That's inevitable modernization. Maintenance asks a different question: are you taking care of what you already have, or just replacing it when it gets inconvenient? Brand made me think harder about what I'm actually investing time in and taking care of.

OBSERVATIONS

Multi-Device Entertainment on Netflix

I recently played Unhinged, Netflix's new short interactive psychological horror game. I opened it on Netflix late night after the power had just come back on from a storm at home. When the game starts, the power goes out too. It is immersive and spooky.

The mixed reality mechanics are probably ahead of their time, and there are recognizable actors like Zoe Kravitz. To play you launch it in your TV’s Netflix app and scan a QR code to answer a phone that’s ringing inside the game. You’ll need to turn your cell phone's volume up to hear the call. Throughout the game you can aim your phone like a pointer to navigate scenes.

I liked the format more than I liked this specific short game. I expect to see more of this multi-device entertainment, where your actual phone becomes a dynamic prop a story can reach through.

Tools of the Trade

I came across a new site that seems AI generated, but I really like the premise: Industry Standard Tools is a crowd-sourced registry of the default items in every profession.

I know much of the site seems written by AI, so today it's distorted and wrong until real people correct it. I still really like the idea of a registry capturing what real professionals actually use across industries, and hopefully some real people can finish the job AI started.

ABOUT THE CATALOG

These days everything is moving at hyperspeed. We're creating and producing more content, with less certainty, than at any point we can remember. AI is fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how content is produced, and how we communicate with each other, faster than we can keep up with.

As an experience strategist I read a lot, and I continually run across things that are useful or worth thinking about. In a fast moving environment, the hardest part can be deciding what deserves your attention.

In this newsletter, I aim to capture what I've found each week that's worth learning, exploring, or watching, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

Learn more about why I started writing this newsletter in Issue 000.

See you next week,

J Corley