My mouth is watering reading this retrospective by Cup of Jo’s retiring food writer, Jenny Rosenstrach. Lots of good recipes, like Smashed Pea Toasts with Ricotta? Yum.
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Balkonkraftwerk: a German word meaning “balcony power plant”, aka the low-cost solar panels people are hanging from their balconies to generate extra household energy.
A Thirty-Year-Old Man Today vs. a Thirty-Year-Old Man in 1884. “Today: Is working toward paying off a two-bedroom condo by age seventy-five, if all goes well. 1884: Owns a drafty, four-hundred-square-foot cabin by the crick. Loves it.”
My Jade Plants Flower And Yours Can Too
I posted this picture of my jade plant flowering on BS and a lot of people expressed surprise that jade plants flower, and I was wondering: did you know jade plants flower? Growing up, my mom always had lots of jade plants, and I was in my twenties the first time I saw flowers on jade plants in Northern California. It blew my flipping mind is what it did.
The flowers are little pink stars with tiny antennae that make the flowers look like they’re sparkling. I think they’re so dainty and gorgeous and I love them. Look at those tiny pink idiots. Look at those itsy bitty show offs sharing their joy with anyone lucky enough to gaze upon their perfect visage.
I live near Boston and my jade plants didn’t start flowering until I moved somewhere I could put them outside most of the year, and by that time they were at least 22 years old and probably 25. The three oldest are the only ones to flower, which makes sense since the other ones aren’t as old. There’s a lot of information here about how to make your indoor jades flower, but it boils down to tricking them to make them think they’re in South Africa. They need to be cold at night and in sun during the day and you gotta stop watering them a little bit.
Do your jades flower?
Al Green’s Cover of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”
Al Green released a soulful cover of R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts,” and it whips.
“I could really feel the heaviness of the song, and I wanted to inject a little touch of hope and light into it. There’s always a presence of light that can break through those times of darkness.”
Last year, Green released a version of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” (via @allyourscreens.bsky.social)
“As an entomologist, I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects.” Murder hornets eradicated from the US.
20-minute video of carving a capital “I” in stone. I love how you can tell how deep he’s carving by the volume of the hammering.
Gisèle Pelicot is the person of the year for 2024. “She told the court in Avignon she wants women who have been raped to know that ‘it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them’”.
From Literary Hub, The 50 Biggest Literary Stories of 2024. Book bannings, AI, Gaza, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Taylor Swift, Alice Munro, The Hugo Awards, etc.
Megastars used a pandemic-era grant intended to save music venues from closing to pay for sneakers and birthday parties, which is especially annoying because of how many venues closed after not receiving funding.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott writes about the $2 billion in donations her foundation gave in 2024 and also some alternate and forgotten definitions of the word “invest”: “To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.”
The Killings of Young Mothers. In the US, “when women under age 25 get pregnant, their odds of death by homicide more than double.”
The Vanity Fair Interview with Billie Eilish, Year Eight
Vanity Fair has done a video interview Billie Eilish every year since she was a relatively unknown 15-year-old singer/songwriter. They skipped releasing last year’s interview but they are back with year eight.
I’ve said this before but it’s incredible that they picked Eilish for this:
I still marvel that Vanity Fair embarked on this project with this particular person. They could have chosen any number of up-and-coming 2017 pop singer/songwriters and they got lucky with the one who went supernova and won multiple Grammys.
Her selection over a multitude of other talented, rising stars is truly one of the great talent scouting successes ever.
Superman Trailer
Hmm. I don’t know. I haven’t liked Superman in a movie since the early 80s. What do you think? Does Superman even make sense as a contemporary superhero?
The Muppets’ Carol of the Bells
The only Christmas music I want to hear this year is The Muppets doing Carol of the Bells. Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef makes a great trio, don’t you think?
The Missing van Gogh Masterpiece
I didn’t know that the whereabouts of one of Vincent van Gogh’s most important works, a 1890 painting called “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”, is unknown and that the painting had not been seen publicly since the 1990s. This investigation into the potential location of the painting is an engrossing read as well as a good opportunity to appreciate van Gogh’s piece.
Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?
The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Dr. Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.
For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.
“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
See also a new short documentary on the missing painting:
I’m an Apple News+ Article. Come and Get Me, Baby. “‘You can look, but don’t touch,’ I whisper from my protected paywall’s safe, loving embrace.”
Saving this for future reference: the 25 most popular recipes published by NYT Cooking in 2024. Includes a link to the full top 50.
Thanks to a large donation, lift tickets will be free all season at Storrs Hill Ski Area in NH. “We hope this initiative brings neighbors together and inspires a love of skiing in a fun and accessible way.”
“Substack Is At It Again”
Marisa Kabas correctly asserts that Substack’s latest announcement reaffirms their status as a publication (and not a platform) and as a place that will publish disinformation and hate under the guise of “free speech”.
As we wrote in the Substackers Against Nazis letter, “there’s a difference between a hands-off approach and putting your thumb on the scale.” And by championing Bari Weiss and her worldview, Substack is once again putting its thumb on the scale.
But this is the bit that really caught my eye (italics mine…and imagine me pumping my fist as well):
Substack has managed to convince some that there is no life for a newsletter beyond them. This is simply untrue.
Since I left Substack for beehiiv in January, I went from making a little bit of money to actually making a living as an independent journalist with my own publication. I didn’t need Substack’s Twitter-esque Notes feature or its recommendation network to grow; I used social networks — mostly Bluesky — to successfully promote my work. That personal engagement created, I believe, deeper relationships with my readers than passive subscriptions via an algorithm. Most importantly, I’ve remained committed to producing work that I’m proud of, and publishing it via a platform that doesn’t force me to compromise my values.
Leaving aside all of the arguments about publication vs platform and whether Substack is a Nazi bar or not, the unfortunate truth for publications on Substack is that in order to amass the money necessary to recoup the investment pumped into the company by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz (Trump supporting billionaire oligarch wannabes who would ruin anything and everything to make one more dollar), they will continue to wedge themselves in between publications and their readers. And at some point, what you thought of as your publication turns out to merely be a tiny fraction of theirs. As Kabas says:
There is no such thing as a perfect place on the internet. But it’s possible to avoid the ones that aren’t even pretending to try to be better. The best time to leave Substack was a long time ago. The second best time is now.
How to make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament of John McClane crawling through the air duct.
I am almost positive that I have posted this before but I don’t care: rotating sandwiches. (There seem to be a couple spinning clockwise but maybe that’s just an optical illusion?)
They Thought They Were Free
First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (Bookshop) is a book by Milton Mayer for which he interviewed ten ordinary Germans about their experiences living in Nazi Germany. From the synopsis:
“These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
And from an excerpt of the book describing how the road to fascism is like being a frog in a gradually heated pot of water:
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ‘43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ‘33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
One is also reminded of Hemingway’s quote about how one goes bankrupt: “gradually and then suddenly”. See also Who Goes Nazi? and What Does Living in a Dictatorship Feel Like?
So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.
I found this via Karen Attiah’s thread about personal foundational texts.
Jamelle Bouie: “Either democracy was on the ballot in November, or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.” 100,000%!! This is driving me *nuts*. Dem pols: fight or piss off.
🔔 Laaaast call for The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you still have holiday shopping to do, it’s probably coming down to the last day or two for ordering in time for Dec 25 (Xmas and also the first night of Hanukkah).
36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024, including Chappell Roan, Missy Elliott, Kendrick Lamar, The Substance, Twisters in 4DX (🤔), and Nobody Wants This. (I think there’s maybe a better version of this list out there…)
A group of scientists warns against creating mirror cells. This sentence is somehow not sci-fi: “Drug developers might be able to create mirror antibiotics, but the treatments might not be ready to use until a mirror pandemic was out of control.”
What Are Your Personal Foundational Texts?
Writer Karen Attiah recently wrote about the pleasure of perusing other people’s personal libraries and then asked her followers what their “personal foundational texts” were…those books that people read over and over again during the course of their lives. Here was her answer:
Herge’s The Adventures of Tintin were foundational books for me — and probably why I’m in journalism today.
Otherwise:
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider”
Howard French: A Continent for the TakingAnd lately: Anaïs Nin’s diaries
And I haven’t re-read them in a long time, but Barbara Ehrenreich’ Nickel and Dimed” and Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid” were paradigm shifting for me.
There are tons of good books mentioned in the replies and quote posts. One of the most faved answers features a book called They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, which I don’t think I’d ever heard of but sounds fascinating and unfortunately very relevant.
In thinking about the books I’ve read that made a significant impact on how I see and understand the world, I’d have to go with:
- Various Richard Scarry books (like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go) when I was little, although Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood & Sesame Street probably had a bigger and more lasting impact on who I am as a person.
- Where the Red Fern Grows was my favorite book as a child — I read it so many times. And there were these biography series for kids at my local library and I read a bunch of them. The two that I distinctly remember were the books on Thomas Edison and Harriet Tubman. From the Edison book I learned that a clever lad from the Midwest could make and invent wonderful things using your mind and your hands. And Harriet Tubman: she was straight-up a superhero and her story taught me all I needed to know about the truth of American slavery.
- I first read Orwell’s 1984 in 1984, when I was 10 or 11. Probably affected my view of the world more than any other book.
- As an adult, I’d say that A Natural History of the Senses, Nickel and Dimed, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1491, Chaos, A People’s History of the United States, and The Warmth of Other Suns have formed the backbone of my view of the world. There are probably a few others that I’m forgetting, but those are the biggies.
How about you? What are your personal foundational texts? Note that, as I understand it, these are not simply your favorite books, but the books that mean a lot to you and have been instrumental to your development as a human.
Then Comes The Body
Then Comes The Body is a great short documentary from Jacob Krupnick about a Nigerian man who taught himself how to dance ballet from watching YouTube tutorials, the ballet school he started in Lagos, and the students who are branching out into the rest of the world.
There’s no ballet here in Nigeria. There’s no one to look up to. There are no theaters. There are no productions. There are no ballet schools at all. The only thing you have is yourself and the internet.
From a piece in Dance Magazine:
The founder of Leap of Dance Academy, Daniel Ajala, was inspired to learn ballet after watching the 2001 American film Save the Last Dance. As there weren’t any ballet schools in Nigeria, he taught himself by watching YouTube videos. Determined to provide his community with opportunities he hadn’t had, Ajala established the Academy in 2017 and offers classes for free, explaining that he doesn’t want anyone “to have an excuse for not following your passion.”
Leap of Dance Academy came to worldwide attention in 2020 via a viral video of student Anthony Madu dancing in the rain, which Krupnick watched and resulted in Then Comes The Body. Madu got a scholarship to a ballet school in the UK and there’s a feature length documentary about him that’s available to watch on Disney+.
It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried after learning they were also hearing aids.
Yo-Yo Ma played the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major at the reopening of the Notre Dame in Paris. I bet this sounded wonderful, with the sound reverberating around the cathedral.
Two More Tiny Desks
Speaking of speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts here are two recent good ones. (Eep, wait, they’re all really good. What if any performance by a very talented performer in an intimate setting is always going to be special?)
Waxahatchee was solo in her 2013 performance, but here she is with an excellent five piece band, including Jeff Tweedy’s son on drums.
And here’s Doechii with a NINE piece. Gosh, this is so good and so fun to watch.
This is also worth a watch about how the NPR engineers make the concerts sound so good.
Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons. The show will end after season four, having told “the entire story contained within Hugh Howey’s books”.
Trailer for The White Lotus Season Three
A teaser trailer for the third season of The White Lotus is out and the release date has been revealed: February 16, 2025. Parker Posey? Walton Goggins? Yes, please. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with this show (I couldn’t get through the first season but thought the second season was great), so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
Speaking of Tiny Desk Concerts, the most popular set of 2024 (18M views) is by “Argentine power duo” Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso. Their music is “heavily dependent on electronic sounds” but for Tiny Desk they went traditional and it sounds great.
Actual things my parents said while watching my son’s swimming lesson. “MOM: He’s so beautiful. The teacher must be beside herself. DAD: She’s barely controlling herself. She’s trying not to cry. [HE IS CRYING A BIT]”
HPV vaccines have been linked to a steep drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women. “We observed a substantial reduction in mortality — a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths over the last decade.”
Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk Concert
During the pandemic, Billie Eilish did a Tiny Desk Concert at home amidst a very faithful recreation of the NPR office. Last week, Eilish played a proper set at the actual office. From the video’s description:
Saudade is a Portuguese word that can be roughly defined as a feeling of melancholy, nostalgia or yearning for something that is beloved but not present. There’s no perfect translation, but one of the closest English expressions of the word I’ve ever seen is Billie Eilish’s Tiny Desk performance.
You’d think the Los Angeles-born singer invented the term. Every breath is so full of indulgent melancholy, hopeful regret, at 22 years old she’s become a captivating fixture of what it means, or rather what it feels, to love and lose simultaneously.
Accompanied by a small band and her brother Finneas, Eilish played The Greatest, L’Amour de Ma Vie, i love you, and Birds of a Feather. Lovely.
“Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country.” Among high income countries, the US has the highest rates of adults with multiple chronic conditions, shortest life expectancy at birth, highest rate of avoidable deaths, etc.
Isle of Tune: a web-based game where you build streetscapes that play music when a car is driven on them — trees, house, and light poles all make different sounds. Big Star Guitar vibes.
From an old version of the Wikipedia page for Warren G and Nate Dogg’s Regulate, an extremely dry synopsis of the song. “Warren, unaware that Nate is surreptitiously observing the scene unfold, is in disbelief that he is being robbed.”
Kottke Comments, Now With Faves
Hello, everyone. I just launched a few new features related to the comments here on kottke.org:
1. The ability to fave comments. This feature has been in test mode for the past few months, and I’m happy it’s finally getting a wider release. Only kottke.org members can fave for now (but I may open it up for everyone depending on how things go). For now, only you will be able to see what you’ve faved. The number of faves on each comment will be displayed next to the fave button (again, I’m going to see how this works…precise fave counts definitely have their minuses). Non-members will not see fave buttons or fave counts. You can’t fave your own comments — no getting high on your own supply.
There aren’t any limits to the number of comments you can fave, but in the spirit of kottke.org’s community guidelines, try to be thoughtful and community-minded about faves…at their best, faves are a useful communal signal for others looking for the most interesting and useful comments.
2. If you’re a member, you can see your own comments and those you’ve faved on your new profile page, which you can find in the menu in the upper right of every page — just click on your name and then “Profile”. (If you’re on mobile, click on the menu, then your name, then “Profile”.) I don’t know if this is the right place for profiles to live, but it’ll do for now. As I add more features to the site, I may have to shift things around a little.
No one else can see your profile page right now, but that might change in the future. At the moment, you won’t be able to see all of your comments and faves, only about ~30 of the most recent — I need to add some pagination here soon.
3. For longer comment threads, I’ve added a sorting option. The default is the threaded view but you can also sort by the most recently posted comments and most popular (i.e. by number of faves). Anyone can use this — it’s going to be super useful for keeping up with new comments on popular threads (like What’s The One Thing Only You Noticed?) and for surfacing the best comments.
Ok, that’s all! I’m pretty excited about finally getting this launched — there’s lots of interesting stuff being shared in the comments these days and helping people find it is a good thing! Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, feedback, or concerns. And as always, thank you to kottke.org’s members for their support in enabling new features like this. ✌️
Once again, The 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide. If you’re shopping online, especially from smaller retailers, getting your order in this weekend is probably a good idea for delivery before Xmas or the first day of Hanukkah.
Go Back Home, Your Mother Made You Waffles
Adam Sharp has curated the most flamboyant ways to tell someone to pound sand in other languages, and it’s delightful. There’s “go ski into a spruce” from Finland, in Brazil you tell someone to “go pick little coconuts,” while in Poland you say “go to the park and paint the ceiling.”
The most devastating in the entire thread, though, is the French saying, “go back home, your mother made you waffles.” If someone said this to me, they would need a dustpan to sweep up the dust of me. If someone said this to me, they’d have to put in the newspaper I wasn’t mad. If someone said this to me, I’d think about the time my 5th grade teacher goaded the entire class to laugh at me because she was wrong about Berlin being on the border between East and West Germany, but I was right! If someone said this to me, all the liquid in my body would heat to one thousand degrees and my skin would melt. If someone said this to me, I’d move away and change my name and miss my family. If someone said this to me, the yellowjackets inside my chest would chew their way out and then sting ME for making them chew through bones. If someone said this to me, all of the songs I’ve heard plus all of the songs I haven’t would play at once inside my brain resulting in a symphony of anguish. If someone said this to me, I would go into debt buying a yacht hoping a gang of orcas wearing dead salmon on their heads would sink it.
Seven benign words on their own collocated into a soul-destroying eviscerator punctuated by a normally pleasant breakfast item. I told the very tall Chris Piasick about this saying and he drew it.
I’m sure there are science or moral reasons I shouldn’t use Jason’s “World’s Best Pancake Recipe” in my waffle maker, but I don’t care, I’ve been doing it for years and the resulting waffles are fabulous.
“What would happen if you spent a nanosecond on the surface of the sun? Would it warm you up, burn you to a cinder, or do nothing at all?”
Time Lapse: From Pinecone to Pine Tree in 110 Seconds
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
Look at feisty confectionary upstart Skittles trying to get in on the NERDS Gummy Cluster candy innovation money bazooka. Freeze-dried Skittles? They sound terrible. I must try them.
The Invention That Accidentally Made McMansions
This is a really interesting video about something called the gang-nail plate, a construction innovation that enabled larger roofs to be built on houses, removed the need for internal load-bearing walls, and made the process of construction cheaper & more efficient.
While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another.
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago? (via @mariosundar.bsky.social)
I really like this: “If you think about it, the very best books are really just extremely long spells that turn you into a different person for the rest of your life.” —Jonathan Edward Durham
Restoring Vintage Star Wars Posters
Watching these expert restorers mend & refresh a pair of vintage Star Wars posters (neither of which features the logo we’re familiar with today and one of which is signed by the designer) is both fascinating and relaxing. It’s like the posters are having a spa day: bit of a soak, a gentle scrub, some light bodywork, and voila, you’re brand new. (via meanwhile)
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