Nothing more exciting than knitted items! This isn’t news, but a relative sent it to me recently, and I see it also made the rounds on Reddit a few days ago. Here’s the gist, per the Rijksmuseum:
In 1980 archaeologists investigated the graves of 185 Dutchmen — whale hunters, and workers at whale oil refineries — who had died on or near Spitsbergen [an island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago] in the 17th century. Many skeletons were still wearing their knitted woollen head coverings. These caps were highly personal. The men were bundled up against the severe cold and could only be recognized by the colours and patterns of their caps. Presumably this is the reason why the caps went with them into their graves.
The hats look remarkably modern, especially if you zoom in. And in fact here are some modern caps, called Deadman Hats, inspired by the old ones. (More info and context for the Dutch hats can be found in this 2016 post from the blog A Bluestocking Knits.)
And this is maybe tangential, but it reminds me of an 18th-century kerfuffle I read about once, in which the young poet Thomas Chatterton claimed to have discovered a 15th-century poem, until a reference within the poem — to knitting — gave it away as contemporary, and presumably as written by Chatterton himself. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway … Although it looks like subsequent research places the advent of knitting earlier than believed at the time.
Even more tangential, to the above tangent: The smoking-gun reference to knitting doesn’t seem to actually appear in the poem, at least not as I’m currently finding it. (??) (The reference: “She sayde as her whyte hondes whyte hosen was knyttinge, Whatte pleasure ytt ys to be married!”) … Actually, I think I’m in over my head. … The “history of knitting” Wikipedia page also generally confirms this impression (of being in over my head).
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Sorry to link to a paywall, but if you like my comics, you might really like Gabrielle Bell’s on Patreon, if you don’t already. Her latest post was especially excellent. (Or, for free from her Instagram: “New Patreon Tiers.”)
For the past couple months I’ve been enjoying CFO and real estate developer Evan Goldfine’s newsletter about listening to J.S. Bach. Called Year of Bach, it often includes more Bach than I can handle, but in a good way, and I like letting it wash over me.
Yesterday’s installment was more of a primer — I mean it was literally labeled “Where to start with Bach” and “a primer for new listeners” — which was especially up my alley.
Through this project, I’m attempting to write for the masses about a niche topic, which embeds the danger of writing for no one. So today I want to recognize my readers who are in earlier stages of their Bach journeys, and in this post I’ll be recommending some of the grassier pathways into this music.
Of the tracks and musicians he linked to, my favorite is the Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, and Edgar Meyer rendition of Bach’s Trio Sonata No. 6 in G Major (above), from their Bach Trios album of 2017. I also loved Brad Mehldau’s Prelude No. 3 in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, which Goldfine describes as “damned perfect, a one track playlist on repeat forever.”
Can’t resist an I Called Off My Wedding essay! (“On another plane ride, I watch Pride and Prejudice. Despite my tendency to be gay, Mr. Darcy makes my heart leap.”)
Since the early 70s, the Native Youth Olympics have showcased the traditional games of the Alaska Native people:
Our Alaska Native ancestors developed traditional games in order to test and prove crucial abilities that governed everyday life. Competition was created with each other to hone their ability to hunt and fish for daily survival in the traditional way of life. The creators of the NYO Games wanted an opportunity to demonstrate their favorite traditional Native contests of their forefathers.
I found out about this via a highlight reel on Instagram — here’s last year’s competition highlights:
One-foot High Kick: “In many cultures, the One-Foot High Kick was used for signaling a successful hunt.”
Indian Stick Pull: “The Indian Stick Pull represents grabbing a slippery salmon, and was used traditionally to develop hand and arm strength.”
Kneel Jump: “Historically, the Kneel Jump was a game used to strengthen the leg muscles for jumping from ice floe to ice floe, and for lifting prey after a successful hunt.”
Seal Hop: “The Seal Hop is a variation of the Inuit Knuckle Hop, and used traditionally as a game of endurance and stamina, and for sneaking up on a seal, mimicking the mammal’s movement on the ice.”
Two-foot High Kick: “The Two-Foot High Kick was historically used to communicate the success of a spring hunt.”
I love these events. I think my favorite is a reintroduced event for the 2024 games (just concluded): the Toe Kick, which returned after a 10-year hiatus. Here’s how you do it:
Here’s a short documentary about the NYO and athlete Autumn Ridley from 2013 — her event is the Alaskan High Kick, perhaps the most impressively athletic event:
Conjuring memories of childhood competitions and absent-minded chomping, the photos zoom in on chewed wads of pink, blue, and green that appear almost corporeal, their pudgy folds and pockets evoking the beauty and repulsion of the human body.
“What they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure. They know how bad it would be for them to be seen clearly; they are fucking terrified of being treated as they treat others.”
Oh wow, this takes me right back to my childhood: Electronic Plastic, a museum of portable, old-school electronic toys. We didn’t have a gaming system in my house growing up — I had to settle going over to my friend Steve’s house for Atari 2600 and my big city cousins’ Intellivision — but we did have a couple of these handheld games. Specifically: Baseball (upper right), Football 2 (lower left), and Q*bert (lower right). The football game was my favorite. I played it for hours and hours — so many touchdowns. (And look at these Soviet handhelds!)
Mike Masnick shares how he uses AI to help write Techdirt. “No, it’s not to write articles. It’s basically to help me brainstorm, critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.”
A lovely profile of Daniel Radcliffe. “If there’s a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then that’s the stuff I really love doing.”
Data artist Robert Hodgin recently created a feedback loop between Midjourney and ChatGPT-4 — he prompted MJ to create an image of an old man in a messy room wearing a VR headset, asked ChatGPT to describe the image, then fed that description back into MJ to generate another image, and did that 10 times. Here was the first image:
It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry jpeg, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
Super cool photos from this story about a nuclear-powered submarine. Interesting detail: “Day 31 is sometimes the lowest morale day while underway. App downloads expire: Spotify, Netflix, etc.”
This is a powerful public service announcement about mental health from Norwich City FC and Samaritans (note the content warning at the start of the video). That’s all I’m going to say about it — just watch it.
“It’s clear to me that sharing our shortcomings and weaknesses with each other is our greatest strength. Our salvation.” I was very moved by this By the Book interview with former NFL player Steve Gleason. His book is out today.
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom.
The oldest longleaf pine tree in the world, I remember, is a nameless tree in Weymouth Woods in North Carolina. It is roughly 474 years old, taking root around the time Michelangelo took over construction of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, fifty-nine years before European colonizers arrived at Jamestown. In 2016, when the tree turned 468, visitors to the North Carolina State Parks system held a “Party for the Pine.” They celebrated by hiking to the tree, cutting cake, singing it “Happy Birthday.”
With MovieCart, you can create Atari 2600 cartridges that will play full-length movies. “Joystick controls brightness, volume, and shuttle position. Console switches control b/w, ten second rewind and full rewind.”
Edith here. For the latest installment of my newish illustrated column, I interviewed my friend and neighbor, the artist and climate activist Zaria Forman. Zaria makes pastel drawings of ice, among other things, and her solo show “Fellsfjara, Iceland” is currently on exhibition at Winston Wächter gallery in New York until May 4. (I’ve rendered a miniature version of some of it right below these words, but definitely click here for the actual images.) Zaria is also on Instagram.
Zaria, have you read, watched, listened to, or otherwise experienced anything good recently? Poor Things. It was so visually stimulating and imaginative — more than anything I’ve seen in a while.
Possibly more interesting: the ice storm a few weekends ago! I’d never seen an ice storm before moving to upstate New York, and although the storms are destructive, they’re so beautiful. It was the most spectacular one I’ve ever experienced.
Seen anything bad? Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new version. I thought it was poorly cast and just plain dumb. OR: All the mud, now that the ice has melted ;)
What’s something you’ve read or seen that changed your life?
Seeing glaciers and icebergs for the first time absolutely changed my life. But if we’re sticking to books, etc., one that changed my way of thinking was Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, by Polly Young-Eisendrath.
She’s a psychologist and couples therapist, and the book just kind of reframed the idea of relationships in my mind — of how you relate to someone you’re in a long-term relationship with, and how you can grow with them. And how, like, love is.
She talks about radical acceptance, fully accepting someone for who they are, learning how to do the same for yourself, and then figuring out how all of that can work together.
Does anything make you laugh online?
Memes on Instagram!
What’s a recent one?
I just forwarded you the last one I sent to [my husband] this morning.
Are there any cultural moments you currently think about unusually often? Like are you haunted by a moment from a TV show, or anything like that?
More “inspired” than “haunted,” but the artists Ray and Charles Eames made a 10-minute documentary in 1977 called “Powers of 10” that made a big impact on me. The Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited the film in a show during my years at Skidmore College, and it’s probably the one film I think about more than any other.
What’s it about?
It starts with a couple on a blanket having a picnic by a lake in Chicago. And then from one of their hands, the camera zooms back 10 meters. And then it continues zooming back by powers of ten. And so you see these squares get smaller and smaller, and it keeps going into the atmosphere, and the solar system, and it’s just mind-boggling how it keeps going.
And then it then zooms back down to the picnic and goes into their skin and all the way down to, like, a molecule inside the body. And it’s crazy to see the similarities between the two.
It’s on YouTube, if you want to watch — I highly recommend!
What were you really into when you were 12?
My So-Called Life, singing along to Alanis Morissette, and a boy named Ben.
Is there a book/movie/whatever you’d like to experience again for the first time?
Burning Man. There’s just no way to really know what it’s like until you’re there, in the middle of it. And when you know what to expect, it’s not as thrilling. But as a climate activist, it doesn’t feel right to continue attending over and over.
What’s a funny or weird way people have described your art?
As “finger painting.” It was a term used first (I think) in the Daily Mail, and then almost every writer used it to describe my work for several years. I wince at a line I say in my TedTalk: “I cringe when people call me a finger painter,” or something like that — my tone just sounds so snobby, I hate it — but I was attempting to detach my work from the term, and it did finally work. It pops up every now and then, but rarely.
Please tell me something silly that you love. Naked Attraction, the dating show where people are naked.
Thanks, Zaria!
Zaria’s work can be found here. And past installments of Drawing Media can be found here.
Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV (so the highs and lows of “Game of Thrones” are succeeded by the faithful adequacy of “House of the Dragon”). Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it.
Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas. (You really liked the star in that other thing! You can’t believe they got Meryl Streep!)
Mid is based on a well-known book or movie or murder. Mid looks great on a big screen. (Though for some reason everything looks blue.) Mid was shot on location in multiple countries. Mid probably could have been a couple episodes shorter. Mid is fine, though. It’s good enough.
Above all, Mid is easy. It’s not dumb easy — it shows evidence that its writers have read books. But the story beats are familiar. Plot points and themes are repeated. You don’t have to immerse yourself single-mindedly the way you might have with, say, “The Wire.” It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
I’d only take issue with this excellent Poniewozik essay in the sense that not all Mid TV is created equal. Poker Face and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are great examples of the kinds of shows they want to be. I’d rather have those than all these wild swings by people who don’t understand how to make TV.
For me, the problem with Mid TV is differentiating it from actual good TV…finding shows that you actually don’t want to fold laundry to. I’ve gotten burned a few times on shows that I thought were going to be challenging & interesting — Constellation, 1899, and Mrs. Davis come to mind — but were just sort of aggressively fine (so much so that it turned me off).
Two more thoughts, from the comments section of Poniewozik’s piece. I love this re: specificity:
Shogun is by far the best show released this year, and it has an enormous amount to do with its *specificity* of artistic vision. All of the “mid” shows otherwise referenced here are trying to achieve too many things at once or appeal to too many demographics to have much of an impact. They are content, not art.
It’s a contradictory truth that if you want to create something that really connects with people (even a lot of people), you gotta make it specific or personal (or both). Shōgun is right at the top of my to-watch list (after I finish the five shows I’m stinge watching).
Writer of TV here. I won awards for an iconic HBO show. I can tell you that 95 percent of the blame here lies with the executives who are now so scared to lose their jobs that they just go right down the middle — to the mid, if you will. It’s easier to say yes to a show they have seen before than take a risk on something outside the box.
And yes, they are using AI to give us “notes”. I feel very lucky to have worked in this medium when it still rewarded real creativity.
The Louvre wants to put the Mona Lisa in its own room to improve visitor experience. Here’s my suggestion: two rooms, 1 w/ the Mona Lisa (timed entry, no photos) and 1 w/ a fake (free-for-all, selfies, usies, etc.)
This is a nice thing to end the week on: Yo-Yo Ma playing “Bach’s Prélude from Suite No. 2, amidst the melting permafrost on Lower Tanana Dene lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.” He was brought to this birch forest by Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a member of the Neets’aii Gwich’in people, who wrote:
Our relationship to our birch relatives, our salmon relatives, and all the beings of Alaska are sacred. Our traditional stories tell us that at one point we all spoke the same language … we still do. If we find the time to truly listen, we might recognize ourselves in the melting permafrost or the fallen birch, but we might also recognize ourselves in the songs of the birds or the freshness of the Arctic breeze. There is still hope when we experience life. We should all fall in love with the places we live and let this love drive our determination to protect the waters, the salmon, the caribou, and all our plant relatives so that future generations may also experience such joy and sustenance.
The Man Who Killed Google Search, i.e. how “growth-hungry managerial types” from Google’s ad business chased out the old search team “to make Google worse to make the company more money”.
This is great: a 25-minute interview with legendary animator Chuck Jones as he sits and draws some of his iconic characters (Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck). He told this anecdote about how Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were both influenced by a particular space-themed cartoon of his:
Porky was just a kind of a little third-string Boy Scout and was not very interesting to me. And then when I put him in a picture called Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. Spielberg used that picture in Close Encounters the Third Kind - when his kids were watching television in the picture, they were watching Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century. And Lucas told me that he saw that picture when he was 12 years old and when when he opened Star Wars in San Francisco he told them they couldn’t have Star Wars in San Francisco unless they ran Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century.
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