If you need some last minute cajoling to not sit out this election, consider these words of warning about abstention in 1968. “Nixon prevailed, thus paving the way for the modern right-wing shift in US domestic and foreign policy.”
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Sometimes a post title just reaches right into your introverted soul: The Pleasure of Being Left Alone.
How ill-advised guidelines created a peanut allergy epidemic in the US. “The more prevalent peanut allergies became, the more people avoided peanuts for young children. This, in turn, caused more peanut allergies.”
Tony Hawk posted a photo from the 70s of a girl skateboarding in the rain to his Instagram: “New fav mystery skater unlocked.” Jeremy Markovich tracked down who she was.
Danny MacAskill Rides the Adidas HQ
Trials rider Danny MacAskill finally got the chance to ride the angularly futuristic Adidas campus in Herzogenaurach, Germany.
The first time I got the invite to campus I immediately started riding the place in my mind. Riding all the rooftops, riding all the railings, you know, it’s a really interesting space. Not just anyone can go there! As soon as you see that kind of big overhanging piece of architecture or whatever, you immediately imagine the different things you could do up there. So, it was cool to finally get to come here to actually do it.
Fleabag in Lego. “I look like a pencil!”
A Scottish children’s hospital has a gamer-in-residence who plays w/ patients. “He said that playing Mario Kart has improved the mobility of a patient’s hand and that it was also a useful tool in distracting the children during medical procedures.”
TIL about argonaut octopuses. “Although most octopuses live near the ocean floor and its ample hiding places, argonauts spend their entire lives sailing in the open ocean, just below the surface.”
Wow, more than 40 people have undergone a CAR-T-cell therapy for lupus, most of whom have gone into drug-free remission. “It is too early to declare any of these patients cured for life, but that now seems within the realm of possibility.”
“I did go touch that rock. I didn’t tell anyone…” I live on a road named for a big boulder and didn’t notice it for far too long…
Some profiles of first-time voters who were formerly incarcerated. “I’m carrying all the people that can’t vote in my vote. And that’s an honor.”
I am *very* excited about this: Christian Marclay’s The Clock is going back on display at MoMA. Member previews: Nov 7–9, Nov 10, 2024 through Spring 2025. “The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.”
The Powerful Density of Hypertextual Writing
The NY Times has had a difficult time covering the 2024 election in a clear, responsible manner. But I wanted to highlight this short opinion piece from the paper’s editorial board, which I’m reproducing here in its entirety:
You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.
What makes this piece so effective is its plain language and its information density. This density is a real strength of hypertext that is often overlooked and taken for granted. Only 110 words in that paragraph but it contains 27 links to other NYT opinion pieces published over the last several months that expand on each linked statement or argument. If you were inclined to follow these links, you could spend hours reading about how unfit Trump is for office.
A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!
How the links are deployed is an integral part of how the piece is read; it’s a style of writing that is native to the web, pioneered by sites like Suck in the mid-90s. It looks so simple, but IMO, this is top-notch, subtle information design.
Based on Our Election Forecast, We Are 100 Percent Sure Anything Could Fucking Happen. “In 1 percent of simulations, Trump and Harris settle the presidency via cage match. In 2 percent of simulations, they open a quaint bakery in Vermont for dogs…”
How Are You Doing?
No seriously, how is everyone doing today? We’re coming down to the wire on the most cuckoo bananapants presidential election campaign in recent memory. There’s so much at stake and there are so many unknowns, a potent cocktail for anxiety. If that’s where you are right now, I hope you know you’re not alone. If you’re feeling confident, that’s great and I’m happy for you. If my Instagram feed is any indication, many of you have already voted and are volunteering to knock on doors, phone bank, or to cure ballots in swing states — thanks so much for doing that! (Greg Pak’s list of last minute actions is a good place to start if you want to pitch in.)
Me? Last week was a rough one — lots of anxiety about the election and other things. I’m feeling better this morning; I got out for some exercise this weekend, spent some really nice time with my son, and generally kept social media at arm’s length. Even though it’s pretty cold here today, I’m heading out for a bike ride this afternoon to load up on some good dopamine. I started season two of The Diplomat last night and it seems to have picked up right where it left off last season — the perfect diversionary viewing for me.
But I’m also struggling to work out what to post here this week. I am very nearly done with anything political in nature (I don’t want to contribute to doomscrolling) but posting anything else at this critical juncture, when people’s actual lives and freedoms are on the line, seems frivolous. I suppose I’ll figure it out, but heads up: things might be a little lighter than usual around here — or maybe the opposite? We’ll see.
In the meantime, if you don’t mind sharing, let us know how you’re doing in the comments.
Type Revival for Film & TV. “Type revival involves recreating period lettering and typography as digital typefaces.”
Letter of Recommendation: DRM-free Audiobooks From Libro.fm
Over the past several months, I’ve settled into a routine that involves reading one book at a time on paper or on the Kindle and listening to one book on audiobook. This way, I can switch back and forth without feeling like I am abandoning one book for the other. Right now, I am most of the way through James by Percival Everett on audiobook and just (finally!) started Craig Mod’s fine-art edition of Things Become Other Things. (Both are about very different kinds of journeys.)
For the last three years, I’ve been been getting my audiobooks through Libro.fm. You can listen through their app or download DRM-free mp3 or m4b files to listen in the app of your choice. They are a social purpose corporation, 100% employee owned, and partner with local bookstores to offer audiobooks & share profits. They don’t have every title because of Audible’s strategy of locking up exclusives (like Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey), but they have most of what you’d want to read. They also make it easy to gift audiobooks to friends and family (and I suppose, enemies and strangers if you want?)
Just in the past few months, I’ve listened to:
- All Fours by Miranda July. This is one of those books that’s better as an audiobook. July is an actress as well as an author and the audiobook is more like a performance than a reading.
- James by Percival Everett. Already mentioned this one, but the narration by Dominic Hoffman is superb and emphasizes some of the vernacular differences that are key to the story that might be tougher to express in print. (Hoffman also narrated James McBride’s Deacon King Kong and Ted Chiang’s Exhalation.)
- Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. This is the definitive account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and a great companion to HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries.
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. A fun sci-fi story that presents an alternative version of Groundhog Day-style time travel.
You can purchase individual audiobooks through the site or sign up for a membership where you get one free credit a month and each credit to good for one audiobook, regardless of price.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
Iceland embraced a shorter work week. Here’s how it turned out. “Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers after the nationwide introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay, according to research released Friday.”
No Fate But What We Make
This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school:
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”
The second part of the piece plainly and succinctly lays out the stakes of a second Trump presidency (emphasis mine):
America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
What a sentence that is.
See also The Guardrails Failed. Now It’s Down to Us., also by Bouie.
We don’t, in 2024, hear much talk of guardrails anymore. And for good reason. The guardrails failed. Every single one of them. The Republican Party failed to police its own boundaries, welcoming Trump when it should have done everything it could to expel him. The impeachment process, designed to remove a rogue president, was short-circuited, unable to work in a world of rigid partisan loyalty. The criminal legal system tried to hold Trump accountable, but this was slow-walked and sabotaged by sympathetic judges (and justices) appointed by Trump or committed to the Republican Party.
When the states tried to take matters into their own hands, citing the clear text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court stepped in to rewrite the amendment, turning a self-executing prohibition on insurrectionists in office into a mechanism that required a congressional vote those justices knew would never come.
The newest book from Atlas Obscura: Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders. “Learn how dung beetles navigate by the stars, and trees communicate through their roots.”
A New Visualization of the Atomic Nucleus
A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleaus.
For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.
The video also establishes what appears to be a new unit of measure with an adorable name, the babysecond:
To better define the velocities of particles at such small distance scales, we establish the baby second as 10^-23 seconds. A photon moving at the speed of light crosses three femtometers (a bit more than the radius of oxygen-16) in one baby second.
Crows hold grudges. “When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.”
Nintendo Music, an iOS app for “enjoying music from Nintendo games”. The extended playback option lets you “lengthen the duration of certain tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes to enjoy an uninterrupted listening experience.”
Game recommendation from Dan Sinker: UFO 50. “I’m doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it’s actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of.”
An oral history of HotWired, Wired’s original website. “We had a meeting to decide whether we should do writing that includes hyperlinks.”
TIL that the dunk tank has extremely racist origins. Unbelievable but also not.
Who Are the People in the Neighborhood? Part Two.
Hey everyone. Since the membership program here at kottke.org is eight years old (tomorrow!) and the first anniversary of the new commenting system happened a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a good time to do another introduction thread. Here’s the prompt from the last time we did this (350+ comments!):
So, in the meantime, if you feel comfortable sharing, you can use this thread to introduce yourself: maybe where you live, what you’re into, your social accounts. I think many of us smartly err on the side of not sharing too many specific details about ourselves online (myself included, but it’s obviously complicated 🙃) due to safety issues, but I think it’s possible to get to know each other a little bit without spilling too many beans.
If you’re a new member/commenter, tell us a little bit about yourself. If you’ve commented here before, give us an update on what you’ve been up to, what you’re reading or watching, etc. If you’re not a member and would like to participate and support the site, you can sign up for a membership here.
“If you were to modify the flash cooling process so that the toffee had more time to harden and work out its air bubbles, it’s possible we could get a type of Butterfinger bar that might be strong enough to be used as a makeshift building material.”
The Time Travel Movie That Doesn’t Go Anywhere
So first of all, before you watch this analysis of Chris Marker’s fantastic La Jetée, you should watch the film itself if you’ve never seen it. It’s 28 minutes long, entirely in black & white, and is a “speculative fiction masterpiece” done with “422 photos, a voiceover, and a score”. You can find it streaming at Amazon, Apple, Criterion Channel, or Kanopy. You will not regret it. And then come back and watch this analysis/appreciation by Evan Puschak.
In a unique settlement agreement, Parkland shooting survivor Anthony Borges now owns the rights to the gunman’s name. “The settlement prevents the gunman from talking to the media or making money by telling his story.”
The Best of Japan’s Mundane Halloween Costumes for 2024
Halloween is not really my thing, but I always like looking through some of the best mundane costumes from Japan via Spoon & Tamago and Nick Kapur. A few of my favorites:
“Man who keeps getting mistaken for a store employee”
“Students who went to the cafe to study but ended up spending the whole time reading manga and looking at their phones”
“Person who was stingy and only paid for the smallest plastic bag”
“That one coworker who kindly fills the office humidifier with water every morning”
“Referee at a tug-of-war competition”
The plan to hand Trump the White House if he loses the election. “Preventing this scenario requires Republicans to act in good faith and certify the results of elections that go against their guy.” I don’t have election anxiety; I’m worried about this.
How to Do Action Comedy
From Every Frame a Painting, an appreciation of Jackie Chan and his particular and excellent brand of action comedy.
I love old Jackie Chan movies. When I lived in Minneapolis, a theater there showed them on Saturday nights, late. Drunken Master II is a particular favorite…the final fight scene is AMAZING. The part about how the camera never moves and shoots wide-angle during his scenes is why action in contemporary Hollywood films leaves me yawning.
Collection of 2000+ Free Science Images from the NIH
From the NIH, a collection of 2,000+ public domain science and medical art visuals (molecules, plants, viruses, proteins, brushes for repeating items like DNA, fungi, equipment…). High-resolution, free to use — scientists on social media seem pretty pumped about this.
See also PhyloPic, a collection of 10,000 “free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms, available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses”. (via @waldo.net)
In 2002, the US military lost a $250 million war game in 10 minutes. A newly declassified report “warned of military vulnerabilities to unconventional tactics that were later exploited by enemies in real conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Lidar drone mapping has revealed previously unknown cities in the mountains of modern-day Uzbekistan that were important Silk Road way stations. One was bigger than many major cities in Italy at the time.
Digital Divinity is a fascinating series on how tech is transforming religion, feat. a Muslim Strava-type app for prayers, tapping digital wooden fish in China, a sharia-compliant streaming service in Malaysia, and Bible advice from an AI chatbot.
Mermaids of North America
Edith Zimmerman has put some new stuff in her Etsy shop, including original watercolors and this print of Mermaids of North America (which I love).
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. “Objectively, and improbably, he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson — maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt.”
Kelli Anderson details how the clever A-to-Z 7-segment display mechanism works on the front of Alphabet in Motion, her new pop-up book about typography.
Hyperlinks, the Open Web, and a Membership Appeal
Ok, look. I know there’s a loooot going on these days, particularly in these United States, but I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has supported kottke.org over the years with a paying membership. It’s the 8th anniversary of the membership program, and I’ve written many times about what that support means to me and to the site; here’s a snippet:
Perhaps nearest and dearest to my heart, member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled. It’s not difficult to imagine an alt-universe kottke.org with ads crammed into every bit of whitespace, email collection forms popping up on every visit, and half the site behind a members-only paywall. No shade to those who have gone that route to keep things running — I’d probably make more money with members-only content on Substack or whatever and that pull is tempting. But seriously, I love you folks so much for collectively keeping all of kottke.org on the open web. Thank you.
One important aspect of the open web I haven’t covered here is linking. The web has always been made up of nodes (web sites/pages) and connections between those nodes (hyperlinks). Over time, the number of nodes has increased (good!) but the nodes have also gotten larger (think Facebook or Google or even Substack) and when they get too massive and too competitive with each other with huge content moats to guard, they turn into hypertext black holes: links go in but they don’t link out.
I love linking out to other sites. The strength of the open web is in its many connections between nodes…the more, the better. Links are the whole goddamned point of the web! I want to send people away from kottke.org to learn something new or have a chuckle and then come back the next day for more. The goal is connection, knowledge, and sharing — I proudly have no competitors in this endeavor, only collaborators. (This is just another sentence so that I can link to more folks who love to link.)
And but so, in the interests of keeping this hyperlink party rolling along here at kottke.org, I wanted to appeal to those who aren’t currently supporting the site to consider doing so. (Or if you’re a past member, to consider rejoining.) As always, if you can’t swing it, no sweat! But if you find value in this site and can manage it, I’d appreciate you supporting the site with a membership.
P.S. I also fixed a couple of nasty bugs with the membership system. Please let me know if you notice anything amiss?
P.P.S. I haven’t raised the prices on memberships in 8 years, but if you are a current member and would like to contribute more, you can go to the subscriptions view and click on “change price”. Thanks!
Household Surrealism: Clothesline Animals
Multidisciplinary artist Helga Stentzel cleverly hangs laundry items on clotheslines to make abstract animal shapes. You can find more of her household surrealism on Instagram. (via colossal)
From 2017: I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People. “Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.” 🎯
As a middle-aged man, I would’ve saved loads on therapy if I’d read Baby-Sitters Club books as a kid. “The social taboo which prevented [boys] from reading fiction marketed at girls was infinitely more powerful than anything censorship achieved.”
Retro 80s Versions of Tech Company Logos
Kostya Petrenko makes 80s versions of tech/media company logos as if they’ve been screencapped from CRT displays. I think my favorite of his might be the retro OpenAI logo, which you can see in this reel.
If you are thinking of protesting by not voting, Bernie Sanders answers this question very well: “I disagree with Kamala’s position on the war in Gaza. How can I vote for her?”
Delimar Vera was kidnapped when she was 10 days old and presumed to have died in a fire. “Then came a chance encounter with her real mother at a birthday party…”
What It’s Like Being a Billionaire’s Personal Assistant. “You have to have thick skin. You’re like a rhinoceros or an armadillo. And you have to have incredible patience. You’re working for people who are not used to hearing no.”
“A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles”
One of the best media endorsements of this election cycle comes from EIC Nilay Patel of The Verge, who absolutely pulls no punches in describing Donald Trump and his by-now very familiar patterns and desires.
Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.
I love Patel’s use of the collective action problem to frame his argument. From earlier in the piece:
Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.
I also thought this was a really interesting observation regarding the challenge facing Democrats (of fitting moderate conservatives, the far-left, and everyone else who isn’t in favor of authoritarianism under the same tent):
Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.
Chris Ware on Richard Scarry
Well! In the Yale Review, Chris Ware (one of my favorite cartoonists) writes about Richard Scarry (one of my favorite children’s book authors) and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my favorite books).
This year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that-well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)
Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.
Reader, I have never clicked “buy” faster than I did when ordering the 50th anniversary version of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — I’m very much looking forward to peeking behind the scenes. But also, do read Ware’s whole piece…it’s an inspiring review of Scarry’s career & impact and contains all manner of little observations like these:
(Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)
And:
But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s.
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