Some of the most prized public spaces in Europe were once used for parking lots (and some still are). “Why are we so comfortable filling our most iconic public spaces with a bunch of metal boxes?”
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Two Sally Rooney Things I Didn’t Know About
I was surprised to learn, via Youngna Park’s excellent newsletter, that Sally Rooney wrote a short story in 2016 that features Marianne & Connell after the events of Normal People (which was published in 2018, technically making it a prequel?)
On the way to the dental clinic they talk about going home for Christmas. It’s November and Marianne is having a wisdom tooth removed. Connell is driving her to the clinic because he’s her only friend with a car, and also the only person in whom she confides about distasteful medical conditions like impacted teeth. He sometimes drives her to the doctor’s office when she needs antibiotics for urinary tract infections, which is often. They are twenty-three.
And that Rooney also published a novella called Mr Salary in 2019.
Opinion: We Need More Consequences for Reckless Driving. “‘Punishment’ and ‘consequences’ aren’t synonyms — and when we confuse the two, we lose lives on our roads.”
Shiny and Chrome
A site called Chromeography collects chrome logos and typography from vintage cars & electric appliances. As I was looking through these, I wondered: “What the hell is chrome anyway?” So I looked it up:
Chrome plating (less commonly chromium plating) is a technique of electroplating a thin layer of chromium onto a metal object. A chrome plated part is called chrome, or is said to have been chromed. The chromium layer can be decorative, provide corrosion resistance, facilitate cleaning, and increase surface hardness. Sometimes, a less expensive substitute for chrome, such as nickel may be used for aesthetic purposes.
(via @presentandcorrect)
When I tell folks (like during my XOXO talk) that I’m leaving a lot of money on the table by not paywalling my stuff on Substack, this is what I’m talking about: “You probably can’t make more than $1 million a year on Substack. But Matthew Yglesias does.”
Two college students paired Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses with facial recognition tech and were able to pull up info on strangers (name, home address, phone number, and family members) in seconds just by looking at them.
What’s the Labor Share of National Income?
While listening to an episode of Scene on Radio’s excellent series on Capitalism, I learned about an economic measure called the labor share of national income. From The Guardian:
This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest estimate for the share labor receives of national income for the first quarter of 2024. The statistics shows the income workers receive compared with the productivity their labor generates.
According to BLS, this income share has declined for non-farm workers from about two-thirds, 64.1% in the first quarter of 2001, to 55.8% in the first quarter of 2024.
Roughly speaking, in the first quarter of 2024, workers received ~56% of the income generated by their labor and 44% went to capital (ownership & shareholders).
Here’s a graph that shows the labor share of national income from 1947 to 2016 so you can get some idea of the decline that’s happened:
Scene on Radio hosts John Biewen and Ellen McGirt described labor share of national income like so:
Ellen McGirt: The labor share of national income. So, of all the income that businesses bring in, from sales of their goods and services, how much of that goes to workers. As opposed to, how much winds up as profits in the pockets of stockholders.
John Biewen: That number, according to the Federal Reserve, also went up significantly during the “thirty glorious years” in the United States. In the before times, in 1930, workers took home about 57% of the money that was generated by their labor. 57%. That labor share went up in the 1940s, to about 65% — almost two-thirds of corporate income was going to workers. It stayed over 60% for the next few decades, well into the 1970s.
Ellen McGirt: That doesn’t sound like a huge increase — from fifty-some percent to sixty-some percent. But the result, over those decades, was trillions of dollars in the pockets of people in the bottom 90-percent of the income scale — that’s money that would have gone to the wealthiest folks without those more progressive policies that reduced inequality. And then, guess what, starting in about 1975, the labor share of national income went down, and down. Until now, things are more like they were back in the days of Herbert Hoover.
This observation by McGirt is important but kind of hard to follow in text so I’ll restate it: when you’re talking about something as massive as the US economy, even a difference of a few percentage points in the labor share of national income over several years is trillions and trillions of dollars. And increasingly, those trillions are going to the wealthiest and not to the bottom 90%.
According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP — enough to more than double median income — enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.
Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant — $50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy — $50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure.
The podcasts generated by Google’s NotebookLM service are “surprisingly effective”. (Whether this says more about the current state of podcasts or AI is an open question…)
Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids. “Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.” This has largely been my parenting strategy, although it’s sometimes been challenging to stick to.
Great Art Explained: Van Gogh’s Last Painting
It’s been awhile since I’d checked in on one of my favorite YouTube channels, Great Art Explained. In the past year, curator James Payne has done videos on Duchamp, Manet, Magritte, and that one painting by Caspar David Friedrich (you know the one). But this one, on Vincent van Gogh’s final painting, particularly caught my attention:
The mystery of what [his final painting] was and where it was painted would take over a century to solve, and that was only thanks to a worldwide epidemic. What it means is that we now have a deeper insight into what van Gogh’s final last hours were like — before his tragic death.
Over 33,000 sounds are available for free download from the BBC’s sound effects library. “Among the plethora of sounds covered are reindeer grunts, common frog calls and crowds at the 1989 FA Cup Final.”
A Murmuration of Starlings
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Great interview by Jia Tolentino of Dr. Warren Hern, one of the few doctors who openly perform late abortions in the US. “Abortion is a clear therapeutic treatment of the condition of pregnancy where the woman is not going to have a healthy baby.”
What’s the Fastest Way to Alphabetize Your Bookshelf?
Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of books that need to be sorted alphabetically by author. What’s the fastest way to accomplish this task? Luckily, efficient sorting is a problem that’s been studied extensively in computer science and this TED-Ed video walks us through three possible sorts: bubble sort, insertion sort, and quicksort.
For more on sorting, check out Sorting Algorithms Visualized, sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing, and a site where you can compare many different sorting algorithms with each other. (via the kid should see this)
The Absolute Best Butter For Every Occasion, After Taste-Testing, Cooking And Baking With 32 Kinds. Definitely need to get my hands of some Le Beurre Bordier at some point. But I’m really happy with Ploughgate’s salted butter. 🤤
“The Work of a Madman”
“Barbaric.” A “nightmare of vulgarity.” “Monstrous.” “A violent mess.” “The work of a madman.” Those are just some of the reactions that Henri Matisse’s Dance received after its public debut in 1910. In this video, Evan Puschak shares How Matisse Revolutionized Color In Art with this painting and other Fauvist work.
The most common adjectives ending in “-y” used in the NYT Cooking section include jammy, silky, buttery, cheesy, and lemony.
Examples of a book cover design trend: multi-panel illustrations or “bento books”. Think the covers for Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered. “If you degrade hyperlinks…you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things.”
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment. “Another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms.”
Status Update
Hey everyone. It’s been more than 2 weeks since my bike accident and I’m still not quite back to full speed. I’ve been slowed down by some emotional/psychological/existential stuff and my wrists haven’t fully healed yet, making typing/mousing for long periods challenging. I’m sorry the site has been slower than usual — thanks for your patience as I get back into the groove here.
But also! I had a really nice, relaxing, contemplative birthday weekend in NYC — museums, art, walking, bookstores, city vibes, friends, and food. It really filled me up. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through Intermezzo and loving it. I’ve got an audiobook going too: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (recommended by Kottke reader Mike Riley). I finished Shōgun (excellent, can’t wait to rewatch), am working my way through season two of The Rings of Power, and am rewatching Devs with my son (a first-timer). I know, I owe you a media diet post…I haven’t done one since December. 😬
If you don’t mind sharing, what have you been up to recently?
Thom Yorke is reworking Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief for a production of Hamlet. “PLEASE NOTE: RADIOHEAD WILL NOT BE PERFORMING IN HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF.”
“As of late September 2024, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of 4 free at-home [Covid] tests from USPS.” Order here!
Old photos of basketball games and boxing matches often have a pleasing hazy blue background that modern photos lack. “The blue haze that adds such a wonderful ambience to the arena is caused by cigarette smoke.”
I appreciate this no-nonsense flight safety video from Emirates. All the jokey entertaining ones are corny and have grown tiresome.
In the late 19th century, hotels started building fully outfitted darkrooms for travelling photographers to develop their plates.
Kodak and the Invention of Popular Photography
In 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company rolled out a new camera and a new slogan. “You press the button, we do the rest.” To say this moment revolutionized photography would be an understatement. But this story isn’t just about Kodak. It’s about what happens when a powerful technology, originally only understood by a select few, can suddenly fit in your hand.
And then, fast-forwarding to the 90s and 00s, Kodak gradually, then suddenly, missed a similar shift that further democratized photography: the move to digital.
Fun little word game: Alphaguess. “Guess the word of the day. Each guess reveals where the word sits alphabetically.” (Today’s puzzle took me 16 guesses…is that good?)
The Pudding has collected satellite imagery of all 59,507 outdoor basketball courts in the United States.
The Williamsburg Bridge Riders
Adam DiCarlo takes photos of commuters (mostly bikers) as they exit the Williamsburg Bridge bike path on the Manhattan side and posts them to his Instagram account. (via @BAMstutz)
Dark Matter Could Be Hiding Out as Atom-Sized Black Holes. “Black holes the size of an atom that contain the mass of an asteroid may fly through the inner solar system about once a decade”…and we can theoretically detect them through planetary wobble.
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a lengthy profile of the writer on the eve of the publication of The Message, his book about “three resonant sites of conflict”, including Palestine.
The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook
Published in 1961 with an introduction by Alice B Toklas, The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook features recipes and wisdom from dozens of writers and artists, including Harper Lee, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Pearl Buck, Upton Sinclair, John Keats, and Burl Ives. Lee shared her recipe for crackling cornbread:
First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:
1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milkBake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).
Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about \$250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.
And Marcel Duchamp offers up a preparation of steak tartare:
Let me begin by saying, ma chere, that Steak Tartare, alias Bitteck Tartare, also known as Steck Tartare, is in no way related to tartar sauce. The steak to which I refer originated with the Cossacks in Siberia, and it can be prepared on horseback, at swift gallop, if conditions make this a necessity.
Indications: Chop one half pound (per person) of the very best beef obtainable, and shape carefully with artistry into a bird’s nest. Place on porcelain plate of a solid color — ivory is the best setting — so that no pattern will disturb the distribution of ingredients. In hollow center of nest, permit two egg yolks to recline. Like a wreath surrounding the nest of chopped meat, arrange on border of plate in small, separate bouquets:
Chopped raw white onion
Bright green capers
Curled silvers of anchovy
Fresh parsley, chopped fine
Black olives minutely chopped in company with yellow celery leaves
Salt and pepper to tasteEach guest, with his plate before him, lifts his fork and blends the ingredients with the egg yolks and meat. In center of table: Russian pumpernickel bread, sweet butter, and bottles of vin rosé.
Not to be outdone, MoMA published their own artists’ cookbook in 1977, featuring contributions from Louise Bourgeois, Christo, Salvador Dali, Willem De Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Here’s Warhol’s recipe:
Andy Warhol doesn’t eat anything out of a can anymore. For years, when he cooked for himself, it was Heinz or Campbell’s tomato soup and a ham sandwich. He also lived on candy, chocolate, and “anything with red dye #2 in it.” Now, though he still loves junk food, McDonald’s hamburgers and French fries are something “you just dream for.”
The emphasis is on health, staying thin and eating “simple American food, nothing complicated, no salt or butter.” In fact, he says, “I like to go to bad restaurants, because then I don’t have to eat. Airplane food is the best food — it’s simple, they throw it away so quickly and it’s so bad you don’t have to eat it.”
Campbell’s Milk of Tomato Soup
A 10 3/4-ounce can Campbell’s condensed tomato soup
2 cans milk
In a saucepan bring soup and two cans milk to boil; stir. Serve.
Frozen food delivery service Schwan’s will shutter in November. Founded in 1952 (and now called Yelloh 🙄), the company cited “economic & market headwinds”. When I was a kid in rural WI, a visit from “the Schwan’s man” was an *event*, let me tell you.
“Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago,” but polling is now the centerpiece of American politics, with “the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip”. Why do we pay so much attention to this bullshit?
Listen to a Performance of Some New Mozart Music
Last week, I posted about the discovery of a “new” piece of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
A previously unknown piece of music composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart when he was probably in his early teens has been uncovered at a library in Germany.
The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.
Via Smithsonian Magazine, here’s the one of the first public performances of the rediscovered work:
Researchers say the music fits stylistically with other works from the 1760s, when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13. Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the foundation, tells Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) that the young composer was no longer creating pieces that sounded like this one by the time he was in his late teens.
In his early years, however, Mozart wrote many chamber works like Serenade in C, which his father recorded on a list of his son’s compositions. Many of these works were thought to have been lost to history, as Leisinger says in the statement. Fortunately, this particular piece was saved — thanks to the composer’s sister.
“It looks as if — thanks to a series of favorable circumstances — a complete string trio has survived in Leipzig,” Leisinger adds. “The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the trio specially for her.”
(via open culture)
“The state should not give itself the right to kill human beings — especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.”
American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists. “American suburbs are full of ugly, empty, liminal spaces: spaces you are not meant to linger in or enjoy. They’re the creepy hallways of the built environment…”
Ian Scott tracked down the full “What were the skies like when you were young?” sample from The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. You can listen to it on the Internet Archive or on Soundcloud.
Substack Still Sucks
From Casey Newton’s post looking back on Platformer’s fourth year, your periodic reminder that Substack still sucks:
When we learned about the extent of far-right extremism, Hitler worship and Holocaust denial on Substack, you pressed us to investigate. And when we published our findings, you overwhelmingly encouraged us to find a new home on the web.
During this time, I talked to several high-profile writers who collectively make millions of dollars writing on Substack. Their readers were also asking them to leave, too. In the end, almost none of them did. They bet that they could simply put their heads down and wait for the controversy to pass. And it worked!
Substack’s Nazi problem continues, but the news cycle has moved on. I suspect it will swing back around eventually. But in the meantime, I’m proud that when Platformer was asked to actually live its values — to stand up for the idea that basic content moderation is good and necessary — we did.
Having principles can be annoying and expensive. (And make you insufferable to talk to at parties.) But it beats the alternative.
Huge respect to Newton and the Platformer team for making the move from Substack even though it was inconvenient and painful.
The NY Times is beta testing a sports version of their popular Connections game.
Ross Anderson on The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball. “It allows a small group of perfect strangers with little in common besides basketball to experience a flow state — a brief, but intense, form of group transcendence.” Super interesting sociology.
Tipping Point is a three-part podcast on The Limits to Growth, a 1970s book that predicted the collapse of civilization by ~2050 (based on early systems dynamics modeling done at MIT) and how it was ignored & discredited.
Foliage season is ramping up here in New England — here’s this year’s foliage prediction map for the US.
Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)
Look, I’m not even going to explain this. Either 1) you’re the type of person who reads the words “Radio Shack Catalog Archive (1939-2011)”, completely flips their shit, clicks away immediately, and therefore isn’t even reading this, or 2) you don’t care. Have a good one!
Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.”
“Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.” JFC.
Out today: Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo. I’m actually gonna grab this from the local bookstore today while I’m out and about.
Astronomy Photographer of the Year for 2024
Royal Museums Greenwich has announced the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 competition. You can also check out some of the shortlist entries and runners-up in each category (Moon, Sun, etc.)
Photos above by (from top to bottom): Tom Williams, Peter Ward, Ryan Imperio, and Tom Rae.
The International Space Station is scheduled to reach the end of its functional life by 2030 — and will then be destroyed. “After 30 years of dutiful service, our home among the stars will be ripped apart by the atmosphere.”
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