Welcome to Choppke’s, Your Wich Is My Command

A couple of years ago, frustrated by a takeout Italian sandwich with unevenly distributed fillings, I had a wonderful, life-changing idea: chopped sandwiches. It’s like what you get at those chopped salad places but instead of chopping up all the ingredients and putting them into a bowl, you put them between two slices of bread or in a hoagie roll or whatever. That way, you get all of the elements of the sandwich — cheese, tomato, lettuce, dressing/mayo, onion, whatever — in every single bite. Yum.

Chopwiches already exist — tuna salad, Philly cheesesteaks, chicken salad, egg salad — and they’re amazing because you get all of their deliciousness in every bite. I just wanted to extend that enjoyment to many other types of sandwich: banh mi, BLT, Italian sub, gyro, turkey club, and even the humble ham and cheese. Great idea, right? I wanted to open a chopped sandwich restaurant and change the world.

Then I made a mistake: I told people about my idea. And every single one of them laughed at me. To my face! My friends, my kids, everyone. It was a heartbreaking moment but as an entrepreneur, I knew I had to persist and follow my dream. Like Wayne Gretzky said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” And I was going to win.

But the whole thing became a joke for awhile and I had to play along, biding my time. My friend Caroline came up with a name: Choppke’s. We brainstormed slogans and things the sandwich artists could say to patrons:

• Choppke’s. You’ll Love It to Bits.
• Welcome to Choppke’s, your wich is my command.
• As you wich. [In response to any customer query.]
• Welcome to Choppke’s! What can I get chopping for you today?

I asked ChatGPT to come up with a logo; this was my favorite one:

When (not if!) Choppke’s gets huge, there’s gonna be a corporate jet, so I wanted to see what that was going to look like:

Caroline got me a custom-made hat for my birthday (actual hat and actual dopey human wearing it, not AI-generated):

Ever so slowly, I was winning her over, despite every fiber of her being telling her that a chopped sandwich restaurant was the stupidest idea she’d ever heard and causing her to question the entire basis of our relationship. And if I could get one person on my side, a person who thought I was an idiot, the rest of the world would surely follow. Ideas + persistence = manifesting your reality.

I think it was the legendary management guru Michael Scott (quoting IBM founder Steve Jobs) who said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”. Well, my long chopped sandwich skate has finally paid off — the puck is here! According to The Takeout, the chopped sandwich is all the rage on TikTok!

If you enjoy a good chopped salad, the kind where every component (veggies, cheese, protein) is chopped into uniformly forkable bites and then tossed in dressing, you’re halfway to a chopped salad sandwich, sometimes just referred to as a chopped sandwich. It’s simply any version of that same salad, just stuffed into a hinge-cut roll. The shape of the roll is crucial, as it prevents all the fillings from falling out the sides.

Yes, exactly. Wow. I’ve never felt so seen. What’s that smell? No, not a delicious chopped sandwich…it’s the sweet smell of V-I-N-D-I-C-A-T-I-O-N.

Nearly any filling is a candidate for a chopped salad sandwich, and that’s the part that appeals most to TikTok users. Beyond the go-to Italian sub, you can create chopped salad sandwiches that contain Vietnamese banh mi ingredients, wedge salads, Caesar salads, whatever your heart desires. And that versatility means it’s a goldmine for social media content.

A goldmine! You’re goddamn right it’s a goldmine! The time is right, the market is PRIMED, Gen Z is on board, it’s now or never. We’re gonna do it, Choppke’s is a go!

Now, just to properly calibrate expectations, I haven’t looked at any commercial real estate nor have I made a single chopped sandwich of any kind at home to test out whether they actually taste better or not because I just know they will. What I do have is the idea (which is amazing, as we’ve agreed), a janky misspelled AI logo, and a dream.

Right now, you’re probably wondering how you can help, how you can climb aboard this rocket ship, how you can secure a place in a better future for us all. Well, I’m happy to announce that you can join the movement for better, tastier sandwiches today by zhuzhing yourself up with an exclusive Choppke’s t-shirt!

All proceeds from shirt sales will be pumped into developing the Choppke’s franchise (or, if that doesn’t work out, buying myself sandwiches from the local deli). Thanks for the support everyone — even though I could have done it without you, I definitely couldn’t have done it without you.

• Choppke’s
• food
• Jason Kottke
• restaurants
• sandwiches

The Enablers

This is quite a paragraph from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review (titled The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (subhead: “The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it.”)) of Timothy Ryback’s new book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power:

Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

I got this via Clayton Cubitt, who says “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”

• Adam Gopnik
• Adolf Hitler
• books
• Germany
• Nazis
• politics
• Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power
• Timothy Ryback

An inexplicably deep dive into a little-watched sitcom called Til Death. “Since nobody was watching and nothing was at stake, the show’s writers went in some really weird directions just for the hell of it.”

Researching An Old Sitcom With AI · ironicsans.beehiiv.com

Plus: The “Til Death” viewing guide

A dedicated community of gamers is racing to complete every uncleared level in Super Mario Maker before Nintendo shuts down the Wii U servers on April 8. They’ve cleared thousands of levels and are down to 1 particularly thorny level.

The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss · arstechnica.com

"Team 0%" is struggling to clear "Trimming the Herbs" before an April 8 server shutdown.

Last year, MacKenzie Scott announced plans to give $250 million to nonprofit organizations through an open call process. Yesterday, she revealed the gifts will actually total $640 million. Scott has given away $17.3 billion in total.

MacKenzie Scott donates $640 million, more than doubling her planned gifts to nonprofit applicants · apnews.com

The billionaire philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday she would give $640 million to more than 360 organizations in response to an application process she launched last year.

The Vela Supernova Remnant

This stunning 1.3 gigapixel image of the Vela supernova remnant comes to us courtesy of the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. From PetaPixel:

The Vela Supernova remnant, located about 800 light-years away from Earth, is the cosmic corpse of a massive star that exploded 11,000 years ago. It is one of the closest supernova remnants to Earth and the perfect subject for the remarkable Dark Energy Camera.

The supernova is a vast cosmic structure about 100 light-years across. For context, one would have to travel around the Earth 200 million times to have traveled a single light-year.

The full image of the supernova remnant is worth exploring. You can also watch this zoom-in of the image to observe the high level of detail available.

(via colossal)

• astronomy
• photography
• science
• space

It’s one of those days when I’m thinking about the interactive hot springs map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Red = boiling, orange = hot, yellow = warm.

Back in 2012, some French apiaries were producing blue, green, and brown honey because their bees were visiting a factory that was processing waste from making M&Ms. Unsellable? Genius marketing idea you mean!

Blue and green honey makes French beekeepers see red · reuters.com

Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M's candy processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.

Why Weather Forecasts Have Gotten So Good

You may not have noticed, but weather forecasts — temperature, precipitation, hurricane tracks — have improved greatly over the past few decades.

Dr. Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data explains why.

The first big change is that the data has improved. More extensive and higher-resolution observations can be used as inputs into the weather models. This is because we have more and better satellite data, and because land-based stations are covering many more areas around the globe, and at a higher density. The precision of these instruments has improved, too.

These observations are then fed into numerical prediction models to forecast the weather. That brings us to the next two developments. The computers on which these models are run have gotten much faster. Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.

The final crucial factor is how these forecasts are communicated. Not long ago, you could only get daily updates in the daily newspaper. With the rise of radio and TV, you could get a few notices per day. Now, we can get minute-by-minute updates online or on our smartphones.

If you’re in the US, you can see how accurate the weather forecast is in your area by using ForecastAdvisor.

• Hannah Ritchie
• meteorology
• science
• weather

On the cultural division of local and global fans of Premier League teams. “What happens to a community institution when the market drags it away from the community?”

The cultural division of football fans only serves those who wish to exploit it | Jonathan Liew · theguardian.com

The battle between ‘true fans’ and ‘plastics’ weakens the ties between supporters and their inclination to unite and organise

Don’t Be the Best. Be the Only.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier for the last few months and keep coming back to one of his tidbits of advice:

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

In a short clip from a longer interview, Kelly explains what he means by this:

You want to be doing something where it’s hard to explain to your mother what it is that you do. So it’s like, “What is it? Well, it’s not quite radio. I don’t know. It’s like talking.” And so that’s where you want to be. You want to be the only. You want to — and that’s a very high bar because it requires a tremendous amount of self-knowledge and awareness to get to that point, to really understand what it is that you do better than anybody else in the world. And for most of us, it takes all our lives to figure that out.

And we also, by the way, need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out. And that’s why most people’s remarkable lives are full of detours and dead ends and right turns because it’s a very high bar. But if you can get there — you don’t need a resume, there’s no competition. And it’s easy for you because you’re doing it. You’re not looking over your shoulder, you’re just right there. So don’t aim to be the best. Be the only.

Although it works in many situations, my interpretation of this aphorism is from the point of view of a creative person. There’s a point in your work/career/journey when you reach an escape velocity of sorts from your peers and the world around you. What you offer to others is just different enough that you become your own category of one: nothing but you will do. Not better, different. I don’t know if I’m there yet in my creative trajectory, but it’s been a worthy goal to pursue — it takes you inside yourself (in a healthy way) and away from “comparison is the thief of joy” territory.

Kelly states in the foreword of his book that much of his advice was gleaned from elsewhere so I decided to track down where this one might have come from. Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham used a similar phrase in a banner describing the Grateful Dead at a 1991 concert for the band:

They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.

Grateful Dead: not the best, but the only. That sounds about right.

• books
• Excellent Advice for Living
• Kevin Kelly
• working

The trailer for a new Star Wars series called The Acolyte. The series will debut in June on Disney+ and is set 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace.

The Acolyte | Official Trailer | Disney+ · youtube.com

In an age of light, a darkness rises. On June 4, don’t miss the two-episode premiere of #TheAcolyte, a Star Wars Original series, only on Disney+.

Hans Zimmer and a group of musicians perform the Dune soundtrack live. Amazing to watch singer Loire Cotler do that piercing chant (you know the one).

Hans Zimmer Performs the Dune Soundtrack LIVE · youtube.com

WATCH AS HANS ZIMMER AND A TALENTED GROUP OF ARTISTS BRING THE MUSICAL SOUNDS OF ARRAKIS TO LIFE IN THIS LIVE PERFORMANCE OF DUNE’S ACADEMY® AWARD-NOMINATED SCORE.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write. “Something as simple as a spell-checker…represents the culmination of a shared human effort, spanning centuries.” Thumbed through this over the weekend…looks really interesting.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write (A Norton Short) · amazon.com

Dolly Parton’s cast iron cookware. Why not!

Dolly Parton Cast Iron Collection · lodgecastiron.com

We partnered with Dolly Parton to create a legendary cast iron collection that delivers all the classic performance you expect from a pop culture icon.

I Put 4 Million Suns in a Black Hole Over New York

Using a scale model of the solar system the size of New York City and some dazzling visual effects, Epic Spaceman explains that black holes are generally smaller than you might think (because they’re so dense) — even the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. But when you consider some of the biggest black holes we’ve discovered…wow.

• astronomy
• black holes
• physics
• science
• video

I love that Lil Nas X impulsively ran a half-marathon.

Overheard at the Half-Marathon: ‘Wait, Was That Lil Nas X?’ · nytimes.com

The rapper and singer, clad in bulky designer sneakers and the official race T-shirt, was a last-minute addition at the NYC Half.

Christopher Nolan tells Stephen Colbert he has “no guilt about being a fan of the Fast & Furious franchise. A tremendous action franchise. I watch those movies all the time. I love them.”

Christopher Nolan: You’re Not Meant To Understand Everything In “Tenet” · youtube.com

Writer and director Christopher Nolan humors Stephen Colbert’s attempt to learn the meaning behind his notoriously obscure film, “Tenet,” and accepts our host’s invitation to watch all of “The Fast and The Furious” films together. #Colbert #ChristopherNolan #Oppenheimer Subscribe To "The Late Show"

Waffle House’s Magic Marker System

I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for food during service, but I can’t find it in the archive. But no matter — the Waffle House training video above runs us through their whole system, including a detailed explanation of their Magic Marker System, which involves zero actual Magic Markers and instead is about arranging condiment packets and other items on plates in a code:

Now let’s talk about our breakfast sandwiches. Just like omelettes, these sandwiches have the same four positions: ham, sausage, bacon, and plain. To mark a sandwich, place two pickle slices in the appropriate position. Here you can see I put two pickle slices in the number three position, which tells me this is a bacon sandwich. If I add a slice of cheese to the plate, I know this is a bacon cheese sandwich. To make this a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, I’ll add this right side up mayo packet to the right side of the plate.

Don’t let this mayo pack confuse you - as long as you see two pickles on the plate you know this is a sandwich. When marking a sandwich, this mayo packet and pickles means a sandwich with eggs. If a customer wanted the eggs on their sandwich to be scrambled instead of the standard over well egg, I’d move this mayo pack down to the bottom of the plate to show that the egg is scrambled.

That sounds pretty complicated and they’ve likely faced pressure to change the system over the years, but I bet it works really well in practice and cuts down on errors. I love stuff like this…seeing how different organizations manage their core processes, especially in non-conventional ways. See also Nightclub Hand Signals and The Quarryman’s Symphony. (thx, erik)

• food
• how to
• language
• video
• Waffle House

This is a perfect New Yorker Talk of the Town piece: now-divorced celebs holding a joint thrift sale of their stuff. The sale was advertised on Vogue’s website, was sponsored by an energy drink, and one of the sellers was recording the scene for her podcast.

For Sale: Busy Philipps’s Marriage Stuff. Yes, Used · newyorker.com

The actor and her ex-husband, the filmmaker Marc Silverstein, host a “divorce sale” to sell their Le Creuset and her wedding veil.

“I was fully in the first time, but the second time, even after getting divorced, it was like, OK, I am all in.” These stories about couples remarrying felt very romantic to me!

They Married, Divorced and Then Married Their Ex-Spouses Again · nytimes.com

Five couples share how and why they decided to reconcile and tie the knot again.

Movie Posters Perfected. “A live, cloud-based library of over 3,500 curated movie posters you can stream to your digital display.” Includes a DIY digital display guide.

Movie Posters Perfected · moviepostersperfected.com

Movie Posters Perfected is an epic, living library of over 3,500 digital movie posters. Every poster is in ultra-high resolution, featuring perfect OLED black levels & meticulously retouched artwork—all streamable to your digital display, with new posters added automatically. Plus: learn how to buil

The 15 Greatest Documentaries

A thoughtful video essay from The Cinema Cartography about 15 of film’s greatest documentaries, including The Thin Blue Line, Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, Shoah, Hoop Dreams, and OJ: Made in America (my personal favorite).

I am not sure I agree with their #1 pick? But it’s been a loooong time since I saw it (in the theater when it came out, if you can believe it), so maybe it’s time for another viewing. (via open culture)

• best of
• lists
• movies
• video

Charlie Jane Anders on why she stopped loving Captain Kirk. “Kirk is obsessed with maintaining his dominance over his crew, in a way that’s very much of its time but also a product of the men who created him.”

I Stopped Loving Captain Kirk · buttondown.email

I used to look up to Captain Kirk, Star Trek's fearless leader, when I was a kid. When I was seven or eight, I had a homemade Starfleet captain shirt, which...

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece about how conservative groups have “co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.”

The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap: How a Civil Rights Ideal Got Hijacked · nytimes.com

The fall of affirmative action is part of a 50-year campaign to roll back racial progress.

Should there be an Oscar for title design? Or movie poster design? An interview with several designers about how the materials they produce increasingly shape moviegoers’ perceptions of films.

Setting the stage: Should there be an Oscar for title design? · itsnicethat.com

Art of the Title’s Lola Landekic speaks to the graphic designers behind titles and posters for some of this year’s biggest films, exploring the process and changing landscape for these creatives setting the tone of films through typography.

Yesterday the Atlantic published a list of great American novels — 136 of them. I’ve read them all! Just kidding.

The Great American Novels · theatlantic.com

136 books that made America think

A forthcoming book from urbanist Carlos Moreno: The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. “…everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home.”

The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet · amazon.com

From The Pudding, a visual essay about how Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” lists changed from 2003 to 2020. Who the voters were and how we listen to music both affected the rankings.

What Makes an Album the Greatest of All Time? · pudding.cool

Examining 30 years of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Albums of All Time” Rankings

The Metaphysically Science-ish Drawings of Daniel Martin Diaz

I have to admit that the illustration style of Daniel Martin Diaz is not completely my cup of tea, but I do like a few of his pieces (like those pictured above). They have an infographic quality that’s quite compelling — and also remind me a bit of Chris Ware, by way of Hilma af Klint and, uh, Edward Gorey maybe?

Anyway, lot of prints of his work are available and you can check out his latest stuff on Instagram.

• art
• Daniel Martin Diaz

Short interview with a seismologist who has debunked a Harvard astrophysicist’s claim that an alien artifact was found on Earth. “One, if you want to do seismic analysis, it’s ideal if you check with a seismologist first. The other is, it’s not aliens.”

Surprise: An ‘Extraterrestrial’ Gadget Was Something More Familiar · nytimes.com

In 2014 a fireball from outer space was posited to be an alien artifact. A recent study suggests otherwise.

It’s really become a thing for bands to go on tour to play their classic albums from start to finish (e.g. Death Cab, Postal Service). When did this start? I found this 10-year-old Reddit thread which mentioned Weezer, Green Day, and The Pixies. Anyone?

“Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move, and no one touches me except in rare occasions, which I cherish.” Extraordinary obituary for lawyer and author Paul Alexander.

Lawyer, Author and TikTok Star Spent 72 Years in an Iron Lung · nytimes.com

Paul Alexander, who died at 78, was paralyzed with polio at age 6 and relied on the machine to breathe. Still, he was able to earn a law degree, write a book and, late in life, build a following on TikTok.

26 Years Ago…

On this day in 1998, 26 freaking years ago, I started writing this blog. I’ve talked at you a lot about the site recently, so I’ll be brief. Last year on this anniversary, I wrote:

My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life, spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence.

And still having fun. Perhaps more fun than ever. Thanks to all of you for being a part of it.

P.S. I hope you’ll forgive me taking advantage of any 26-years!-I-love-this-place! feelings you might have today to ask that if you find value in what I do here, I’d appreciate if you’d support the site by purchasing a membership. And to everyone who has supported the site over the years, thank you so much!

• kottke.org

The deepest points in each of the Earth’s oceans are called The Five Deeps. I didn’t know the deepest spot in the Atlantic Ocean is a trench off the coast of Puerto Rico.

The Five Deeps, the deepest point in each of Earth's oceans · thekidshouldseethis.com

Molloy Deep, the Sunda Trench, aka Java Trench, the South Sandwich Trench, the Puerto Rico Trench, and the famed Mariana Trench, home of Challenger Deep,

On TV: ‘Free to Be… You and Me’

I didn’t know (or had somehow forgotten) that Marlo Thomas’s seminal children’s album Free to Be… You and Me (Spotify, Apple Music) was turned into a TV special that aired in 1974.

The basic concept was to encourage post-1960s gender neutrality, saluting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one’s identity. A major thematic message is that anyone — whether a boy or a girl — can achieve anything.

The TV show starred Thomas, Mel Brooks, Harry Belefonte, Dionne Warwick, Carol Channing, Michael Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. You can watch the whole thing (commercials included) on YouTube:

Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote about the show for its 50th anniversary.

The opening sketch features Thomas and Mel Brooks as cue-ball-headed puppet babies in a hospital nursery, daffily trying to work out which of them is a boy and which is a girl — the Brooks baby declares himself a girl because he wants to be “a cocktail waitress” — and setting up the bigger themes of the special: What is a boy and what is a girl?

As newborns, they’re indistinguishable, just base line people - eyes, ears, hands, mouth. They haven’t yet been programmed with all the lessons about boy things and girl things, boy colors and girl colors, boy games and girl games. The rest of the special gives its young viewers a decoder ring for those messages, and permission to disregard them.

Take “Parents Are People,” a duet with Thomas and Harry Belafonte, which remains one of the most innocently radical things I’ve ever seen on TV. The lyrics explain that your mom and dad are just “people with children,” who have their own lives and a wide range of careers open to both of them.

Back in 2012, Dan Kois wrote a three-part series on the album.

Mel Brooks’ session was more eventful. Thomas had written to him that the album “would benefit the Ms. Foundation,” and when he came in the morning of his recording, he told her that he thought the material Reiner and Stone had written was funny but that he didn’t know what it had to do with multiple sclerosis. Once set straight about the MS in question, Brooks joined Thomas in the recording booth, where they would both play babies for the album’s first sketch, “Boy Meets Girl.”

“When I directed,” Alda recalls, “I would be meticulous and relentless. I would do a lot of takes. But Mel is not a guy who’s used to doing a lot of takes. He’s not used to taking direction from anybody — you know, he gives direction.” Alda didn’t love the first few takes of “Boy Meets Girl”; in the end it took, Alda remembers, 10 or 15 tries, with Brooks improvising madly all along the way. Rodgers was there that day to record “Ladies First,” and she still remembers standing in the control room laughing harder with each take. “Mel was generous,” Alda allows, “and he let me egg him on.”

We listened to Free to Be… quite a bit in the car when the kids were younger. Nice to see it pop up again.

• Free to Be… You and Me
• James Poniewozik
• Marlo Thomas
• music
• TV
• video

Dew Point I is a mesmerizing water sculpture piece by Lily Clark — water droplets seem to appear from nowhere and bead up on a surface made of superhydrophobic ceramic.

The Most Populous Cities in the World, From 3000 BCE to Today

I’ve always been a little fascinated by the list of the largest cities throughout history, so this animated version from Ollie Bye is right up my alley. While watching, it’s interesting to think about what makes cities grow large at specific times: a mixture of economics, demography, social movements, empire/colonialism, technology, and the like.

• cities
• lists
• maps
• Ollie Bye
• population
• time lapse
• video

Dawn Baillie: The Art of the Movie Poster

I love a good movie poster and Dawn Baillie designed one of the best ones ever: the iconic poster for The Silence of the Lambs. Her other work includes posters for Dirty Dancing, Little Miss Sunshine, Zoolander, The Truman Show, and The Royal Tenenbaums. A show of her work opens soon at Poster House in NYC. Some of Baillie’s original posters are for sale at Posteritati.

• Dawn Baillie
• design
• movies

From Taschen, The Book of Colour Concepts. Man, I am just a total sucker for palettes and spectrums.

The Book of Colour Concepts · amazon.com

Chiroptera is a dance performance from artist & photographer JR, choreographer Damien Jalet, Thomas Bangalter (Daft Punk), dancer Amandine Albisson, and 153 “pixel” dancers (you’ll see what I mean).

"Chiroptera", a collaborative project · youtube.com

Spotlight on "Chiroptera", a project by JR, Damien Jalet and Thomas Bangalter, presented as part of the Act II of “Retour à la Caverne”, the collaboration between the Paris Opera, JR and 𝘭𝘦19M, the Parisian building dedicated to the savoir-faire of the Fashion and Interior Design Métiers d'art. As

The winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition for 2024. “Whale Bones was photographed in the toughest conditions, as a breath-hold diver descends below the Greenland ice sheet to bear witness to the carcasses.”

Underwater Photographer of the Year 2024 winners · bbc.com

Alex Dawson has been named Underwater Photographer of the Year, for an image of a diver finding whale bones.

On trimming the silence from our lives. “One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on efficiency.”

Museum-Worthy?

This is a fun ad for the 2024 AICP Awards about the pitfalls of focus-grouping & corporatizing art, featuring an annoyed van Gogh (“How can a painting fail?”) and an even more annoyed Frida Kahlo. (via noah kalina)

• advertising
• art
• Frida Kahlo
• video
• Vincent van Gogh

Warped & Bendy Pen Plots

I like these small scale pen plotted artworks from Adam Fuhrer. You can see his larger scale work, buy work from his shop, and more of his generative art projects.

• Adam Fuhrer
• art

Jim Martini, a short story by Michael Bible. “He wasn’t one of us. He didn’t understand team culture. He didn’t have our warrior mindset.”

Jim Martini · relegationbooks.com

Founded in 2012 by Dallas Hudgens, Relegation Books works to connect readers and writers on a smaller, more intimate scale, understanding that success isn't always measured by sales numbers.