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A visual tribute to the gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins, one of the all-time great cinematographers. Deakins has worked on a number of films with the Coen brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, No Country for Old Men) and a bunch of other films as well (Skyfall, Kundun, and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel).
Some recent genetic testing of the blood of AIDS patients has determined that the strain of HIV responsible for the majority of the AIDS cases in the US spread from Zaire to Haiti around 1967, from Haiti to NYC around 1971, and from there to San Francisco around 1976 and that Gaétan Dugas (aka Patient Zero) was not responsible for setting the epidemic in motion.
The strain of H.I.V. responsible for almost all AIDS cases in the United States, which was carried from Zaire to Haiti around 1967, spread from there to New York City around 1971, researchers concluded in the journal Nature. From New York, it spread to San Francisco around 1976.
The new analysis shows that Mr. Dugas’s blood, sampled in 1983, contained a viral strain already infecting men in New York before he began visiting gay bars in the city after being hired by Air Canada in 1974.
The researchers also reported that originally, Mr. Dugas was not even called Patient Zero — in an early epidemiological study of cases, he was designated Patient O, for “outside Southern California,” where the study began. The ambiguous circular symbol on a chart was later read as a zero, stoking the notion that blame for the epidemic could be placed on one man.
The United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and six other European countries still have hereditary royal leaders and they are all related to each other. Royal Constellations is an interactive infographic for exploring the ancestral relationships of Europe’s royalty.
Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. Restraining aggression between two families, creating a stronger front towards a third family, increasing territorial acquisitions, legal claim to a foreign throne through inheritance are some of the most common reasons.
This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees which the visual below tries to convey. It shows how all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors. We don’t have to look very far back. Even the most distant royal relatives have their shared forebears born after the year 1700.
Whoa! Had no idea there was a pronounciation battle over “read” in “read receipts” (I say “reed”)
In Iceland, geothermal vents and hot springs abound and you can use them to bake rye bread in a pot at fairly low temperatures for 24 hours. At a spa outside Reykjavik, they have something called the Rye Bread Experience where they take guests to see how the geothermal ovens work. Filmmaker Alison Grasso went on one of the tours and made a short film about it.
Rave review for Fleabag. I highly recommend this show.
When I watch Black Mirror, particularly the newest Netflix season, I don’t think it’s primarily classic science fiction or about our relationship to technology.1 What I’m reminded of most strongly is The Twilight Zone and Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, both of which appear on the list of movies, books, and TV shows that influenced Charlie Brooker while making Black Mirror.
I read Tales of the Unexpected when I was a kid, having exhausted all of the other Roald Dahl books in our small town library and one day randomly discovering that he’d written this book of short stories for adults. His use of horror and black comedy are evident in the most celebrated story, Lamb to the Slaughter, in which a woman murders her husband by whacking him in the head with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves the lamb to the police detectives who come round to investigate the death.
Anyway, what I didn’t know was that Tales of the Unexpected was also adapted into a TV show hosted by Dahl himself. I’ve embedded the Lamb to the Slaughter episode above and there are many more of the full episodes available on YouTube.
In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite images of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — but one that delivers a powerful feeling of how large the world is and how meaningless borders are from a certain perspective.
The project started from a really simple place. It was about looking. It was about the pure desire to understand the visual landscape that we are talking about when we are talking about the southern border of the United States. What does the southern border of the United States actually look like? And in that sense it was a very simple gesture to try to see the border in aggregate. If you were to compile all 2000 miles and try to see it in a short space — what would that look like? In another sense it grew out of the discourses as you suggested. The way migration is talked about in our contemporary moment and in particular the way migration is talked about in terms of the southern border of the U.S. So part of this piece is a response to the way migrants and borders are talked about in our politics. And it’s also just a way of looking at landscape as a way to think about some of those things.
The online version of the film is 6 minutes long, but Begley states that longer versions might make their way into galleries and such.
These Lego shopping bags are cleverly designed to make people carrying them look like they have Lego minifig arms. Fantastic design. (via @andrewbloch)
Over at GQ, Lincoln Michel shares 12 Books to Read After Binge-Watching Black Mirror. Among them:
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Version Control by Dexter Palmer.
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
Earlier this month, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker shared 105 cultural artifacts that influenced the series, including some surprises like Fawlty Towers — “often in our episodes, someone is trapped at the center of a dilemma they never get out of, and that describes every episode of Fawlty Towers” — Airplane!, and Radiohead’s The National Anthem, as well as more familiar influences like 2001, The X-Files, and The Matrix. Only a handful of books on the list though, including:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders.
On Killing by Dave Grossman.
On Twitter recently, Joshua Topolsky called Black Mirror “the show for people who’ve never read any science fiction”. Perhaps that’s because Brooker hasn’t really either?
IT CONTINUES. Publishers Weekly’s 10 best books of 2016.
IT BEGINS. The best films of 2016 so far.
NASA has uploaded a beautiful and relaxing 18-minute fly-through video of the International Space Station filmed in ultra high-definition 4K resolution. They used to a fisheye lens to film it, which means you get plenty of detail and depth of field.
In an interview with Alexander Olch, founder of the cool new Metrograph theater in NYC, Wes Anderson just casually reveals that he’s doing another stop-motion animated movie that’s currently in production.
I’ve got an animated movie I’m doing that’s happening across the room from me right now. So I can see a long list of e-mails from people on the set whom I now need to address.
We know from about a year ago that dogs are involved, as are Bryan Cranston, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, and Jeff Goldblum. Looking forward to this one…Fantastic Mr. Fox is Anderson’s most underrated film.
P.S. In the same interview, Anderson and Olch briefly discuss Powers of Ten. :)
A species of worm in the north-east Atlantic has been observed farming. They plant grass seeds in their burrows and feed on the sprouts when they start growing.
Ragworms (Hediste diversicolor) were thought to consume the seeds of cordgrass, an abundant plant in the coastal habitats where they live. But the seeds have a tough husk, so it was a mystery how the worms could access the edible interior.
Zhenchang Zhu at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in Yerseke and his team have now discovered the worms’ surprising trick: they bury the seeds and wait for them to germinate, later feeding on the juicy sprouting shoots.
I, for one, welcome our new farming worm overlords.
On Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt tests out different recipes using slow cookers, Dutch ovens, and pressure cookers and comes to the conclusion that the pressure cooker and Dutch Oven often give better results.
A good traditional chicken stock is made by simmering chicken carcasses and aromatics in water on the stovetop for several hours. A couple of years ago, I ran a few quick tests to determine whether or not stock could successfully be made in a pressure cooker or a slow cooker. From my own experience, I was fairly certain that the pressure cooker would produce a superior stock, while the slow cooker would produce a thinner, less flavorful one, but I was surprised by the degree to which this was true. The difference between the stock made in a Dutch oven or pressure cooker and the stock made in a slow cooker was like night and day. This experiment was a good start, but I decided that to really get to the bottom of this, a lot more serious testing was in order.
Neven Mrgan has been preaching the gospel of the pressure cooker for making risotto on what is probably my current favorite Instagram account, Sardine Brunch.
Ham and pea risotto: arborio rice, ham stock, parmesan. 6 minutes in the pressure cooker!
(Of course, as with all recipes, this refers to the length of the longest step, really. You still have to chop the onions, fry them with the rice, get the whole thing up to temp/pressure. But that would be the case with a traditional recipe, too, except you’d have to add at least half an hour of stirring!)
Mrgan uses The Instant Pot, which seems to be the internet’s choice for pressure cookers.
At a recent concert in Chicago, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong noticed a kid in the audience holding a sign saying “I can play every song on Dookie” and pulled him up on stage to prove it. Aside from a slightly slow tempo, he did pretty well on When I Come Around.
P.S. Was thinking about this the other day: I don’t know that I would have picked Green Day as one of the 90s bands that has stuck around, still touring, still recording, still attracting new fans.
Twitter is shutting down Vine. I kinda do and don’t understand this.
The actor and comic Patton Oswalt lost his wife earlier this year to an unknown cause.
This was, Mr. Oswalt said, the second worst day of his life: “The worst is when I told my daughter the next day.”
He paused his rushing monologue, his voice lowering as he skipped over that awful memory to one from the next day, when Alice mentioned “Inside Out,” the Pixar film peopled with characters representing a girl’s emotional states. “I guess Sadness is doing her job right now,” she said.
Oh man, what a thing. How do you even deal with that? I’ve had some sad, low days over the past three years, but nothing compared to what Oswalt’s going through.
Update: Oswalt has been talking about his wife’s death and the aftermath in appearances and his updated stand-up material.
“If they would call it a numb slog instead of a healing journey, it would make it a lot fucking easier!” Oswalt said. “Because when they call it a healing journey and it’s just a day of you eating Wheat Thins for breakfast in your underwear, it’s like, ‘I guess I’m fucking up my healing journey.’ But if they would say you’re going to have a numb slog, instead you’d go, ‘I’m nailing it!’”
He went on to say that when he would sometimes tell his wife that “everything happens for a reason,” she would tell him, “No it doesn’t.” Ironically, he said, she ended up proving her point to him “in the shittiest way possible.” He added, “She won the argument in the worst way!”
(via @austinkleon)
Update: Oswalt writes about becoming a single parent after the death of his wife.
It feels like a walk-on character is being asked to carry an epic film after the star has been wiped from the screen. Imagine Frances McDormand dying in the first act of Fargo and her dim-bulb patrol partner — the one who can’t recognize dealer plates — has to bring William H. Macy to justice.
I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I want to tune out the world and hide under the covers and never leave my house again and send our daughter, Alice, off to live with her cousins in Chicago, because they won’t screw her up the way I know I will. Somebody help me! I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
I could barely get through this piece without losing it. Every single fear and anxiety I have is now channelled through my parenting. If this is what it feels like for me — and I am lucky to have time away from it and an amazing parenting partner — I cannot imagine what this feels like for a truly single parent like Oswalt.
Update: Oswalt and actress Meredith Salenger have announced their engagement. Congratulations to them!
Ok, maybe this is fair.
Most introverts find small talk cumbersome, but I actually hate all sizes of talk. I especially hate talking on the phone, even with friends. If a friend texts me, “Hey, you’re twenty minutes late! You promised you wouldn’t flake again, are you still coming?” or “emergency i need your help please call me asap,” I just won’t do it. When you think about it, it’s sort of selfish of them to demand that I talk to them on the phone even after I’ve told them multiple times that I’m an introvert.
As an introvert, I hate donating money to charity. I’m just too shy to think about my money going to help some stranger.
See also Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert.
This video is a combination of two things I like very much: long zoom histories and how things are made. The first part of the video follows the story of graphite back to the Big Bang.
[Carl Sagan-eque interlude: “If you want to make a pencil from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”]
The second part shows how pencils are made. Most surprising discovery while watching: Henry David Thoreau (yes, that one) was a talented pencil engineer:
John’s thoughtful son David*, unemployed after graduating from college, started helping out with the family business. He developed new refining techniques that made Thoreau pencils less brittle, less greasy — at the time, they were the finest pencils America had to offer. The Thoreaus were able to offer a variety of pencils, from No. 1 (the softest) to No. 4 (the hardest). That numbering system survives today.
The best artists invent their own tools. (via the kid should see this)
Last year, back when he was only one of more than a dozen GOP candidates, I discovered Citizen Kane was one of Donald Trump’s favorite movies via a video filmed by Errol Morris.
Trump acquits himself pretty well on Kane and its lessons — although I would not characterize Kane’s fall as “modest” — and his commentary about the film is probably the first actually interesting thing I have ever heard him say. But I watched all the way to the end and he shoots himself in the foot in the most Trumpian & misogynistic way — it’s actually perfect.
Spurred by a recent re-watch of Citizen Kane, Anthony Audi digs deeper into Trump’s misunderstanding of the film and finds that the course of Trump’s life has followed that of Charles Foster Kane.
He understands instinctively that by controlling the press, he can shape opinions on a mass scale — bending the truth as he sees fit. Over time, and through his marketing savvy, he develops a powerful media empire. Because that’s not enough, he then turns his sights to politics, running for New York governor as a stepping-stone to the White House. At campaign rallies, Kane gleefully brags about his poll numbers, and vows to lock up his opponent Jim Gettys, whom he condemns as an establishment tool. “Here’s one promise I’ll make,” he finally thunders. “My first official act as governor of the state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of “Boss” Jim W. Gettys!”
Kane never gets to fulfill that pledge. Instead, he loses the election-his campaign derailed by a last minute sex scandal. His editors know what to do, and the following day their headlines scream: “FRAUD AT POLLS!”
The piece is entitled Donald Trump Modeled His Life on Cinematic Loser Charles Foster Kane. Consciously or not, Trump does seem to be following Kane’s playbook here, right down to the fascism.
Specifically, Citizen Kane was a vision of what fascism might resemble in America. Both men knew better than to expect Hitler or Mussolini on our shores. They knew that our demagogue would be glossier, more entertaining-more American; and the man they conjured, inspired by real-life plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst, happened to look an awful lot like Donald Trump.
Read the whole thing…this is right up there with the best explainers of why Trump is the way he is. And part 2 is coming soon, an interview with Morris about Trump’s love of Kane.
Update: Audi’s interview with Morris was posted a couple of weeks before the election. Morris says Trump suffers from Irony Deficit Disorder.
Somehow he identifies clearly with Kane. Kane is Trump. And it’s not the kind of identification that I would make if I were Trump. Of course that issue — if I were Trump, what would I do, what would I think, what would I say? — it’s one of those counterfactuals I’m probably not equipped to address. But, if I were Donald Trump, I would not want to emphasize that connection with Kane. You know, a megalomaniac in love with power and crushing everything in his path. The inability to have friends, the inability to find love. The moral that Trump takes from Kane — I mean, it’s one of the great lines that I recorded. I ask, “Do you have any advice for Charles Foster Kane, sir?” You know, let’s get down to the psychiatric intervention. How can we help this poor man? He’s obviously troubled. How can we help him? Donald, help me out here!
And Donald says, “My advice to Charles Foster Kane is find another woman!” And you know, I thought, is that really the message that Welles was trying to convey? That Kane had made poor sexual choices, poor marriage choices?
Are you ready? Because I am about to change your life! (Ok, only a little, but still.) If you’re still using disposable batteries and wastefully throwing them away after they’re spent, I want to you stop what you’re doing and — right now!! — order a charger and enough rechargeable AA batteries & AAA batteries to power all the devices in your life.1 I did this about three years ago and haven’t looked back.
Look around you: your remotes, your wireless mouse & keyboard, and your kid’s remote control car. Close your eyes, what else? Flashlight, portable radio, clocks, smoke detectors, etc. Count all those batteries up, add a few extras so you always have charged batteries on hand, and then order that many rechargeable batteries. Battery problems solved forever.
Why do this? For starters, throwing batteries away is wasteful & harmful to the environment and recycling them is inconvenient (which means you probably won’t do it). In addition to saving the planet, you’ll also save money in the long run. While rechargeables might cost you 2-3X the price of normal AA batteries, you can reuse them hundreds of times. I’ve changed the batteries in my mouse every 2-3 months over the past 3 years and only used 2 rechargeables vs. 24 normal batteries over the same period. Even factoring in the charger cost, you’re saving money. There’s also the convenience factor. I never have to run to the store anymore when the remote batteries die — there’s always a fresh pair of batteries in the drawer or in another device I can use while the spent ones quickly recharge.
Rechargeable batteries used to suck but they don’t anymore. They ship fully charged, last a long time with good power, charge quickly, stay charged while sitting on a shelf, can be reused hundreds and even thousands of times for years, and you can charge AAs and AAAs from different brands with the same charger at the same time. So buy a charger, buy some batteries, and upgrade your life.
The batteries and chargers I’ve linked to here are the Wirecutter’s recommendations. I’ve personally been using the Eneloop charger and batteries with zero complaints.↩
Soundcloud user kmlkmljkl took the Stranger Things opening title song and mixed it with Childish Gambino’s Bonfire. [fire emoji] [fire emoji] [fire emoji]
(Will they have Lando sing in the upcoming young Han Solo movie? That would be a brave move.)
America is no longer a majority white, Christian country.
At 45 percent of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic — and the backlash from many members of the group against the increasing diversification of America has been swift and bitter.
The narrator of the video, Robert P. Jones, wrote a book about this new reality called The End of White Christian America.
For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) — the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians — set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white Christian nation.
After World War II, the helmets of German soldiers were refashioned into colanders, pots, and other kitchen utensils. This video from the British Pathé archive shows how the repurposing happened.
A beautifully shot HD video of machines manufacturing springs and other wire gizmos. I love how all the tools take turns and work together to make the widgets. Imagine the chatter amongst the tools:
“Ok, thanks, my turn.”
“Here, hold this while I turn it. Alright, we’re out.”
“Lemme just bend that a little for you.”
“Outta the way, I just gotta twist this for a sec.”
(via @pieratt, who says to substitute Steve Reich for the provided music)
When rowing crew, each rower is attempting to achieve a flow-like state called “swing” with the other members of the boat.
Legendary sportswriter Paul Gallico — who rowed in the six-seat of an outstanding 1921 Columbia crew — described the bonding process every squad undergoes when it coheres from a group of individuals to a single crew. “We became one with the boat and our fellow oarsmen and felt ourselves as giants, since one’s own power applied to the shell was multiplied by eight,” he wrote. “Not often, but from time to time, there are moments when a good crew really blends together, bringing an ineffable delight to the rower as he feels his shell surge forward beneath him. Eight oars whip out of the water in unison; eight oars dip again and one feels a great exultation in one’s breast.”
This “great exultation” is known to all oarsmen as “swing.” Swing is ephemeral and almost indescribable. It’s the challenge that keeps oarsmen rowing. It’s the moment when the physical propulsion of a shell evolves into a metaphysical feeling of transcendence. This is the essence of crew.
As with other sporting endeavors like free throw shooting and putting in golf, excelling in rowing requires relaxed concentration.
Rowing is a paradoxical quest. To row effectively, an athlete must be simultaneously graceful and brutal, intense and relaxed, thoughtful and robotic.
(via @jjg)
I watched the new Ghostbusters last week and:
1. It was good…better than the trailers indicated it would be.
2. LOL to all the whiny man-babies who boycotted and trashed it because of the all-female main cast. If there was anything wrong with the film, it had nothing to do with the leads.
3. Kate McKinnon was flat-out amazing, a revelation. I could watch 20 more minutes of her outtakes.
4. “Not just Higgs!”
Jodi of @legalnomads on her chronic pain and how she’s managing it. This is a journey toward wisdom.
Gina Pell on the Perennials, the growing group of people who aren’t bound by age in the way most people in society used to be.
We are ever-blooming, relevant people of all ages who live in the present time, know what’s happening in the world, stay current with technology, and have friends of all ages. We get involved, stay curious, mentor others, are passionate, compassionate, creative, confident, collaborative, global-minded, risk takers who continue to push up against our growing edge and know how to hustle. We comprise an inclusive, enduring mindset, not a divisive demographic.
This is an idea that’s been gathering steam for some time. In 2006, Adam Sternbergh wrote Up With Grups for New York Magazine.
Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because-you know what?-screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?
As part of a package of 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now, Catherine Mayer wrote about Amortality for Time Magazine.
Amortals live among us. In their teens and 20s, they may seem preternaturally experienced. In later life, they often look young and dress younger. They have kids early or late — sometimes very late — or not at all. Their emotional lives are as chaotic as their financial planning. The defining characteristic of amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming much the same things, from late teens right up until death.
Cowell is one of their poster boys; so too is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, as mercurial as a hormonal teenager. Madonna is relentlessly amortal. It’s easier to diagnose the condition in the middle-aged, but there are baby amortals — think Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, who looks set to comport himself like a student geek to the end of his days. The eldest amortals, born long before the first boomer wave, are still making mischief around the world.
As centers of culture, big cities have always been places where people could go to not act their age. The internet has become another of those places — no one knows you’re a dog or 43 years old or 14 years old — and the sort of reinvention that’s commonplace online has leaked out into the real world.
In their solution to the trolley problem, Mercedes self-driving cars will be programmed to save the people riding in the cars at the potential expense of pedestrians, cyclists, or passengers in other cars.
“If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car,” von Hugo told Car and Driver in an interview. “If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that’s your first priority.”
In other words, their driverless cars will act very much like the stereotypical entitled European luxury car driver. (via @essl)
This folding measuring spoon on Kickstarter is clever as hell. Polygons lays flat in a drawer and, depending on how you pick it up, folds into four different volumes.
Premarked areas on both spoon sizes (tablespoon and teaspoon) let you know where to pick up from to measure the volume required for your recipe. Practicality and simplicity at its finest.
The spoons come in two sizes (the smaller measures teaspoons and the larger one tablespoons), they’re marked with US and metric measurements, you can flatten it to easily scrape every last bit of stuff into the bowl, and it doubles as a knife when flat as well. (via colossal)
Update: Hmm, it looks like Polygons needs a little more work to be a fully functional product. (thx, mac)
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