Behind “Like a Boss,” the NYT work diary/column by podcaster/writer/strategist @aminatou

A Rare Interview with Olivia Jaimes, the Pseudonymous Cartoonist Behind “Nancy”

At Vulture, my father* Abraham Riesman scored an interview with Olivia Jaimes, a mysterious young (?) cartoonist who’s resurrected the venerable strip “Nancy” for the 21st century.

Do you remember how you first got exposed to “Nancy”?

I read newspaper strips, so she was kind of in the air I was breathing. And my parents actually have an original “Nancy” in the house that I’ve read now, maybe, 10 million times. I’ll describe it to you.

Please.

Okay, so, panel one, Nancy’s looking at Sluggo and she’s like, “I really wish that guy would take a bath.” And then in panel two, she’s thinking really hard about soap and her eyes are looking at him and there’s a dashed line. And then in the third panel he hasn’t taken a bath, but instead, he’s sitting on a soapbox, blowing soap bubbles, and listening to a soap opera. She has not succeeded in her goal. I was really more into Pokémon. When I was reading the newspaper strips, I was like, No, what I gotta read is “Zits” and “Mutts” and other things that are cool for me, age 9. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I really got into “Nancy,” and it was because there was a Tumblr that just posted panels out of context. Like, Nancy imagining a bank blowing up, or Nancy parading around banging something really loud. They were a gateway to more Nancy for me.

On her vision for the comics:

Why did you decide to lead off your run on the comic with the strip about Nancy eating corn bread?

I went back and I looked at the end of [previous “Nancy” cartoonist] Guy Gilchrist’s run. Nancy as a character had drifted from where I envision her, in that the Nancy I know and love is a total jerk and also gluttonous and also has big feelings and voraciously consumes her world. And I was like, I need to do a character-reset week. Just kinda being like, Here’s who Nancy’s gonna be right now. And also, I love corn bread. So, that’s it. That’s the reason. I wanted to reset expectations and pay homage to my favorite food.

It’s funny that you say the Nancy you know and love is a jerk because that plays into my thesis about why your version of the strip has caught on. We’re living in this era of a curious sort of hedonism, where we’re totally aware and ashamed that we’re being slothful and vain and greedy, but we continue doing it all anyway. Nancy is our avatar, and we look at her and laugh because we see how terrible we, ourselves, are. Or maybe I’m off base.

No, that’s so true! Okay, so, yeah, I wanna talk more about this with you because I think you’re really onto something. There’s this thing in webcomics: #relatable. And #relatable can be used as a slur. To be like, “Uh, your comic is pandering to people.” I’m almost always in the camp where … It’s not like comics are easy, but I think it’s great to be relatable, and I don’t want people to use relatable as an insult. I feel like Nancy is #relatable, except that she also isn’t apologetic. So, there’s the camp of #relatable, which is like, “I’m the worst person: I can’t stop eating bread,” or “I can’t get out of bed,” and like, Nancy is that, but then she’s also like, “So what?” The kind of self-hating type that often comes with relatable comics. The self-hating part that often comes with #relatable comics is being like, “Ohhhh, I procrastinated, I’m the worst.” And “Nancy” adds one more panel to that, being like, “Who cares? I don’t care. More corn bread for me.”

On why Nancy is studying robotics:

I realized that all of the nouns that Nancy used to have are being supplanted by a phone. Things that she would have lying around the house to make up a joke are gone. She uses megaphones for a ton of things in Bushmiller’s strips, and I don’t have megaphones lying around my house. So how, then, can Nancy solve problems, given that technology is advancing to the point where problems are being solved in really nonphysical ways? That’s why I’m making her learn robotics. It opens up a wider range of visual gags to make down the line.

It’s been a long, long time since I read a daily comic strip. Probably The Boondocks in its heyday, or one of the Bloom County resurrections. But I read Nancy. It’s consistently warm, weird, current, and good.

* Abe’s not actually my dad, it’s just a fun running gag between redheads

• Abraham Riesman
• comics
• Olivia Jaimes

The pathology of fetishizing pathology isn’t limited to Louisiana. Abuse, Fear and Intimidation: How Viral Videos Masked a Prep School’s Problems

Ask Dr. Time: In Praise of Hope

This week’s edition of Noticing, the Kottke.org newsletter, features the return of Doctor Time, the world’s only metaphysical advice columnist. In this case, the good doctor tries to explain the difference between faith and hope, and tries to understand what hope might mean in the absence of God. Here’s the section in full. For more thoughtful goodness, subscribe to the newsletter! I write it just about every week; if you like my posts or Jason’s posts at all, I think you’ll like it.

What’s the difference between faith and hope?

Okay, to be fair, nobody actually asked this question in this way, but the distinction came in conversation more than once this week, and for lots of reasons, it’s worth talking about right now. For the answer, we’re going to start with an excellent podcast episode from the BBC’s In Our Time, all about the philosophy of hope.

The episode starts its genealogy with Hesiod, who right away poses the problem of Pandora’s Box and/or Jar: Hope is sealed up in the jar of all the evils in the world, but does that make it one of the evils Zeus sent to punish humanity with, or is it a good in our pantry that helps us deal with all the other evils? Even the Greeks seem split on this: Hesiod’s original story is decidedly pessimistic, and Plato and Aristotle didn’t set much store by hope, but one Greek-speaker, St. Paul, thought enough of hope that he put it with faith and love as part of a second Holy Trinity of Christian virtues. (I guess if faith is God the father, and love is Christ, hope is the holy spirit? Probably not worth mapping them onto each other too closely.)

Anyways, the really great thinker on hope is St. Augustine, who is MY MAN for many, many reasons. (I’m not Catholic or Christian any more, but I love the way the great theologians think about the universe and its problems, and Augustine is the very best one.) For Augustine, hope is first and foremost about the second coming, and the ultimate fulfillment of human beings and their potential. So you have faith, a belief that God is real and salvation is possible, which is given to you by God, you can’t manufacture it. You have love — also caritas, or charity — a kind of selfless outpouring of affection and righteous deeds towards God and all His works, especially other human beings. And then you have hope, which is this imaginative representation of being fulfilled and made whole at the end of time.

Time is important for Augustine, and hope becomes a kind of ontological structure for understanding time. Augustine thinks of temporality as a kind of eternal stretching of the now, from the beginning of time in the creation through the end of time in the resurrection, and hope is also imagined as a kind of stretching. This is how he puts it in his tractates on the first letter of John:

The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied.

Suppose you are going to fill some holder or container, and you know you will be given a large amount. Then you set about stretching your sack or wineskin or whatever it is. Why? Because you know the quantity you will have to put in it and your eyes tell you there is not enough room. By stretching it, therefore, you increase the capacity of the sack, and this is how God deals with us. Simply by making us wait he increases our desire, which in turn enlarges the capacity of our soul, making it able to receive what is to be given to us.

So, my brethren, let us continue to desire, for we shall be filled. Take note of Saint Paul stretching as it were his ability to receive what is to come: Not that I have already obtained this, he said, or am made perfect. Brethren, I do not consider that I have already obtained it.

It’s kind of sexy, isn’t it? Holy desire! Stretching ourselves to be filled up! Utter satisfaction! It’s a kind of religious tantra. And every kind of hope or desire, no matter how base, is a prefiguration of (and ideally, subordinate to) that ultimate desire: to be reconciled with the universe in the godhead. We imagine, i.e., represent to ourselves, the satisfaction of our desire by stretching ourselves across time to the endpoint of our fulfillment.

And hope, like faith, is a thing that happens to us. We don’t will it; it’s inflicted on us and we receive it, make it manifest, and figure out what to do with it. This bothered the classical Greeks tremendously, because their virtues were virtues of control and mastery. But for Greek-speaking Jews and the Christians that followed them, the passive nature of hope was itself a virtue. It left room for the Messiah to walk through the door.

It also means that hope has a secular dimension that faith just doesn’t. Any object can be an object of hope. Hoping for ordinary fulfillment trains us to hope for spiritual fulfillment. It stretches us out. It makes our hearts bigger. It makes time intelligible for human beings. For all these reasons, hope, more so than faith and even love, is my favorite theological virtue. It’s the most powerful. It’s the easiest one to lose. And we are at our best and most human when we find room to hold holy our deepest hopes.

• Ask Dr. Time
• Dr. Time
• philosophy
• religion
• St. Augustine
• time

“The philosophical canon, such as it is, was not always so European and male, even by the lights of European men.” A deep, moving dive into Asian, Muslim, American, and European traditions of women in philosophy:

Borges on God’s Nonexistence and the Meaning of Life

This link comes from Zito Madu, who knows what I like. An interview with Jorge Luis Borges from 1981.

On the meaning of life:

If life’s meaning were explained to us, we probably wouldn’t understand it. To think that a man can find it is absurd. We can live without understanding what the world is or who we are. The important things are the ethical instinct and the intellectual instinct, are they not? The intellectual instinct is the one that makes us search while knowing that we are never going to find the answer.

I think Lessing said that if God were to declare that in His right hand He had the truth and in his left hand He had the investigation of the truth, Lessing would ask God to open His left hand - he would want God to give him the investigation of the truth, not the truth itself. Of course he would want that, because the investigation permits infinite hypotheses, and the truth is only one, and that does not suit the intellect, because the intellect needs curiosity. In the past, I tried to believe in a personal God, but I do not think I try anymore. I remember in that respect an admirable expression of Bernard Shaw: ”God is in the making.”

On time and space:

I am naturally idealistic. Almost everyone, thinking about reality, thinks of space, and their cosmogonies start with space. I think about time. I think everything happens in time. I feel we could easily do without space but not without time. I have a poem called ”Cosmogony” in which I say it is absurd to think the universe began with astronomical space, which presupposes, for example, sight, which came much later. It is more natural to think that in the beginning there was an emotion. Well, it is the same as saying, ”In the begining was the Word.” It is a variation on the same theme.

On faith in God:

I cannot believe in the existence of God, despite all the statistics in the world.

But you said you believed some time ago.

No, not in a personal God. To search for the truth, yes; but to think that there is somebody or something we call God, no. It is better that He should not exist; if He did he would be responsible for everything. And this world is often atrocious, besides being splendid. I feel more happy now than when I was young. I am looking forward. Even I don’t know what forward is left, because at 86 years of age, there will be, no doubt, more past than future.

When you say you are looking forward, do you mean looking forward to continuing to create as a writer?

Yes. What else is left for me? Well, no. Friendship remains. Somehow, love remains - and the most precious gift, doubt.

On death and life after death:

In the ”Zohar” (”The Book of Splendor”), which Gershom Scholem considers the most important literary work of the kabbala, there are many speculations about life after death. Swedenborg describes in detail hells and paradises. Dante’s poem is also about hell, purgatory, paradise. Where does this tendency of man come from, to try to imagine and describe something that he cannot possibly know?

In spite of oneself, one thinks. I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death. I feel every suicide has that doubt: Is what I am going to do worthwhile? Will I be blotted out, or will I continue to live on another world? Or as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body? It could be a nightmare. And then we would be in hell. Christians believe that one continues after death to be who he has been and that he is punished or rewarded forever, according to what he has done in this brief time that was given to him. I would prefer to continue living after death if I have to, but to forget the life I lived.

Borges’s thinking has strong gnostic influences, which appeal to me and are well represented here: essentially, taking a Platonic-Christian metaphysics, but subtracting a benevolent God from the center in favor of one who’s capricious, if not evil, or has absconded from the world. His magnificent short story “Three Versions of Judas” extrapolates this brilliantly to a new understanding of the Messiah:

Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and
revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it to
the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the
point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and bearing this
perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and the world was made by him, and the
world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the
conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man
for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the
sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any
omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross
is blasphemous. To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin
contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are
not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold,
confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin
and be damned. The famous text “He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there
is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a
man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks” (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people
a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance,
Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar
consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of
one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word
made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save
us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain
web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus;
He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this revelation. The
incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious theological game;
the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from this universal indifference
an almost miraculous confirmation. God had commanded this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret propagated in the world. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain top so as not to see God; he remembered Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes saw That One whose glory fills the earth; Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Wasn’t he, perchance, guilty of this dark crime? Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for having revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his for having discovered and divulged the terrible name of God?

Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be given the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.

The messiah as Judas, the rejected cornerstone, a mirror Christ buried in ignominy and forever doomed to suffering in hell for humankind’s sins and his own degradation. It’s both the ultimate extension of the Christ story and, like George Steiner said of Euripides’s Bacchae, a dark miracle. For my money, it’s the only catechism worth professing.

• books
• Jorge Luis Borges
• religion

Europa Excursion, a children’s book about anthropomorphic animals exploring one of Jupiter’s most interesting moons, just met its Kickstarter goal. There’s still time to get in on the book and other early bird rewards:

Forget Book Trailers: Book Playlists are the New Hotness

Book trailers are already such a thing that there’s whole weekly columns devoted to them, a whole slew of tips and tricks; a veritable ecosystem. People want multimedia with their books. But what if the new hotness wasn’t a trailer at all? What if it was something that lots of us already do anyways, with a much lower barrier for entry?

I’m talking about book playlists, music that reflects the theme or the time and place of the book, a non-audiobook soundtrack that enhances and embellishes the written word. I love this idea!

Now, there are, as I see it, two ways to go with playlists period, and book playlists in particular. First, you can go big. Spotify and other music services can support hundreds of songs in individual playlists, and there’s no reason why you have to have just one. You can literally drown your reader/listener in sweet tunes to listen to while they read, to get psyched up while they’re waiting for their books to arrive, or to have a way to interact with the world of a book they might not even read or by.

This is the approach Questlove took when making a playlist for Michelle Obama’s blockbuster Becoming. It’s over a thousand songs split into three playlists, covering 1964 (Michelle’s birth year) to the present. Amazingly, as far as I can tell, there’s not a dud in the bunch. These selections are ridiculously good.

The other approach, which is a little more feasible for most of us, is to make a playlist about the length of an old mix CD — about 80 minutes, for those who don’t remember (and 60, 90, and 120 for those who remember back to cassette tapes). This is best exemplified by Tressie McMillan Cottom’s outstanding book playlist for her new essay collection Thick (now available for preorder). Here, too, the selection is terrific — and if I can say, a touch more personal and intelligible than Questlove’s epic collection.

If I ever write a book (and that day seems farther away every year), I’m definitely doing this. Hmm — I wonder what a Kottke.org playlist would look like? [smiles mischievously]

Update: Brett Porter points out that Thomas Pynchon created a playlist for Inherent Vice that includes songs mentioned in the book. Kyle Johnson notes that largehearted boy’s Book Notes series consists of book playlists by various authors each week inspired by their books, including “Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.”

• books
• media
• Michelle Obama
• music
• Tressie McMillan Cottom

Photography Tricks That Advertisers Use to Make Food Look Delicious

To make food look appetizing in advertisements, food stylists use a bunch of tricks that may not even involve edible objects. For example, syrup on pancakes is motor oil (because it doesn’t absorb), Elmer’s glue is cereal milk (it prevent the cereal from sinking), shaving cream is whipped cream (doesn’t melt), and dish soap helps the head on a beer appear foamier and last longer. Check it out:

(via @machinepix)

• food
• video

A new single from Tycho (@ISO50)…new album coming soon hopefully?

The 100 Best Pens

I’m certain the pen community has a lot to say about this New York Magazine list of the 100 best pens, but for the rest of us just looking for something good to write with, it appears like a solid place to start. Tip: skip right to the top 20…no need to buy a pen that’s 63rd best.

My current go-to pen, the Zebra F-301, is not on the list but was the first ballpoint or rollerball pen I found that I didn’t totally ruin because I was left-handed. Ballpoint pens are meant to be pulled over the paper so that the tiny ball rolls easily, dispensing ink along the way, which right-handers do naturally as they write from left to right. But lefties often push the pen across the paper, going against the grain…which eventually gums up the works and renders the pen useless. This list didn’t consider the durability of pens, especially under the brutal treatment of the left-handed, but I still might give the runner-up pen a shot: OHTO Horizon Needle Point Knock.

• best of
• lists

Sixteenth-Century Flemish Superheroes

Sacha Goldberger made a series of portraits of characters from Star Wars and superhero comics as if they were the subjects of 16th-century Flemish paintings, ruffs and all. (thx, anna)

• art
• remix
• Sacha Goldberger

Fascinating piece about a possible way to help those thinking about suicide: by regularly sending them friendly messages

How Parmesan Cheese Is Made

Officially, according to the Italian government and the EU, parmesan cheese (or more formally, Parmigiano-Reggiano) can only be made in a small region in northern Italy. Wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano weigh about 85 pounds, can be aged for three years or more, and can cost upwards of $1000. With all the fakes out there (see also olive oil and canned tomatoes), it can be tough to find the real stuff, but when you do, it tastes amazing.

Update: Headline writers might wait their whole careers for an opportunity like this: A Bank That Accepts Parmesan As Collateral: The Cheese Stands A Loan. (via @jazzfishzen)

• cheese
• food
• how to
• Italy

A small number of the people living in a mountainous region of northern Oaxaca communicate using a whistling language

2.4-million-year-old tools found in Algeria place hominids there far earlier than previously thought. Don’t miss the Rihanna reference in the URL slug. :)

Life expectancy in the US continues to drop. “People are essentially dying from preventable deaths due to stress, hopelessness, and desperation, reflected in the suicide and overdose numbers.”

Jack White has a “no phones” policy at his concerts. “The no-phones policy illuminated something about smartphone use that’s hard to see when it’s so ubiquitous: our phones drain the life out of a room.”

They Shall Not Grow Old

Earlier this year, I wrote that director Peter Jackson was working on a documentary about WWI that would feature film footage cleaned up and colorized with the same special effects technology used to produce massive Hollywood films like Jackson’s own LOTR movies.

The footage has been stabilized, the grain and scratches cleaned up, and the pace slowed down to from comedic to lifelike. Jackson’s also planning on using colorization to make the people in that old footage seem as contemporary as possible.

The brief glimpses of the cleaned and colorized footage in the initial trailer were tantalizing, but the newly released trailer above is just breathtaking or jaw-dropping or however you want to put it. I’ve watched it three times so far…some of those scenes are so vivid they could have happened yesterday! That what viewing early color photography and film does to you:

Until recently, the color palette of history was black and white. The lack of color is sometimes so overpowering that it’s difficult to imagine from Matthew Brady’s photos what the Civil War looked like in real life. Even into the 1970s, press photos documenting the war in Vietnam were in B&W and the New York Times delivered its news exclusively in B&W until the 90s, running the first color photograph on the front page in 1997.

Which is why when color photos from an event or era set firmly in our B&W history are uncovered, the effect can be jarring. Color adds depth, presence, and modernity to photography; it’s easier for us to identify with the people in the pictures and to imagine ourselves in their surroundings.

Jackson talked to the BBC about how the film was made:

Check out this post at Open Culture for more about the making of the film.

They Shall Not Grow Old just became my #1 most-anticipated movie for the rest of 2018. It’s only showing in the US on Dec 17 and Dec 27…I just got my ticket here.

• movies
• Peter Jackson
• They Shall Not Grow Old
• video
• war
• World War I

Catalog of LA rave flyers from the 90s

The Fake Rolex of Canned Foods. “According to the guy who oversees the certification of those tomatoes, at least 95 percent of the so-called San Marzanos in the U.S. are fakes.”

Opioid overdoses have fallen sharply in Dayton, Ohio. City officials attribute the drop to greatly expanded access to treatment (esp for low-income people) and other factors.

The End of Space Travel?

Remember Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity? A missile strike on a satellite causes a chain reaction, which ends up destroying almost everything in low Earth orbit. As this Kurzgesagt video explains, this scenario is actually something we need to worry about. In the past 60 years, we’ve launched so much stuff into space that there are millions of pieces of debris up there, hurtling around the Earth at 1000s of miles per hour. The stuff ranges in size from marbles to full-sized satellites. If two larger objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) collided with each other, the resulting debris field could trigger a chain reaction of collisions that would destroy everything currently in that orbit and possibly prevent any new launches. Goodbye ISS, goodbye weather satellites, goodbye GPS, etc. etc. etc. The Moon, Mars, and other destinations beyond LEO would be a lot harder to reach because you’d have to travel through the deadly debris field, particularly with crewed missions.

• Gravity
• movies
• science
• space
• video

“Let It Be” - Life Advice from The Beatles

From illustrator Michelle Rial, a Venn diagram of some advice for when you’re sad, angry, stressed, or hurt in the form of Beatles lyrics. “Let It Be” is the perfect middle spot. Prints are available.

• infoviz
• Michelle Rial
• music
• The Beatles

A good video on the sometimes deadly logistics of climbing Mount Everest

The Effects of Pollution on Human Cognition & Performance

While I am not a big fan of shifting to an economic argument for things that are already plenty bad for other better reasons (see diversity in the workplace, immigration policy, healthcare, etc.), this article by Austin Frakt on the economic cost of pollution reports on the results of a number of studies linking pollution to low performance in work and school. This study of baseball umpires was particularly troubling:

Pollution may also affect the quality of work, which is much harder to measure. An intriguing study in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists got at this issue by examining how accurately baseball umpires called balls and strikes under different pollution conditions.

Since 2008, pitch calls have been checked by Major League Baseball with an electronic system. In a typical game, an umpire makes 140 ball/strike calls. When there was a 150 percent increase over average carbon monoxide levels or the same increase in small particulate matter, the study found an average of 1.4 additional incorrect calls. Levels of pollution that high occur in about one in 10 games.

Imagine what the rest of us, especially kids, are getting wrong when we’re in polluted areas (i.e. many American cities). (via @tylercowen)

• Austin Frakt
• economics
• science

ISS Time Lapse Video of Two Complete Trips Around the World

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first module of the International Space Station being put into orbit, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst shot a 15-minute time lapse video of the Earth from the ISS, long enough for two complete orbits of the planet. Landmarks along the journey are annotated right on the video and the location of the ISS is also plotted on a map in the top right corner. Love the nighttime thunderstorms over the Pacific.

See also An Incredible Video of What It’s Like to Orbit the Earth for 90 Minutes.

• Alexander Gerst
• Earth
• ISS
• space
• time lapse
• video

Street style photos of NYC kids. “Q: What inspires your style? A: Fortnite.”

“Research suggests there are two kinds of people who tolerate the cold very well: indigenous Arctic groups, and men.”

How a multimillionaire sexual abuser of young girls spent only a year in county jail thanks to a secret deal with Trump’s current Secretary of Labor

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s Upcoming Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

On Twitter this morning, Margaret Atwood revealed that she’s writing a sequel to her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, inspired in part by “the world we’ve been living in”. According to the pre-order page on Amazon, The Testaments takes place 15 years after the events of the first book and is narrated by three women from Gilead. We’ll have to wait a bit though…the book is due out in early September 2019.

In the meantime, season 3 of the the TV series has started production and will likely debut next spring.

• books
• Margaret Atwood
• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Testaments

“Why My Best Friend And I Decided To Move In Together And Co-Mother Our Children”

Good, Cheap, and Fast is a data scientist’s take on things to buy on Amazon that are both good and cheap

Kevin Kelly turned his Recomendo mailing list into a book: “Recomendo: 500 brief reviews of cool stuff”

The Best Table Tennis Shot of 2018

This is probably the craziest and most unlikely table tennis shot you will ever see. Just watch. The guy who pulls it off is Christopher Chen from the Trondheim Table Tennis Club in Norway. I haven’t watched ESPN in years so I don’t know if “getting on SportsCenter” is as big a deal as it used to be, but if so, this should get on SportsCenter.

See also the table tennis volley that sounds like the Super Mario Bros theme song and The Community of the Tables.

• sports
• table tennis
• video

These Are Barely Maps

Peter Gorman is creating dozens of minimalist maps that he’s rolling up into a book that will be ready late next year (hopefully).

One of my favorites is this map that shows the 5 largest cities in each US state as constellations.

I also like how this map of Manhattan mostly keeps its shape only using subway stations.

You can follow Gorman’s progress on Instagram.

• maps
• Peter Gorman

The Salty Avocado

My pals Aaron Cohen and illustrator Chris Piascik, both of whom have contributed to kottke.org for years now, have produced a children’s book called The Salty Avocado, which you can pre-order on Kickstarter.

The Salty Avocado is a children’s book about a truly rotten fruit who finds redemption in the healing power of raspberry hugs. The book features Chris Piascik’s vibrant illustrations and style-defining lettering matched with Aaron Cohen’s playful and endearing story. This book is for kids who like big colors and catchy words, but it’s also for parents who end up reading the same story every single night.

Since it’s Giving Tuesday today, I’ll point out that one of their most popular rewards is the “One for you, one for them” option — you get a book for yourself and they donate a second copy to a school or library of your choice. To sweeten the deal for kottke.org readers, they’ve added an option called “Kottke’s One for you, one for them” that also includes a set of 3 buttons and a PDF copy of the book. It’s the second-to-last day to order, so make sure to check it out before it’s too late.

• Aaron Cohen
• books
• Chris Piascik
• The Salty Avocado

A major Frida Kahlo exhibition is coming to the Brooklyn Museum in February 2019

If the Planets Were As Close As the Moon

Using 3D rendering software, Yeti Dynamics made this video that shows what our sky would look like if several of our solar system’s planets orbited the Earth in place of the Moon. If you look closely when Saturn and Jupiter are in the sky, you can see their moons as well.

the moon that flies in front of Saturn is Tethys. It is Tiny. but *very* close. Dione would be on a collision course, it’s orbital distance from Saturn is Nearly identical to our Moon’s orbit around Earth

See also their video of what the Moon would look like if it orbited the Earth at the same distance as the International Space Station.

Update: And here’s what it would look like if the Earth had Saturn’s rings. (via @FormingWorship)

• astronomy
• Moon
• remix
• space
• video

Christine Blasey Ford Is Donating Her GoFundMe Money To Sexual Assault Survivors

Carl Sagan’s 1977 series of six hour-long lectures about the solar system is now available to stream online for free

How a Six-Year-Old Kid Saved Himself from Being Lost in the Woods

When he was six years old, Cody Sheehy got lost in the woods near his home in Oregon. Rather than panic or hunkering down to await rescue, Sheehy hiked more than 15 miles over 18 hours to a nearby town, finding himself in the process.

Cody believes that he was changed by getting lost. “Over the course of your life, you push through a lot of physical barriers,” he says. “As you grow older, your first coach helps you break through barriers, and maybe in the military you learn to push through barriers or maybe in your first hard job. As a little kid, I had this opportunity to be tested and learn that there really aren’t any barriers. I think a lot of people figure that out. They just might not figure it out at six.”

It’s a great story and a sharp rebuke of today’s helicopter parenting, not letting kids do their own thing, etc. I wonder about something though. We would think a lot differently about this tale if he hadn’t survived. If it had been a couple of degrees colder or if those coyotes had been a big hungrier or if he’d have turned a different way on that road, he might have died. Sheehy’s story is an example of survivorship bias. We hear of his adventure and how it transformed his life only because he survived, but it’s possible that nine out of ten kids in similar situations don’t survive…and we hear those tales only briefly and locally, not as features in national magazines.

• Cody Sheehy
• parenting

Questlove curated a 300-track playlist for Michelle Obama’s book tour and posted it to Spotify

A church in The Hague harboring a Armenian refugee family from deportation has been conducting a single church service for nearly a month because Dutch law prohibits church services to be interrupted

Great book spine design for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

I am sorry to shout but ENROLLMENT FOR 2019 HEALTH CARE PLANS IS OPEN AND ENDS DECEMBER 15TH so if you’re eligible (or think you might be), GO GO GO

Watch It Live: NASA’s InSight Probe Lands on Mars Today

After a seven-month journey covering over 300 million miles, NASA’s InSight probe will land on the surface of Mars today around 3pm. The video embedded above is a live stream of mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that starts at 2pm and will be the best thing to watch as the probe lands. (See also this live stream of NASA TV.) The landing will occur around 2:47pm ET but the landing signal from Mars won’t arrive on Earth until 2:54pm ET at the earliest. And no video from the landing itself of course…”live” is a bit of a misnomer here but it still should be exciting.

NASA produced this short video that shows what’s involved in the landing process, aka how the probe goes from doing 13,000 mph to resting on the surface in just six-and-a-half minutes.

The NY Times has a good explainer on the InSight mission and landing.

NASA’s study of Mars has focused on the planet’s surface and the possibility of life early in its history. By contrast, the InSight mission — the name is a compression of Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — will study the mysteries of the planet’s deep interior, aiming to answer geophysical questions about its structure, composition and how it formed.

I love this stuff…the kids and I will be watching for sure!

Update: The Oatmeal has a great comic about the InSight landing.

• astronomy
• InSight
• Mars
• NASA
• science
• space
• video

Fox News Isn’t A Normal Media Company. We Have To Stop Treating It Like One. “Liberals have spent decades complaining about, mocking, and fact-checking Fox News. Instead, we should remove it from polite society.”

Some Cyber Deals for Your Cyber Shopping on Cyber Monday

Retailers love invented holidays and so do shoppers looking for a bargain. The term “Cyber Monday” was coined fairly recently, in 2005, when ecommerce companies started to realize that Internet users in the US waited until after Thanksgiving weekend to begin their holiday shopping. And now the slightly corny term is A Thing™. After a bit of poking around, here are some of the best deals on interesting things that I found.

- The 6-quart Wifi-enabled Instant Pot pressure cooker is on sale for $90. You can schedule your cooking via an app on your phone. If you don’t need that, the regular 6-qt is $70 (30% off).

- 23andMe’s Health + Ancestry DNA testing kit is $129 (35% off). A genetic testing kit from AncestryDNA is only $50 (51% off).

- Hulu is just $0.99/mo for 12 months. What?! That’s worth it just for catching up on The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t seen it yet.

- The Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush is $30 after coupon. I bought one of these this summer and I actually look forward to brushing my teeth now!

- Whoa, a bunch of All-Clad stuff is up to 30% off. This cookware is expensive but it is also the best…well worth it IMO.

- The Anova sous vide cooker w/ Wifi and Bluetooth is just $84 after discounts. I have the first generation version of this from their Kickstarter campaign and love it. Might be time for an upgrade…

- Three Fitbit watches are on sale for up to $25% off: Fitbit Versa Smart Watch, Fitbit Ionic GPS Smart Watch, and Fitbit Charge 3.

- These Bose noise-cancelling headphones are only $110 (63% off).

- My friends at Tattly are offering 30% off with promo code HEARTART30 and will donate a portion of the proceeds to Donors Choose projects.

- It’s nuts that you can get a 50-inch 4K TV for just $300.

- littleBits has a number of deals for up to 33% off their kits. Love these in our house.

- A few LEGO kits are up to 35% off on Amazon.

- The Kindle Paperwhite is not on sale, but there’s a new version out that is thinner, lighter, waterproof, and equipped with Bluetooth for audio. I use my Paperwhite for 95% of my book reading and am definitely getting one of these, sale or no.

- My pals at 20x200 are offering up to 30% off their vast selection of artwork…check out the discount codes here.

- Not on sale, but these Goodthreads t-shirts are currently my go-to for plain white t-shirts. $14.42.

- The 2017 edition of the Kano Computer Kit is just $99.

- The Apple Watch Series 3 is on sale for 20% off in both the 38mm and 42mm sizes.

From Time, the top 10 podcasts of 2018