“The removal of shows from HBO Max means WB Discovery is able to save money in residuals paid to cast and crews of productions, on top of the money saved by not continuing with the shows at all.”

So weird that HBO Max is removing shows (like Westworld?!) to, uh, “make room” for other things? It’s a digital service – it has infinite room?

Another magisterial performance today at the World Cup by Lionel Messi, “the normcore Mozart mooching about still making these extraordinary things happen”.

A good piece in Nature about today’s nuclear fusion breakthrough at the US National Ignition Facility. “Although positive news, this result is still a long way from the actual energy gain required for the production of electricity.”

Hell Yeah, Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse

They just nailed the tone and aesthetic with these Spider-Verse movies. Really looking forward to seeing this one.

As a refresher, here’s how the team at Sony Pictures Animation created the distinctive look and feel of the first Spider-Verse movie.

• movies
• Spider-Man
• trailers
• video

Some of the Best Moon & Earth Photos from NASA’s Artemis I Mission

Over the weekend, NASA’s Artemis I mission returned from a 25-day trip to the Moon. The mission was a test-run of the rockets, systems, and spacecraft that will return humans to the surface of the Moon. Visual imaging has been an integral part of even the earliest space missions — strap a camera to a spacecraft, let the people see what space looks like, and they will be inspired. Well, the photographs returned by Artemis I’s Orion spacecraft have certainly been inspirational. Working from NASA’s archive of images (on Flickr too), I’ve selected some of the most interesting and dramatic photos from the mission. The one at the top, showing a crescent Earth rising over the Moon’s surface, might be one of my favorite space photos ever (and that’s really saying something) — you can see a bigger version of it here.

• Artemis
• astronomy
• Earth
• Moon
• NASA
• photography
• space

The USPS will introduce a stamp in 2023 celebrating the life and legacy of civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis.

Because of a bill passed by New Zealand’s parliament, “the number of people able to buy tobacco will shrink each year. By 2050, for example, 40-year-olds will be too young to buy cigarettes.”

Experience: a stranger secretly lived in my home. “As I lay in the [bath], I noticed the attic hatch was open. Suddenly, everything slowed way down.”

How Jamiroquai Shot Their Iconic Virtual Insanity Video

Some 26 years after the release of the group’s groundbreaking music video for Virtual Insanity, Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay explains how the band and director Jonathan Glazer achieved such a convincing moving floor effect. The trick to getting the video made on a budget was to channel Einstein a bit in remembering that motion is relative to your frame of reference.

See also the hilarious musicless version created by Mario Wienerroither. Squeeeeeeeak. (via a whole lotta nothing)

• Jamiroquai
• Jonathan Glazer
• music
• video

“The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow.” Mmm, pineappley.

For his latest film Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan and his crew recreated the first atomic test without using computer graphics. I’m so looking forward to seeing this.

Central Park’s new Gate of the Exonerated will memorialize the criminal exoneration of the Central Park Five, “a rare instance of a municipality formally memorializing its colossal mistake”.

Here’s the Department of Energy’s press release on the nuclear fusion breakthrough, an experiment that “surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output”.

Genetic Portraits: Split Multi-Generational Portraits of Family Members

I’m not going to actually look, but I’ve probably featured Ulric Collette’s series Genetic Portraits here before. Collette photographed family members in the same pose and then digitally stitched them together. The resemblances and differences between family members are fascinating. (via jenni leder)

Update: A similar series by Bobby Neel Adams. (via @geedix)

Update: See also these similar paintings by Daevid Anderson.

• art
• photography
• remix
• Ulric Collette

A NY Times trend piece on married couples living apart. One woman says it was useful to “remember who I am by myself, remember what I like doing by myself”.

Major Fusion Energy Breakthrough to Be Announced by Scientists. Reports are that the energy output in a recent experiment exceeded the input. Announcement is at 10am today; let’s hope this is actually something.

US Healthcare. “American healthcare is split into 2 piles: 1. Face holes. 2. Not face holes.”

MAR1D, a 1-dimensional version of Super Mario Bros., aka you see the in-game action as Mario would see it, flattened into a single dimension. Sort of a video game version of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

The world’s timekeepers are getting rid of the leap second in favor of pure atomic time. “It will take a few thousand years for atomic time to diverge as much as an hour from Earth time.”

I Believe That Marriage Is a Sacred Union. “I believe that marriage is a lasting partnership between one person without health insurance and one person who gets pretty good coverage through work.”

Due to the lull in human activity, some birds changed their birdsong during the pandemic.

The Best Books of 2022

Oh man, I read so many books during my time away from the site this summer — but barely made a dent in the towering pile of books I desired to read.¹ Even so, I am excited to dig into the various end-of-year book lists to see what everyone else has been reading — and what I might add to my own pile for 2023.

As I’ve done for several years now, I went through many of these best-of lists and compiled a list of reads that appeared often or just looked interesting. And since I’m not doing a gift guide this year (sorry!), I will just note that great books make great holiday gifts. So here they are: (some of) the best books of the year.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (ebook) by Gabrielle Zevin.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Sea of Tranquility (ebook) by Emily St. John Mandel.

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

The Wok: Recipes and Techniques (ebook) by J. Kenji López-Alt.

J. Kenji López-Alt’s debut cookbook, The Food Lab, revolutionized home cooking, selling more than half a million copies with its science-based approach to everyday foods. And for fast, fresh cooking for his family, there’s one pan López-Alt reaches for more than any other: the wok.

Whether stir-frying, deep frying, steaming, simmering, or braising, the wok is the most versatile pan in the kitchen. Once you master the basics — the mechanics of a stir-fry, and how to get smoky wok hei at home — you’re ready to cook home-style and restaurant-style dishes from across Asia and the United States, including Kung Pao Chicken, Pad Thai, and San Francisco-Style Garlic Noodles. López-Alt also breaks down the science behind beloved Beef Chow Fun, fried rice, dumplings, tempura vegetables or seafood, and dashi-simmered dishes.

The Candy House (ebook) by Jennifer Egan.

The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious” — which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others — has seduced multitudes.

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (ebook) by Dan Charnas.

He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson. He died at the age of thirty-two, and in his lifetime he never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play.

Either/Or (ebook) by Elif Batuman.

Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.

The Nineties (ebook) by Chuck Klosterman.

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn’t know who it was. By the end, exposing someone’s address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn’t know who it was. The 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we’re still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (ebook) by Ed Yong.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.

Checkout 19 (ebook) by Claire-Louise Bennett.

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses — and finds — herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration.

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams (ebook) by Stacy Schiff.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams’s improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (ebook) by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. He seduces you with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling. Told in six parts, laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate — a masterpiece.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (ebook) by Rachel Aviv.

In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel — until it no longer does.

The Book of Goose (ebook) by Yiyun Li.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.

The World We Make (ebook) by N.K. Jemisin.

All is not well in the city that never sleeps. Even though the avatars of New York City have temporarily managed to stop the Woman in White from invading — and destroying the entire universe in the process — the mysterious capital “E” Enemy has more subtle powers at her disposal. A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and “law and order” may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside.

The Last White Man (ebook) by Mohsin Hamid.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth — an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (ebook) by Kate Beaton.

Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush — part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.

I was particularly excited to see books by Stacy Schiff and Siddhartha Mukherjee in several lists. I read Schiff’s Cleopatra and Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies right around the same time and I remember being blown away by both of them. I recommend those two books to others all the time.

Here are some of the lists I used to assemble this collection:

• Best Books of 2022 [New York Public Library]
• 100 Notable Books of 2022, The 10 Best Books of 2022 [NY Times]
• The Best Books of 2022 So Far [New Yorker]
• Books We Love [NPR]
• The Best Books of 2022 [The Guardian]
• Best Books of 2022 [Book Riot]
• Best Books of 2022 [Kirkus Reviews]
• The 27 Best Cookbooks of 2022 [Bon Appetit]
• The Best Books of 2022 [Vulture]
• The 100 Must-Read Books of 2022 [Time]
• The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Fiction, The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Nonfiction, The Best Audiobooks of 2022 [Book Marks]
• Best Books 2022 [Publishers Weekly]
• Our 38 Favorite Books of 2022 [Literary Hub]
• Best Books of 2022: Fiction, Best Books of 2022: Nonfiction [Powell’s]
• The 10 Best Books of 2022 [The Washington Post]
• Best Books of 2022 [Amazon]
• The 10 Best Books of 2022 (Dan Kois), The 10 Best Books of 2022 (Laura Miller) [Slate]
• The Best Books of 2022 [Smithsonian Magazine]
• Best Books of the Year 2022 [Financial Times]
• Best Books of 2022 [Goodreads]
• The Best of 2022 [Audible]
• Favorite Art Books of 2022 [Colossal]

Note: When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. This year, I’m linking to Bookshop.org when I can but if you read on the Kindle or Bookshop is out of stock, you can try Amazon. Thanks for supporting the site!

1. The Japanese have a word for the bedside stack of books that pile up unread: tsundoku.↩

• best of
• best of 2022
• books
• lists

Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing, is coming out with a new book called Saving Time. “Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock, is destroying us. It wasn’t built for people, it was built for profit.”

Classic television banger: Mr. Bean is late for the dentist.

The New York City Sub-Culinary Map

In the early 2000s, Rick Meyerowitz and Maira Kalman made a version of the NYC subway map where names of all the stations and landmarks were replaced with food. Here’s a detailed view of lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn:

See also Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear and the City of Women NYC subway map.

• food
• Maira Kalman
• maps
• NYC
• remix
• Rick Meyerowitz

My Silkscreen typeface is now available on Google Fonts!

A lovely bit of writing by Barney Ronay about Lionel Messi and Argentina at the World Cup. “Lionel Messi doesn’t so much trap the ball or kill it but lets it come and nestle, falling asleep on his toe like a fond old cat.”

A Short History of the Banjo and Early Black Folk Music

In this video from Vox (produced by none other than Estelle Caswell, who does the excellent Earworm series), scholar and musician Jake Blount runs us through a quick history of early Black folk music, using the banjo as a rough through-line. If you’d like to read more about Black stringband music, Blount has compiled some recommended resources.

• Jake Blount
• music
• video

The best 49 stop-motion animated movies of all time, according to Rotten Tomatoes.

kottke[dot]org posts and links are now available on Mastodon! Come follow the site over there if you’d like.

The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie are doing a joint US tour this year. Big day for Gen X nostalgia; first Tracy Flick returns and now this.

Reese Witherspoon will return as Tracy Flick in a sequel to Election directed by Alexander Payne. YES YES YES.

Relax with 12 hours of colorful slow motion fluid dynamics accompanied by relaxing music.

Flamingos From Above

The flamingo’s vibrant color makes it a particularly striking bird to take photographs of, especially from the air — the pink really pops against the dark background of the water. Photographer Raj Mohan showcases this in his beautiful photos of flamingos at Pulicat Lake in India.

The annual flamingo festival is held in the month of January, and it is said that about 18 to 20 flamingo groups are distributed across the lake with each group having 700 to 800 birds. This pink flock congregation makes lake Pulicat a pink heaven.

You might remember that flamingos get their pink color from eating halophile dunaliella salina algae and shrimp that feel on algae. (via colossal)

• birds
• photography
• Raj Mohan

The Seven Levels of Busy, from Not Busy (“my schedule is wide open. I can choose infinite paths”) to Unsustainable (“eating and other necessities are frequently neglected”).

In the 3rd Q, the 5 biggest US banks paid out a paltry 0.4% interest on savings accounts while the 5 highest-yielding banks paid 2.14%. I switched to a higher yield bank in 2019 and they’ve raised the interest rate ~20 times in 9 mo; it’s 2.6% rn.

Michael Bierut remembers designer George Lois, whose iconic Esquire covers from the 60s are still influencing designers today.

WNBA player Brittney Griner is on her way back to the US after being held in Russia since February on a drug charge.

The Top Gun “Mach 10” Scene Is Like a Perfect Pop Song

As I said in my recent media diet post, I really enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick. It’s a movie that’s made to be seen on a big screen with a loud sound system — I ended up seeing it in the theater twice. The movie just felt…good. Like a really well-crafted pop tune. In this video, Evan Puschak takes a look at the first scene in the film where (spoilers!) test pilot Maverick needs to achieve Mach 10 in an experimental plane and compares it to the structure of a pop song. His comparison really resonated with me because I listen to music and watch movies (particularly action movies) in a similar way: how movies and music feel and how they make me feel is often more important than plot or dialogue or lyrics.

• Evan Puschak
• film school
• movies
• music
• Top Gun
• video

Members of The NY Times Guild are going on strike today and you can help them out by not engaging with any NY Times products today.

Bourdain’s World Map, a collection of all the places (restaurants, shops, hotels) that Anthony Bourdain went when filming Parts Unknown and No Reservations.

3D Image Capture Just Got Much Easier

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) is a relatively new technique that generates well-lit, complex 3D views from 2D images. If you’ve seen behind-the-scenes looks at how image/motion capture is traditionally done, you know how time-consuming and resource intensive it can be. As this video from Corridor Crew shows, NeRFs changes the image capture game significantly. The ease with which they play around with the technology to produce professional-looking effects in very little time is pretty mind-blowing. (via waxy)

• 3D
• artificial intelligence
• video

Another cover that’s better than the original: the Mr Little Jeans version of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

File this one under covers that are better than the originals: HAIM’s version of Tame Impala’s ‘Cause I’m A Man.

More on blower door tests, which measure air leakage from buildings. “It has been estimated that based on standard building practices, air leakage accounts for about 1/3 of the total heat loss of a home.”

A Modern Pyramid of Energy Conservation: the recommended order of steps to upgrade your home for energy efficiency. #1 thing? Employ “The Red Door of Truth” (aka the blower door test) to see where air is leaking in/out of your house.

The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg

Activist Greta Thunberg is coming out with a new book about the climate crisis called The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions (kindle).

In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts — geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders — to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild’s strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried?

The book is already out in Europe (I actually included the European cover above because, unsurprisingly, it’s better than the US cover), but will be released in the US in February.

• books
• climate crisis
• Greta Thunberg
• The Climate Book

A recently rediscovered archive of photos of artists Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, taken by William John Kennedy.

A few people I know will be happy with this news: Matt Lucas is stepping down as co-host of The Great British Bake Off.