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Entries for May 2023
The Immaculate Copy of the Declaration of Independence Found Hidden Behind a $4 Flea Market Painting
Back in 1991, a man bought a painting at a flea market for $4 because he liked the frame. Hidden behind the painting was an envelope containing a copy of the Declaration of Independence. It turned out to be one of approximately 200 copies of the Dunlap broadside, the first published copies of the historic document. From a contemporary NY Times article:
Mr. Redden described the document, found behind the painting when the collector took the frame apart, as an “unspeakably fresh copy” of the declaration. “The fact that it has been in the backing of the frame preserved it,” he said. Of the 24 copies known to survive, only 3 are in private hands, he added.
How “unspeakably fresh” was this particular copy? The ink wasn’t yet dry when it was folded into the envelope:
“The ink was still wet on this copy when it was folded,” Mr. Kiffer said. “The very first line — ‘In Congress, July 4, 1776’ — shows up in the bottom margin in reverse, as a faint offsetting or shadow printing, one more proof of the urgency John Dunlap, the printer, and others felt in dispersing this document.”
The document sold for $2.2 million in 1991 and then sold again in 2000 for $7.4 million to legendary TV producer Norman Lear (All in the Family, The Jeffersons), who mounted a three-and-a-half year tour of the it across the US. (via my modern met)
An important opinion piece written by an SUV: Outdoor Dining Must Not Interfere With NYC’s Historic Parking Spots. “Who are they to deny me the pleasure of idling underneath a tall willow in the West Village?”
A rave review of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon by Shannon Shaw Duty of the Osage News. “The film Scorsese has made is definitely not a simple adaptation of Grann’s book, but an adaptation that’s magnified.”
Going to High School in an Old Department Store
A high school here in Vermont is located (temporarily) in an abandoned Macy’s department store. A crew from the BBC recently made a short video tour, where you can see books on shelves designed to display fine china, an absence of windows, escalators, a lack of floor-to-ceiling walls, and fashion branding that remains on the walls.
Alexandra Lange wrote about the school in 2021 for Curbed.
The genre may be nearly dead, yet the building remains. And for economic, ecological, and social reasons, those buildings should be reused. “It’s amazing to think that we are standing in what used to be a department store; that we’re greeting people where we used to buy winter coats; reading books where they once sold fine china; taking phone calls in converted changing rooms; and learning science in the old suit racks,” Burlington’s school superintendent, Tom Flanagan, said at the ceremony. A school in a department store doesn’t have to be a sad story. In fact, this should just be the beginning, both for the students and for a country once addicted to big boxes.
Vermont indie newspaper Seven Days published a writeup, video tour, and photo slideshow of the school when it opened two years ago.
What It’s Like to Have an Abortion Denied by Dobbs. An infuriating & important profile of a Mississippi woman who was forced to give birth and raise a child she wasn’t ready for. “I feel like I’m in a prison.”
From 1999 to 2020, there were 1.63 million excess deaths among Black Americans (when compared to the death rates of white Americans). Total cumulative potential years lost: 82 million.
The 20 best TV series finales of all time. Several of my favorites are on here, including Six Feet Under, Fleabag, and The Americans. I would have liked to see ST:TNG on here maybe?
Sex Ed Books Don’t ‘Groom’ Kids and Teens. They Protect Them. The author of It’s Perfectly Normal says that a 10-year-old girl read the book and “showed her mom the chapter on sexual abuse and said, ‘This is me.’”
Kenny Log-Ins. “Generate a secure password from the lyrics of America’s greatest singer songwriter.”
The Greatest Classic Tetris Game of All Time
In the finals of the Classic Tetris Mega Masters Championship held at the end of last month, two of the top Tetris players in the world played what is probably the greatest 1-vs-1 Classic Tetris game of all time. And then they did it again…
Even if you only have a passing interest in Tetris or video games, this is worth a watch and just as exciting as watching a hard-fought soccer or tennis match.
Fun fact: one of the finalists, Alex T, managed to score zero points in a match at a previous tournament. (via @peterme)
Carl Sagan on Climate Change: “We’re Doing Something Immensely Stupid”
This is sobering: in an ad for the United Nations Global Compact, the words of Carl Sagan from nearly 40 years ago warn us of the necessity for urgent action on climate change, deforestation, and extinction.
Life is something rare and precious. There is something extraordinary about the planet that we are privileged to live on. The human species is destroying forests and we’re doing it at a rate of one acre of forest every second. We’re doing something immensely stupid.
(via colossal)
Indie comics publisher The Nib is shutting down in August after 10 years of publishing.
A Brief History of the Concept Album
Polyphonic’s videos on music are always worth a watch and in this latest one, they explore the history of the concept album, from its proto-origins in the Romantic era to the 70s rock opera heyday to the modern era, where a large percentage of all album releases are conceptual in nature. Along the way, they namecheck a variety of artists from many genres, including Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, The Beatles, The Who, Pink Floyd, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk, Iron Maiden, De La Soul, Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar, and Taylor Swift. (via open culture)
This is totally silly and I can’t look away: a treadmill race between Mario Kart cars and Pixar’s Cars cars. See also Solar System Battle Royale and Sports Battle Royale.
A Ukrainian refugee flees Columbus, Ohio and returns to Kyiv (in a literal war zone!) because of shitty public infrastructure and a non-existent social safety net.
Civil rights organizations like the NAACP and advocacy groups for Latino and LGBTQ+ people are issuing travel advisories for Florida, saying the state is “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals”.
Is Ozempic an Anti-Addiction Drug?
Writing for The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang details how some people taking Ozempic for weight loss are reporting that the drug has also curbed their addictive impulses (to drink, to shop, to smoke).
Earlier this year, she began taking semaglutide, also known as Wegovy, after being prescribed the drug for weight loss. (Colloquially, it is often referred to as Ozempic, though that is technically just the brand name for semaglutide that is marketed for diabetes treatment.) Her food thoughts quieted down. She lost weight. But most surprisingly, she walked out of Target one day and realized her cart contained only the four things she came to buy. “I’ve never done that before,” she said. The desire to shop had slipped away. The desire to drink, extinguished once, did not rush in as a replacement either. For the first time — perhaps the first time in her whole life — all of her cravings and impulses were gone. It was like a switch had flipped in her brain.
Not everyone experiences these effects, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence at this point that scientists are interested and investigating.
Office Workers Don’t Hate the Office. They Hate the Commute. “We have to do something about the daily commute, a ritual of American life that’s time-consuming, emotionally taxing, environmentally toxic and expensive.”
How ‘Succession’ Busts One of America’s Most Cherished Myths (that we like strivers when what we really respect is money & power). “Power and money are fine if you have them already. It’s wanting to acquire them that’s the problem.”
The Four Republican “Freedoms”
For the NY Times, Jamelle Bouie takes a look at the legislation that Republicans around the country are pushing and, in the style of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, outlines what goals they are attempting to achieve.
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.
That sounds about right, and it reminds me, as Republican “governance” often does these days, of Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservatism:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Ice Merchants
This is just beautiful. This short animated film by João Gonzalez starts off slow but really pays off in the end. Ice Merchants was nominated for a 2023 Academy Award. Here’s an interview with Gonzalez at Director’s Notes.
Ancient Romans Dropped Their Bling Down the Drain, Too. “The colorful intaglios — gems with incised carvings — likely fell out of signet rings worn by wealthy third-century bathers, and ended up trapped in the stone drains.”
The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores From Suffocating Black Communities. “They’re like an invasive species. They overpower all the resources and make the businesses in those neighborhoods vulnerable.”
What can we learn about art from The Simpsons? “The long-running sitcom has such wise lessons on the art world, it ought to be on art school curricula.”
In the 70s, the Chicago Sun-Times bought a bar and staffed it with journalists to investigate extortion by city employees. “[Various inspectors] all took envelopes with money in them and they all passed us. And we should never have passed.”
Abstract Wood Block Sculptures of Notable Paintings
Using colorful wooden blocks cut at different angles, Timur Zagirov makes pixel-log 1 representations of famous artworks by Vermeer, van Gogh, and Leonardo. You can check out his work on Instagram or at Stowe Gallery. (via moss & fog)
Pixelized + analog + wood = pixel-log! Ok fine that’s terrible but I’m leaving it in. 😜↩
Some “New” Music from Daft Punk, Perhaps Their Last Ever
Earlier this week, the retired electronic duo Daft Punk released the 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories, their last studio album. The anniversary album includes 35 minutes of previously unreleased music.
Among the tracks is a demo of Infinity Repeating, featuring Julian Casablancas and The Voidz, which a recent interview w/ Casablancas on Daft Punk’s YouTube channel called “the last Daft Punk song, ever”. The music video for Infinity Repeating, embedded above, features a cool evolution-of-humanity animation (with robots!) and is highly re-watchable.
The Heated newsletter will no longer refer to “natural gas”, instead using “methane gas”. “Most people think things that are called ‘natural’ are good for the environment — and natural gas is objectively not.” Language matters!
Space Iris
Space Iris is a mesmerizing abstract video by Rus Khasanov of expanding and contracting patterns that resemble eye irises and cosmic nebulae. The description doesn’t say how this was made, but a glance at Khasanov’s Instagram account shows a bunch of experiments with liquids. You can cehck out still from the video on Behance. (via colossal)
User Inyerface, a game in which you attempt to get through a deliberately bad user interface as quickly as you can. OMG, this is maddening…
Latinos Can Be White Supremacists. “Racial identity is not fixed. It’s not natural. It’s not biological. It’s not monolithic. Racial identity is culturally and politically produced. How people respond to it varies enormously.”
TikTok and Instagram Reels are driving some chefs to concoct viral food that plays well on video. “The food can’t just sit there. Nothing hooks a viewer more than items that melt and drip and stretch.” Oh good, more stunt food.
Unboxing a 400-Year-Old Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio
The First Folio is a collection of 36 plays by William Shakespeare that was published in 1623. One of the most influential books ever published, only about 230 copies are known to have survived. The Victoria and Albert Museum has three copies, and in this video, they lead the viewer on a tour through one of them.
There are 36 plays by Shakespeare in this book and half of them had not been previously printed. So this book preserves really half of Shakespeare’s complete works — plays that would probably have been completely lost to us include the Tempest, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, many others that are among people’s favorites today.
(via aeon)
Birder Peter Kaestner has recorded seeing 9,856 different species of birds on his life list in the eBird app, a world record. He’s trying for 10,000, travelling to remote (and sometimes unstable) locales to do so.
Extremely hot days are warming twice as fast as average summer days in North-West Europe. “Last year’s heatwave was not a fluke.”
Watch the Trailer for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon
I’ve been waiting patiently on this one: the teaser trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s based on the fantastic book by David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.
The movie will be out in theaters on October 6. Oh, and Scorsese & DiCaprio have already signed on to adapt Grann’s latest book, The Wager, which I recently read and loved.
There’s a 98% chance that global temperatures will soar to record highs in the next five years, due to human-caused warming and El Niño, including a possible spike above the 1.5°C threshold.
Your Slow and Sad Descent Into Bird-Watching. From Big Bird and The Ugly Duckling in your early years to moving upstate in your late 30s, your path was seemingly predetermined…
Why Did Kids Stop Walking to School?
Right now in the US, the majority of children are driven to school, even though many of them live within walking or cycling distance.
In 1969, about 48% of students walked or cycled to school in the United States. Today that figure is about 11%. And this decline wasn’t just in the US — you can find the same trend in Australia, England, and Canada: today the majority of students are driven to school in a car. One of the larger studies we have on this issue in [British Columbia] found that 58% of 4th graders and 50% of 7th graders were driven to school by their parents.
There are various reasons for this shift, including that roads are unsafe for cyclists and pedestrians because of cars, a cultural shift towards greatly increased parental supervision of children, and inflexible parental work schedules.
A list of the best pens you can buy in 2023 in dozens of categories: fountain, gel, left-handed, manga, glitter, highlighter, dry erase, etc.
Please stop using AI to make Wes Anderson parodies. “You can’t parody Wes Anderson, because he is already parodying himself.”
Tiny Electronic Desktop Sculptures
Hardware engineer Mohit Bhoite designs functional little desktop bots like this thermometer and this internet-connected weather display:
These are adorable…there’s no other way to describe them. You can check out more of Bhoite’s sculptures on his website or on Instagram. (via core77)
Depression hits new high among Americans, per survey. “More than a quarter of American adults are depressed, a 10% surge from nearly a decade ago.” So many people I know are struggling.
Going Infinite is a new book from Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short) about the rise and fall of the FTX crypto exchange and its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, now under indictment for fraud and money laundering. Cool cover.
How to Design an (Unofficial) Transit Map
In this short video, Norwegian creative director Torger Jansen explains how he designed an unofficial transit map that combines all three of Oslo’s public transportation networks (tram, metro, train) into a single diagram. His four main goals:
1. Showing all the lines on every network, thus making it easier to understand the service patterns.
2. Making it recognisable with the official line colours.
3. Compressing unnaturally long distances between stations.
4. Balancing aesthetics and accessibility. The diagram is clear and easy to read with minimal fuss.
As Jansen notes, this is not how a design process would work in the real world — there’s no user testing or competing stakeholders to please — but from a purely aesthetic and functional standpoint, it’s still an interesting challenge and puzzle to attempt to solve. (thx, david)
Americans’ Largely Positive Views of Childhood Vaccines Hold Steady. But: “Among Republicans, 57% now support requiring children to be vaccinated to attend public schools, down from 79% in 2019.”
How Tokyo Became an Anti-Car Paradise. “What Tokyo shows is that it is possible for enormous cities to work rather well without being overloaded by traffic congestion. Actually, Tokyo works better than big cities anywhere else.”
Using AI, creatives are imagining alternate world histories like “What if the Mayan empire never fell?”, “What if Somalia conquered Europe?”, and “What if India ruled Great Britain?”
The Otherworldly Ice Caves of Iceland
Well, I don’t think these photos of Icelandic ice caves by Ryan Newburn need much explanation. Stunning. I found these photos via Colossal, which has more information about how they were taken.
Occupying such an ancient and always evolving space is an experience that’s difficult to photograph, Newburn shares, because the constant trickle of melting water, the roar of distant rivers, or even the unique interplay of light and glacier are impossible to depict entirely. “Underneath the ice, where the sun cannot penetrate,” he says, “your eyes slowly adjust from the bright sun to the glowing deep blue crystal walls of the ice cave. The more that your eyes adjust, the more saturated the blue gets. It’s a surreal visual experience that you cannot get from any photo of an ice cave.”
If you’d like to see some of these places for yourself, Newburn runs a tour company called Ice Pic Journeys.
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